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

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

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.

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 with clay failed because the creatures were weak and could not think well; the second attempt with wood also failed because those creatures had no souls or reverence for their creator; not until the third attempt when the gods made people from maize were they satisfied (190-191).

Even now, Q’eqchi’ farmers consider themselves to be made of maize, associating each of the

cultivated criollos (native corn varieties) with one part of the body: red is blood, white is bone,

yellow is skin, black (blue) is hair, and green (sweet corn) is sky and earth (Grandia 2012: 191).

The spiritual significance of maize to the Q’eqchi’ compares to that of other Maya groups in that

it shapes family life and timing in the village (191-192). Since the milpa encompasses not only

the grain that grows from the soil but also the soil itself – and the microbial, fungal, and

macrofaunal communities that reside within it – the Q’eqchi’ often define their identity more

broadly as R’al Ch’och, meaning the “sons and daughters of the earth” in their language

(Alsonso-Fradejas 2012: 523).

Nor is this relationship to the land perceived as unidirectional; just as the earth nurtures and supports the Q’eqchi’, they do the same for their milpas. Reciprocity underlies many aspects of the traditional Q’eqchi’ social structure, which in the milpa takes the form of labor-exchanges between village members in the same social network (Wilk 1997; Downey 2010). The most prominent labor-exchanges gravitate around the different stages of milpa cultivation, from “el chapeo” and “la quema” (“clearing” and “burning” a forest parcel) to “la siembra” (“planting” the milpa) to “la limpieza” (“cleaning” the milpa of weeds with a machete or other means). Prior to initiating one of these phases in the milpa cycle, a Q’eqchi’ farmer will recruit between ten and thirty members (varying by milpa size) of his or her social circle to assist. The recruiting farmer is expected to provide all meals for the day and eventually to return the favor by lending a hand on the other farmers’ plots. The planting of the milpa has particular ritual significance.

Farmers work hand-in-hand with their neighbors to bring the task to completion over the course of a day, and the group’s efforts are rewarded at day’s end with an elaborate meal, including ceremonial foods like cacao and a fermented maize drink to mark the occasion (Grandia 2012:

192). When asked about their greatest expense for milpa cultivation, the majority of farmers

(66%) I interviewed cited the high cost of feeding laborers on the sowing day. The cost was especially high among farmers who served expensive meats (pork and chicken) in addition to the staple tortillas and beans.

Concurrent with the spiritual and social importance of maize, the grain is also physiologically critical to the Q’eqchi’ people. Processed in the typical manner as nixtamal

(boiling in partially dissolved “slaked lime,” or calcium hydroxide, and soaking to soften the kernels and increase calcium, vitamin B complex niacin, and lysine and tryptophan amino acid concentrations (Grandia 2012: 191)), corn tortillas with beans provide the complete protein

complement for human dietary needs (Bressani and Elías 1974). Guatemalans consume maize,

usually in the form of handmade tortillas, thrice daily, and many Q’eqchi’ say they feel hungry

after a meal unaccompanied by tortillas (even a starch-based one, such as pasta) (Grandia 2012:

191). In rural areas, the average Guatemalan eats one pound of maize per day, accounting for approximately 65 percent of their carbohydrate and 71 percent of daily protein requirements

(Fuentes Lopez et al. 2005).

To the Q’eqchi’, the milpa and maize are inextricable. “Milpa” in Spanish, as in Q’eqchi’

(k’al), understands “cornfield” to be both the physical field and the crop of maize growing within it (Grandia 2012: 191). While the milpa is often home to many food crops and useful non-crop species, maize is essential to the agroecosystem’s social-ecological structure. Through ordered village cultivation practices, Q’eqchi’ milpas have also been shown to contribute to community conservation practices and agroecological adaptation. As one social scientist noted,

The Q’eqchi’ swidden appears to encourage learning, diffusion of agriculturally important information and adaptation to changes in the local environment. These features help the Q’eqchi’ monitor the forest’s response to farming activity and respond accordingly to these changes (Downey 2010: 24).

Villages with plentiful land attract immigrants interested in subsistence farming, who are almost exclusively Q’eqchi’ Maya or “Ladinos” (used in Guatemala to mean “mestizos,” or people of mixed Spanish-indigenous descent) in Sarstún. When a village loses its land to plantation owners or cattle ranchers, who are often absentee international operators or urban, wealthy Ladinos, Q’eqchi’ smallholders are obligated to work as tenant farmers at the plantation or as hired help at the ranch. Should neither of those options prove appealing, they must uproot

their families and relocate to another village in order to continue their subsistence lifestyles.

FORCED MIGRATION AND AGROECOLOGICAL ADAPTATION

Q’eqchi’ Maya land dispossession and forced migration have played dominant roles in

their biocultural history since the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. There are records of

Q’eqchi’ presence in the forested highlands of Alta Verapaz in central Guatemala from at least the Early Classic period, around A.D. 300 (Wilk 1997: 42). Over the first century of Spanish colonialism in Mesoamerica (modern-day Mexico and Central America), massive “reductions … removed all but an ephemeral Maya population” from the tropical lowlands and western highlands regions of Guatemala (Downey 2010: 18; Thompson 1938). Spanish massacres and

enslavement of indigenous Maya populations caused cultural dispersion and loss of life and land

throughout the Colonial period (Viscidi 2004). The Q’eqchi’ of the Verapaz were spared

complete elimination, first by putting up a fierce resistance to a waning Spanish offensive in

1529 and then by serving as test subjects in the Dominican priests’ “great experiment” at

religious pacification beginning in 1537 (Wilk 1997: 42-43).

Dominican control over Alta Verapaz, spearheaded originally by the pacifist Friar

Bartolomé de las Casas, lasted well into the 19th century (until Central America gained political

independence in 1821) and focused on religious conversion and consolidation of Q’eqchi’

communities (Wilk 1997: 42-48). The Q’eqchi’ population plummeted by 77 percent between

1560 and 1594, not due to Spanish “reductions” per se but due to widespread disease (notably

smallpox and measles) and disrupted agricultural production (46). Agricultural inconsistencies

likely came about through Dominican pacification techniques, such as attempting to condense

Q’eqchi’ villages into high-population townships, relocating communities, and breaking up

extended families (Wilk 1997: 45-46). These forms of societal restructuring forced Q’eqchi’

communities to begin their milpas from scratch, often in a distinct climate zone.

Guatemala’s newfound statehood in 1841 did little to prevent Dominican institutions

from progressing into a forced Q’eqchi’ labor system based on land tenancy and debt. This

minifundio-latifundio system was the prevailing post-colonial agricultural framework throughout

Central America. Latifundistas, or wealthy foreign landowners, distributed small tracts of land

(minifundios) to subsistence farmers in exchange for their plantation labor, in a system that dominated Guatemala’s agricultural regions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (Castellón

1996: 266; Grandia 2012; Harbour 2008).

In spite of socio-political and physical institutions engineered for indigenous submission,

the Guatemalan census of 1893 maintained that 64.8 percent of the population was Amerindian

centuries after the Spanish conquest (Censo General de la Poblacion de la Republica de

Guatemala 1893: 189). The hard hitters in Guatemalan export-oriented agriculture during this period were coffee and banana growers, the latter epitomized by the United Fruit Company, which held unmatched political sway in Guatemala starting in the late 19th century (Bucheli

2003). Continuing into the mid-twentieth century, United Fruit Company played a role in the US

Department of State-backed overthrow of the reformist government (which had been

redistributing plantation lands to indigenous peasants) in 1954 (Bucheli 2003: 90).

Starting in the 1960s, at the dawn of the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996), the

Guatemalan military urged peasant farmers and their families to emigrate from western regions

to take advantage of the untapped agricultural potential in the Northern Lowlands. The Northern

Lowlands lie to the east, in an area characterized by altitudes below 500 meters and a tropical

rainforest biome (Alonso-Fradejas 2012: 515). This region includes Izabal, where Sarstún is

located, and is the department of focus for this study.

Guatemala-Belize border (Sarstún River)

Livingston, Guatemala

Map 1. Village study sites in the region of Sarstún, Izabal, Guatemala, with inset map of Guatemala and Belize for context. The Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz lies directly to the west of Izabal, with the El Petén department to the northwest and Belize to the northeast. Livingston, Guatemala, is the nearest municipality to most villages in Sarstún. Image provided by Ecologic Development Fund, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

Propelled by civil unrest, military violence, and labor conditions in the neighboring

department of Alta Verapaz, thousands of Q’eqchi’ arrived in the largely unpopulated Northern

Lowlands of Izabal and El Petén, seeking communal landholdings and agrarian subsistence during the latter half of the 20th century (Wilk 1997: 53; Ybarra 2010). That said, the political violence of the civil war was not limited to higher, more populous areas. Over 160 military massacres (80 percent of whose victims were rural Mayas) took place in the Northern Lowlands over 36 years, with violence reaching a climax during the “scorched earth” period of the 1980s

(CEH 1999). According to 2001 census data, indigenous peoples still compose 40 percent of

today’s Guatemala (CIA World Factbook 2014). Of those, 6.3 percent are Q’eqchi’ Maya. The

majority of Guatemalans claim Ladino (mestizo) heritage/ethnicity.

With a change in region – from the cloud forests and steep, mountainous slopes of Alta

Verapaz to the hilly lowland tropics of Izabal – came a changed milpa. Abandoning their high-

ground homeland, Q’eqchi’ immigrants to Sarstún had to adapt cultivation patterns and practices

to their new home on the Caribbean coast. While the milpa has been the face of Q’eqchi’

agriculture since pre-history (Perez-Brignoli 1989), the plants cultivated within it, from maize

landraces to complementary vegetables and medicinal plants, have shifted along with the

Q’eqchi’ communities that tend them. Logically, the woody and herbaceous species that flourish

in a high-altitude cloud forest, from oaks (Quercus sp.) and laurels (Lauraceae) (Eisermann &

Schulz 2005) to beans (Phaseolus vulgaris and P. lunatus L.) and squash (Cucurbita pepo L. and

C. moschata) that grow with maize in a highland milpa, differ in growth pattern, nutrient

requirements, and community composition from tropical rainforest species (Castellon 1996: 34-

36; Pope et al. 2015: 3; Renner et al. 2006). In the tropical lowlands, rainforest species like

palms (Carludovica palmata), fruit trees (plantain/Musa spp., avocado/Persea americana,

breadfruit/Artocarpus attilis), and root vegetables (yame/Dioscorea trifida, yucca/Manihot

esculenta, sweet potato/Ipomoea batatas) are commonly found in and around the Sarstún milpa

(Wilk 1997:110-117).

Weeds and useful herbs that grow as volunteers in the milpa also vary between highland

and lowland regions. Farmers described common edible and medicinal species in Sarstún’s

milpas, including wild mushrooms, nightshade (“hierba mora”/Solanum nigrum), “tres puntas,”

“junco,” and “piel de paloma," all of which were associated with specific uses for cooking and/or healing (field interviews, June and July 2014). These useful non-crop plants are found most often

in secondary milpas after a full fallow period and are less likely to grow in fields with depleted

soils (Wilk 1997: 111-117). Noxious weeds also vary by both landscape and soil conditions

(Kellman and Tackaberry 1997). As the bracken fern (Pteridium sp.) is indicative of low soil quality in Baja Verapaz (Castellon 1996), the aggressive grass locally called “tunoso” (directly translated as “tenacious”) plagues short-fallowed secondary milpas in Sarstún (farmer interviews, June and July 2014). “Tunoso” has taken over some farmers’ fields so completely that even vast quantities of herbicide could not eradicate it, let alone hand-weeding with a machete (field notes, June and July 2014). This hardy weed is one of the reasons farmers struggle to reduce their herbicide use despite its disadvantages for social-ecological wellbeing.

Immigrants to Sarstún, whether or not they are of Q’eqchi’ origin, must learn and adapt to not only their new village’s social norms but also its agroecological particularities, challenges, and appropriate cultivation practices.

Another difficulty with farmer adaptation to the tropical lowlands is the climatic change that has already become evident throughout much of Guatemala (Lawrence 2011). In Sarstún, farmers do not hesitate to state that the climate has changed in recent years. In fact, 89 percent of farmers I interviewed said they had observed changes in rain patterns, temperature, and/or extreme weather events over a period of a decade or more (field interviews, June and July 2014).

Specifically, farmers noted inconsistent seasonal precipitation (less distinction between monsoon and dry seasons), higher temperatures in the rain, and increased incidence of violent, windy storms. According to farmers, each of these shifts offers new challenges for milpa cultivation.

Inconsistent rainfall patterns make the timing of planting and harvesting difficult, resulting in crop losses or delayed planting. Rain in the dry season increases erosion on sloped fields and leads to flooding in low-lying plots. High winds knock over plantain trees and maize stalks,

forcing them to re-plant or accept their losses. A changing climate makes any effort to adapt to a

novel agroecosystem more trying.

Past research has shown that smallholder farmers’ ability to rely on management

practices that enhance or maintain agroecosystem viability and reduce deforestation has more to

do with ecological knowledge of the area than with innate cultural characteristics or value

attributed to environmental conservation (Atran et al. 1999; Castellón 1996). The learning curve

inherent in immigrant adjustment to a novel ecological zone can work to the detriment of long-

term agroecosystem vitality unless the native community facilitates a diffusion of local

knowledge and practices to newcomers. In one study of commons management in the El Petén

region of the Northern Lowlands, Q’eqchi’ immigrants to a predominantly Itzaj Maya area

inflicted significantly more forest damage and demonstrated less agroecological awareness than

their Ladino immigrant counterparts (Atran et al. 1999: 7603). The authors blamed Q’eqchi’

socio-linguistic isolation from local ecological knowledge and a mismatch of agricultural practices from Alta Verapaz highlands to El Petén tropical lowlands for the difference. Q’eqchi’ management practices led to reduced tree cover in reserve (long-fallow) lands and lower vegetative diversity in Q’eqchi’ milpas (7599-7600).

While problems of deforestation and erosion are also prevalent in Sarstún, they often result from loss of land and the inappropriate use of new technologies, such as chemical herbicides, in addition to Q’eqchi’ population growth and continued immigration to the region.

The resulting soil depletion is only expected to increase in severity with exaggerated climate variability in rural Guatemala (Lawrence 2011).

“GRABBED” LAND AND THE MILPA IN TRANSITION

Since migrating east to the tropical lowlands in the mid-twentieth century, Q’eqchi’

farmers in Sarstún have been producing commodity corn and other products (pineapple, for

example) for the market in addition to their subsistence maize (Grandia 2012: 192). This shift in

practice came about due in large part to “government colonization programs” in the 1970s and

pressure from the government and developmental organizations to “modernize” by planting

hybrid corn and complementing with agrichemical inputs (193, 231). Though farmers I

interviewed in Sarstún prided themselves on their “maíz de aquí” (maize from here), or “maíz

criollo” (native maize landraces (Fitting 2011: 40)), ten to fifteen years ago nearly all of them

made the switch from physical weeding with a machete to chemical weed removal with toxic

herbicides marketed as Gramoxone (Paraquat) and Hedonal (2,4-D) (field interviews, June-July

2014; Castellon 1996: 165). When asked where their backpack herbicide applicators (“bombas”) came from, farmers mentioned that either a rural development NGO or a governmental extension agent had arrived to distribute the equipment and encourage farmers to begin applying herbicides in their milpas.

Rural development programs responsible for introducing conventional technologies in places like Sarstún are oftentimes part of foreign-run aid organizations or national programs

channeled through the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture (Ministerio de Agricultura,

Ganadería y Alimentación, or MAGA). International NGOs, many of which have partnerships

with community-level Guatemalan organizations, tend to arrive in rural areas with their own

agendas and deadlines, not all of which coincide with local needs and desires (Rohloff, Kraemer

Díaz, and Dasgupta 2011). The contrary missions of developmental and environmental NGOs

can lead to ineffective strategies overall, as community clients become disillusioned or

overwhelmed by opposing messages.

Such is the case in Sarstún, where NGOs like the now-retired CEIDEC (Centro de

Estudios Integrados de Desarrollo Comunal, or The Center for Integrated Studies of Community

Development) focused on modernization and development goals (CEIDEC 1993), have been replaced by “sustainable development” NGOs like APROSARSTUN (Asociación Maya Pro-

Bienestar de Sarstún, or The Mayan Association for Wellbeing in Sarstún, and my partner organization for this study) and FUNDAECO Río Sarstún (a religious-affiliate national environmental group with a branch in the area) that introduce technologies geared toward long- term agroecosystem productivity, reforestation, and soil replenishment without agrochemical inputs.

As CEIDEC and MAGA handed out herbicide applicators and hybrid or “improved” seeds in the 1990s and early 2000s, FUNDAECO (1990) and APROSARSTUN (2007) have stepped in to propose alternative practices and behavior change that may or may not better serve the community. In my interviews, many farmers expressed feelings of guilt or helplessness at their continued reliance on herbicides in light of the harmful effects for soil (through reduced ground cover and increased erosion), plant, and human health that APROSARSTUN has discussed with them (CDC 2013). APROSARSTUN as an organization was formed by Q’eqchi’ students at a local Mayan school (Ak’Tenamit), and its field technicians have a vested interest in improving the wellbeing of those who inhabit the villages and milpas in which they work. Main projects implemented by APROSARSTUN include installing fuel-efficient (and safer) stoves and water filters in Q’eqchi’ homes, teaching farmers about agroforestry (with a specific focus on intercropping the milpa with a nitrogen-fixing tree, “guama” or Inga edulis) and distributing

seeds, providing micro-grants to entrepreneurial villagers for small-scale animal production, and developing nurseries for reforestation projects with native and commercial trees.

APROSARSTUN is well-received by its partner villages and has good relations with the

COCODE (village leader) in each locale, creating a positive institutional reputation that was instrumental in the completion of field research for this study. FUNDAECO’s work overlaps somewhat with that of APROSARSTUN. Notably, the two farmers I interviewed who had the highest crop diversity (growing eleven and sixteen crops, respectively) had received many of the starts for their specialty crops (citrus trees and cinnamon, for example) from FUNDAECO.

Other local organizations influencing Q’eqchi’ milpa production are the Compania

Petrolera del Atlantico (CPA, or the Atlantic Petroleum Company), which in 2002 received authorization from the Guatemalan President Portillo to drill 1,278 square kilometers in Izabal

(Business News Americas 2002). This area overlaps with three of my study villages and has implications for both land and water quality throughout the region. Two other villages, Plan

Grande Tatin and Plan Grande Quehueche, are the most accessible to tourists from Livingston, the municipality nearest to Sarstún’s villages, and have mildly successful eco-tourism operations that bring in visitors and some additional income (field notes, June 2014). A summary of villages and their institutional influences can be found in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Village profiles from the eleven field interview locations in Sarstún, Izabal, Guatemala. Data was collected in July 2014 and represents updated estimates from 2007 statistics.

Number Total Village of Land Landholdings Land per Village code Village Name families ownership Institutional Influences* (ha) family (ha) 1 CB Cerro Blanco 70 communal Unknown 2700 55 2 ER El Rosario 19 communal Land grab 68 5 Lo De En Medio Compania Petrolera del 3 LDM II 12 parceled Atlantico (CPA) 225 27 4 LG La Guaira Cocoli 60 communal Adjacent to plantation 685 16 Nuevo Land grab (teak plantation); 5 NNC Nacimiento Caliz 35 communal FundaEco unknown unknown Plan Grande 6 PGQ Quehueche 133 communal Eco-tourism 675 7 Plan Grande 7 PGT Tatin 68 communal Eco-tourism 855 18 Compania Petrolera del 8 PS Playa Sarstun 15 n/a Atlantico (CPA) 0 0 Compania Petrolera del 9 SC Sarstun Creek 32 parceled Atlantico (CPA) 360 16 10 SJ San Juan 35 n/a Land grab (teak plantation) 0 0 11 SM San Martin 17 n/a Land grab (teak plantation) 0 0 *APROSARSTUN (Mayan Association for Wellbeing in Sarstún) works in all of these villages.

Zooming out to a grander scale, policies that create MAGA programs often result directly

from “harmonization” stipulations in international free trade agreements like NAFTA in Mexico

and DR-CAFTA in Guatemala and the rest of Central America (Grandia 2012: 188). Such

political dialogues juxtapose risky traditional practices with modern commercial techniques to

create the impetus (and funding) for change. Besides introducing Guatemalan smallholder

farmers to the industrial agricultural paradigm through technologies like herbicides, fertilizers,

and (potentially) genetically-modified seeds, DR-CAFTA (2005) is expected to have big-picture

impacts on farmers like the Q’eqchi’ in Sarstún as well.

Grandia sums it up by stating, “One may anticipate the fate of the Q’eqchi’ milpa under

the DR-CAFTA by looking to Mexico’s experience with NAFTA since 1994” (2012: 193).

Mexico’s agricultural sector exhibited many of the same characteristics as that of Guatemala,

with a multitude of indigenous subsistence farmers making ends meet by producing a small

maize surplus to sell to their neighbors (Fitting 2011: 65-71). Between 1994 and 2001, Mexico’s

corn imports nearly tripled (from 2.5 to 6 million tons) due to the United States policy of

“predatory corn dumping” that keeps prices low for US processors but proved fatal to Mexican

subsistence farmers (Fitting 2011: 46-47; Grandia 2012: 193). With yields five times those of

Central America, US corn sells cheaply – so cheaply that 1.5 million Mexican farmers could no

longer support themselves by selling local maize after the implementation of NAFTA’s “free

trade” (Friedmann 1993; Grandia 2012: 193-194; Winders 2009). In the end, these macro-level

drops in corn price have forced (through debt or destitution) over a million Mexican farmers to

sell their lands to plantation owners or ranchers at bottom-of-the-barrel prices (Grandia 2012:

193).

Similarly, with the “new terms of trade under the DR-CAFTA,” many Q’eqchi’ producers in the Guatemalan lowlands have “succumb(ed) to land speculation” and “sold out” to pressures by weightier enterprises – a process enabled by the privatization of communal (milpa) landholdings by World Bank and IMF surveys and deeding procedures (Grandia 2012: 169-170).

When the smallholders sell out, development banks are there to promote their preferred newcomers to the region – large-scale sugar, oil palm, and commercial hardwood agribusinesses

(Alonso-Fradejas 2012: 514). For example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) intends to dedicate US$150 million to fund “sugar and bioenergy companies and exporters in

Guatemala” and other Central and South American nations (IDB, 16 January 2009). In the same article, the IDB calls itself the “leading source of long-term financing for economic and social projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Global institutions (The World Bank) and international trade agreements (DR-CAFTA) have not acted alone to alter Q’eqchi’ lives. The Guatemalan government is currently, with

World Bank backing for its Land Fund (FONTIERRAS), funding the resale of newly privatized

Q’eqchi’ properties to remove “‘distortions’ from land and agricultural markets” (Lahiff, Borras, and Kay 2007: 1417). Specific strategies include voluntary sale and contracts as well as outright coercion and violence to gain smallholder parcels. Voluntary land-control grabbing usually involves one or more of the following: (1) leasing from landed elites, (2) vertical buy-ups of small parcels for integration, (3) contracts between landowners and the palm oil or sugar industry, and/or (4) contracts between landowners, industry, and the government’s Oil Palm

Programme under MAGA (Alonso-Fradejas 2012: 518-520). FONTIERRAS serves as a national institution meant to, in World Bank terms, “transfer land towards more efficient users and producers” (World Bank 2007: 138). In Q’eqchi’ terms, that means the disintegration of the communal ejido system, degraded milpas on marginal land, and a three-hour walking commute to work as day laborers on a palm oil plantation whose product is destined for international biomass or bioenergy markets.

The new land-control grabbing model applied in Sarstún has been called a “flexible agrarian capitalist regime” and a continuation of the forces, from colonial to corporate, that force the Maya into a pattern of “territorial dispossession” and “subordination” (Alonso-Fradejas

2012: 510). These “flex crop” agricultural markets operate on the assumption that lands are most effectively utilized when under intensive production and when their products become feedstock capital in the global marketplace (510-511). Rather than fostering food safety and security and

“reduc[ing] rural poverty” as many such policies allege to do (Alonso-Fradejas 2012: 513;

Deninger et al. 2011), the plantations near (or supplanting) communities in which I interviewed

appeared to have a harmful impact on smallholder wellbeing and food production. In fact,

farmers in villages subject to land-control grabbing by an oil palm and a teak hardwood

plantation were growing so little on leftover, marginal lands that they frequently had to purchase more maize than they produced in a year (Interviews in El Rosario, San Martín, and San Juan,

June-July 2014). Many farmers also resorted to renting higher quality land from plantation owners to avoid growing on the worn-down lands that remained in village ownership (Interviews in La Guaira Cocolí, Nuevo Nacimiento Caliz, Playa Sarstún, San Martin, and San Juan, June-

July 2014). From where did the funds to afford the added expenses of marketed maize (often three or more times greater than their largest standard expense in a year) and rented land come?

Farmers strapped for money to feed their families worked for day wages at the very plantations that had dispossessed their villages of land in the first place.

MILPA IN MODERNITY

Where do these changes – local to global – leave the Q’eqchi’ milpa? The milpa has been moved from the cloud forests of Alta Verapaz to the mangrove swamps of

Sarstún, been privatized and turned to capital by World Bank surveyors (Grandia 2012), and been flooded with chemical herbicides introduced by MAGA and development

NGOs. Yet it still showcases biodiverse polycultures and acts as a site for reciprocal community labor-exchange. Q’eqchi’ farmers are aware of their milpas’ predicament and their role in its decline in vitality and its (and their own) future.

A prominent source of chagrin and helplessness among Q’eqchi’ smallholders I interviewed was their reliance on chemical herbicides for weed control. Not only are these herbicides dangerous to farmers and family members who manipulate them in the milpa without

proper protective coverings, but they dissolve the multispecies networks so carefully cultivated in a traditional milpa system. When farmers speak of herbicides, they use a language of

“burning” and “contamination” (field notes, July 10, 2014). Normally, when farmers describe the steps they take to prepare the milpa for harvest, they use the word “limpiar” (to clean) – one

“cleans” the cornfield with a machete, ridding it of weeds (farmer interviews June-July 2014).

Herbicides, however “queman” (burn) the soil, decreasing the milpa’s health through the loss of cover crops and increased erosion, and potentially impacting the amount and quality of food available for farmers and their families.

The use of chemical herbicides like Paraquat and 2,4-D also triggers another chain of events to the detriment of farmers and their interspecies relationships across the board: herbicides eliminate Mucuna pruriens, the soil-restoring, erosion-preventing cover crop that in the past has self-regenerated from seed during the matahambre milpa (Castellon 1996: 142, 165).

Farmers are cognizant of the negative effects of herbicides for soil fertility. “Frijol abono”

(“fertilizer bean,” the common name for Mucuna pruriens in Sarstún) is lost when the milpa is burned by agrochemicals instead of cleaned with a machete,” said a village leader at a workshop in one Sarstún village, “Everyone in the village needs to plant frijol abono (instead of using herbicides) or we are going to keep seeing the same contamination” (meeting notes, July 10,

2014). Of course, it requires a high degree of physical labor to wield a machete over several acres containing herbicide-resistant grasses. There is a desire for change, but as of now few farmers are willing to put in the effort to revert from herbicides to their old ways.

Another reality that has put additional stress on the Q’eqchi’ milpa is the wild population growth in Sarstún. The average Guatemalan family size is nine (Grandia 2012: 208), but many of the farmers I interviewed had ten children or more. With land growing scarce due to buy-outs by

plantations and cattle ranchers, farmers no longer have enough land to sub-divide between all of

their children if they hope to cultivate using the traditional milpa system of fallowing (Grandia

2012: 83-116). Due to this land squeeze, Q’eqchi’ families are increasingly sending their eldest

children to Guatemala City (Guatemala’s capital and by far its largest metropolis) to be educated

and work in the service industry (field notes, June 2014). Some of these children return to take

up the family milpa later in life, but there are many who never return to live in their villages of

origin.

Where do Sarstún’s Q’eqchi’ farmers shift from here? Their social-ecological swiddens

have been subjected to change on multiple spatial and temporal scales, from migration across

agroecosystems, to government handouts of herbicide applicators, to village land grabs by

transnational agribusinesses. Q’eqchi’ dialogues highlight their disillusionment with chemical

technologies they willingly employ, as well as their desire for a viable alternative for weed

control and soil maintenance. Until Sarstún’s farmers reduce their herbicide use, revitalize their

cover crops and fallow periods, and nurture their multispecies milpa back health, their practices

reinforce declines in both Q’eqchi’ and milpa vitality. With poorer soils comes poorer nutrition for the Q’eqchi,’ who rely on maize and complementary food crops to fill their stomachs at every meal. The results of this study suggest that by revitalizing the use of the cover crop Mucuna pruriens, paired with vegetable intercropping and smaller herbicide applications, Q’eqchi’ farmers could increase the amount of protein in their maize grains and in their diets.

CHAPTER 2: LINKING BIODIVERSITY, NUTRITION, AND RESILIENCE IN THE MULTISPECIES MILPA

My work with the Q’eqchi’ took place over two months in the summer of 2014, when I interviewed and collected maize kernels from sixty farmers. The theoretical framework I present here reflects the findings of my biological lab work with those kernels. I found that farmers who used the cover crop Mucuna pruriens in the milpa and who limited their herbicide applications produced maize with a higher protein concentration. Farmers were significantly more likely to use Mucuna in their fields if they cultivated in polyculture rather than in a single-crop system.

The practices of intercropping, cover cropping, and low herbicide use conserve the soil by fixing nutrients like nitrogen, hindering weed proliferation, and preventing erosion.

MULTISPECIES MILPA

The Q’eqchi’ depend upon their milpas - their cornfields and the multiple crops within them - for both material and cultural sustenance. The milpa, in turn, could not exist without the

Q’eqchi’ farmers who plant its seeds, pull its weeds, and construct its boundaries. There is a long history of codependency between the Q’eqchi’ and the milpa; the Q’eqchi’ tend and feed their maize through soil-building practices like intercropping and cover cropping, and they reap the benefits of this care when they consume the fruits of their labor at every meal. The sugars and amino acids of digested maize grains become the building blocks of Q’eqchi’ bodies as they are knit together into human proteins. The more Q’eqchi’ farmers work to improve the health of their milpas, the more nutrition they derive from the maize grains that result. Q’eqchi’ and milpa are co-constituted.

The traditional Q’eqchi’ milpa, marrying dozens of plant species and far more animals, fungi, and microorganisms, is a prime example of an agricultural space as it is meant to be, according to anthropologist Anna Tsing (2012). Tsing envisions the world (and humanity) through its interspecies relationships, writing that no one species can exist alone in nature (Tsing

2012: 144). Polyculture, then, is the natural order of things, and monoculture is an aberrant human construct that cannot persist. Even systems designed to function as monocultures fail to do so for long; weeds and insects quickly adapt to the pesticides that attempt to narrow an agroecosystem into a single crop system. The pests return with even greater vigor to interact in undesirable ways with the crop under cultivation.

In the multispecies literature, the world consists of complex, interconnected webs of relationships between mutually-defined species. As Donna Haraway frames in her Companion

Species Manifesto, “The world is a knot in motion. Biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concreteness … mistak[ing] provisional and local category abstractions like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ for the world” (Haraway 2003: 6). Nature and culture have been artificially separated, and authors like Haraway propose systems of thought to rejoin them in theory as they are in practice. The multispecies model nixes the hierarchical human-dominant perspective assumed by many disciplines and imagines the Q’eqchi’ milpa as a closely intertwined multispecies space, or “natureculture,” that includes the farmers themselves

(Haraway 2003; Tsing 2012).

Fitting (2011) describes it well with an excerpt from a Mexican op-ed for the “In Defense of Maize” campaign, describing how “cultivation” does not only apply to traditional foods in the field, but also to the cultures of people who grow them:

Peasants not only cultivate maize, beans, chile, or coffee, they also cultivate clean air, pure water and fertile land; biological, social and cultural diversity; a plurality

of landscapes, smells, textures and tastes; a variety of dishes, hairstyles and attire; a great many prayers, sonnets, songs and dances; peasants cultivate the inexhaustible multiplicity of uses and customs that make us the Mexicans we are (Armando Bartra, “What Purpose Does Agriculture Serve?,” La Jornada, 21 January 2003; in: Fitting 2011: 67).

MILPA: ORIGINS AND IDEALS

The “traditional” milpa I describe in the passages below is not universal and it does not lie outside of time. In its purest form, it does not and has not ever existed. The Q’eqchi’ milpa has been comingling with other traditions and other geographies for hundreds of years. The multispecies milpa, then, is a milpa of origins and of ideals, and it exists to some degree in every

Q’eqchi’ farmer’s field.

In this traditional form, Sarstún’s milpa system exemplifies a multispecies sphere for three reasons. First, the majority of Q’eqchi’ farmers in Sarstún plant their milpas in polyculture, growing other species between the rows of maize, and they do so according to the timing and nutritional needs of each crop (Grandia 2012: 231). Second, the structure of Q’eqchi’ social practices revolves around the milpa through reciprocal labor-exchanges to plant each family’s milpa. Third, and most critically, the Q’eqchi’ and maize have evolved and persisted together, the energy of people feeding into plants through soil-enriching practices and the energy of plants feeding people in the form of tortillas.

Milpa as Polyculture

“Interspersed among the corn stalks” of a Q’eqchi’ milpa, one will find a wide variety of food crops, especially in the wet season (Grandia 2012: 231). Amid the maize, there grow root vegetables (malanga, cassava, sweet potato, onions), beans, squash, chilies, herbs, and even pineapples, while alongside the milpa farmers plant trees like bananas, plantains, and avocadoes,

which produce too much shade to be grown with the maize and other crops (field notes, July 9,

2014). The intentional chorus of species interacting within even a five-by-five meter milpa plot has little in common with the uniform lines of a commercial plantation.

The Q’eqchi’ cultivate in accordance with the interdependent “natural” and “cultural” cycles of their region. The days for planting maize, felling trees, building homes, and adding any other crops to the milpa are chosen with regards to the lunar calendar (field notes, July 10, 2014).

As a Q’eqchi’ participant in a workshop hosted by a local non-profit asserted, “One can’t plant beans at just any moment of the year because one knows that they won’t produce during many times” (farmer from Plan Grande Quehueche, July 10, 2014). The period of the full moon is considered a time of good luck for planting maize because rain will come promptly – which makes it a poor time to harvest. Maize is harvested during the new moon, in September or

October, and the next cycle of planting begins in November or December with the matahambre

(dry season) milpa (farmer interviews, June-July 2014).

Halfway through the dry season, farmers intercrop with Mucuna pruriens, a nitrogen- fixing cover crop or green fertilizer, which, like fallowing, “prevent(s) weed infestation and maintain(s) soil fertility” in the milpa (Grandia 2012: 231; Barthés et al. 2000; Chabi-Olaye et al.

2005). After cultivating an area for one to two years, Q’eqchi’ farmers fallow their fields. The traditional fallow period lasts from three to five years, letting the milpa rest until sufficient vegetation has grown back to enrich the soil for another cycle (Grandia 2012: 231). Taken together, farmer practices of polyculture, cover cropping with Mucuna, and fallowing return some of the nutrients the milpa has offered up as crops back to the soil.

Milpa as Site of Social Reciprocity

After clearing the forest to make way for a new milpa in March or April, in May or June farmers gather together community members for a ritualized planting ceremony (Grandia 2012:

99). They invite between ten and thirty family members and neighbors to plant the first of two annual milpas over the course of a pre-selected auspicious day (field interviews, Sarstún, June-

July 2014). Once the work is complete, the group unites over a feast of traditional fare. The nature of labor-exchange is reciprocal: when a farmer is asked to lend his labor to a planting ceremony, he expects the farmer he helps to return the favor.

This form of work exchange builds camaraderie within Q’eqchi’ communities and makes the work of planting several acres far less arduous for a single family. An anthropologist in

Sarstun encountered such “shared-work exchanges,” and called them “so successful that quite a few Ladino [mestizo] farmers in mixed-ethnic frontier communities lamented that their Q’eqchi’ neighbors did not invite them to join” (2012: 214). One social scientist’s work with the Q’eqchi’ also suggested the value of shared labor-exchange networks to mitigate deforestation at the community level (Downey 2010). Farmers I interviewed consistently cited “la siembra” (the planting ceremony) as the most costly aspect of farming due to the expenses incurred in offering a communal dinner to as many as thirty-five neighbors who helped with planting. By my reading, these generous contributions from subsistence maize farmers to their labor-exchange networks indicate the importance of shared-labor milpa practices. In a way, farmers participating in labor-exchange are cultivating not only their milpas but their social circles as well.

Co-evolutions and Co-constitutions

The milpa epitomizes the associations of “people, plants, and places” that form a

natureculture because the human and plant species involved are defined by one another (Kirksey

and Helmreich 2010: 555; Haraway 2003: 6-9; Latour 1993: 7-11). Philosophically, a

naturecultural milpa could include arrangements of species that “remak(e) biological and

political relations” (Lowe 2010: 626), a renewed romance between interdependent flora and

fauna (Tsing 2012: 148), or a recognition of the common history of human and natural

relationships (Cronon 1991: 19). Other authors might see the Q’eqchi’ milpa as the result of a centuries-long co-domestication and evolution that began with teosinte (“mother of corn”) and ended with Q’eqchi’ milpas and the social customs that happen within and around them (Pollan

2006: 23-28; Fitting 2011: 43).

Biologically, a milpa natureculture is the equivalent of a biodiverse system. It is made up

of mycorrhizal fungi and soil nematodes that build underground communities, a panoply of

medicinal herbs and nitrogen-fixing beans that grow as volunteers, and bird species that feast on

produce and drop crop diversity as seed from above. Ultimately, a healthy natureculture, or a

vibrant ecosystem, produces fruit – the maize grains that nourish their Q’eqchi’ cultivators with

carbohydrates and proteins. The nutritional components of maize then integrate into the human

body, and the cycle repeats.

TODAY’S MILPA

Historically, the Q’eqchi’ have nurtured multispecies relationships in their milpas, and

they have in turn been sustained by their milpas. Farmers have grown several maize landraces,

intercropped maize with complementary vegetables, planted nitrogen-fixing legumes, and rested

their fields for lengthy fallow periods. Villages have come together as labor-exchange networks

to plant the milpa in two yearly cycles, and they have organized communal lands into an ejido

system to offer each family enough acreage to provide for itself. The milpa has produced the nutrients for subsistence, yielding not only maize but also many other crops for human consumption.

The ideals of the Q’eqchi’ milpa contrast starkly with those of the highly calculated, export-oriented plantations that have displaced them since the Colonial Era. They also contrast with the input-to-output rationale that drives the chemical technologies first introduced to the

region by the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture (MAGA) and rural development NGOs. These

technologies are now sold at every farm supply store in the area. The relationship between

traditional and conventional agriculture is far from static in Sarstún, and the force of expansion

guiding market-oriented agriculture has shaped Q’eqchi’ cultivation patterns and livelihoods for

generations (Grandia 2012). While certain aspects of the milpa system in its current state still

encourage interspecies relationships and mutual growth, in other ways the Q’eqchi’ model is

being set into the industrial agricultural mold. The modern milpa reality is a far cry from its

multispecies past.

Beyond re-shaping human relationships within their agricultural spheres, the products

and practices of industrial agriculture sever the milpa’s multispecies ties. The tools of this

process are the inputs required for commercial corn production: synthetic NPK (nitrogen –

phosphorus – potassium) fertilizer, herbicides, and insecticides. As Donna Haraway puts it, these

agrochemicals are the agents of “better protected species boundaries and sterilization of category

deviants” (4), and they are engineered to remove all plant, animal, and human connections that

could hinder the path to high corn yields.

Liquid ammonia fertilizer (the N in “NPK”) deconstructs multispecies relationships by

providing an artificial alternative to the nitrogen-fixing symbioses between the bacterial nodes and leguminous roots present in Sarstún’s bean and cover crops. Few farmers in Sarstún can reliably afford to purchase artificial fertilizer, but MAGA provides it free-of-charge to a select group of farmers for a trial period. According to Q’eqchi’ farmers, the soil “grows accustomed”

(se acostumbra) to synthetic fertilizer applications, causing most farmers to avoid the product so that their fields will not become dependent on the chemical input for production (field interviews, June and July 2014).

Herbicides and insecticides aim to purify the landscape through chemical extermination of other flora and micro- and macrofauna present in the multispecies milpa. Unlike fertilizer, herbicide use, and to a lesser extent insecticide use, has been adopted by most farmers in Sarstún.

This chemical cleansing of croplands, as it eliminates the original multispecies networks in a given ecosystem, fabricates new relationships between plants, animals, and the agents of disease

(Lowe 2010: 641-642; Tsing 2012: 147). There is a “link between the intensiveness of agriculture and the proliferation of … disease” (Lowe 2010: 641). The evidence lies with the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds and pesticide-resistant bacteria, fungi, and insects in monocultural fields (Pollan 2006: 40). Q’eqchi’ farmers are keenly aware of this feedback loop.

They have been battling herbicide-resistant grasses in their milpas since they first adopted herbicides for weed control over a decade ago.

As the milpa’s multispecies relationships are rent asunder by herbicide use and challenged by the influences of plantation agriculture, governmental and non-governmental institutions, the Q’eqchi’ struggle to maintain the polyculture, cover crops, and fallow fields that rejuvenate their soil. Being co-constituted, the fewer nutrients farmers bestow upon their milpas

through healthy agricultural practices, the fewer nutrients will be present in the maize they consume. The Q’eqchi’ and the milpa are caught between tradition and a market, and their mutual vitality is showing signs of decline.

THE MILPA AS A SYSTEM

The multispecies milpa, seen through the eyes of social scientists and ecologists, is also a social-ecological system. While the concept of a multispecies agricultural space is intentionally unbounded, a milpa “system” has boundaries that make its qualities measurable. Drawing from the anthropological literature on multispecies relationships, I have explained the co- constitutional origins and ideals of the Q’eqchi’ milpa. From here, I will look to the social- ecological systems literature in order to make quantitatively supported statements about current relationships in the milpa. As I have argued thus far, agricultural and nutritional vitality are closely linked on a theoretical level. Relating theory to practice, I will pull from both the multispecies and social-ecological systems frameworks to explore which farmer cultivation strategies have the potential to influence maize nutrient composition on the ground.

In the past several decades, studies linking deforestation, land degradation, and swidden agriculture have relied increasingly on resilience-based analytical frameworks. Looking back on this work, I will touch on the original discussions of resilience by Holling (1973) and social networks and stewardship by Ostrom (1990; 2007) before moving on to later conceptions of ecological (Gunderson 1999) and social (Westley 2002) resilience. I will then highlight combined models that describe various forms of “social-ecological” resilience, adaptation, and transformation (Adger 2000; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003; Olsson et al. 2006; Walker 2004;

Walker 2006) before focusing my attentions on one social-ecological model of the lowland

Q’eqchi’ milpa (Downey 2010). While there are assumptions in a resilience-based framework that do not allow for a complete analysis of the dynamics of the Q’eqchi’ milpa system, social- ecological resilience will offer insights into the milpa as a site of both agriculture and nutrition.

Beginning with Holling’s 1973 seminal paper, the concept of resilience has been defined as the ability of a system to bounce back to a stable state following disruption or “perturbation”

(Folke et al. 2010). Various authors have contested the simplified ecological model, but most have added complexity to Holling’s definition while still upholding its basic premise (Gunderson

2000; Folke 2006; Scheffer 2009). The concept’s original application was in ecological systems, but resilience analysis has since been applied to social (Westley 2002) and interdependent social- ecological systems (Ostrom 2007) as well as dynamic (Scheffer et al. 2009) and coupled human and natural systems (Liu et al. 2007). These later models came about due to practical pushback against artificial boundaries between human and environmental systems in the academic literature. Commenting on the necessary re-framing of social and ecological resilience into one integrated system, Folke et al. write,

Recurring problems… stem precisely from the lack of recognition that ecosystems and the social systems that use and depend on them are inextricably linked. It is the feedback loops among them, as interdependent social-ecological systems, that determine their overall dynamics (2010: 21).

A recent heuristics paper on systemic response to social-ecological change cited these five guiding principles: adaptive cycling, panarchy, resilience, adaptability, and transformability, thereby nesting social-ecological resilience within a larger group of factors involved in change across scales (Walker et al. 2006). The oft-cited 2004 Ecology and Society paper entitled

“Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social– Ecological Systems” by Walker et al., however, focuses on just three qualities as those with the greatest power to shape dynamic systems, and theorists have followed this line of thought in subsequent publications (Folke et al.

2010). For instance, in the framework of “resilience thinking,” the three interacting system

characters are (1) resilience, (2) adaptability, and (3) transformability (Folke et al. 2010: 20-21).

Here resilience, which requires “change… to persist,” is complemented by adaptability, through which actors learn and alter their social-ecological patterns in accordance with internal and external forces, and transformability, meaning the overall ability to forge a novel system when the old model becomes “untenable” (Folke et al. 2010: 21-22; Walker et al. 2004: 9).

The three characters of this dynamic systems model, as well as their applications, encompass many of the possible results of social-ecological system disturbance and shift, but authors still question whether cure-all models of ecosystem management and development can or should exist (Ostrom 2007; Folke et al. 2010). The late Elinor Ostrom, prominent writer on social and institutional resilience and “pioneer” of social-ecological systems theory (combining elements of systems ecology and complex adaptive systems theory), wrote that further analyses into the variables involved in “complex, multivariable, nonlinear, cross-scale, and changing systems” must be done prior to the development of any such model (Anderies and Janssen 2012;

Ostrom 2007: 15181). Looking forward, she suggested a “nested, multitier” structure to diagnose particular and interactive effects of variables within social-ecological systems for management applications (Ostrom 2007: 15181).

Picking up where Ostrom left off, ecological anthropologist Sean Downey applied previously characterized principles of social-ecological resilience to his study region in the

Q’eqchi’ Maya lowlands of Southern Belize (just north of the Sarstún River). While governmental influences in the two regions are distinct, Belizean and Guatemalan Q’eqchi’ share their origins as well as many biocultural practices and strategies for milpa cultivation (Grandia

2012). As background, Downey introduces the Malthusian model of carrying capacity to keep

population growth in check and reduce environmental degradation (Malthus 1826). Next he writes a detailed account of Ostrom’s framework for environmental stewardship, which proposes a role for external institutions (i.e. NGOs, government, market forces) to monitor and evaluate the status of a social-ecological system (Downey 2010: 15-17). He then asserts that the Q’eqchi’ have an internal mechanism to reduce resource exploitation (18).

Based on his analysis of Q’eqchi’ labor-exchange networks (reciprocal milpa planting, tending, and harvest among community members), Downey argues that Q’eqchi’ villages mitigate deforestation and land overuse through “graduated sanctions” within these social networks (2010: 18). In other words, farmers will only choose to lend a hand at a neighbor’s planting ceremony free-of-charge if they think the land is being put to appropriate, subsistence- level use (23). When farmers do not participate in maize planting they deem excessive for the commons available, fewer hectares are felled for the milpa and village deforestation rates decrease (23-25).

Downey builds on concepts of network efficiency and the adaptive cycle model of land use to support his hypothesis. Network efficiency in this case means that as village networks mature, they lose redundancy and therefore decrease the material investment needed for individual farmers to maintain reciprocal labor-exchanges (mainly the cost of the customary meal following planting) (2010: 27). The adaptive cycle model, a mainstay of the social- ecological resilience literature, here demonstrates the ebb and flow of Q’eqchi’ milpa size through time. Downey explains this cycle as though Q’eqchi’ land use patterns are the only ones involved in village land degradation: Q’eqchi’ first exploit their land for swiddens to the point of near-collapse; then Q’eqchi’ respond reflexively by transitioning to conservation efforts (27-28).

The transition to rainforest conservation, his study concludes, is governed by internal graduated

sanctions rather than overt external regulation (29).

Integrated and interactive dynamical systems models, such as those employed in

Downey’s analysis, do allow for changes in system composition (used to determine resilience)

and management by actors (used to determine adaptability) at varied rates (Folke et al 2010: 22).

They also extend the theoretical range of possibilities to “regime shifts,” during which the entire

system may undergo a “critical transition” and level out at the original or an “alternative stable

state” (used to determine transformability) (Holling 1996; Scheffer 2009). In practice, shifting

between stable states means moving the system’s baseline – transforming a milpa into a pasture,

for example.

Assumptions and Limitations of Social-Ecological Systems

Yet even updated, more nuanced models of social-ecological system dynamics have their flaws. They assume a constant or near-constant system boundary. Lead authors in the field acknowledge their models’ incompleteness, admitting that one of the major “limitations of the dynamical systems theory that forms the broader underlying framework [of social-ecological systems] is that it does not easily account for the fact that the very nature of systems may change over time” (Scheffer 2009, cited in Folke et al. 2010: 21).

In Downey’s analysis of swidden agriculture, for instance, Q’eqchi’ villages are seen as discrete entities in control of their own – seemingly fixed – communal forest resources. These entities, by his interpretation, self-regulate their land use according to population size and forest succession rates through semi-hierarchical graduated sanctions on reciprocal labor-exchanges

(Downey 2010). What Downey does not address, however, is how these patterns change when

the amount of village land is reduced, population continues to increase, and adjacent, open lands are sequestered from Q’eqchi’ use. These conditions indicate not only compositional shifts but also impose new limits on the boundaries of the Q’eqchi’ ejido system of communal lands

(Scheffer 2009). Similarly, the milpa system has migrated with the Q’eqchi’ from Alta Verapaz to the far reaches of the Izabal department in Guatemala and Southern Belize. When its social- ecological context changes, does that not indicate a change in the “very nature” of the milpa system?

Q’eqchi’ farmers have the power to transform many aspects of the milpa system, to be sure, but they have little say in determining their agricultural boundaries when outsiders appropriate caballerías (an area equal to approximately 90 football fields) by force (Alonso-

Fradejas 2012). Nor is it pure agency that propels Q’eqchi’ families from their villages of origin across the country in search of safe, available land in the lowlands (Wilk 1997). Theirs is not the

“deliberate transformation” of a social-ecological system by the actors within it that is often referenced in resilience theory (Folke et al. 2010: 25). Rather, the cycles of Q’eqchi’ displacement that shape their post-colonial history have in many cases prevented boundaries from forming around the milpa system at all.

The milpa in Sarstún is unbounded in the sense that it can appropriate and relinquish elements into surrounding systems with relative ease, as it has done with every shift in region and microclimate. The composition of the milpa varies between highlands and lowlands, from the forest species burned to become the milpa, to the crops cultivated within it, to the non-crop plants and animals that complete the ecosystem (Castellon 1996; Pope et al. 2015; Wilk 1997).

These floral and faunal networks are created in relation to one another (Haraway 2010; Tsing

2012). Moving the milpa system from Alta Verapaz to Izabal and eventually to Sarstún means

repeatedly uprooting crop species and replanting them in a novel setting, where they are

newcomers and lack healthy multispecies relationships. Crop species, like the Q’eqchi’

themselves, must adapt to each new environment or they cannot persist.

Climate change also far surpasses the standard system boundaries used to determine

social-ecological resilience. Q’eqchi’ farmers do not hesitate to mention that the weather patterns

in Sarstún are increasingly unpredictable, making burning difficult before planting la quema

milpa, drowning low-lying milpas, causing beans to germinate on the vine, and making their

ancestral polycultural planting schedule obsolete (field interviews, June and July 2014). While

many authors have written about social-ecological resilience to climate change (Pelling 2011;

Young et al. 2006), I would argue that climate change, like land grabs, alters the fundamental

structure of the Q’eqchi milpa system.

Resilience and the Q’eqchi’ Milpa

Resilience analysis may not fully describe the diverse factors at play in and around the

Q’eqchi’ milpa, but no model can accurately represent reality. The modern Q’eqchi’ milpa is far

from stable, but that does not stop the Q’eqchi’ from striving to make it so. When the communal

milpa system degrades due to climate, loss of land, or other changes in a village, farmers and

their families have the choice to move to a new village or even a new region in the pursuit of the

subsistence farming lifestyle. Key to that lifestyle for the Q’eqchi’ is their milpa system of

cultivation. Farmers who choose to emigrate and re-create their milpas elsewhere rather than take

on another role as plantation laborer or urban worker are resilient by definition. They are actors

in a social-ecological milpa system, and they are adapting to a novel environment in order to lend stability to traditional agricultural practices (Folke et al 2010).

Ecological complexity has long been thought to increase the stability of a system (Pimm

1984), and the multiple intertwined species of a traditional, polycultural milpa far outweigh a monoculture in terms of complexity. To phrase it ecologically, the milpa is a biodiverse space – one with numerous plants, animals, and microorganisms living in a multispecies agroecosystem

(Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995). The biodiversity of species has a well acknowledged role in increasing the resilience of a social-ecological system (Folke 2006), a beneficial quality which may be extended to include genetic diversity within species like maize as well (Altieri 1999).

Because there is a desire for stability in the milpa system, I have chosen to analyze several of its biodiversity-related characteristics as factors for resilience. These “resilience factors” include crop and non-crop plant biodiversity, cover crop use, maize genetic diversity, and planting in mono- or polyculture in individual farmers’ milpas in eleven Sarstun villages.

Along with resilience factors, I will examine two characteristics that result from changes beyond the standard social-ecological system framework: farmers renting land from plantation owners for maize production and herbicide use. These seven farmer practices will be compared to white maize protein and amino acid concentrations in order to determine the extent of the relationship between agroecosystem management and maize nutritional quality in the milpa. As they mend relationships in the multispecies milpa, resilience factors are expected to relate to higher quality maize. As a counterpoint, herbicide use is expected to have an antagonistic effect on social- ecological resilience. Seeing Q’eqchi’ and milpa as co-constituted, farmer adoption of soil- building practices will allow for their mutual vitality.

CHAPTER 3: FARMER PRACTICES AND MAIZE NUTRITIONAL TRAITS IN SARSTÚN

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity in agroecosystems has been shown to contribute to soil and plant

health by way of multiple environmental services. Increased crop biodiversity and genetic

diversity, non-crop plant biodiversity, polycultural cultivation, and cover crop use in agroecosystems may also lead to improved nutritional traits of produce for human consumption.

In the tropical lowland region of Sarstún, Guatemala, land dispossession, expanding indigenous

population, shorter fallow periods, and inappropriate agrichemical use in a swidden agricultural

cycle are contributing to severe declines in soil quality, crop productivity, and food security

among Q’eqchi’ Maya smallholders. After conducting interviews and collecting maize grains

from farmers in eleven Q’eqchi’ villages in Sarstún, I posed four principal research questions to

pursue:

(1) How do farmer practices relate to one another?

(2) How do farmer practices vary by village?

(3) How do farmer practices influence maize nutritional traits?

(4) How do villages differ in nutritional traits?

Farmer practices in each of these cases include resilience factors, which I defined as agricultural practices that lend stability to the milpa system in Chapter 2. The four research questions aimed to identify and describe any relationships between Q’eqchi’ milpa management and food quality. It was hypothesized that farmers who manage their fields to increase biodiversity, especially through the use of cover crops to smother weed populations and reduced herbicide inputs, produce higher protein maize grain. This study sought further understanding

into the impacts of the following farmer practices on maize protein composition: intercropping

with a nitrogen-fixing cover crop (Mucuna pruriens), crop diversity, non-crop herb diversity,

maize landrace diversity, mono- or polycultural cultivation, herbicide (combined Paraquat and

2,4-D) use per hectare, and land rented for production. These factors related to Q’eqchi’-milpa resilience were selected based on data from sixty farmer surveys in Sarstún. The relationship between farmer management practices and maize grain protein concentrations was then analyzed using Pearson’s bivariate correlation matrices followed by one-way or two-way univariate analyses of variance (ANOVA), depending on the variables considered.

The principal finding of this study was the interactive effect of Mucuna cover crop and herbicide application (Liters/hectare, or L/ha) on protein concentration (p=0.008). Overall, farmers who planted Mucuna grew maize with an average of 13% higher protein concentration than those who did not report use of the cover crop (p=0.061, not significant outside of interaction), and farmers who applied a medium or high quantity of herbicide produced maize with 14% lower protein concentration than those who used low quantities or no herbicide (p >

0.05). Taken together, the practices of cover cropping and herbicide use had a significant effect on protein, with opposite trends depending on the presence or absence of Mucuna (p=0.033, corrected model). Mucuna appeared to have a protective effect that allowed maize protein levels to remain constant – and even improve – with high-volume herbicide applications to the milpa

(p=0.008, R2 = 0.7146). This quality may be attributed to the cover crop’s nitrogen-fixing potential and its extensive coverage of the soil, which prevents the erosion of nutrients already present in the soil.

Cultivating maize in polyculture was strongly correlated with use of Mucuna (p=0.005) as well as crop diversity (p<0.0001). Renting land was positively correlated with maize diversity

for individual farmers (p=0.029). Maize diversity (p=0.001), crop diversity (p<0.001), non-crop plant diversity (p=0.076), herbicide application pattern (p=0.057), renting land (p<0.001), and area of land cultivated (p=0.003) varied by village. Village had no relationship with maize nutritional traits of percent protein and amino acid concentrations (p=0.336). Amino acid concentration data had no identifiable significant relationships to farmer practices and will not be considered in analyses.

Data demonstrate that intercropping with Mucuna in Central American tropical maize agroecosystems has the potential to improve not only soil and plant health and increase yields, but also to increase relative crop nutritional quality. The biodiversity of Q’eqchi’ milpas does not depend solely on farmer decisions, but also varies significantly by village. Institutional influences on these villages could therefore push farmer practices toward or away from resilience. Maize, the staple crop in Sarstún, provides as much as 65 percent of the daily carbohydrate and 71 percent of the daily protein required in a rural Guatemalan diet. Elevated maize protein concentration could therefore create a social-ecological incentive for farmers in

Sarstún and elsewhere in Latin America to reduce their herbicide use and to intercrop with

Mucuna pruriens or other nitrogen-fixing cover crop species. Farmers who increase milpa biodiversity and resilience also improve the quality of the subsistence crops upon which they rely for sustenance.

I. INTRODUCTION

The availability of nitrogen is a limiting factor for both plant and human growth. Soil

nitrogen is made available to plants primarily through biological (symbiotic leguminous plant-

rhizobial) fixation as well as through synthetic ammonia fertilizer produced via the Haber-Bosch process (Crews and Peoples 2003). It has been estimated that 75 percent of the nitrogen that makes up protein consumed by humans comes from agricultural crop production for direct consumption or for feed grain (Smil 1991). As one of the principal elements in the amino acids that form proteins critical to human health, nitrogen acts as a natural bridge between soil, plant, and human nutrition.

Protein consumption is required for human growth and development, daily function, and short- and long-term nutrition (Young and Pellett 1994). Plant protein alone is responsible for 57 percent of per capita protein supply in Latin America, especially within lower income populations (FAO/Agrostat 1991). Because of its presence and utility across trophic levels, the

quantity of nitrogen present in plant material can indicate both the availability of fixed nitrogen

in the soil (indicative of soil health or depletion) and the nutritional quality of the plant material

for human consumption (through protein concentration) (Crews and Peoples 2003). In making

the connection between and nitrogen present in an agroecosystem and its availability to human

communities in the form of nutritional protein, it is necessary to consider environmental and

social spheres not as separate entities, but rather as a connected, actively interacting socio-

ecological (Gallopín et al. 1989), social ecological (Berkes and Folke 1998), or coupled human-

environment systems (Liu el al. 2007; Turner et al. 2003). Such combined perspectives are

relevant to understanding the role of plant nitrogen in the socio-ecological system of maize

smallholder agriculture in the tropical lowland region of Sarstún, Guatemala, which was the

collection site for this study.

Corn (Zea mays L.), or more precisely “maize” (Farnham et al. 2003), has been a staple

grain crop in Mexico and Central America since its domestication from teosinte (Zea mays L.

subsp. parviglumis) grass in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, over 6000 years before the

present era (Doebley et al. 1987; Matsuoka et al. 2002; Turrent and Serratos 2004). It is now the

most widely produced and consumed grain in the world, with 940 million tons of maize

consumed in the 2013-14 cycle, up from 858 million tons in 2012-13 (International Grains

Council 2014). In Latin America’s maize-producing regions, up to 60 percent of maize cultivation takes place in an agroecosystem, formed through intercropping with other useful species (Francis 1986).

Compared to other tropical staple crops such as rice and sweet potato, maize is considered protein-poor and calorie-rich in its unprocessed grain state (Norman, Pearson, and

Searle 1995). It is notably deficient in two of the eight essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan, and so communities reliant on maize as a principal food source must supplement their diets with a crop rich in those amino acids, such as the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris

L.) in Central America (Bressani and Elías 1974). However, when treated with lime (calcium hydroxide) through the traditional practice of nixtamalization, lysine and tryptophan become more bioavailable in the protein fractions, creating a better protein profile for human consumption (Bressani et al. 1958; Bressani and Scrimshaw 1958; Paredes-López and

Saharópulos 1983; Figueroa et al. 2001).

Nixtamalization is a key process in Central America, and also softens the maize grains

and removes their seed coats before they are ground into masa (dough) for tortillas (Bressani and

Scrimshaw 1958; Maya-Cortés et al. 2010). Tortillas are the principal food source in Mexico,

Guatamala, and the rest of Central America, where they provide the majority of the protein,

energy, and calcium in the diets of city and village inhabitants alike (Trejo-González et al. 1982;

Reguera et al. 2000; Figueroa et al. 2001; Bello-Pérez et al. 2002; Grandia 2012). Scientific

evaluation of the nutritional value of maize for human consumption in tortillas must therefore

incorporate nixtamalization into its processing procedures if it is to accurately represent local

practices and their effects on health or wellbeing.

Due to maize’s central role in day-to-day nutrition, and therefore long-term health, this study focuses on the nutritional quality of maize for inhabitants of Sarstún, Guatemala. With consideration for the link between the quality of soil nitrogen and the nutritional quality of maize grains (through protein) for human consumption, I tested maize grain protein composition through two assays. These assays measured the percent nitrogen (and percent protein, proportional to nitrogen) as well as seven essential amino acid concentrations in maize collected from Sarstún farmers. To understand the relationships between variables in Sarstún’s social- ecological context, I first compared each farmer’s milpa management practices to one another.

Next, I examined the relationship between village and farmer practices. I then compared laboratory results to factors for resilience in the Q’eqchi’ milpa system, five of which relate to biodiversity. Finally, I looked at whether maize nutritional traits varied by village.

Increased biodiversity, or the sum of living and associating plant, animal, and micro-

organisms in an ecosystem (Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995), has been shown to improve soil and

plant health through nutrient cycling, decomposition, and nitrogen fixation by soil biota in

conjunction with symbiont legumes (Altieri 1999). After examining the agricultural system in

Sarstún and formally interviewing Q’eqchi’ farmers about the plant species present in their

cornfields, I identified plant biodiversity as a resilience factor for maize agroecosystem stability

(see Chapter 2). Thus, I hypothesized that farmers with lower maize and general crop diversity,

as well as those who did not plant cover crops in their milpas, would see declines in soil and

plant health. They would therefore produce maize with relatively low concentrations of protein

and amino acids.

To test this hypothesis, I compared measures of plant biodiversity to percent protein and

amino acid concentrations in the corresponding collected white maize grains. Five metrics were

selected to represent plant biodiversity in Q’eqchi’ farmers’ cornfields: (1) use of Mucuna

pruriens, or “velvet bean,” a leguminous cover crop planted during the second yearly maize crop

cycle (“matahambre”), (2) management of maize as a monoculture or a polyculture with other

food crops, (3) the maize diversity index, (4) the crop diversity index, and (5) the non-crop plant

diversity index (based on the number of edible or medicinal plants that grow as volunteers in the

milpa). The third measure seeks to evaluate another aspect of plant biodiversity – genetic

diversity within Zea mays – that may lead to crop improvement through hybridization and adaptation to specific environments (Harlan 1975; Brush 1982; Bellon and Brush 1994).

To complement resilience factor analyses, I sought out the relationships between the farmer practices of land tenancy or renting, herbicide application in liters per hectare (L/ha), and level of grain infestation by maize weevils. I later crossed them with percent protein and relative concentrations of seven essential amino acids to evaluate any associations with crop nutritional traits.

Prior to all other analyses, the relationships between protein concentration and level of grain infestation by Sitophilus zeamais, the maize weevil, were evaluated. The maize weevil is a near-

ubiquitous post-harvest pest in Sarstún, and 40 percent of this study’s white maize samples were infested to some degree while in storage after harvesting.

II. MATERIALS & METHODS

Field Collections

Maize Grain Sampling. Corn samples were collected between June 5 and July 16, 2014, from 55 smallholder farmers in eleven Q’eqchi’ Maya villages in the region of Sarstún (near Lívingston,

Izabal, Guatemala). Field collections were done on the Guatemalan side of the Sarstún River, which acts as the border between Belize and eastern Guatemala. The villages in which collections took place included Plan Grande Tatin, Plan Grande Quehueche, Nuevo Nacimiento

Cáliz, El Rosario, La Guaíra Cocolí, San Juan, San Martín, Playa Sarstún, Sarstún Creek, Lo De

En Medio II, and Cerro Blanco (see Table 1, Chapter 1 for village profiles).

Following an interview with the researcher, farmers were asked if they would be willing to offer a handful of seeds from their last corn harvest for scientific analysis back in the United

States. The farmers selected seeds from their cache of corncobs and brought them back in a small paper coin holder (or several separate coin holders if they provided seeds of several grain colors, or landraces), which was stored alongside the other farmers’ samples in a double-layer of plastic

Ziploc bags while in the field.

The Q’eqchi’ grow far less red, yellow, black, and red-husked white maize than they do staple white maize, and they tend to eat varieties like black maize fresh rather than dried for storage and use in tortillas (field notes, July 2014). Because it is much more likely for a Q’eqchi’ family to have a consistent supply of white maize than any other variety, I collected only white maize from most farmers I interviewed. White maize is by far the variety most commonly grown

and consumed in Sarstún. Due to this trend, in this study I only conducted nutritional analyses on white maize grain samples.

Farmer Interview Questions. Biodiversity data were determined based on farmer responses to lines of interview questioning. During the 20-40 minute interview process, Q’eqchi’ farmers were asked (1) whether they used anything to improve their soil, and if so, whether they planted

“frijol abono” (“fertilizer bean,” Mucuna’s local name) in their cornfields. If farmers planted other food crops in addition to maize, they were then asked (2) whether they planted additional crops within the milpa or separate from their maize. Next, (3) farmers were asked how many varieties of maize (based on kernel color) they cultivated, and responses ranged from one to four in a maize diversity index (MDI). In the same vein, (4) farmers mentioned the number of crops they planted in addition to maize, which became their crop diversity index (CDI). Finally, (5) farmers were asked whether any edible or medicinal plants grew of their own accord in the milpa, and responses were used to create a non-crop plant index (NCDI) for the total number of non-crop plants mentioned by a farmer.

Sample Processing and Analysis

Levels of Infestation. Seed envelopes were changed and samples rearranged in new sealable plastic bags based on the level of herbivory (“good,” “gorgojo,” or “infested”) by Sitophilus zeamais, the maize weevil (or greater rice weevil in the US). This occurred in August, after I returned from the fieldwork period in Guatemala. “Good” samples were free from mold, weevils, and weevil bore-holes. “Gorgojo” packets contained one to four weevils, bore-holes, and/or mold. “Infested” packets contained five or more weevils, numerous bore-holes, and mold. Bore-

holes per grain per packet were calculated as an additional measure of level of herbivory. All

samples were frozen at -20°C from September 4, 2014, until they were processed.

Nixtamalization and Sample Preparation. Maize nixtamalization is a traditional process

throughout Mexico and Central America by which dry corn grains are soaked in a heated lime

(calcium hydroxide) solution before they are ground and cooked as tortillas or tamales (Bressani

and Scrimshaw 1958; Turrent and Serratos 2004; Maya-Cortés et al. 2010). Prior to

nixtamalization, packets containing 6 to 20 maize grains were dried for 48 hours in a lyophilizer

(VirTis, SP Scientific). Maize was nixtamalized according to the procedure first described by

Bressani and Scrimshaw (1958). Using a proportion of 1 g maize to 1.2 mL deionized water to

0.05 mL Ca(OH)2, a ~4% solution of calcium hydroxide (Mrs. Wage’s Pickling Lime, Precision

Foods, Inc.), ten maize grains from each sample packet were heated to 94°C and maintained over

a Bunsen burner for 50 minutes. They were then removed from the heat and left to stand for 14

hours. Additional deionized water was added when necessary to keep grains submerged as liquid

evaporated from the beakers during the “cooking” process. After 14 hours, the supernatant was

decanted, the seeds were washed three times with deionized water, and the wastewater was

discarded. Seeds were transferred to an air-dryer and kept at 30°C until they were lyophilized a second time for 48 hours. Finally, samples were pulverized to a fine powder in a ball mill (Kleco pulverizer), with a grinding time of 20 seconds.

Percent Nitrogen and Protein Analysis. Two milligrams (+/- 0.2 mg) of finely ground corn material from each sample were weighed into tin capsules for dry combustion with a CHNOS analyzer (vario MICRO cube, Elementar Americas, Mt. Laurel, NJ, USA). Standards of 5 mg +/-

0.2 mg of L-Glutamic acid were used in triplicate. I then converted the % nitrogen data from the

CHNOS analyzer to percent protein via the proportion: % protein = % nitrogen x 6.25 (maize

conversion factor) (Galicia et al. 2009).

Sample Extraction and Amino Acid Analysis. Three hundred milligrams (+/- 1 mg) of each pulverized sample was extracted in 1 mL of 80% ethanol (v:v) at room temperature. Samples were vortexed every five minutes for twenty minutes and centrifuged at 7,000 rpm for ten minutes to condense the pellet. The supernatant was then extracted through 0.45-μm pore size

Acrodisk® Syringe filters (Pall Gelman Laboratory, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) for amino acid analysis. Free amino acid concentrations were determined for 200 μL of filtered sample extract using the EZ: FaastTM kit (Phenomenex, Torrence, CA, USA) and Gas Chromatography-FID. As

directed in the EZ: FaastTM protocol, I injected 4 μL of sample (15:1 split) on a Zebron ZB-AAA

column (0.25 mm x 10 m; Phenomenex) at 250°C. Helium, the carrier gas, had a flow rate of 1.5

mL/minute. The oven temperature increased from 110°C in increments of 32°C per minute until

it reached 320°C and then stayed constant for three minutes (Gomez, Orians, and Preisser 2012:

1018). The concentrations of seven essential amino acids (tryptophan, lysine, leucine, isoleucine,

phenylalanine, histidine, and valine) were measured and combined into a summary value for

“essential amino acids” (discluding arginine, which could not be measured). Sample

concentrations were evaluated by comparing sample chromatograms (using norvaline as an

internal standard) with the spectra and retention times of two standard free amino acid mixtures

provided by the EZ: FaastTM kit. Concentrations were then quantified with ChemStation software

(Rev. B.04.02; Agilent Technologies, Waldbron, Germany).

Statistical Analysis. Prior to testing the effects of the five biodiversity measures as resilience

factors and two other farmer management practices, the effect of weevil infestation was

examined using a regression analysis. The number of weevil emergence holes was the

independent variable, and percent protein of white maize was the response variable. Because

there was no effect of infestation on percent protein (most likely a content rather than a

concentration effect, see “Results” below), herbivory was not included in future analyses.

To answer the first research question, (1) How do farmer practices relate to one another, a

Pearson’s correlation test was run on all resilience factors (mono/polyculture, Mucuna, CDI,

MDI, NCDI) as well as herbicide use and land tenancy. For the second research question, (2)

How do farmer practices vary by village, one-way ANOVA tests were run for all resilience factors by village. The third research question, (3) How do farmer practices influence maize

nutritional traits, was answered using a two-way ANOVA between use of Mucuna, herbicide

application volume, and percent protein. The final research question, (4) How do villages differ

in nutritional traits, was examined using both Pearson’s correlations and ANOVA. All statistics

were run on IBM SPSS Statistics software (IBM, v. 22). Statistical significance was determined

at a 95% confidence level (p<0.05).

III. RESULTS

Protein concentration of white maize grains was not affected by herbivory level, as

determined by weevil bore-holes per seed per sample (Figure 1, R2 = 0.0309) or by “good,”

“gorgojo,” and “infested” categories (p= 0.184). The results for the four questions posed were as

follows:

(1) How do farmer practices relate to one another? Cultivating maize in polyculture was

strongly correlated with use of Mucuna (Figure 2, p=0.005) as well as crop diversity

(Figure 2, p<0.0001). Renting land was correlated with maize diversity for individual

farmers (Figure 3, p=0.029).

(2) How do farmer practices vary by village? Maize diversity (Figure 4, p=0.001), crop

diversity (Figure 4, p<0.001), non-crop plant diversity (Figure 4, p=0.076), herbicide

application pattern (Figure 5, p=0.057), renting land (p<0.001), and area of land

cultivated (p=0.003) varied by village.

(3) How do farmer practices influence maize nutritional traits? Protein concentration

was associated with an interactive effect of Mucuna cover crop and herbicide application

in L/ha (Figure 6, p=0.008). Overall, farmers who planted Mucuna grew maize with an

average of 13% higher protein concentration than those who did not report use of the

cover crop (p=0.061, not significant outside of interaction), and farmers who applied a

medium or high quantity of herbicide produced maize with 14% lower protein

concentration than those who used low-quantity or no herbicide (p > 0.05). Taken

together, the practices of cover cropping and herbicide use had a significant effect on

protein, with opposite trends depending on the presence or absence of Mucuna (Figure 6,

p=0.033, corrected model).

(4) How do villages differ in nutritional traits? Village had no relationship with maize

nutritional traits of percent protein and essential amino acid concentrations (p=0.336).

Amino acid concentration data had no identifiable significant relationships (correlation or

ANOVA) to resilience factors, other farmer management practices, or village.

IV. DISCUSSION

Because level of herbivory by the maize weevil (Sitophilus zeamais) had no clear effect

on percent protein in infested maize grains, it may be deduced that maize weevils do not

preferentially consume nitrogen-rich portions of maize grains, which would affect protein

concentration or percent. Rather, it appears that they consume the starchy endosperm evenly,

decreasing total protein content without altering protein concentration. Effects of herbivory on

nutritional quality lie outside the realm of discussion for this study, but they should be explored

in the future because post-harvest pests are highly prevalent and can cause major losses in maize

crop yield in the tropical lowlands.

Biodiversity in agroecosystems such as the Q’eqchi’ milpas of Sarstún, Guatemala,

contributes to soil, plant, and human health through enhanced interactions between flora, fauna,

and biota. One interaction in particular stood out in analyses of biodiversity in the milpa: the

presence or absence of Mucuna pruriens, a leguminous cover crop. Through my analyses, I

found that Mucuna mediated two distinct trends between herbicide application volume (Paraquat

and 2,4-D, in total L/ha) and white maize protein quality (Figure 6). In fields without the cover

crop, maize percent protein declined markedly as herbicide application volume increased, despite

relatively high maize protein concentrations when no herbicides were applied (Figure 6, R2 =

0.8143). Farmers who intercropped maize with Mucuna, however, produced maize with 13%

higher protein concentration overall, a value which increased slightly with higher herbicide

applications (Figure 6, R2 = 0.7146). Farmers employing high-volume herbicide treatments on

milpas without Mucuna produced maize with the lowest percent protein (Figure 6). Interestingly,

Mucuna appeared to have a protective effect that allowed maize protein levels to remain constant

– and even improve – with high-volume herbicide applications to the milpa (Figure 6). This

quality may be attributed to the cover crop’s nitrogen-fixing rhizome activity (Caamal-

Maldonado et al. 2001) and its extensive coverage of the soil, which prevents the erosion of

nutrients already present in the soil (Barthès et al. 2000).

Mucuna intercropping was significantly correlated with other measures of biodiversity,

including planting in polyculture and crop diversity (Figure 2). Those factors could therefore

have relevance for maize grain protein concentration despite their lack of a significant

relationship with the nutritional trait in this analysis. According to prior work on agroecosystem

biodiversity by Southwood and Way (1970), four principles govern the level of biodiversity in an

agricultural setting: (1) diversity of vegetation in and around the plot, (2) the permanence of

those plant species in the agroecosystem, (3) management intensity, and (4) proximity of the

agroecosystem to outside plant communities. The five measures of biodiversity (as factors for

resilience) included in this study fall within the first of those principles, the diversity of the plant

species in the agroecosystem. I examined these five categories of plant biodiversity: MDI

(genetic diversity of Zea mays); CDI, NDCI, and mono- or polyculture (species diversity); and

Mucuna cover cropping (interspecies diversity between a leguminous crop and its bacterial

symbionts).

In this study’s case, data show the positive effects of plant biodiversity primarily through

the symbiotic relationship between leguminous Mucuna pruriens cover crop and the nitrogen-

fixing bacteria associated with its roots (Altieri 1999). Cover crops like Mucuna have been cited

as ‘ecological turn table(s)’ with the ability to revitalize macro- and nematofauna soil

communities, generate soil organic matter, cycle nutrients, fix nitrogen, and even improve

microclimate within the agroecosystem (Altieri 1999), making them critical components of total plant biodiversity and their multispecies relationships in a milpa agroecosystem.

Non-crop plant species and genetic diversity in Sarstún’s milpas may play a more complicated role in determining crop quality through nutrient cycling and crop pest resistance

and adaptation, which was not accounted for within the variation in maize grain percent protein

(Altieri 1994; Bellon and Brush 1994; Brush 1982; Harlan 1975). Past work exploring biodiverse

cropping systems has focused on the distinct but related mechanisms of planned and associated

biodiversity to explain the benefits of crop diversity for ecosystem function, including

biodiversity’s role in pest deterrence, nutrient cycling, and increased soil biomass (Vandermeer

and Perfecto 1995). According to Vandermeer and Perfecto, when a farmer manages an

agroecosystem by increasing the number of crop species (planned biodiversity), he or she sets in

motion a chain of ecosystem events that draw other plant, animal, and microbial communities to

the system (associated biodiversity). Such an effect would therefore be notable in overall maize

agroecosystem health, which is expected by the correlation between polyculture, crop diversity,

and Mucuna intercropping (Figure 2). Mucuna’s protective effect on crop quality, which results

in higher maize kernel percent protein even as herbicide inputs increase (Figure 6), would be

more likely to occur in milpas that are already biodiverse through associated practices (Figure 2).

Genetic diversity within the species Zea mays, while also unapparent in the variation of

maize percent protein, has benefits for insect and disease resistance (Brush 1982). Maize

landrace diversity has also been liked to higher adaptability to various environmental conditions,

including in the center of maize genetic diversity in southern Mexico (Harlan 1975; Bellon and

Brush 1994; Brush 1982). This potential for genetic improvement through biodiversity of maize

landraces did not significantly alter maize grain protein in this instance, but the possible impact

of genetic diversity on crop quality in Sarstún merits further study.

Increased grain protein concentration is indicative of higher nutritional quality of maize

for human consumption (Young and Pellett 1994). The effects of the use of Mucuna pruriens in

a short-term fallow crop cycle have been well studied with regards to its benefits for maize crop

yield (Akobundu et al. 2000; Hauser and Nolte 2002; Chabi-Olayea et al. 2005) and for ecosystem services such as pest and weed suppression (Akobundu et al. 2000; Chabi-Olaye et al.

2005), increased density and compositional change of soil macrofauna and nematofauna

(Blanchart et al. 2006), increased soil organic matter content and stability (Barthès et al. 2004), and reduction of runoff and soil erosion (Barthès et al. 2000). The increased crop productivity offered by Mucuna would be advantageous for Sarstún’s farmers, whose best-producing plots yield only slightly more than 50% of the Guatemalan national average for cereal production

(World Bank 2013). Mucuna prevents weed growth by entangling other plant species in its vines and out-competing them for sunlight and water resources (Akobundu et al. 2000). Farmers often commented on the yield-focused and environmental benefits of “frijol abono” (Mucuna) during

interviews in Sarstún.

An important note about Mucuna pruriens is that it has been shown to have allelopathic

properties for the chemical suppression of weed seed germination (Caamal-Maldonado et al.

2001; Udensi et al. 1999). Beyond smothering competing weed species above the ground, then,

Mucuna also prevents weed proliferation beneath the soil. The phytotoxic effects of Mucuna on ubiquitous weed species (Caamal-Maldonado et al. 2001) could therefore reduce the need or desire for chemical herbicides among Q’eqchi’ farmers. One study also found that Mucuna’s ability to suppress weeds was reduced when seeds were removed from “mulched” plots (Mucuna

leaves left to cover the ground and enrich the soil after the growing season) (Udensi et al. 1999).

This suggests that farmer anecdotes about “losing” Mucuna seeds due to herbicide use could also

relate to lower efficacy of Mucuna as a weed removal strategy overall (farmer interviews, June

and July 2014). To maximize the cover crop’s benefits for self-regeneration, weed suppression, ground coverage, and nitrogen fixation, Q’eqchi’ farmers should apply minimal herbicide to their milpas.

The quality of the maize crop produced in a Mucuna intercropped system has received little to no attention from the scientific community. Because of low yields in the marginal, sloping milpas of the lowlands, the nutritional traits of the maize that is being consumed are particularly relevant. This study’s assessment of improved white maize protein concentration in grains from land with Mucuna pruriens could provide a social-ecological health incentive for farmers in Sarstún and in other tropical maize-growing regions to adopt a Mucuna intercrop-and-

mulching system within a shorter fallow cycle. Such a model could provide an alternative to

synthetic fertilizer and herbicide applications, and could pave the way for the milpa to nourish

Sarstún’s “people of maize” once again.

V. FIGURES

6 y = 0.4038x + 9.3972 R² = 0.0309 4 % Protein % Protein by dry white in mass maize 2

0 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 Weevil bore-holes per seed per sample

Figure 1. Correlation of percent protein of white maize grains (by dry mass) to number of weevil bore- holes per grain per sample, a measure of extent of herbivory in grains from Sarstún, Guatemala. Sample size was 55 packets of maize, each containing an average of 20 grains. No relationship exists between the mean number of bore-holes per grain per packet and the percent protein in the grain (R² = 0.0309, p> 0.05).

25 Pearson’s Correlation coefficients

20 Mucuna x Mono/Poly = 0.360; p=0.005

CDI x Mono/Poly = 0.455; p<0.0001 15 Monoculture

10 Polyculture 5 Number of Farmers of Number 0 No Mucuna Mucuna

10 Monoculture 5 Polyculture 0 Number of Farmers of Number 0 - 3 4 - 6 > 6 CDI (Crop Diversity Index)

Figure 2. Number of Q’eqchi’ farmers cultivating in monoculture and polyculture in Sarstún, Guatemala, and how cultivation system relates to cover cropping (Mucuna) and crop diversity (CDI). N = 60 for all three resilience factors. Values are raw counts of farmers, binary Mucuna and Mono/Polyculture variables, and grouped CDI categories drawn from coded farmer interviews. Cultivating in polyculture was positively correlated with Mucuna use (p=0.005). There were a greater number of farmers with medium or high CDIs who cultivated in polyculture than in monoculture (p<0.0001).

30 Pearson’s Correlation coefficient 25 MDI x Renting = 0.282; 20 p=0.029

15 Not Renter 10 Renter

Number of Farmers of Number 5

0 1 2 3 4 MDI (Maize Diversity Index)

Figure 3. Number of Q’eqchi’ Maya farmers renting land to farm in Sarstún, Guatemala, and its relationship to maize diversity (MDI). Sample size was 60 farmers. Values are raw counts of farmers, binary renting variables, and categorical MDIs drawn from coded farmer interviews. Overall, the relationship was determined by the far greater number of farmers who did not rent land (n=42) than those who were renters (n=18). However, the value indicating a higher incidence of renters than non-renters growing four maize varieties (MDI=4) is the effect of one village, Playa Sarstun, which owns no land but has the highest recorded MDIs of any village.

Source of Variation Village x MDI: F=3.601(10, 59); p=0.001* Village x CDI: F=5.283(10, 59); p<0.001*

Village x NCDI: F=3.601(10, 59); p=0.076

*significant association to 95% confidence interval 7 6 5 MDI 4 1 3 2 2 3

Numberof Farmers 1 4 0 CB ER LDM LGC NNC PGQ PGT PS SC SJ SM Village

6 5 CDI 4 0 - 3 3 4 - 6 2 > 6 1

Number of Farmers 0 CB ER LDM LGC NNC PGQ PGT PS SC SJ SM Village 7 6 5 NCDI 4 0 - 1 3 2 2 - 3 1 > 4 Number of Farmers 0 CB ER LDM LGC NNC PGQ PGT PS SC SJ SM Village

Figure 4. Q’eqchi’ farmer management for milpa biodiversity by village in Sarstún, Guatemala. Sample size was 60 farmers. Values are raw counts of farmers and maize diversity (MDI), crop diversity (CDI), and non-crop plant diversity (NCDI) indexes taken from farmer interviews aggregated by village. Diversity indexes were not correlated, but MDI and CDI differed significantly by the village in which the milpas were located (p=0.001 and p<0.001, respectively). LG and PS had the highest mean maize diversity (MDI=3) NNC, CB, and LDM had the greatest mean crop diversity (CDI=9, 6, and 5, respectively). PGQ had the highest mean non-crop plant diversity (NCDI=4).

5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 Mean Herbicide Application Application (L/ha ) 0.0 CB ER LDM LGC NNC PGQ PGT PS SC SJ SM Village

Figure 5. Q’eqchi’ farmer management of herbicide application (L/ha) on their milpas by village in Sarstún, Guatemala. N = 60 total farmers in eleven villages. Values are mean herbicide application rates for farmers in each village ± standard deviation. SM, CB, and PGQ had the highest average levels of herbicide application, but they also had the greatest variations in practice between farmers. LGC, PGT, SJ, and SC had the lowest levels of application, although LGC and PGT had large standard deviations.

16 Source of Variation

14 Mucuna: F(1, 54)= 3.732; p= 0.061

12 Herbicide: F(12, 54)= 1.43; p= 0.196

10 Mucuna x Herbicide: F(4, 54)= 4.027; p= 0.008* 8 *significant interaction % Protein 6

4 Mucuna 2 No Mucuna 0 0 1 2 3 4 Herbicide Application (L/ha)

Figure 6. Percent protein of white maize grains (per g dry mass) from milpas planted with or without Mucuna cover crop and at various rates of herbicide application. Sample size was 55 farmers. Trends indicate that farmers without Mucuna experienced a drop in maize percent protein as herbicide application rose (R2 = 0.8143), whereas farmers with both Mucuna cover crop and high rates of herbicide use saw a slight increase in protein (R2 = 0.7146). Values are means grouped by herbicide application strategy and use of Mucuna +/- standard error. Potential outlier points, filled in black, were single values for their category. Nearly all the farmers I interviewed applied between one and three L of herbicide per hectare of milpa.

CHAPTER 4: FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The results presented in this manuscript will be summarized, translated to Spanish, and delivered to the staff of APROSARSTUN in Guatemala, as well as to Ecologic Development

Fund, Inc., their partner funding organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Drawing from data on milpa biodiversity, resilience factors, land ownership and tenancy, and herbicide use, I will propose an action plan for APROSARSTUN’s field technicians. This plan will focus on strategies for decreasing herbicide use through intercropping with Mucuna pruriens and other food crops. By describing the interactive effect of herbicide and Mucuna on maize protein concentration, I will explain the nutritional incentives to increase plantings of Mucuna in the dry season milpa. I will also argue that higher prevalence of Mucuna may decrease the occurrence of weeds like “tunoso” and reduce the need for herbicide applications after the first “quema” milpa

(see: Caamal-Maldonado et al. 2001; Udensi et al. 1999).

Additional analyses of the data from this pilot study could benefit from more comprehensive statistical models, such as a regression model or principal components analysis.

These highly defined models would allow me to identify the specific relationships between contextual factors, farmer practices, and maize grain protein composition in the Q’eqchi’ milpas of Sarstún. To complement the existing data set, further research should be done into successful post-harvest grain storage strategies to circumvent maize losses once corncobs (“mazorcas”) leave the milpa.

The diversity of Q’eqchi’ milpas and diets does not depend solely on farmer decisions, but also varies significantly by village. Institutional influences on Sarstún’s villages could therefore push farmer practices toward or further afield of social-ecological resilience.

Connecting farmer practices and nutrition to the influences of non-governmental and government programs, it would be useful to survey farmers in Sarstún and compile a list of every institution with which they have worked. The variation in farmer practices in my dataset may be better explained by the strategies of specific institutions that have funded rural development projects in

Sarstún. In Nuevo Nacimiento Cáliz, for example, crop diversity in individual farmers’ milpas has been shaped by FUNDAECO, an environmental NGO that introduced fruit trees and spices into female farmers’ fields (farmer interviews, July 2014). For this study, I asked farmers about the diversity of maize, crops, and non-crop plants grown in their personal milpas. This study also provided insights into the nutritional value of white maize, the staple crop produced by Q’eqchi’ farmers. Adding to these data, comprehensive household consumption surveys could demonstrate the full variety of foods that nourish Q’eqchi’ families.

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