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People of Maize”: Maize Protein Composition and Farmer Practices in the Q’Eqchi’ Maya Milpa

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People of Maize”: Maize Protein Composition and Farmer Practices in the Q’Eqchi’ Maya Milpa Nourishing the “People of Maize”: Maize Protein Composition and Farmer Practices in the Q’eqchi’ Maya Milpa An honors thesis for the Department of Environmental Studies. Anne Elise Stratton Tufts University, 2015. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 CHAPTER 1 The Q’eqchi’ Milpa in Context Introducing the Milpa The Maize People and the Milpa Forced Migration and Agroecological Adaptation “Grabbed” Land and the Milpa in Transition Milpa in Modernity 23 CHAPTER 2 Linking Biodiversity, Nutrition, and Resilience in the Multispecies Milpa Multispecies Milpa Milpa: Origins and Ideals Today’s Milpa The Milpa as a System 39 CHAPTER 3 Farmer Practices and Maize Nutritional Traits in Sarstún Abstract Introduction Materials and Methods Results Discussion Figures 62 CHAPTER 4 Future Directions 64 LITERATURE CITED ii CHAPTER 1: THE Q’EQCHI MAYA MILPA IN CONTEXT INTRODUCING THE MILPA Nestled along the mangrove-bound border between Belize and Guatemala, in the region called Sarstún, are the clusters of palm-thatch or tin-roofed wooden huts where Q’eqchi’ Maya (henceforth Q’eqchi’) farmers spend their lives. Q’eqchi’ communities can consist of as few as a dozen and as many as 150 families, with an average family size of nine (Grandia 2012: 208). What the casual onlooker may not observe in visiting a village are the communal milpas, or “cornfields,” which physically surround and culturally underlie Q’eqchi’ societies (Grandia 2012: 191). The Q’eqchi’ have traditionally raised maize using swidden (slash-and-burn) techniques, in which they fell a field-sized area of forest, burn the organic matter to release a nutrient pulse into the soil, and then raise their crops on the freshly-cleared land. Similar to other Maya groups, the Q’eqchi’ staple crops are maize (Zea mays: white, yellow, black, red, and red-husked white landraces) and black beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Maize has two growing seasons in Sarstún, the first called “la quema” (“the burn” milpa) for the rainy period directly following the field- clearing fires, and the second known as “la matahambre” (“the hunger-killing” milpa) during the dry season. Farmers plant other crops alongside the maize, cultivating in polyculture, during la quema milpa, whereas with the matahambre milpa they plant solely an inedible, nitrogen-fixing cover crop with maize. Following one or two years of harvests on cleared land, when the plot’s productivity begins to fall (by 35% in the second year), farmers generally leave the plot fallow for three to five years (harvest to fallow ratio of 1:3 or 2:5 years) until sufficient vegetation has grown back to enrich the soil for another cycle (Grandia 2012: 231). Ecologists consider shifting agricultural practices appropriate to manage weed populations and renew spent soils in tropical environments (Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995: 46). While these cultivation techniques form the foundation of the Q’eqchi’ social-ecological structure, neither the Q’eqchi’ nor the milpa resides in a stable system. Practices must constantly shift to adapt to social and ecological changes. As communal lands are divided between the next generation, newcomers, and outside investors, farmers can no longer afford to let their land sit fallow for so many years and will begin the next cycle before the ecosystem has fully recuperated. These maladaptive processes lead to the deforestation, soil degradation, and expansion into unoccupied rainforest for which the Q’eqchi’ and other indigenous communities have been scolded and occasionally demonized by ecologists and the media (Sundberg 1998). In such instances, new technologies become available through new markets and non-profit institutions, including herbicides, NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) fertilizer, and hybridized seeds. These products make possible increased or constant productivity and temporarily increase yields, but gains are short-lived when the technologies prove inappropriate for Guatemala’s karstic, thin tropical topsoils (Mongorria and Gamboa 2010: 51; Alonso- Fradejas et al. 2011: 143). When shortening the fallow period, some Q’eqchi’ farmers grow dependent on purchased inputs to maintain soil quality (or its auspices) as the agroecosystem moves into marginal milpas. The combined Q’eqchi’-commercial agricultural model did not come about due to Q’eqchi’ demand for market availability or income-generating labor outside of agriculture. On the contrary, it was the millennial shift in international and Guatemalan state policies toward “efficient,” privatized landholdings that stripped indigenous inhabitants of their communal 2 territories in the tropical lowlands and ushered them as tenants or day laborers onto corporate fincas (plantations) (World Bank 2007: 138; Alonso-Fradejas 2012). High-quality parcels are being redirected via corporate-institutional “voluntary” contracting schemes or outright coercion into export-oriented plantation agriculture (largely sugarcane, oil palm, and teak in my study area) (Robbins 2003; Alonso-Fradejas 2012: 519). What remains for Q’eqchi’ farmer use are smaller tracts of secondary forest and other marginal lands with poor soil quality, including steeply sloping plots that lead to heavy erosion and further soil degradation when cultivated. Left with little time to work their family milpas and poor yields, farmers are shifting toward input- mediated management practices that require less labor and time. The result is a social-ecological domino effect. Farmers respond to new environmental conditions with chemical inputs that further exacerbate problems of soil quality and biodiversity loss, which in turn contribute to the deterioration of crop quality and yield. In the end, Q’eqchi’ farmers and their families eat tortillas made of poorer quality maize, their staple’s proteins (and their own) left underdeveloped due to nitrogen-deficient soil. There were two key sources in my reading of the milpa’s social-ecological context in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala. The first comes from Liza Grandia, a political anthropologist at Clark University who lived among the Q’eqchi’ for six years before writing Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders. Her book envisions the lowlands as a “commons” (an unowned, communal natural resource) in jeopardy due to land privatization and restructuring (Grandia 2012). The second source is one of several articles published in a special edition of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies centered on the concept of land-grabbing. Alberto Alonso-Fradejas is a PhD candidate in the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and as a visiting professor at San Carlos University in Guatemala he has published many articles on “land-control grabbing” in the 3 country. Several of his studies took place in the tropical lowlands region near Sarstún, where he noted massive land acquisitions for commercial sugar and palm oil production in the past few decades (Alonso-Fradejas 2012; Alonso-Fradejas, Alonzo, and Durr 2008). In this introductory chapter, I will trace the biocultural history of the Q’eqchi’ milpa in its idealized form to the fragmented milpas that pervade Sarstún today, highlighting the principal actors and institutions that have shaped its rocky “developmental” path over the past fifty years. I will first introduce the Q’eqchi’ inhabitants of Sarstún in the context of their ancestral and present ties to maize, seeing the milpa as a site of both cultural and physiological importance. Next, I will examine the social-ecological changes through which the Q’eqchi’ people have endured and adapted, migrating from the Alta Verapaz cloud forest highlands to the Izabal department’s tropical lowlands, all the while maintaining their communal milpas. With each move, farmers shifted into the next available environment with abundant communal land resources. After touching on the impetus for Q’eqchi’ migrations in the violent sociopolitical sphere of 20th century Guatemala, I will look to the more recent past and present land-control grabs facilitated by international and Guatemalan governmental policies and the “flexible agrarian capitalist regime” as an updated context (Alonso-Fradejas 2012). Finally, I will describe the modern milpa as it stands in Sarstún, basing my analysis on Q’eqchi’ farmer interviews conducted in June and July of 2014. The overarching and local factors at play in the Q’eqchi’ milpa have resulted in a commons in decline. Working to improve their condition, farmers seek agroecosystem and nutritional resilience through management practices from cover cropping to intercropping to high biodiversity plantings. 4 THE MAIZE PEOPLE AND THE MILPA To grasp the Q’eqchi’ relationship to maize, one must first understand the Maya relationship to maize. Since modern maize (Zea mays L.) was first domesticated from one variety of the wild grass “teosinte” (Zea mays L. subsp. parviglumis) over six thousand years ago (Doebley 1990; Matsuoka et al. 2002), the Maya civilization has developed and grown with it. The milpa system of cultivation has been in use since the Pre-Columbian era, during which time the Maya relied on maize intercropped with legumes, fruits, and vegetables to fuel their empire (Perez-Brignoli 1989). The Maya call themselves “the people of maize” (“los hombres de maíz”), and their holy book the Popul Vuh contains a creation story in which the first people are physically made from the grain (Grandia 2012): As the legend goes, the gods made three attempts to fashion humans. The first attempt
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