Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for DevelopmentReport read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

Abstract

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.

Keywords:

• Guatemala
• agrarian development
• poverty
• indigenous communities
• modernisation
• civil war

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tania Li and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this piece. Thanks also to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright IIE program, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the York Faculty of Arts Fellowship for their support.

Notes

I am grateful to Tania Li and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this piece. Thanks also to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright IIE program, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the York Faculty of Arts Fellowship for their support.

¹In 2002, urban Guatemalans earned three times what rural Guatemalans did, up from 2.5 times in 1989 (p. 67).

²Rural households made up 77.3 percent of all households living in poverty and 93.2 percent of all households living in extreme poverty in 2000 (UNDP 2002, 105).

³In the 2003 Censo Agropecuario, 2 percent of landowners controlled 57 percent of Guatemala's cultivable land (UNDP 2005, 134), while the poorest 87 percent of farmers control just 16 percent of arable land.

⁴ Maxeños, people from Chichicastenango, have specialised in trade since before the Conquest, and the families of most Chupolenses engaged in some trading even when they were also travelling to the fincas.

⁵See McAllister (2007) for a more detailed account of this process.