Juan Estanislao Pérez Sarmiento was born in 1960 in El Guzo de Penipe, a village of about 50 families in the province of Chimborazo, in the central highlands of Ecuador, named for the highest volcanic peak of the Ecuadorian Andes. Like most of their neighbors, the Perez family -mestizos of mixed origin, including the indigenous Pinipis - were farmers. From the age of six to 12 Juan went to a school a kilometer away, and then for a year walked three kilometers each way to the local middle school. His parents were unable to afford uniforms or books, however, so after a year Juan left school to help on the farm and look for work. He found it on road crews, rising at 4 am on Monday to get a ride to where the crew was working and returning home on Friday.
All the while the family's life was enriched by ERPE (Escuelas Radiofonicas Populares del Ecuador), a radio station begun by a Catholic monsignor who wanted to better the lives of Ecuadorian campesinos. Juan's parents listened to ERPE in the early mornings and evenings, following courses on literacy, farming techniques, and the economic and political exploitation of workers.
The radio changed Juan's life. Through a local priest he met the father who then directed the station, and started taking courses at its headquarters in the large and active city of Riobamba, the province's capital. When Juan was 17 he went to study, work, and live at ERPE. His path led him to direct ERPE after it became independent of the Church. It also led him to show farmers a way to better their incomes and improve their land for the next generation, growing a crop that had made the Incas mighty - quinoa.

Broadcast Activists
ERPE was founded in 1962 by Leonidas Proano Villalba, a progressive priest who was called the ‘bishop of the poor.’ Proano was an important member of the activist wing of the Catholic church that flourished in Latin America beginning in the 1950s.
In 1961, Proano visited the studios of Radio Suatenza, in the neighboring mountains of Colombia, where a fellow activist monsignor had made pioneering use of the radio to teach literacy, mathematics, basic economy, and political consciousness. The largely illiterate and devalued indigenous Colombian groups that listened to Radio Suatenza were too widely dispersed to congregate in classrooms or meeting halls, and too busy to attend regular classes or organizational meetings.
When he returned to the Ecuadorian Andes to begin his own broadcasts, Proano made literacy his first goal. ERPE equipped volunteer teachers from villages with a gas lamp, a makeshift blackboard, notebooks, and a radio. The volunteers would go to communities of 12-20 families on weekday evenings and hold up signs with letters and words while two radio hosts explained the alphabet and led pronunciation drills. Between 1962 and 1974, ERPE estimates, it taught 20,000 members of indigenous and mestizo groups in 13 Ecuadorian provinces how to read. As ERPE became a trusted friend to people who had never had any access to the media - let alone media directed to them - it expanded the range of its programming and the courses it offered. Subjects included all the ones Proano had seen at the Colombian station, and also instruction in more explicit social activism: how farmers could organize into co-operatives and get better prices for their crops, for example, and how villagers could fill out formal applications to the ministry of education to have schools built closer to their communities. ERPE used its handsome group of buildings in downtown Riobamba, which had been donated early in its life, to house in-depth courses. It was these courses - especially ones in leadership formation - that Juan Perez followed most closely.

A New Generation with Organic Ideas
Juan himself became a leader. For seven years he lived and worked at ERPE along with eight other students and the successor to Proano, an equally dedicated priest named Ruben Beloz. The young students wanted to take ERPE's activist agenda even farther than did the original ERPE leadership, whom they thought of as being too content with the status quo. In 1988, the new generation took over, with the consent of the old. They elected Juan Perez as their director.
Perez faced the problem of how to raise money. There were no more subsidies from the Church. ERPE had always derived a portion of its budget from its own enterprises, chiefly advertising sales at the radio station. ERPE had ended its legal affiliation with the Church in 1974, and completely separated from the Church in 1987. A Canadian fund for Ecuadorian development gave ERPE substantial support, and modest grants came from several European associations.
Organic farming looked like a way both to make some money and expand ERPE's teaching mission. ERPE had once been deeded farmland near Riobamba, but had never made steady use of it. The farm went completely organic in 1991, after a year-long experiment. ERPE broadcast programs about organic farming and featured interviews with local farmers who had converted their farms. Perez started offering courses in organic farming in buildings at the farm rather than in the city. ‘Indigenous people have to see what we were doing’ before they believe it, he explains. From a few curious local farmers the first year, the number of annual visitors among ERPE's listeners grew into the hundreds.
Many of these visitors were willing to think of taking up organic farming. But they needed on-site technical assistance. The two full-time ERPE farmers were too busy to act as traveling advisors, and the rest of the staff knew more about radio than farming. So Perez hired agricultural *tecnicos,* or teachers, to visit farms, offer information and support, and provide organic seeds.

Return of a Native Crop
The question was which seeds to give to farmers. Perez realized that he had only one chance to convert many of them, and it had to be with a crop that would produce immediate results. That eliminated the two main Incan agricultural triumphs: corn, which many of the farms nearby were too high to grow, and potatoes, which were too susceptible to blight to guarantee a high yield from organic seeds. That left three native plants: amaranth, the cereal high in protein and suited to high, dry climates; chocho, or Andean lupin, a high-protein bean useful for alternating with other crops; and quinoa--a potent symbol of the Spanish oppression of Incas.
Quinoa is unique among plants in offering a complete source of protein, one the World Health Organization has called equal to milk in protein quality. It is native to the Andean altiplano, the region that today includes Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (still the world's centers of quinoa, although it has been grown in the United States and Canada). Quinoa thrives at extremely high altitudes - over 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) - where frequently no other food crop will grow For centuries the indigenous peoples of the Inca empire lived on quinoa, calling it their sacred mother grain and (as Rebecca Wood recounts in The Splendid Grain) waiting to plant it until their ruler ceremonially planted the first seed with a golden spade - his symbol of state.
The Spanish banned quinoa, perhaps fearing it as a source of Incan strength and certainly preferring to cultivate barley so that their invading armies could drink beer. Some of the banned crop did survive in the highest of the highlands--including the region around Riobamba, much of it 10,000 feet high. But even the indigenous and mestizo groups adopted the Spanish eating patterns of bread and rice (which they knew to mix with native beans, to improve the protein), and by the early 1990s few families farmed quinoa.
In all his organic thinking Perez had an enthusiastic and knowledgeable ally by his side: a young German named Hansjorg Gotz, a representative of BCS, a German organic certification board that has offices, and credibility, all over the world. Gotz's predecessor had established the Ecuador base of BCS in a few extra offices at the hospitable ERPE headquarters. He was eager to help train the new ERPE teachers how best to farm organically.
The assistance the teachers offer is unpatronizing, Perez says: ‘We try to work along with farmers in what they already know, to give them warm rather than cold instruction - acompañamiento, not lectures. We're not professors teaching them their own business’.
If teachers are the occasional visitors, radio is the constant companion. Every day ERPE broadcasts a half-hour program on an organic farming technique - say, starting a worm farm to produce fertilized soil--and a teacher visiting a farmer in the field will go back over the points raised in the program. Teachers show farmers how to use a machine to thresh seed hebanner rather than the old way of beating them over a stone to make the quinoa seeds fall out. With a group of farmers they set a rotation schedule for tractors and threshers, and haul the machines from family to family.

A Benign American Invasion, and a Farming Explosion
This assistance and machinery doesn't come free. Perez needed someone to buy the quinoa he was convincing farmers to grow. A steady market presented itself in the person of Bob Leventry, a Chicagoan who had worked in Ecuador on various development projects for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer after retiring as chief operating officer of a commercial insurance company. Leventry and his wife, Marjorie, became committed to Ecuador and in particular to organic farming there, and began looking for development projects they could continue on their own.
In their searches the Leventrys would frequently be disappointed to find that the packager who claimed to be organic and friendly to farmers would ‘cheat.’ Bob says, ‘The government supported the use of chemicals and pesticides, and they still do’. He theorizes that governmental resistance to organic farming held back ERPE from finding local assistance for its nascent quinoa project. Companies and co-operatives would promise Leventry that farmers would get a fair share of the higher prices he was prepared to pay. But somehow that money would remain in the middleman's pocket.
Through other Peace Corps volunteers Leventry met Hans Gotz, and learned about the new ERPE quinoa--reliably organic, and certified by the internationally respected BCS, no less. He told Perez that Inca Organics, the company the Leventrys formed with Marcos Tapia, their Ecuadorian partner during their Peace Corps service, would buy as much quinoa as the ERPE farmers could produce. Both the farmers and ERPE should go at their own pace, Bob said; Inca Organics would even pay for the harvest before planting time. This was just the kind of assistance Ecuadorian agencies had refused to give ERPE. And Leventry could trust Perez to give the money straight to the farmers. ERPE and Inca Organics agreed that farmers would keep 30 percent of their harvest for their own use, even if that would delay profitability.
The bet paid off. In 1997, 220 families in 25 communities produced 27 metric tons of quinoa--’a heck of a start,’ Bob Leventry says now. But it turned out to be a very modest beginning. Other families saw their neighbors make much more money from what they had been able to harvest on their small plots of land (usually less than 1 hectare, or two acres).
Seeing is believing, and families joined by the hundred and then by the thousand. In 2001, 4025 families produced 700 metric tons of quinoa, keeping 200 metric tons to feed themselves. ERPE has built its own cleaning and processing plant (with the help of Inca Organics and the Canadian development fund), and the number of teachers it employs has gone from a handful to 40. By the third year, Inca Organics could follow standard business practice and pay for the quinoa after harvest. The Leventrys have become ambassadors for Ecuador in all the United States, and especially for quinoa. They have sold ERPE quinoa to some of the largest natural-foods stores, including the Midwestern stores of the national Whole Foods Markets chain.
The surest result is the annual increase in the average income of the farmers who grow organic quinoa for ERPE: from $230 to almost $450.

Why the Slow Food Award?
ERPE has found a way to help indigenous Ecuadorians greatly increase their incomes by growing a grain that gave life, strength, and pride to their ancestors. Its goal is to improve the health of farmers and their land: ERPE gives farmers trees to plant along with the quinoa, to control water runoff and also help reforest that Andean altiplano.
Radio still is the main tool. ERPE now broadcasts regular programs on natural medicine, preventive and reproductive health, and on how to combat malnutrition--fully 74 percent of the children of its 1 million listeners, Perez says, suffer the effects of inadequate nutrition. The quinoa that its farmers keep for themselves is helping combat this.
The agenda is always growing, and Perez is always looking for more help to achieve it. But ERPE has already restored a livelihood and native crop to people in danger of losing both--and keeps working to ensure the health and future of their land and families.


Corby Kummer