Buen Vivir: Colombia’s Philosophy for Good

Living
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210207-buen-vivir-colombias-philosophy-for-
good-living
Chef Anibal Joe Criollo is helping to spread the indigenous idea of
"Buen Vivir", that one’s wellbeing is intimately connected to that of the
environment and community.

 By Dimitri Selibas

8 February 2021

It's 16:00 near lake La Cocha in Colombia's

southern department of Nariño, and the kitchen
staff at Naturalia are busy at work. Long light rays
of an overcast afternoon mingle with smoke
wafting in from the trout being prepared in the
scullery next door. Indigenous Colombian chef
and environmentalist Anibal Jose Criollo presides
over the team inside the humble cabin, pausing to
greet a neighbour delivering a basket of fruit while
his six-year-old niece Helen sits in a corner,
playfully sifting blackberries.

Between stoves and an immense square table in

the middle of the cabin’s creaky wooden centre,
Criollo prepares a mix of local and ancient
specialities – herido de frutas rojas silvestres (a
warmed alcoholic drink made with a mix of wild
red berries), trucha ahumada (smoked trout) from
the lake, quinoa arepas and a pork caldo (broth)
from a pig that formerly resided in
Criollo’s shagra (an ancestral indigenous food
garden).

This region of Colombia, with its cool climate and

high-altitude plains, is known for being different to
the rest of the nation, culturally far closer to other
Andean countries like Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador,
which it borders. Here in the furthest reaches of
the Incan empire, the Pasto indigenous people
stood firm against Emperor Huayna Cápac,
leading him to give them the name "past awá" or
"people of the scorpion" because he supposedly
said he "wanted to step on their heads and they
bit me with their tail".

After resisting the Incan imperial advances, the

Pastos were later overwhelmed by the Spanish
colonial invasion and successive waves of
Catholic missionaries.

"[The Spanish] took away our culture... and in the

process annihilated us," said Criollo. "But one
thing they cannot annihilate is the feeling of
ownership of a territory, and that attribute of the
territory which is food."
Award-winning indigenous Colombian chef Anibal Jose Criollo
prepares locally sourced food at his restaurant, Naturalia (Credit:
Dimitri Selibas)

Today, Pasto communities still live in what is now

Ecuador and southern Colombia, and they are still
fighting to maintain their cultures, which is
epitomised by the philosophy of Buen
Vivir ("Living Well").

"Buen Vivir in a few words, is learning to value

myself as a human being... learning to value the
other and learning to value and care for the
environment in which one develops themselves,"
said Criollo.
Buen Vivir is a pluralistic worldview that's
prevalent among indigenous communities
across Latin America
Buen Vivir is a pluralistic worldview that's
prevalent among indigenous communities across
Latin America and whose principles are shared by
different cultures around the world. Similar to the
concept of ubuntu from South Africa, it holds that
an individual’s wellbeing can only be achieved
through harmonious relationships with the wider
community – including people, the environment,
other living beings, their ancestors and the
cosmos. Practically speaking, it encompasses
themes like food sovereignty, land rights,
environmental justice, economic solidarity and the
protection of local biodiversity.
Buen Vivir is a relationship between people, the environment and the
spirits (Credit: Dimitri Selibas)

According to Criollo and other environmental

activists, in an era of coronavirus and climate
crisis uncertainty, there has been a global
awakening that our way of life need to become
less individualistic and more sustainable. Now,
the guiding social and environmental principles of
Buen Vivir are being considered by outside
communities.

The philosophy resonated powerfully for Criollo

when his restaurant Naturalia closed for seven
months during the Covid-19 lockdown. Without his
primary income, Criollo sustained his family and
himself by growing broad beans, potatoes
and arracacha (an Andean vegetable that
resembles a cross between a carrot and celery
root), among other crops in his shagra. He also
made yoghurt from his cows and traded with
others in his community through a cooperative-
sharing system called mindala.

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Covid-19

Fellow Pasto Nancy Margoth Estación Puenayan

is part of the Shagreros of Panam Association,
whose 26 participating families use their shagra
gardens to cultivate traditional seed varieties
through growing food and medicinal plants.
Puenayan describes the mindala system as, "the
things that we don’t consume ourselves we share,
also sharing knowledge about planting and
gastronomy."

The UN's Food and Agriculture Association

worked in the Nariño department with Pasto
communities like Puenayan’s and in 2013
prepared the Mindala and Shagra guide,
showing to outside communities the viability of
these ancestral models to construct and promote
autonomy, sovereignty, security and biodiversity.
For seven months during lockdown, Criollo sustained his family by
relying on his indigenous ancestral garden (Credit: Dimitri Selibas)
Protecting the environment is also a central
mission for the Shagreros of Panam Association,
and in 2018 it won an award from the Nariño
government, in conjunction with the Global
Environment Facility and United Nations
Development Program, for its work in planting
native trees which helped to protect the area’s
water sources.

“If I plant a tree, it then takes care of me. It

provides me with seeds, it gives me water, clean
air. Each tree is an ecosystem, one supporting
insects and biodiversity,” said Criollo, who also
works with neighbouring families to reforest areas
with native plant species. Working with indigenous
and peasant farming families, he has helped to
ensure that La Cocha lake – which is considered
sacred to indigenous communities –
received Ramsar status as a protected wetland,
and expanded the area's network of around 100
civil society nature reserves – a Colombian
conservation model where private individuals
devote part of their land to environmental
protection.

“What are we connecting? Conservation, clean

food production, caring for seeds and looking at
culture through the lens of food,” said Criollo. And
with Covid-19, this interconnectedness has
enabled many more people to revaluate their
relationship with the planet.

“One of the impacts of the pandemic has been to

work towards integral health, highlighting the
importance of recuperating the balance between
 man and nature,” said Luis Eduardo Calpa, who
works with the Basque Mundukide
Foundation to support Criollo and Puenayan by
promoting agroecology, community self-
management and responsible consumption by
connecting small-scale producers with traditional
chefs. “Now the proposal of the indigenous
communities has much more validity,” Calpa
added.

Criollo's restaurant, Naturalia, presents culture through the lens of

food (Credit: Dimitri Selibas)

Like other indigenous communities, the Pastos’

traditional ways of life have historically been
marginalised, first by Spanish colonialists and
then by indifferent national governments. But
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution recognised
indigenous people’s rights to their own territories
and legal and economic systems. Additionally,
Colombia’s Constitutional Court’s
jurisprudence notes how indigenous land is not
only the basis for subsistence, but it is also a
 living entity that is intimately entwined with
indigenous communities' cultural and spiritual
practices.

Now indigenous and farming communities in

southern Colombia are increasingly mobilising to
grow healthy food, promote supportive local
economies, use ancestral seeds and protect the
environment, with shagras and the mindala
system forming the cornerstones of this revival.

Alba Portillo is the founder and coordinator of the

local Guardians of the Seed Network, which
currently shares and cultivates more than 2,500
traditional, heirloom and non-genetically modified
food species with rural farmers and urban
consumers. She says seeds are a sacred part of
understanding Buen Vivir, and that the spiritual
relationship people have with food is nurtured
through cultivating and caring for what you eat.

Communities in southern Colombia are increasingly using ancestral

seeds as a way to practice Buen Vivir (Credit: Dimitri Selibas)
Portillo says that a large part of what the network
does is to fight the crisis brought about by big
agriculture that relies on chemical fertilisers,
herbicides, pesticides and genetically modified
seeds instead of those whose unique traits were
carefully bred over thousands of years.

"We have lost more than 80% of our agro-

biodiversity, which means for each one gone, we
have lost a story, an inheritance, an identity in the
territory," said Portillo.

The philosophy of Buen Vivir is also gaining wider

recognition among non-indigenous Colombians.
In November 2020, the Colombian government
created a Buen Vivir fund to finance
entrepreneurial projects in indigenous
communities. Last May, the ground-breaking
documentary series El Buen Vivir (“The Good
Life”) launched on YouTube and Colombian
television. The series showcased how nine
Colombian indigenous communities incorporate,
live and embody the concepts of Buen Vivir, with
each film created and directed by indigenous
filmmakers.
A documentary series highlighting how Colombian indigenous
communities incorporate Buen Vivir recently launched on YouTube
(Credit: Michael Marquand/Alamy)

And while Colombia is regularly ranked by Gallup

as one of the happiest countries in the world,
Buen Vivir researcher Martin Calisto Friant, says
this seems to speak more about how people there
have strong community and family structures and
are not dependent on the state or a capitalistic
market.

In a research paper, Fraint notes that Buen Vivir

is the opposite of capitalistic consumerism. Those
who follow it aspire for a democratic society
where happiness is not bound by material
accumulation. It focuses on solidarity, reciprocity
and citizenship, thus sharing many elements with
recent concepts like degrowth and slow economy.

In Friant’s native Ecuador, the government of

former president Rafael Correa took radical
 steps to popularise the principles of Buen Vivir,
making it a fundamental pillar of the country’s new
2008 constitution and creating a short-lived
secretariat in 2013 to support its implementation.
Further afield, countries like Iceland, New Zealand
and Scotland are exploring alternative
indicators to GDP to measure citizen wellness.
For decades, the mountain kingdom of Bhutan
has used Gross National Happiness (GNH),
integrating a mix of spiritual and social markers to
measure its citizens' wellbeing.

Most recently, on 2 February 2021, the

landmark Dasgupta Review on the Economics
of Biodiversity was released. Commissioned by
the UK Treasury in 2019, the report calls for a
transformational change in our economic
approach to nature and proposes recognising
nature as an asset and reconsidering our
measures of economic prosperity.

Criollo says one of the most important parts of Buen Vivir is that it is
intergenerational (Credit: Dimitri Selibas)
Back outside in his shagra, Criollo walks with his
niece Helen, showing her how the scraps from the
kitchen get fed to earthworms or pigs. Helen
squeals with joy as she holds a cuy (guinea pig),
a local regional delicacy, and collects eggs from
under a cackling hen.

"This is an education you can’t find in schools,"

said Criollo, who believes that the most important
part of Buen Vivir is that it is intergenerational.
"The land nourishes us, it feeds us, it teaches us,
it takes care of us, and so we leave it as our
inheritance for the next generations."

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