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Abstract
Integration of smallholder agriculture into oil palm production schemes has been advocated as a strategy for rural poverty reduction in the global South, including Guatemala, where the crop had been promoted through a contentious government programme. This study, set in Guatemala’s northern lowlands, challenges the official narrative that smallholder oil palm cultivation catalyses rural development and deters peasant land sales. Results indicate that oil palm expansion is accelerating land sales and provides minimal benefits, namely non-inclusive and precarious jobs. The host community is becoming increasingly susceptible to global market volatility, as oil palm puts pressure on subsistence farming and eliminates other livelihood options.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr. Ryan Isakson for his thoughtful and pointed comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as his mentorship and support. Many thanks to Dr. Carlos Avendaño who is a key collaborator on this project, as well as to Oscar Rojas and Tania Montenegro for their outstanding research assistance in the field, and to Julio Morales for his valuable guidance and logistical support. The author also wishes to extend a special acknowledgement to the leaders of the participant communities and to the local translators, without whom this project would have been impossible. A special thanks to the palm growers, the staff of the Laguna Lachuá National Park, Bosque Modelo Lachuá, and all research participants, for their helpful information and honest opinions. Thank you to the reviewers of this paper for their meaningful input and constructive critique. Any remaining errors are those of the author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Although ‘preventing land sales’ is not found as an official objective in the ProRural documents, it was often presented as a goal by programme officials to potential participants. Two oil palm producers in the studied communities as well as several community leaders either expressed this view, or recalled the programme being presented this way to them. See also Alonso-Fradejas et al. (Citation2011).
2 Contracting arrangements and production models can vary substantially. In Southeast Asia, versions of hybrid smallholder–large plantation models have also been implemented (see Hall et al. Citation2011; McCarthy Citation2010).
3 Independent oil palm producers in Guatemala range substantially in terms of land holding size, which can be from less than one hectare to over 100 hectares, or anything in between.
4 ‘Oil palm producer’ or ‘oil palm grower’ in this paper refer to the smallholder owners of the palm plantations or farms in the study area. ‘Oil palm workers’ are the wage workers employed by the oil palm growers.
5 The investment was considered an advance on future production, without interest or collateral. However, some beneficiaries claim to have received less than a quarter of that amount in the first year of the programme (Guereña and Zepeda Citation2013).
6 From interviews with oil palm growers and community leaders. One community leader recalled instances of agents coming to the region to promote cash crops such as cardamom, and never returning to purchase the harvest as initially promised.
7 International prices of palm oil tend to roughly follow petroleum prices. However, petroleum prices have fluctuated considerably more than those of palm oil, particularly in the last five years, due to a variety of complex geopolitical factors (World Bank Data Citation2015).
8 Green Earth Fuels pulled out of the Guatemalan venture allegedly due to economic losses during the 2008 financial crisis. However, it is highly likely that the US Environmental Protection Agency's decision to strip palm oil-based biodiesel of its ‘renewable’ fuel designation due to concerns over deforestation heavily contributed to the company's withdrawal from oil palm (Guereña and Zepeda Citation2013).
9 Several programmes under ProRural were transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture (MAGA); however, ProPalma was effectively discontinued after just one year of operation.
10 ADINC is the Association of Farmers for the Comprehensive Development of the Northern Basin and the Chixoy River, supported by government and international aid. Initially, the main objective of ADINC was to promote agriculture of staple crops, maize and beans, to sell in local markets. In the late 2000s, it expanded its scope to include cash-crop promotion, particularly oil palm (Guereña and Zepeda Citation2013).
11 Because conditions often differ between agribusiness-owned plantations and their independent suppliers, documenting detailed vendor information may be disadvantageous to oil palm agribusinesses as it may complicate their prospects for obtaining sustainability certifications. The Roundtable for Sustainable Oil Palm, for instance, has only recently started a certification programme for smallholder oil palm producers; however, it is aimed at smallholder groups or co-operatives and not individual producers who may be selling fruit to a large agribusiness (RSPO Citation2016).
12 A larger sample and additional in-depth interviews with oil palm workers and community members (and other ethnographic methods) are required to build on the work presented in this paper and to substantiate a thorough analysis of household dynamics, and detailed individual experiences.
13 The centres of the communities are located approximately five kilometres from each other; however, some of the agricultural parcels belonging to members of COM1 and COM2 border each other.
14 The World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were among the major sponsors of various post-war initiatives, notably for the explicit purpose of developing a dynamic land market (Lastarria-Cornhiel Citation2003).
15 At least two major, and highly contentious, hydroelectric projects are underway on the neighbouring rivers Chixoy and Icbolay.
16 The Guatemalan civil war, which claimed more than 200,000 lives, officially ended with the signing of the United Nations-sponsored Peace Accords in December 1996.
17 ‘Ownership’ here is used in a problematic sense, referring to occupation of the land, without necessarily or immediately obtaining legal documentation, due primarily to the challenges posed by the country's problematic land tenure procedures and recourses.
18 National Institute of Agrarian Transformation, created by the law 1551 in 1962.
19 ‘Fundo de Tierras’ or the Land Fund, created after the 1996 peace accords to eventually replace INTA in 1999.
20 The class of soils in COM1 and COM2 is characterized by limited agricultural potential due to acidity and high potential for erosion (Monzon Citation1999).
21 Two former ranchers in COM1 claimed that their cattle failed to thrive because the pasture soils were too low in minerals, causing the cows to fall ill. The ranchers did not anticipate this problem when they first moved into the area.
22 Although the general soil characteristics are similar between COM1 and COM2, survey results suggest that parts of COM2 have maintained fertility more successfully than in COM1, possibly due to differences in temporal patterns of land use and over-use (survey results; Monzon Citation1999). Other historical and social factors have likely played a role in explaining the (so far) minimal oil palm establishment in COM2.
23 As discussed in Gauster and Isakson (Citation2007), this process was facilitated by the land titling process that was mandated in the 1996 Peace Accords.
24 It should be noted that only one of the oil palm growers (PG6) in COM1 has engaged in aggressive land acquisition, although this is by no means a unique case among independent producers in the northern lowlands.
25 In an interview, a community leader who was among the founders of COM2 described the burdensome legalization process which took 30 years to complete. During those years, other families had arrived in the community who were not part of the initial land titling application. Some ended up purchasing land (illegally, in technical terms) from the founding families, renting, or remaining landless.
26 This was a disturbing trend which I witnessed in two other communities in the region during my field work, where a large agribusiness had negotiated a purchase of all of the land in the village, and immediately proceeded to indiscriminately convert all land use into a monocrop plantation, forcing a large portion of the residents to leave the village in search of other opportunities. See also Grandia (Citation2013).
27 The use of contracts also solves the problem of production time exceeding labour time, which has long been attributed to the failure of capitalist social relations to develop in agricultural production (Mann and Dickinson Citation1978; Watts Citation1994).
28 No interviews with Palmas del Ixcán representatives were carried out to confirm these findings in the context of this study.
29 MTPS looks after official employment statistics.
30 IGSS provides social insurance and health benefits to workers.
31 Referring to the tendency of the labour market towards more insecure and less predictable employment conditions such as short contracts, subcontracts, lack of benefits, and general lack of protection for the employee from bad employer practices and poor or dangerous working conditions (see Standing Citation2011).
32 ‘Invaders’ was the term used by the oil palm growers and a few other residents in COM1. However, it is a highly problematic term since the purported ‘invaders’ may not see themselves as ‘invaders’ in this long-standing and highly complex conflict space.
33 This can be problematic since they routinely exclude applicants based on personal bias.
34 Child labour is prevalent in the region and not only on oil palm plantations, with most youth (especially boys) beginning to work around the age of 10. Those continuing to attend school do so on the weekends. Large agribusinesses, however, generally do not hire minors. Refusal to hire minors is not regarded favourably by the people in the region because some families count on their children for help with the household income.
35 ‘Voluntarily’ is a contestable term here considering that many workers quit because they were faced with unfeasible demands from their employer, such as 12-plus-hour days of hard physical labour.
36 Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm is a global organization that issues sustainability certificates to oil palm producers (RSPO Citation2016).
37 It has partly done so at the expense of other agricultural employment, including pineapple and cardamom. Historical employment statistics in COM1 are non-existent.
38 Here, income or monetary income excludes any non-monetary types of earnings, such as crops grown for household consumption.
39 p = 0.05; Wilcoxon test.
40 This area had been designated as a protected wetland of international importance under the Ramsar convention in 2006 (CONAP Citationn.d.), yet oil palm expansion had gone on largely unchecked for potential environmental impacts to the wetland.
41 Oil palm is associated with a number of pests, such as the whitefly, which can be vectors for human-affecting illnesses (GREPALMA Citation2016; Morales et al. Citation2005). COM1 residents have become concerned about an increase in flies (‘moscas’), mosquitos and diseases, especially in children, since the arrival of oil palm. Public health studies on the subject are lacking.
42 Calculated from survey data for PG1, PG2 and PG3.
43 Further research is needed to evaluate other poorly understood risks such as climate change.
44 One of the small oil palm growers had already considered cutting down and replacing oil palm with another crop. However, he has not yet done so because this task would require a substantial investment and carries its own risks. Of particular concern is that the network of roots left by oil palm trees are said to make it extremely difficult to cultivate crops on the land once the palm trees are gone.
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Anastasia Hervas
Anastasia Hervas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning and the School of Environment at the University of Toronto. She is a primary investigator for the project examining the socio-ecological impacts of oil palm in the Lachuá Ecoregion in Guatemala, funded by the Canada–Latin America and the Caribbean Research Exchange Grant (LACREG) through the International Development Research Council (IDRC) of Canada. Email: [email protected]