Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin: Reindigenizing our myopic views of poverty for true wealth (ep241)
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is the founder of Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (@regenagalliance), which is an ecosystem of industry leaders, farmer and public interest organizations, food sector businesses and cooperatives, tribes, and elected officials that are working together to scale up regenerative agriculture supply chains.
He's also a lifetime Ashoka Fellow and the author of In the Shadow of Green Man, which tells the story of his life growing up in revolution-torn Guatemala and how it led him to his work in regenerative agriculture.
In this podcast episode (part one of our two-part conversation—tune into episode 242 for part 2!), Reginaldo sheds light on the dominant western culture's myopic view of poverty; why it's dangerous to presumptively want to help ‘lift’ materially poor communities out of economic poverty while holding an incomplete worldview that is not universal; what the coronavirus pandemic reveals about what wealth really means in the face of a crisis; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Reginaldo and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by The Fruitful Darkness by Trevor Hall (@TrevorHallMusic)
“Our economic poverty wasn’t evaluated on the basis of how much money we brought into the household; it was mostly evaluated by how much money did not go out of our household.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological regeneration, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes!
On redefining and expanding our views of poverty:
"We need to divide poverty into various categories before we can actually understand the true definition of poverty.
Most of the world today evaluates and defines conditions of poverty on the basis of material possessions; poverty really comes in different forms. For example, I've been tracking statistics on depression, suicide, and all sort of issues that are associated mostly with what we call spiritual poverty.
In some cases, you'll find people with incredible material wealth but extreme levels of spiritual and purpose-driven poverty.
We also have to keep in mind that in a lot of our cases, for indigenous and native communities around the world and those of us who grew up with an Indigenous sense of who we are on this planet, our material poverty was only partially affecting our overall health, because we may have been materially poor but we were spiritually super rich."
On challenging the ties between poverty and food insecurity:
"For people who grew up in the conditions that I did, economic poverty is really way below even some of the federal standards in the United States. Why is that true?
Because our economic poverty wasn't evaluated on the basis of how much money we brought into the household; it was mostly evaluated by how much money did not go out of our household.
From that perspective, although we had a very tiny income, we were economically secure. That was before the colonizing system became so overpowering that our subsistence systems and our resiliency—in this case our perennial farms and our ability to market locally—was invaded by this dumping of international surplus production which was subsidized by systems that had nothing to do with the competitive advantages or the capacity of the businesses that were disrupting our communities.
The playing field would have been leveled if they had the same access to subsidies that we had—which was zero."
On critically remembering the role of government in a society:
"Why did we pay our taxes in the first place if it weren't for the government to invest it back in our social services? Why should we have representatives and a president and all of that if their role isn't to safeguard the resources we have entrusted to them, to make sure that we are not as vulnerable as we are right now in the face of a crisis?
Instead, what we have done is that we have privatized all of the profits, and we've socialized a lot of the costs. When those companies have problems, we bail them out. We, the public—not the government—with the money we have entrusted to our government."
To be continued in episode 242!
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