Build a Food Economy
with Local Resources

Camilla Bustamante

Our ability to build from our local heritage of sustainability is key to our future. Water, heritage food-crop seeds, rotation of crops and livestock to provide variety and minimize impacts of degradation, all done with spirit and gratitude, sustained the health of the environment, as well as the culture and people who make up the Indo-Hispanic community of Northern New Mexico.

As early Spanish inventories evidenced, the effort to bring olives and other varieties of environmentally insupportable species to our region has been in a long pattern of sharing and learning.

Rocky Durham of the SF School of Cooking serves local produce

It has always been the wisdom of the indigenous people that has sustained community health through the toughest of times. I’ve been told there were no food lines along the northern Rio Grande and the acequia system in northern NM during the Great Depression. The Works Progress Administration brought bridges and outhouses, but there were no bread lines. After the passing of my maternal grandmother in 1990, shelves of beans and fruit that she had put away in anticipation of the dreaded Depression were finally tossed from the storage shelves in the basement.

Big box grocery chains, believed to be affordable solutions for families, only rob us of our local food heritage and our opportunity to build our local economy. In our communities with statistically staggering food-related disease such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, our growing dependence on the shelves of high fructose (sugar) and simple carbohydrates is literally killing us. Even the trendiest natural food stores, when they don’t provide locally grown food, transport it from as far as 1,100 miles away, requiring produce to ripen in transport and measurably lose valuable nutrients along the way. As fuel costs continue to rise, so to will the cost of food. The only real choice is to support the traditional communities and acequia systems that ensure that fresh local food continues to be available locally.

The food heritage of northern NM is the justification for the $4.6 million Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. A student in a class I taught at the University of New Mexico in 2004 asked if I would assist in the effort to re-adjudicate water rights from the upper Rio Grande to Rio Rancho because “that is where the real economic development was.” My answer required serious consideration of what economic development really means. Is economic development based on building one’s life on the resources of others, or is it the ability to build from one’s own assets? Our current dependency on foreign oil best illustrates the answer to this question. Possibly re-adjudication of water rights to Rio Rancho would have some short-term payoff to someone, but the potential impact to the farming community and food resources of the upper Rio Grande were too extreme to even consider such support. The more sustainable option is to keep the resources where they are and build the economy where it is – that is the definition of sustainability.

It is imperative that we support our regional farmers and maintain the agricultural water rights. What will the future hold if we supplant agricultural land and water use to support tourism, only to have to rely on imported food for ourselves? Through education we have the opportunity to integrate tradition with innovation, develop value-added capabilities for food production and sustain the food-crop potential we have in our region. At best, supporting the local food system has the potential for thriving food-based economic security. At worst, it could mean a healthier environment, culture and people, which is an indigenous metaphor for sustainability.

Camila Bustamante (c.) at SW Agricultural Marketing conference