Produce faster to receive new families in a new settlement. The Mandala technique is used by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese), and was created to make the supply to the settlers who are arriving to live in a new space more efficient.
This model of production consists in 576 square meter circular space (approximately 24m x 24m). Protein production is located at the center. Pigs, chickens or a fishpond are all options for this type of production. Around the central circle, other circular strips are formed for the production of different foods.
Initial production is made up of short-cycle products, mainly leaves. Lettuce, arugula and cabbage are the first to be planted for harvesting and feeding the settlers, who complement this with other products brought from elsewhere. Later, the mandala is complemented with other products that will broaden the range of food options for the families.
A Mandala garden can produce any type of food. Onions, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, radishes and lettuce are some of the examples used by these families.
This technique is now being used in Venezuela for the new MST settlement at Vergareña. The 180,000 hectare terrain will be used by the Venezuelan government to produce food following the logic of agroforestry. The territory in the south of the country is intended to produce enough food to guarantee the country’s food sovereignty.
For this end, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has called on MST activists to help coordinate the project, called Patria Grande del Sur, and to train Venezuelan producers for the later use os the techniques developed by the Movement to produce food without pesticides.
Mauricio Arantes is a member of the National Landless Youth Collective and one of the contributors to the training in the MST brigade in Venezuela. He is in Vergareña helping to set up the movement’s new settlement in the region and to produce the mandala-shaped vegetable garden for these families. He explains that once the garden is ready, the settlers focus on producing food that will be produced in large quantities.
“The Mandala is the first production experience. The goal is to provide food for the settlers first. This type of vegetable garden is intended to provide the most immediate food. Then, over time, with the families’ arrival and set up, other forms of production will be developed, such as crops, cattle and pig production, and, then, large-scale production will begin,” he told BdF.
The goal is to have 300 families occupying the Vergareña land. Despite being the project’s director, the MST will be relying on the Unión Comunera to organize not only production, but also to mobilize families to occupy the land.
Although the set tlement’s set up is happening now, the study and agreements between the Venezuelan government and the MST have been underway since August 2024.
Gessica Lima is an MST activist and is also in Venezuela to help with the project. According to her, the Mandala is part of an agroecological production that respects the land and the space where it will be grown.
“Even though agroecology has its principles, it also has this proposal of starting from the reality of each territory. So we studied the territory, each communal council within the Patria Grande del Sul commune. How production is done, what they produce, what their relationship with the land is like, what these human relationships are like. Based on this, we put together the production projects,” she told BdF.
