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March 1 , 2007
DH 07 JH28
Contact: Joanie Harmon-Whetmore
(310) 243-2740/2001
Anthropology Professor's Study of the Past May Ensure Agricultural Future
Carson, CA - Like many women, Janine Gasco is obsessed with chocolate. Her obsession however, centers less around eating it,
and more around finding ways to bring fair trade practices to its production. Having spent more than 25
years researching forest crops such as cacao and vanilla in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, Mexico, the
associate professor of anthropology was able to provide a single source of chocolate to Askinosie Chocolate in Springfield, MO.
“I’ve always looked at the historical development of cacao production there,” she says. “Now I’m working
with modern farmers, who have had to abandon their lifestyle because the modern global economy has cut them
out of the process. I’m trying to find chocolate makers in the United States, who will directly buy from
the producers.”
Shawn Askinosie contacted Gasco through the Internet, based on her research. She was able to connect him
with a local farmer organization, which sold him five tons of cacao last November. He hopes to have the first
chocolate made from this cacao in the next few months.
“We’re working with the idea that cacao is purchased from a cooperative of producers, where the farmers
all get the same price for their crop,” she says. “They actually get above market price, which is great,
because they make so little when they sell down there. They spend more money than they make to keep
growing cacao.
“This is a big part of ethoecology, where we are trying to create alternate ways of how the economy works,”
she continues. “I’m really excited about that, and I’m hoping it will help the farmers be able to continue
a way of life that they’ve had for thousands of years.”
Gasco points out many technologically-advanced societies could learn a lot from “people who are not educated
in a formal way, but have generations of experience." Time-tested practices such as multicropping and
non-invasive forms of insect control could benefit Western agribusiness, which is primarily focused on
high yield, at the expense of the land and sometimes, the quality of the product.
“Our land use patterns in agribusiness give a really quick return and look promising,” she continues. “But if
you look at the long-term effects, you find they’re not sustainable. But we are learning about some things that work really well. The growth of the organic food
industry in the U.S. is due to the fact that there are sustainable methods.
“Multicropping is where you plant lots of different crops on the same parcel of land,” she explains.“This used to be seen as very inefficient. In agribusiness, you see acres and acres of one thing. But
what becomes clear is that it’s very hard on the soil when you have the same crop year after year. In
Mexico, the traditional crops are corn, beans, and squash. An agricultural plot there may look messy.
But the beans put nitrogen back into the soil, and the corn takes it out.”
Gasco is also the co-author of a widely-used textbook, The Legacy of Mesoamerica (with Robert M. Carmack
and Gary H. Gossen; Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 1st ed. 1997). A second edition is scheduled to come
out this year. Her appearance on the History Channel last fall shed some light on the little known
engineering abilities of the ancient Aztecs. A recognized expert on Mesoamerican archaeology and ethnography,
she was interviewed on location in Mexico City as a scholarly expert for “Engineering an Empire: the Aztecs.”
“Often, when people think about the Aztecs they associate them with human sacrifice and brutal warfare,”
she says. “There is a whole other side to their society that often gets overlooked, a pragmatic and scientific
side. They lived in the middle of a lake and constructed a whole city there. It was a salt lake, so they
had to find a way to bring in fresh water. They built these huge stone pyramids, with materials that they
had to import from somewhere else, since there was no stone on their island.”
Gasco underscores the fact that Spanish conquerors of the Aztecs depended on their expertise with the
natural environment to help further their own colony, after the initial conflicts.
“When the Spaniards won the conquest, they had to learn from the Aztecs how to build their city,” she says. “They employed Aztec engineers to help them to learn how to live in that environment, and they really couldn’t
have survived in that location without them.”
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