Meeting peasants where they are: cultivating agroecological alternatives in neoliberal Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Social movements increasingly embrace agroecology as an integral part of food sovereignty. This essay has two related aims: first, to highlight the barriers to agroecology and explore how these can be overcome; second, to deepen understandings of how agroecology can strengthen movements for food sovereignty or extend neoliberal governance. I ground these questions by examining state and social movement agroecological programs in Guatemala. I argue that strict rejection of conventional inputs and market production, in addition to insufficient state investment and redistribution, creates barriers to participation among a rural peasantry whose livelihoods have been transformed by decades of scientific, market-led development. Facing these limits, agroecology can work to strengthen food sovereignty movements, but can also reinforce the neoliberal food regime by promoting resilience and indigenous agriculture as sufficient to resolve the food crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• agroecology
• food sovereignty
• peasant agriculture
• neoliberalism
• resilience
• governmentality
• Guatemala

Acknowledgements

This research would not have been possible without support and collaboration from FUNDEBASE, and their commitment to strengthening grassroots organizations to build a democratic and plurinational Guatemala. I am also thankful to CCDA, and to Elías Raymundo, who helped me navigate ICTA and MAGA. This essay benefited from the immense wisdom and generosity of several anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Peasant Studies on this and a previous draft, and Marc Edelman, who read an early version. All errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nicholas Copeland is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of American Indian studies in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. He has written about neoliberal democracy and authoritarian populism in Mayan communities, and Walmart's corporate strategies to fend off unions and regulation, and he is currently investigating indigenous and peasant environmentalism and the politics of food security and food sovereignty in Guatemala. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Over 60 percent of all Guatemalans live in poverty, with 20 percent living in extreme poverty (INE 2014).

2 Sarah Horne (2012) found similar results in the Red Tianguis in Chiapas.

3 Anibal Salazar, personal communication, 2017.

4 Alonso-Fradejas (2015, 496) found that one third of displaced farmers in the northern lowlands sold their land to flex crop plantations because ‘it was useless for farming, and the rest because they were highly indebted’.

5 I thank Marc Edelman and an anonymous reviewer respectively for these observations.

6 In 2010, they were funded by ‘Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development, American World Jewish Service, German Development Service, Trócaire, the Canadian International Development Agency  … , Rights Action, Miserios de Alemania, and Veterinarians without Borders’, among others (Granovsky-Larsen 2014, 213–14, fn. 76).

7 The agronomist explained that the most enthusiastic participants had significant prior experience with development training.

8 They also concede that some peasants’ advanced ‘conversion to the agroindustrial model [has] modified their system so profoundly  …  that a reconversion to agrecological management may prove difficult or impossible’ (Altieri and Toledo 2011, 594).

9 For discussions of the relationship between resilience and neoliberal governance see Joseph (2013) and Reid (2012).

10 See Boyer (2010) on divisions between agroecology and food sovereignty movements in Honduras.

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the Virginia Tech Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech.