Agricultural Autonomy: The Rural Poor as a Force for Sustainable Development in Guatemala's Western Highlands
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Authors Percival, Abigail Vera
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Abigail Percival · 1 ·
ABSTRACT: In Guatemala’s Western Highlands, conservation and development are inextricable goals because poor people generally depend on nature for their entire livelihood. Ironically, the cultivation practices of the country’s poorest farmers pose one of the greatest threats to the environment even though these campesinos are among the most vulnerable to its degradation.
This study seeks to analyze the historical roots of this paradigm and show how barriers to agricultural autonomy, imposed in various ways since the Spanish conquest in 1524, have created oppression, inequality, and ecologically unsustainable techniques. I will argue that sustainable rural development demands that these barriers be reduced or eliminated and describe the individual roles of the state, NGOs, and farmers in this essential process.
Abigail Percival · 2 ·
AGRICULTURAL AUTONOMY: THE RURAL POOR AS A FORCE FOR SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT IN GUATEMALA’S WESTERN HIGHLANDS
PREFACE: AUTONOMY UNDER FIRE
“Oh would that this Eden might be reclaimed, the swords beaten into plough-shares, and
the generals and other officers turn their wasted energies to agriculture…!” – William T.
Brigham1
In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan military tortured, exiled, and killed a group of Kaqchikel farmers as part of a scorched-earth warfare policy in the highland town of Chimaltenango.2
These smallholders had been receiving supplies from outsiders, forming organizations, and digging ditches – dangerously subversive activities given the atmosphere of anti-guerilla paranoia that was sweeping violently through the countryside. The victims, however, were not actually combatants but rather members of a growing movement of participatory agricultural development begun by the NGOs World Neighbors and Oxfam in the seventies. These
“outsiders” had recognized the pressing need for sustainable innovations that would reduce highland farmers’ vulnerability to natural disasters, increase yields, and prevent the degradation of the soils. In the wake of a devastating 1976 earthquake, the practices they taught became all the more relevant and began to spread organically from farm to farm.
The ditches were, in reality, designed for soil conservation and the prevention of erosion, not hiding places for guerillas as had been supposed. Nor were the groups of farmers gathering to
1 William T. Brigham, Guatemala: The Land of the Quetzal, First ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887), 19. Mr. Brigham, an American geologist, botanist, and ethnographer, traveled through Guatemala in the latter half of the 19th century. Many of his observations of the country continue to ring true today. 2 Eric Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2006). The following story is adapted from first hand accounts pp. 1-7, 44-56. Abigail Percival · 3 · share communist ideology per se, but rather the kuchub’al shared the burden of labor and helped one another cultivate their land and provide for their families. The NGOs were supplying seeds and agricultural extension, not ammunition. The persecutors felt no need to make any distinction between communism and conservation because the real threat was empowered farmers. The successes of these “people centered” development projects had led to increased crop production, higher incomes, and increased solidarity among peasant farmers – all of which promised to topple a status quo favoring an elite group of large landowners. Indeed, the coffee growers in the area were able to maintain their own operations precisely because of the landless desperation of the poorer class. Their economic subjugation ensured a cheap and abundant labor source and little competition for land or markets.
And so, in what the farmers perceived as a direct retaliation to their newfound success, they were “disappeared.” In light of the violence and intimidation the conservation ditches were filled in, working groups dissolved and thus the progress made by the development agencies in the 1970s screeched to a halt. The ditches, and their farmer proponents, would remain hidden until the end of the war 1996…
Abigail Percival · 4 ·
I. INTRODUCTION: DEFINING AGRICULTURAL AUTONOMY IN THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT
CONTEXT
au·ton·o·my (noun) –
1.the quality or state of being self-governing; especially the right of self governance;
2. Self-directing freedom and especially moral independence.
In agriculture farmers must often identify limiting factors – the soil conditions, nutrient deficiencies or other inputs that inhibit production. In thinking about and striving for development there is an equivalent need to identify the roots of poverty in order to achieve human flourishing. As the prologue story of Chimaltenango illustrates, the Kaqchikel farmers shared a limiting factor of autonomy. That is, they were prevented from doing sustainable agriculture by the constraints of society that inhibited self-governance. While this violence was of course an isolated event and is in no way intended to diminish the complexities of
Guatemala’s armed conflict or imply that guerilla resistance was a myth, the story highlights a historically powerful motivation for the rich to keep the poor in their place, at the expense of the health of the environment. Their tale, like many other rural communities of Guatemala’s Western
Highlands, is one of poverty and repression – one that finds its answers in the elimination of barriers to agricultural autonomy.
For the purposes of this study, agricultural autonomy is defined as a theoretical condition of independence and self-government applied to the cultivation practices of resource poor farmers in Guatemala. The concepts of economic, political, and social autonomy will create a framework in which development in Guatemala’s poorest highland communities can be discussed, understood, and aided in a way that is suitable and humane. I will argue that farmers who have a sustainable livelihood will not exploit natural resources and these resources, in turn, Abigail Percival · 5 · represent sources of wealth for their development and wellbeing. Agricultural autonomy, then, is a way to achieve this by entrusting the burden of conservation with the poor farmers themselves.
Though not a method in and of itself, agricultural autonomy is a goal of development that by definition requires a “bottom-up” approach with extremely localized, if not individualistic, strategies. It is a rejection of the “Big Push” development plans of economists like Jeffrey Saachs but also of any approach that promotes dependence on outsiders, even on beneficial NGOs.
Rather it turns Eurocentric notions of “progress” inside out and holds to the idea that farmers, locals, or communities know best how to deal with their individual problems.3 The underlying concepts are not new and have been expressed by many development practitioners who have worked in agricultural improvement. The ideas of participation and farmer-to-farmer development espoused by Eric Holt-Giménez, Roland Bunch, and Robert Chambers, in particular will inform the final section concerning what can and should be done for Guatemalan farmers.
As I will show, obstacles to agricultural autonomy are far deeper than just single acts of violence – they are the social, economic, and political underpinnings of Guatemalan society.
Barriers to economic autonomy include the various forms of debt peonage and of financial dependence on expensive inputs such as fertilizer and patent seeds. Political autonomy includes issues of land tenure, distribution and resource management as well as the freedom to decide for oneself the type of agriculture to practice without fear of oppression. Social or cultural autonomy refers to the recognition of indigenous capacity to innovate, respond, and teach agricultural methods within their own communities as well as a respect for the agricultural heritage of Mayan
3 Robert Chambers, "Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?" Environment and Ubranization 7, no. 1 (1995), 173-204, http://eau.sagepub.com/content/7/1/173. Abigail Percival · 6 · cultivation. Autonomy, therefore, is as much a moral imperative as a practical one. In the words of economist Amartya Sen, “development is freedom.”4
II. IN THEIR OWN HANDS: HOW POOR FARMERS REPRESENT THE GREATEST THREAT AND THE
MOST PROMISING SAVIOR OF AGRICULTURE IN GUATEMALA
“… if improvement is going to begin anywhere, it will have to begin out in the country
and in the country towns. This is not because of any intrinsic virtue that can be ascribed
to rural people, but because of their circumstances. Rural people are living, and have
lived for a very long time, at the site of the trouble. They see all around them, every day,
the marks and scars of an exploitative national economy.” – Wendell Berry5
Throughout Guatemala, the extraordinary natural beauty of the landscape belies the fact that much of its forest cover is threatened by the prevailing agricultural paradigm. The extreme poverty and inequities of the nation are themselves becoming threats to the natural abundance as desperation necessitates degrading practices for survival. This is why Guatemala, as part of the larger Mesoamerican biodiversity hotspot, represents the second highest priority for the conservation of biodiversity in the world in terms of species richness, endemism, and endangerment.6 Rural development, if it is to be successful, must necessarily combine the complementary, even inextricable, goals of farmer empowerment and conservation. In order to reverse the current trends, we must recognize farmer autonomy as an essential focus of any
4 Michael P. Todaro and Stephen C. Smith, Economic Development (Essex, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 16-19. 5 Wendell Berry, "The Work of a Local Culture," in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkely, CA: Counterpoint, 2010), 155. 6 James Tolisano and Maria Mercedes Lopez, Guatemala Biodiversity and Tropical Forest Assessment (Washington D.C.: United States Agency for International Aid,[2010]), http://www.usaid.gov/locations/latin_america_caribbean/environment/docs/section_118/Guate_F Y2010.pdf. Abigail Percival · 7 · development effort because it links the issues of sustainability and poverty among the rural poor.
It is the idea that, if barriers to autonomy are torn down and farmers empowered to conduct agriculture on their own terms, conservation and poverty reduction will become mutually reinforcing – leading to development that is sustainable both ecologically and over time.
AGRICULTURE & BIODIVERSITY IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS
The Republic of Guatemala, a country of staggering natural beauty, is often described as the land of the eternal spring for its mild tropical climate and lush, year-round greenery. The legend is that Guatemala’s name comes from the Nahuatl word Quauthemallan, meaning ‘land of abundant forests,’ used by indigenous guides who first led the infamous Spanish conquistador
Pedro de Alvarado southward from Mexico.7 The nation’s topography, tropical latitude, and unique location on the Central American isthmus connecting the northern and southern hemispheres, have together fostered amazing diversity of flora and fauna. There are seven different biomes and 66 separate ecosystems containing over 3,000 species of birds and over
10,000 species of plants.8
Much of the awe-inspiring terrain and biological diversity of Guatemala can be found in the Western Highlands that make up the focus of this particular study. This region lies on boundary of two continental plates, whose convergence over the course of geologic time has led to the creation of an extremely varied topography including mountain ranges and striking volcanoes. The isolated ecosystems created by these geographic features are one of the reasons
Guatemala boasts not only rich biodiversity but also extraordinary levels of endemism. In total, there are 197 insects, 149 plans, 45 amphibians, 25 reptiles, 17 fish, three mammals, and one
7 Literally, land of abundant lush groves from the Spanish “tierra de abundantes florestas.” Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Guatemala, Las Líneas De Su Mano (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Económicos y Sociales del Tercer Mundo, 1982), 171. 8 Tolisano and Lopez, Guatemala Biodiversity and Tropical Forest Assessment, 9-11. Abigail Percival · 8 · bird, the nationally renowned resplendent quetzal (Pharomarcus moccino) that are quite literally found nowhere else on earth.9 This region will be the primary focus of this study as much for this rich abundance of biological life as for the tragic juxtaposition of this with the bleak conditions of the poor.
The highlands, dotted with their enclaves of irreplaceable plant and animal life, are important to the study of rural development because of their high species endemicity, high rates of deforestation and, significantly, the large population of smallholders to whom the conception of agricultural autonomy is at once the most relevant and most foreign. Today, most
Guatemalans are considered poor and in rural areas this proportion rises above 75%. Of those who fall into the category of extremely poor 93% live in rural areas and are predominantly of indigenous Mayan ethnicity.10 This region, which includes the capital city Guatemala, Antigua, and the Chimaltenango of the prologue, is particularly significant because it contains 40% of all farms in country. Of these, 95% are smaller than seven hectares and half of these are smaller than two hectares. Small farmers are encroaching farther up hillsides and into these ecosystems of astounding species diversity and endemicity in search of cultivatable land leaving patchwork trails of degradation in their wake.11
The troubling reality is that the current agricultural practices of poor smallholders represent the greatest threat to Guatemala’s biodiversity. Deforestation is currently occurring at a fearsome rate of 1.4%, or approximately 73,000 hectares of forest per year - with shifting
9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Elizabeth G. Katz, "Social Capital and Natural Capital: A Comparative Analysis of Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management in Guatemala," Land Economics 76, no. 1 (2000), 114-132. Abigail Percival · 9 · agriculture accounting for approximately 80% of this.12 Agriculture shifts for two reasons:
Guatemala’s shockingly high population growth of 2.8%, and the degradation of soils coming from unsustainable land use. In addition, conventional practices include high agrochemical use in the forms of pesticides and fertilizers, which is contributing to pollution problems throughout the country.13 Within the current paradigm, farmers have little choice but to forge on and carve out another piece of forest from which to feed their families and communities.
Yet, they are also the most vulnerable to losses of biodiversity. The obvious reason for this is that these plants and animals provide economic goods: the food, fiber, medicines, firewood, and lumber – to say nothing of their cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual importance.
Indeed many of these values may be unknown or as yet only utilized by small communities.14
Central to this study is the importance of biodiversity on smallholder agriculture and the sustainable development thereof. As scientists are becoming increasingly aware, biodiversity is a fundamental component of all agricultural systems. Genetic crop diversity, found in “wild and weedy” cultivars, lends stability harvests as these variety contain genes that will help agriculture systems remain flexible in the face of disasters or climate change. Some animals, such as insect pollinators and pest predators, as well as other non-crop plants provide beneficial relationships that sustain yields while reducing the need the for outside inputs. As we will see later this
12 Tolisano and Lopez, Guatemala Biodiversity and Tropical Forest Assessment, 40-47. 13 Kalim Siddiqui, "Agricultural Exports, Poverty and Ecological Crisis: Case Study of Central American Countries," Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 39 (1998), 135. 14 Janis B. Alcorn, "Economic Botany, Conservation, and Development: What's the Connection?" Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 82, no. 1 (1995), 34-46. Abigail Percival · 10 · interconnectedness of life, known in reference to cultivation as agroecology, is a fundamental link between farmer autonomy and sustainable development. 15
BARRIERS TO AUTONOMY
It is clear that the current agricultural paradigm of the rural poor of the Western Highlands is plagued with insupportable ironies. Subsistence agriculturalists constitute one of the largest threats to the forests and yet are arguably the most vulnerable to its degradation. Hunger remains prevalent in the region that gave the world maize – a region to which tomatoes, cacao, beans, squash, sweet potato, manioc, jicama, chayote, avocados, chilies, cacao, papaya are also native.16
Poverty persists among an indigenous people with an impressive heritage of alternative and sustainable agricultural systems. How can this be turned around? I argue that the reasons for such incongruities can be found in the political, economic, and social barriers to agricultural autonomy and that the removal of these barriers will unearth the latent abilities of indigenous poor to become, again, farmers who are forces for conservation.
Inequitable land tenure and distribution constitute barriers to autonomy because they reduce farmer ability and desire to engage in the capital and labor intensive practices that sustainability demands. In 2003, the agricultural census revealed that less that two percent of farms constituted 56% of the agricultural land whereas 45% of farms only constituted 3.2% of
15 Miguel A. Altieri and Laura C. Merrick, "Agroecology and in-Situ Conservation of Native Crop Diversity in the Third World," in Biodiversity, ed. E. O. Wilson, Fifth ed. (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), 361-376. 16 CONAP, Guatemala y Su Biodiversidad: Un Enfoque Histórico, Cultural, Biológico y Económico [The Biodiversity of Guatemala: a historical, cultural, biological, and economic focus.], eds. Dr César Azurdia Pérez, Fernando García Barrios and Martha María Ríos Palencia, First ed. (Guatemala: Consejo Nacional de Áreas Protegidas - Oficina Técnica de Biodiversidad, 2008), 650. Abigail Percival · 11 · the land.17 This duality of latifundios and minifundios is prevalent throughout Latin America and has important implications for land management and the protection of the environment. The title- less land tenure structures of the highlands, including rental and usufruct, constitute a major obstacle to sustainability by providing a disincentive for long-term sustainability. Furthermore, even in cases where settlement is secure or even permanent (for many of these lands are not actually desirable in the slightest) a lack of legal title makes credit difficult or impossible to attain, further impeding the likelihood that farmers will invest in sustainable practices.18
Economic desperation is another barrier to autonomy because it requires that poor farmers use extractive and degrading practices, such as short fallow swidden,19 just to feed their families. Historically, this desperation has also made farmers vulnerable to dubious outside influences, such as the Green Revolution in the 60s and 70s, which encouraged the use of unsuitable agrochemicals on the marginal slopes of the Western Highlands leading to the pollution of soil and water resources. Indebtedness to the agribusiness companies as well as the
“addictive” nature of many of these inputs also constitutes a barrier to decision making based on what is best for the individual’s land, community, and the environment.20
Colonization and the policies it engendered has also brought about a loss of cultural autonomy among indigenous communities. At the crux of the issue, modern and mechanized
17 Wendy Santa Cruz, Una Aproximación a La Conflictividad Agraria y Acciones Del Movimiento Campesino [A study of agrarian conflict and actions of the campesino movement], Vol. 2 (Guatemala: FLASCO, 2007), 31. 18 Katz, Social Capital and Natural Capital: A Comparative Analysis of Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management in Guatemala, 122. 19 Swidden, more commonly known as “slash and burn” agriculture, refers to a method of cultivation common in the tropics in which sections of forest are cut down and burned. The ashes and organic matter nourish crops but the soil fertility is generally a short-lived (about 5 years). The length of the fallow period determines the ability of the forest to return, and thus the sustainability. 20 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture Abigail Percival · 12 · agricultural production has been imposed, oftentimes violently, on an entire people, replacing their traditional and locally adapted agricultural technologies. The Spanish colonists brought with them high-tillage practices, deep plowing and monocropping systems that were common and largely successful in European soils and climates. Ironically, proponents of sustainable agriculture now cite pre-Hispanc Mayan systems as models for sustainable development and much modern research for agriculture in the tropics has been linked to these ancient practices.21
It is due to a lack of autonomy that these indigenous people live in the highlands cultivating just a few subsistence crops in the first place. Throughout history, colonists and capitalists relocated populations of unwilling Indians from the tropical lowlands to make room for the expansive production of export crops.22 Moreover, the idea of a pre-Hispanic culture based on single monocrop on has been widely rejected by scholars. While maize was undoubtedly a staple of the ancient diet it was almost certainly supplemented by a multitude of other fruits and vegetables that were either grown or collected in the wild.23 Now the indigenous poor cultivate, not by choice, marginal lands that are ill suited to production of subsistence crops such as maize and are in fact particularly vulnerable to degradation under such agricultural use.
Again, the paradigm of poverty and inequality forces them to degrade lands really only suitable for forests.24
21 Miguel A. Altieri, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc., 1995), 107-144. 22 David Friedel, "Lowland Maya Political Economy," in Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica, eds. Murdo J. MacLeod and Robert Wasserstrom (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983), 44. 23 B. L. Turner II and Peter D. Harrison, "Implications from Agriculture for Maya Prehistory," in Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, eds. Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, First ed. (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 1978), 337-373. 24 Santa Cruz, Una Aproximación a La Conflictividad Agraria y Acciones Del Movimiento Campesino, 32. Abigail Percival · 13 ·
Pre-Hispanic Mayan civilizations actually incorporated a sensitivity to, if not direct acknowledgement of, environmental processes into a surprisingly wide variety of agricultural systems. These included wetland cultivation with raised beds called chinampas, dry land irrigation using reservoirs and wells, terraces and contours for hillside cultivation, and rotating long-fallow swidden agriculture. Irrigation canals and raised beds imply awareness of the importance of regulating soil moisture for crop production. Terracing and long-fallow swidden agriculture, suggest a sophisticated understanding of soil fertility, moisture, and the importance of organic matter for crop production.25 In addition to these, kitchen or “door-yard” gardens, usually comprised of multiple vegetable crops for household consumption, were apparently employed throughout Mayan territory. These species-rich gardens provided a resource of locally adapted genetic varieties that could have been utilized based on individual needs or other stresses. There is also evidence that Mayans tended artificial rainforests and managed existing native vegetation to their advantage as well as hunting in communal lands. These low-impact practices have been largely lost since the conquest.26
THE AUTONOMOUS FARMER: A FORCE FOR CONSERVATION
Despite this long history of agricultural achievement, rural farmers in the Western Highlands are currently their own worst enemy in terms of the causes and consequences of environmental degradation. In 2010, tropical storm Agatha brought destructive mudslides and flooding
Note that this does not necessarily mean the lands are useless in terms of subsistence or food production. On the contrary, Mayans were well aware of large potential of forests to provide food and fiber as long as their use and management is properly regulated. 25 David R. Harris, "The Agricultural Foundations of Lowland Maya Civilization: A Critique," in Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, eds. B. L. Turner II and Peter D. Harrison (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 1978), 301-323. 26 Turner II and Harrison, Implications from Agriculture for Maya Prehistory, 368-371. Abigail Percival · 14 · throughout the nation but hit the rural poor particularly hard.27 These dangerous effects of soils’ reduced natural ability to absorb water, results from the extensive and extractive practices and remind us of the importance of agriculture that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Standing alone, the word
“sustainability” has become something of a cliché in development circles but this ought not to be so, for development can only be successful in so far as it fulfills this definition.
However, in light of the research, it is clear that sustainable development does not necessarily divide agricultural practices between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but rather considers how appropriate they are in a given locality and for a given context. In a similar vein, poverty is not simply about a dearth of resources but about the social and political forces that sustain inequality.
The solutions to sustainability are, like the problems, “local, diverse, complex, and dynamic”28 – which is precisely why development strategies must be prioritize local autonomy, and thus the empowerment of individual people and communities. In other words, development can only be sustainable if it grows organically out of the wants and needs local actors, because their attitudes towards conservation are based on survival and love of place, not on fads or fashion.29
As we have seen it is the barriers to their autonomy that perpetuate this paradigm. For this reason, Eric Holt-Giménez, a development scholar and advocate for Central American farmers, rightly points out that sustainability is ultimately a “political and social concept – a regional framework within which to make decisions.”30 And who better to make the decisions than the farmers who live in the trenches of environmental degradation? Before assessing
27 "Agatha Afecta 25 Mil Hectareas," Prensa Libre, sec. Economia, 8/6/10, 2010 (accessed 5/3/11). 28 Chambers, Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?, 173. 29 Ibid. 30 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, xv. Abigail Percival · 15 · specifically how this can be done, we must first gain an understanding of the agricultural, environmental, and humanitarian crises in Guatemala. We will see that they can be traced back to the systematic reduction of indigenous autonomy over agriculture. It is not the norm in rural
Guatemala because, over the course of her tumultuous history, it has not been in the economic interest of elite groups to allow it. Instead, those who were able have accumulated wealth by the sweat of the indigenous poor with the precious nutrients of the land.
III. PATH DEPENDENCE: THE UNRAVELING OF INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY
“Por qué Guatemala, mi Guatemala mía, es tan trágica? Nuestra historia tiene precisa
respuesta.”- Luis Cardoza y Aragón31
The above lament, published at the height of Guatemala’s armed conflict in 1982, introduces a study of “path dependence,” an exercise used in economics to understand the historical causes of underdevelopment in a particular nation or region.32 For a country that has endured centuries of colonialism followed by centuries of political instability and a recent 36-year civil war, this turns out to be a particularly important tool. Beginning with the agronomies of pre-colonial Mayan civilizations, the following historical analysis will show how barriers to local autonomy over agricultural production, through the unrelenting exploitation of land and labor, have engendered the inequalities and environmental degradation we see today.
MAYAN AGRICULTURE AND FARMER AUTONOMY
Before the arrival of the Spanish in 1524, civilization in Guatemala was, like all others, imperfect in terms of social equality and its interactions with the environment. Most notably, the
31 “Why is Guatemala, my own Guatemala, so tragic? Our history gives the answer.” Rodríguez Prampolini, Guatemala, Las Líneas De Su Mano, 11. 32 Todaro and Smith, Economic Development, 557-558. Abigail Percival · 16 · conquistadors encountered the distinct presence of slavery within social hierarchies, though usually as a form of punishment or a result of intertribal warfare.33 There is also evidence that problems of environmental degradation resulting from poor agricultural practices, such as erosion and nutrient depletion, were at least somewhat problematic before the conquest, possibly contributing to the Maya Collapse in the Late Classic period and the existing intertribal conflicts over resources that were occurring on the eve of conquest.34 However, Mayan societies on the whole offered more autonomy to agriculturists than would the colonial regime that replaced them in the 1500s because farmers were able to decide for themselves how to conduct their own agricultural systems.
Agriculture was the principal foundation for social organization and is therefore illustrative of the distribution of power in Mayan society. The nobility were usually the official landowners and reserved certain rights such as jurisdiction over allocative disputes but they did not generally engage directly in cultivation. Rather, the majority of the population was free farmers and while tribute did exist it was apparently designed more to ensure military and political loyalty rather than complete economic control. The individual cultivators enjoyed autonomy over their labor and over their harvests. The economic power thus gained from agricultural production and involvement in trade allowed for at least some upward mobility within Mayan society as well as a relatively high degree of political involvement. It gave rise to a subclass of wealthy commoners called the ah-cuch-cabob that served as town council, becoming involved in the governmental systems.35
33 William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 15-19. 34 Ralph Lee Woodward, Central America: A Nation Divided, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-24. 35 Friedel, Lowland Maya Political Economy, 54-56. Abigail Percival · 17 ·
The predominant system of land distribution was the chinamit (which translates roughly to ‘our town’) was a self-contained institution for resource management. Although land tenure was defined in various ways within these localities including freeholders, sharecroppers, and land owned by nobles, methods of cultivation were determined from within. 36 This seemingly paradoxical power balance can then be understood in terms of a distinction made between
“property by land” and “property by its products.”37 In other words, while land ownership may have been centralized among the elite class, there is no evidence that the fruits of the harvest were centralized in a similar manner.38
Archaeological and scientific evidence has demonstrated the existence of surprisingly advanced systems of agricultural production to match the highly evolved social structures seen throughout Mesoamerica. Of course, agricultural technologies differed based on environmental conditions, but in both the highlands and the lowlands large-scale projects such as canals, raised fields, and terraces required coordination of large labor forces.39 The range of agricultural practices varied over time and geography, supporting large and dense populations throughout
Mesoamerica. Whether population pressure demanded the innovation of such sophisticated techniques, or the advances themselves caused the demographic growth, agricultural intensification was closely related to population density. This was especially true in the
36 Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, First ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 123. 37 Friedel, Lowland Maya Political Economy, 54. 38 Ibid., 48 39 B. L. Turner II, "Ancient Agricultural Land use in the Central Maya Lowlands," in Pre- Hispanic Maya Agriculture, eds. Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, First ed. (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 1978), 181. Abigail Percival · 18 · highlands where marginal agriculture lands demanded specialization rather than expansion and the cultivation of new areas.40
CONQUEST: THE SYSTEMATIC REDUCTION OF AUTONOMY
The entrance of the conquistadors into Mesoamerica in the 16th century marked a drastic turn for the worse in terms of local autonomy over agriculture. Spaniards arrived in Guatemala in search of a quick and easy path to prosperity and, when it became clear that her mineral wealth would not suffice, they turned to the assets that she did have: land and labor.41 Immediately they appropriated the country’s abundant land by the “rights of conquest.”42 They also saw a population of natives, larger upon their arrival in the New World than it would be for another
300 years, over which they felt a similar sense of entitlement.43 The existing indigenous agricultural systems, and thus social structure, in Guatemala were severely disrupted and largely dissolved by the entrepreneurial ambitions of the colonists.
The Spanish vecinos, backed by the authority of the Spanish Crown, systematically wrested power from the indigenous people via the violent institution of new and foreign land tenure structures – a process began in earnest in the mid 16th century. Despite Indians claims that these lands were already owned from time immemorial, the colonists obtained legal right to them under the assumption that they were to be occupied and cultivated – by the sweat of the very same Indians from whom they had taken it, of course – for the benefit of the Crown.44 By the
1550s Spain had granted favored colonists encomiendas, or tracts of land that guaranteed the
40 Turner II and Harrison, Implications from Agriculture for Maya Prehistory, 364-368. 41 MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, 97. 42 Ibid., 125 43 Norman Myers and Richard Tucker, "Deforestation in Central America: Spanish Legacy and North American Consumers," Environmental Review 11, no. 1 (1987), 58 . 44 MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, 222. Abigail Percival · 19 · owners labor and tribute from the Indian inhabitants.45 This occurred in conjunction with the policy of congregación, or the forced relocation native people into more dense units called pueblos de indios. Together these served to strengthen the power of the conquerors over the conquered and brought about profound and enduring impacts on the agricultural landscape of
Guatemala. 46
Colonial policies essentially destroyed Indian autonomy over agriculture and resource management. Indeed, the forced relocation of the majority of indigenous people under the policy of congrecación brought about a widespread abandonment of intensive, time consuming, and ecologically sustainable practices of their forebears. They no longer enjoyed the same rights to the land, nor to their own labor, that would have allowed for the continuation of Mayan practices. One pertinent example is the Spanish acquisition of Indian montes or wild uncultivated forests that provided game, wild cacao, and fuel among other valuable products.47 Instead, in this period there was a reduction of Mayan practices to extensive, swidden agricultural production, a giant step backwards that continues to have implications today.48
Because the Mayan civil society had been fundamentally based on agriculture, the transformations wrought by the introduction of the encomienda system brought about the dissolution of their political autonomy to this point. The colonists brought with them an agricultural tradition focused on wealth accumulation and exports that ran counter to the chinamit and even the nobility-ownership model of the Maya.49 Communal ownership was unfamiliar and thus antithetical to the designs of colonists seeking to bring order and prosperity
45 Ibid., 128 46 Ibid., 121-122 47 Ibid. 48 Friedel, Lowland Maya Political Economy, 43-44. 49 MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, 96-97. Abigail Percival · 20 · to the New World. Rather monocrops such as sugar, indigo, cochineal, wheat, and of course cacao, played formative roles in both the economy and the development of society by setting a precedent of large-scale export oriented agriculture. The cultivation of monocrops, with their high returns on investments for plantation owners, supplanted the cultivation of crops that might have been more suited to the ecology and the diets of the people.50
The ultimate blow was to autonomy on an individual level, which was destroyed by the institution of various forms of forced labor during the colonial period. Understandably, Indians would not volunteer for labor under which they would suffer extreme abuse for a pittance, meaning that Spaniards had to resort to coercion and conscription. Although the Spanish crown technically forbade slavery, the line between law and practice was rife with inconsistencies in
Guatemala and the abuses were manifold. In certain cases even the so-called “volunteer” labor of
Indians, those outside of the jurisdiction of any particular landowner, were held against their will, branded, and traded among land owners.51 In spite of edicts like the New Laws of the Indies for the Protection and Preservation of Indians in 1542, Spaniards continued to find loopholes in the laws or just ignored them entirely.52 Indian men were obligated to work, without wages, growing crops or other performing other forms of manual labor for their masters. The tribute, in addition to this unpaid labor, was more than most Indians could bear and yet when they were unable to fulfill these tribute obligations they were required to work additional days in service of the encomendero, essentially creating an early form of debt peonage.53
Spaniards justified this coercion by claiming that the Indians were slothful and indolent and that the growth of the colony depended on their labor, neither of which the church could
50 Ibid., 387-389 51 Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America, 102-111. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 89- Abigail Percival · 21 · abide. They neglected to understand that the native people had very modest needs and did not share in the capitalistic intellectual heritage of their European conquerors.54 In addition, the tribute and labor systems implemented by the Spaniards further reduced Indian motivation for agricultural development or maintenance by erasing all incentive for improvement or specialization. Under the stressful labor requirements of the encomienda system Indians abandoned many of the more advanced pre-Hispanic agricultural systems, regressing instead to the more simple rotating milpa agriculture.55 With crop surpluses going straight to the dinner tables of foreigners, Indians were unlikely to put in more than the bare minimum to their milpa plots even if they had the time or the energy – which they did not. Indians had no choice therefore but to neglect their own crops because of overwork that kept them away from their fields and rational self-interest that prevented them from doing more labor just to have it taken away.56
The agricultural transformation brought about by colonists in Guatemala had some unintended environmental repercussions. Traditionally European methods of cultivation, such as deep-plowing, were unsuited to the sloped terrain and tropical soils, baring the karst below and reducing the soil nutrients and ability to absorb water. Meanwhile the introduction of grazing animals also dramatically reduced ground cover on the slopes (not to mention Indians’ milpa plots), to the same effect. Unsurprisingly, the Indians were the first to bear the consequences. In
1699 the erosion situation was so dire that it warranted an edict from the ayuntamiento of
Santiago, present day Antigua, to cease cultivation of the slopes surrounding the city because the reduction of forest cover was causing flooding problems in town. The irony, of course, was that
54 Ibid., 191-207 55 Friedel, Lowland Maya Political Economy, 43-44. 56 MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, 295. Abigail Percival · 22 · the edict was directed to the very Indians who, by the gradual and unjust process of land appropriation, had been pushed onto the marginal, more vulnerable, thin soils of the slopes.57
IV. INDEPENDENCE, FOR WHOM?
RESISTANCE TO AUTONOMY & REVOLUTIONS IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
Tragically, Guatemala’s independence from Spain in 1821 did little to change the desperate situation of the rural poor and in fact served to perpetuate much of the systemic problems of underdevelopment caused by colonialism. The early years were characterized by chaotic, and oftentimes violent, pendulum swings between conservative and liberal leaders but in the end the reforms were only nominally in support of the rural poor, particularly the indigenous. The abuses of Indians did not end proving that the paternalistic attitude of the conservatives and the ideals of assimilation championed by the liberals were essentially just two ways to achieve this same end of increasing wealth for the elite.58 In the end, Guatemala’s focus on economic growth came at the expense of local needs and development, further entrenching rural poverty.
LIBERAL REFORMS
The Liberal Reforms, which began in 1871, were designed to encourage the growth of the agricultural sector thereby bringing prosperity and dignity to the newborn Republic. At the end of Spanish rule, the agricultural sector was in ruins thanks in part to local conditions, such as locusts and epidemics, and in part to the worldwide economic situation and Guatemala’s lack of comparative advantage amidst a global market suddenly inundated with tropical suppliers of raw
57 Ibid. 58 Woodward, Central America: A Nation Divided, 419. Abigail Percival · 23 · materials.59 In order to achieve this the government implemented three main reforms: to increase the number of landowners, to abolish Indian servitude, and to expand agricultural production.
These lofty sounding goals, however, did little to substantially improve equality or living conditions for Indians and rural autonomy actually declined in the decades following
Independence. What did change dramatically in this era were the roles played by different strata of society: Guatemalan-born Spaniards now made up the ruling class and ladinos slowly but surely replaced encomenderos as Guatemala’s new elite of powerful landowners. Yet, as historian Severo Martínez Peláez points out, these ladinos learned from the colonial structure how to create wealth for themselves – through their own exploitation of land and labor.60
The newly formed Guatemalan state required that all lands be registered and titled as well as claiming rights to all tierras baldias. Furthermore, in 1836 they actively dissolved the communal lands, or ejidos that the Crown had given or assigned to Indians, converting them into private land-holdings and selling them to entrepreneurial ladinos and foreign immigrants for the planting of coffee. This transition occurred in order to achieve the first goal of increasing the number of landowners, ladinos were given the right to purchase the land they had been living and working on. However, the same land reform policies that empowered this ladino class were the downfall of the Indians who remained as the lowest class of society. In an unhappy coincidence the highlands, to which the Indians had been forced from the lowlands, became the
59 David McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17-24. 60 Severo Martínez Peláez, La Patria Del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala, eds. W. George LoVell and Christopher H. Lutz, trans. Susan M. Neve and George W. Lovell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 307. Abigail Percival · 24 · hotspot for its ideal coffee growing conditions. The rural poor, disregarded, were edged into even more marginal and agriculturally inappropriate lands.61
Even the abolition of involuntary servitude for Indians, which seemed to be the saving grace of the liberal reforms, proved to be impotent in light of this devastating land policy.
Disempowered by the loss of their land they were not more but less free, especially given that their working conditions did not change much at all. The new system of labor draft called mandamiento, as well as the Vagrancy Laws, quickly supplanted repartimiento but in reality maintained its defining characteristics of low wages and abusive working conditions. In fact, they were even more constrained by the implementation of new requirement to carry a libreta where rural peasants could record their hours for the state.62 The situation of Indians drifted farther from independence and more towards dependence on their exploiters. Indians often depended on the fincas where they worked for food, which owners purchased in abundance for their workers and charged usurious prices. This created an even more strikingly vulnerable status for Indians as this increasing dependence drove them farther from their agricultural heritage63
Land reform post-independence had succeeded in at least one endeavor, to expand agricultural production, though it came with a two-fold blow to autonomy. Indigenous autonomy was further reduced by the fast-multiplying labor requirements of coffee plantations, debt peonage, and land expropriation. However national autonomy was also reduced by policies that encouraged foreign investment. In the late 1800s the government lured foreign capitalists from Europe using tax breaks and incentives to buy land. This, they believed, would jump-start
61 McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760-1940, 50-58. 62 Ibid., 188 63 Ibid., 265-294 Abigail Percival · 25 · the economy with the entrepreneurial skills of “superior” minds.64 In many ways the transition from dependence on the colonial motherland to dependence on foreign markets was seamless as state became synonymous with the economic interests of the elite group of entrepreneurs – primarily the coffee and banana finqueros.65 In mid-century, these two crops alone constituted
90% of foreign exchange earnings.
CENTURY XX: FROM THE OCTOBER TO THE GREEN REVOLUTION
Given the barriers to autonomy created between 1520 and 1899, it should come as no surprise that the twentieth century has been characterized by widespread internal conflicts. The 1900s witnessed some waves of resistance, as forward thinking revolutionaries encouraged campesinos to regain some of the control over their agriculture. The backlash from this resistance however has made agricultural autonomy a distant memory. What replaced the decade of revolution from
1944-1954 was a pattern of paternalistic development that suffocated farmer independence in the name of progress.
From 1944 to 1954 the country witnessed an all-too-brief period of increasing autonomy that Guatemalan poet and political exile, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, remembered as “años de primavera en el país de la eterna tiranía.”66 The October Revolution, and the assassination of dictatorial President Jorge Ubico, ushered in this dynamic and unprecedented change. Ubico’s replacement, the left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz implemented the “most sweeping agrarian reform in the history of Central America.”67 In 1950, two years before the Agrarian Reforms were official, just two percent of the population controlled 72 percent of the land. Therefore, to answer the
64 Ibid., 232-235 65 Ibid., 174 66 “Years of springtime in the country of eternal tyranny” Rodríguez Prampolini, Guatemala, Las Líneas De Su Mano, 9. 67 Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemala Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 13. Abigail Percival · 26 · needs of the peasantry and address the dramatic inequities of wealth, Arbenz set out to redistribute land to 100,000 impoverished Guatemalan families. He also sought to empower rural and indigenous groups by extending them credit for agricultural improvement and allowing them the political power of unions. These polices effectively lost the President the support of coffee and banana oligarchies who, having become mammoth political and economic forces within the country, were enormously threatened by such redistributive laws and their newly empowered employees.68
Arbenz’ Agrarian Reforms were not perfect and were plagued by many of the same misguided goals of progressivism from the Liberal Reforms. Significantly, they did not address the dangers of a monoculture-dependent economy and actually encouraged the cultivation of just a few export crops as a strategy to raise GNP. The finqueros were apparently aware of the vulnerabilities yet were too blinded by economic ambition to take those fears very seriously.69
Arbenz and his followers also held to idealistic goal of integrating peasants into the modernization of agricultural – neglecting that this may not have been the best route to development, much less the only one.70 All this is to say, we cannot be sure that Arbenz reforms would have encouraged more traditional, sustainable practices. Indeed, it is impossible to know because the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 brought the Agrarian Reforms to a complete halt.
The coup, precipitated by rising conflicts between laborers and large landowners, reduced rural autonomy to pre-revolution levels by introducing paternalistic and environmentally degrading development strategies as an alternative to land redistribution. First, in order to avoid giving land to peasants in their local regions, the government that replaced Arbenz encouraged
68 Jim Handy, "National Policy, Agrarian Reform, and the Corporate Community during the Guatemalan Revolution," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 4 (1988), 698-724. 69 McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760-1940, 173. 70 Ibid., 173 Abigail Percival · 27 · the expansion of the agricultural frontier into the sparsely populated northern part of the country.
This led to a rapid spike in national deforestation rates and the increase of extensive cultivation on artificially cheapened land.71 In the 1960s, government officials also supported a significant military presence in the countryside. Soldiers entered into the war-torn and generally impoverished rural communities under the pretext of “developing” them with public projects.
Yet even their slogan, Seguridad y Progreso (Security and Progress), suggested something more than humanitarian efforts was at play. Indeed, an underlying anti-communist paranoia motivated them to keep the rural masses and their revolutionary tendencies at bay. This militarization, which would eventually evolve into the violence described in the preface, marked the start of
Guatemala’s 36-year civil war and lasted until its conclusion in 1996.72
Simultaneously beginning in the 60s, an influx of foreign development initiatives also set farmers back in terms of autonomy and actually worsened the relationship of poor farmers and the environment. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN provided 37 million tons of rations to the countryside. These rations did little, if anything, to relieve malnutrition because they did not address the inequities and barriers to agricultural autonomy – the old roots of
Guatemala’s poverty.73 Then American scientist, Norman Bourlag, further increased farmer dependency with his modern approach to agriculture now known as the Green Revolution. The movement heralded “technological packets,” including patent high-yield seeds, agrochemicals, and mechanized equipment, as the end of hunger and poverty in rural areas and farmers were encouraged to buy these items on credit.
71 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, 153. 72 Schirmer, The Guatemala Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy 73 Ibid. Abigail Percival · 28 ·
Sadly the promises of the Green Revolution turned out to be hollow, and the technologies introduced only provided barriers to local food sovereignty. The yields of mechanized and irrigated agriculture never measured up to the theoretical yields in the real conditions of the highlands and farmers, unable to pay their interest on expensive inputs, became trapped in another form of debt peonage, only this time to the industrial world’s agribusinesses. The introduction of genetically modified crops also worked to subvert farmer autonomy by taking over important aspects of the agricultural process such as seed selection and breeding. This meant that the cultivation of “high-yield” crops oftentimes failed to satisfy local expectations of flavor as well as utility of crop residues for other purposes like construction or textiles.
Unreliable access to packets slowly increased farmers’ vulnerability to pests and soil degradation as they became dependent entirely on environmentally detrimental chemical inputs for production.74
These reductions to farmer autonomy were mirrored by reductions to national autonomy during the same time period. Just as the farmers had become indebted to seed companies,
Guatemala as a nation became indebted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank, lured by similarly false hopes of “development.” In the 1980s, the Latin American debt crisis precipitated a series of Structural Adjustment Plans designed and enforced by the development banks. The main tenets of these plans included trade liberalization, the elimination of tariffs on imports, and the opening of Guatemala’s borders to foreign investment. Of course, debt relief and aid packages were contingent on cooperation with the plans and so it mattered little whether or not these policies would help or harm the country’s poorest farmers. Looking
74 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, 145-166. Abigail Percival · 29 · back on this time period one can see that increases in poverty actually led to a substantial exodus of immigrants from rural areas.75
In light of these macro-scale policy changes, the eighties and early nineties saw the worst of the civil war’s violence, likely a result of increasing tensions over agricultural autonomy. Social unrest in Guatemala has almost always been rooted in agrarian issues and it is by no means a historical anomaly that rural indigenous communities suffered the worst of the armed conflict – losing their houses, families, and crops in the scorched-earth warfare, which further inhibited their capacity for agricultural self-governance.76 Luckily, the 1996
Peace Accords, which brought an end to the civil war, leave no doubt as to the importance of agriculture in the overall development and stability of Guatemala. But, if the lessons of history have any worth, then only once agricultural autonomy is recognized as a top priority from the standpoints of extension specialists and policymakers alike will we see the scaling up of real, sustainable, human development.
V. RECOVERING AGRICULTURAL AUTONOMY: THE ROLES OF FARMERS, NGOS, AND THE STATE
“…there can be a good idea, a brilliant idea, a great idea, but if the people don’t see it as
part of them…that great idea will stay an idea. Participation is not just asking, ‘Okay, what
do you want? Speak!’ Sometimes, being participatory means being sufficiently humble to just
stand aside. Just be quiet and let people make their own mistakes and learn.” – Jorge Irán
Vasquez77
75 Ibid., 149-164 76 Cristóbal Kay, "Reflections on Rural Violence in Latin America," Third World Quarterly 22, no. 5 (2001), 741-775. 77 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, 67. Abigail Percival · 30 ·
The question of agricultural autonomy is, at its root, a question of power. Development in the
Western Highlands requires empowering poor farmers which is in many ways a process of disempowerment for those of us who are neither poor nor farmers.78 It is way of letting rural smallholders make decisions about how they want to develop themselves – even if that means letting them make mistakes we may know how to avoid, or decisions we simply do not like. In this section I will describe the separate, complementary, and equally necessary, roles of the
Guatemalan government, local and international NGOs, and farmers themselves in achieving autonomous development.
FARMER AUTONOMY: THE PRECEDENTS OF RECENT YEARS
This study has consistently defended the role of farmers in determining sustainable agriculture production but this assertion is open to several reasonable doubts. Can poor, and oftentimes uneducated, farmers possibly take on the responsibilities inherent to autonomy? And, if they do, will they really use their empowered status to affect sustainable changes? In recent years, the agriculturalists of Guatemala’s Western Highlands have shown that they are not only fully capable of achieving sustainable development – they are also willing. Particularly since the end of the armed conflict in 1996, the region has witnessed the growth of many homegrown organizations and unions that challenge the status quo and defend their rights to autonomy. The goals, political demands, and projects of these institutions prove that farmers place profound value on the sustainability of their livelihoods.79
To a certain extent, the organizations that are sprouting up in the Western Highlands are using their limited autonomy (for they regained the rights to unionize after the war) to fight for
78 Chambers, Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?, 173-204. 79 Kuchub'al, "Kuchub'Al - Red De Comercio Equitativo y Solidario," http://www.kuchubal.org/english/whoweare/index.php (accessed May 1, 2010). Abigail Percival · 31 · more autonomy. They do this in order to defend their ability to create sustainable livelihoods with their agriculture. The Comité de Unida Campesinos, for example, began in the late 1970s fighting for higher agricultural wages and against militarization and ethnic discrimination against indigenous groups. However during a march on the capital city in 2008, they carried a banner reading, “Por la soberania de nuestros pueblos y la defensa de los recursos naturales,” which, in English this means “For the sovereignty of our towns and the defense of our natural resources.” While this possibly refers to recent controversy over mining activities in region, it nevertheless highlights the complementarity of autonomy and sustainability for poor farmers.80
Another pertinent example is the Kuchub’al which functions as a distribution network for small producers of both agricultural and non-agricultural products. They too recognize the need for solidarity, self-sufficiency, and ecological sensitivity – in other words, the byproducts of autonomous development.81
These local advocacy groups are becoming legitimate social forces for sustainable and humane policies, impossible to ignore within their larger political context. Their influence now reaches beyond regional and even international bounds. Interestingly, it is the political exiles from Guatemala’s highlands, like the of the Kaqchikel farmers of the preface, who brought about the internationalization of the farmer-to-farmer movement throughout Central America. Despite government efforts to suppress the farmers, the concepts of autonomy and sustainability were able to flourish and shape campesino institutions in Mexico and Nicaragua, even while
Guatemala remained embroiled in conflict.82 Many of these organizations throughout Central
80 Comite de Unidad Campesina, "Comite De Unidad Campesina," CUC, http://www.cuc.org.gt/es/ (accessed 5/3, 2011). 81 Kuchub'al, Kuchub'Al - Red De Comercio Equitativo y Solidario 82 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture Abigail Percival · 32 ·
America, have also formed international support networks and receive funding from European countries such as Holland and Denmark, where farmers generally enjoy a high degree of autonomy.83 This demonstrates an important fact: autonomy and bottom-up development need not be limited by scale.
HOW NGOS CAN PROMOTE AUTONOMY (AND PUT THEMSELVES OUT OF BUSINESS)
As Robert Chambers argues, it is a “basic human right of the poor to conduct their own analysis.”84 But if farmers are to be autonomous over their own local agricultural, then should
NGOs play a role in sustainable development? And, if so, to what degree? It is not right to deny the usefulness of NGOs altogether, but rather I wish here to offer some of the ways in which
NGOs might facilitate autonomous development.
As a strategy, agricultural autonomy turns most developed world ideas about how development should be conducted upside down. It is essentially a reversal of the prevailing development paradigm in which the relationships of “expert” and “peasant” are relatively static.
Rather, implied in the defense of agricultural autonomy is the idea that the rural poor have their own expertise. Therefore the goal of the NGO should not be simply high rates of participation from the peasantry, but rather a high degree of participation from development agents themselves in the processes already going on within the community. Accountability, too, works oppositely.
Development agents and the NGOs they work for are accountable to the farmers and not the other way round, recognizing that the rural poor have much more at stake.85
83 Marc Edelman and Rosamaria Nunez, "El Moviemiento Transnacional De America Central," Revista Mexicana De Sociologia 60, no. 4 (1998), 305. 84 Chambers, Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?, 173-204. 85 Robert Chambers, Ideas for Development, 2nd ed. (London & Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2005), 251. Abigail Percival · 33 ·
The key to creating development that is enduring and self-reinforcing is autonomy, meaning that it is absolutely essential that NGOs have an exit strategy. Programs that set up to work in a particular region indefinitely foster a self-defeating sense of dependence among farmers. They will learn to rely on the NGO’s help for resources, leadership, and motivation – and these will end when the program inevitably does. If, on the other hand, a program begins with deadline in the not-too-distant future, this creates an atmosphere of dignity and motivation among locals. It signifies the NGO’s confidence in their capacity to do development on their own and creates an incentive for the organization to identify and train local leadership who will carry out the goals.86 Allotting a specific and relatively short amount of time to any given project should also cause the development experts to think and reflect on what technologies and methods will be both useful and repeatable, thus avoiding the “rusting hulks of well-intentioned but long- forgotten giveaways scattered all over Third World.”87
If rural development NGOs plan to introduce agricultural technologies, they must be both ecologically appropriate and locally feasible if they are to foster, and not provide barriers to, agricultural autonomy. Although they do not necessarily need to be “organic,” the methods best suited to the Western Highlands often are, because the ideal is to reduce farmer dependence on off-farm sources as much as possible. The methods behind the growing science of agroecology are exactly suited to this goal. By taking advantage of biological processes and functions, this type of cultivation minimizes inputs, technology, and to a large degree the capital necessary for agricultural production.88
86 Roland Bunch, Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement, 2nd ed. (Oklahoma City, OK: World Neighbors, 1985), 192. 87 Ibid. 88 Altieri, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture, 379. Abigail Percival · 34 ·
Given the lack of formal education among most of the rural farmers in the Western
Highlands these technologies or methods can and should be simple enough to be taught through hands-on workshops using a rule of 80% practice to 20% theory.89 Examples of appropriate practices include: polyculture systems, “green manure” (intercropping with nitrogen fixing legumes), mulching with organic matter, terraces, conservation ditches, and reduced or no-tillage cultivation. These practices reduce soil erosion, prevent nutrient depletion, improve soil quality, and protect biodiversity. Together they reduce farmer vulnerability to pests, natural disasters, and the dangers of agrochemicals.90 But, perhaps most importantly, they require little to no outside inputs, allowing farmers to develop their autonomy and provide more for their families and communities.
In many ways these “modern” sustainable practices are just revisions of traditional
Mayan practices, which should remind us the relativity of the term “expert” when dealing with development. Humanity, no matter the ethnicity, has the capacity for innovation, experimentation, and organization. NGOs, then, should accept their role as facilitators of these innate capabilities by inviting farmers into the process of development as equal and dignified partners with vital, localized knowledge of their own. Agricultural development becomes, as
Holt-Giménez describes a process of shared culture not just transfer of information.91
THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN FOSTERING AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT
At last, given Guatemala’s complicated history, we must address the ways in which the government can remove the barriers to local autonomy that limit sustainable development. If the
1996 Peace Accords are to be taken seriously, then Guatemala’s government must necessarily
89 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, 88. 90 Ibid., 23-26 91 Ibid., 92 Abigail Percival · 35 · take this development approach into account. Article 9 of the “Agreement on a Firm and Lasting
Peace” contains a simple yet powerful declaration of reads as follows:
9. The State and organized sectors of society must join forces to find a solution to
agrarian problems and promote rural development, both of which are the key to
improving the situation of the majority of the population living in rural areas – the
population group most seriously affected by poverty, inequity and the weakness of State
institutions.92
Simple enough. The problem is that actually reducing the barriers to autonomy, which would allow for sustainable rural development to occur, requires powerful people to relinquish some of their own power. Since colonization, the core of the Guatemala’s agrarian problems has been a simple conflict of interest within the elite groups. Those who have power and wealth would be happy to let the poor and marginalized farmers have land, be prosperous, and enjoy equal rights and privileges before the law – if only it did not interfere with their interests. The truth is it does interfere. Their own power and wealth depends on a paradigm of rural poverty in which cheap and abundant labor and elitist land distribution allow them to increase their wealth. This is not, as history shows, a partisan problem, but rather liberal and conservative governments alike have been plagued by this inner contradiction.93
92 Acuerdos De Paz Firme y Duradera, (29 Diciembre 1996, 1996): , www.un.org/Depts/minugua/afinal.htm. 93 This relationship (and reluctance) can even be said to play out on an international scale between developing and developed countries. Those of us from the developed world, particularly the U.S., have little authority to criticize Guatemala’s policies until we have addressed the implications of our own agriculture and economic policies. Abigail Percival · 36 ·
Addressing land tenure must form an integral piece of any development policy because without the land there is very little room to exert autonomy over one’s agriculture.94 This is because increased access to land tenure exploits human motivation and the enhanced productivity of labor that occurs when people are truly owners of their own property. Farmers with landholdings will be more likely to invest time and labor into creating complicated structures for long-lasting development. This is the essence of sustainability.95
Redistribution is, understandably, a sensitive issue given Guatemala’s violent history and the constitution prohibits land expropriation with limited exceptions.96 Nevertheless, legal battles are fought to this day over the true ownership of communal and ejidal lands once “given” by the
Spanish colonists.97 In these cases farmers are then barred from access to credit because their property rights are not legally validated outside the community and thus cannot function as collateral.98 Municipal and local governments may be more qualified to deal with these property rights on individual basis.99
For sustainable development to occur, the Guatemalan government must also evaluate the effects of their economic policies – both international and domestic – on the rural poor.
Currently, policies favor the large, often multinational, corporations because they bring the
94 Katz, Social Capital and Natural Capital: A Comparative Analysis of Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management in Guatemala, 116. 95 Chambers, Ideas for Development, 5. 96 Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, 2009 Investment Climate Statement - GuatemalaU.S. State Department,[2009]), http://www.state.gov/e/eeb/rls/othr/ics/2009/117436.htm (accessed 3 May 2011). 97 Santa Cruz, Una Aproximación a La Conflictividad Agraria y Acciones Del Movimiento Campesino, 76. 98 Katz, Social Capital and Natural Capital: A Comparative Analysis of Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management in Guatemala, 124. 99 Sarah Scherr, Byron Miranda and Oscar Niedecker-Gonzalez, eds., Investigación Sobre Políticas Para El Desarrollo Sostenible En Las Laderas Mesoamericanas [Investigation of the politics of sustainable development on hillsides in Mesoamerica], 1st ed. (San Salvador, El Salvador: IICA-Holanda/LADERAS C.A., CIMMYT, 1997), 104. Abigail Percival · 37 · nation wealth in obvious ways. This prioritization came to popularity with the liberal reforms of early Independence and reveals itself now in the flow of “development assistance” into textile factories, tourism and large-scale infrastructure – all while rural areas flounder because only the smallest portion of the revenue accrues to agricultural laborers.100 Subsidies and incentives should be directed instead to activities that ameliorate environmental degradation such as reforestation, agroforestry, and other ecologically sustainable forms of cultivation. Investments in research and development of marginal highland agriculture should also be made in order to both optimize production and eliminate the tendency to rely on inappropriate technologies for lack of locally proven alternatives.101
Finally, the national government plays an undeniable role in the overall the reduction of rural poverty, which we have established is a barrier to agricultural autonomy. The government may either take on or encourage micro-credit lending as a way to diminish startup risks for more appropriate agricultural projects. They may improve market functions as well infrastructure, such as roads, that provide access to markets. However, this responsibility also involves the provision of certain basic human rights. For example, improvements in education and literacy, of which
Guatemala boasts the second lowest in Central America next to Haiti, can increase the transferability of sustainable methods and facilitate campesino organization. Health, likewise can increase the productivity of labor, and so on.102
What all of this sums to is the need for Guatemala, as with every country, to abandon the conception of development as something that can be measured entirely by increasing GNP.
100 Holt-Giménez, Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Voice from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, 177. 101 Scherr, Miranda and Niedecker-Gonzalez, Investigación Sobre Políticas Para El Desarrollo Sostenible En Las Laderas Mesoamericanas, 57-100. 102 Ibid., 98 Abigail Percival · 38 ·
There are measurements of wealth, or as Robert Chambers prefers “the good life,” that do not necessarily translate into financial statements but are nonetheless integral to the humanitarian foundations of development. These subjective values, including human satisfaction and protection of the environment, should be somehow accounted for in discussions of national growth and wealth, all the while remembering that their absence will undermine future growth in
GNP as well. 103
VI. CONCLUSION: AGRICULTURAL AUTONOMY & TH EBIGGER PICTURE
Agricultural autonomy, despite its wide applicability, is not a panacea to the problem of rural poverty in Guatemala’s Western Highlands. First of all, it is obviously limited in scope to farmers and agricultural communities – and there are many who fall outside of this category.
Secondly, as Robert Chambers argues, even in the midst of sustainable development, the vulnerability of the rural poor means that there is still a necessary role for “safety nets” in times of particular stress. Short-term aid such as natural disaster relief is a supplementary approach that should not be considered mutually exclusive to the more permanent goal of farmer autonomy.104
In these cases, which may become all too common as climate change worsens and tropical weather becomes increasingly deadly, we must be careful not to choose one at the expense of the other because, after all, this is not a question of ideological purity, but of the welfare of human beings.
There have also been concerns voiced about the future and longevity of a development strategy that relies on local people and organizations for conservation. As development occurs, the argument goes, the rural poor will integrate themselves into the “cash economy” and become
103 Chambers, Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?, 174. 104 Ibid., 200 Abigail Percival · 39 · exploiters of biodiversity in their own right as they begin to demand material goods. Indeed, the indigenous poor of the highlands, as members of a consistently imperfect race called humanity, may choose to follow in the unsustainable footsteps of the already developed world. Farmer autonomy does not negate this risk but it does reduce its likelihood. The negative feedback loops of poor resource management will be obvious to the autonomous farmer who, by virtue of proximity to the natural system in question, is among the most likely to enact timely modifications - even if it means limiting his or her own desires.105
Even if this turns out not to be the case, an increased demand for resources is a liability with any successful development strategy. It is also one that, when presented by the rich world as a reason to avoid development altogether, smacks of selfish apathy at best and bigoted malice at worst. Far from making us suspicious of development, this potential result should remind us of the impact our own lifestyles have on ecosystems near and far – recalling that the richest 20% of people are responsible for 70% of the destruction to our shared environment.106 The fear is natural and right, but the response should be to consider the ways we might learn from the poor how to live, so as not to impinge on the resources we share with future generations.
Finally, in order for autonomy to be achieved the entire global economy must reorient itself. To say this is daunting and means that the exhortations for change are not limited to the
Guatemalan state or NGOs or even farmers. Rather its calls into question the solidarity of developed countries and consumers with the rural poor. Our governments’ policies and as well as our own attitudes towards development, debt, and rural places can shape for better or worse the efforts of each of these actors to achieve sustainable development. Most of all, we must integrate
105 Alcorn, Economic Botany, Conservation, and Development: What's the Connection?, 40-45. 106 Ibid., 42 Abigail Percival · 40 · trust and respect of the poor and rural people into our institutions and allow them the dignity to define for themselves what it means to be “developed.”
Abigail Percival · 41 ·
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