No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question, food sovereignty, and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands

Abstract

Although they receive little recognition for their contribution, peasant farmers in the global South play a fundamental role in securing the long-term global food supply. Via their self-sufficient agricultural practices, they cultivate the crop genetic diversity that enables food crops to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this paper I draw upon empirical data from the Guatemalan center of agricultural biodiversity to investigate the concern that market expansion will displace peasant agriculture and undermine a cornerstone of the global food supply. I find that even though peasants' livelihoods involve multiple forms of market provisioning, they also engage in a Polanyian ‘double movement’ to protect their subsistence-oriented agricultural practices from the potentially deleterious effects of markets. I also investigate the so-called ‘agrarian question’ about the effects of market expansion on the viability of peasant agriculture, finding that although new forms of market provisioning are likely exacerbating rural inequality, the income from market activities actually enables rural Guatemalans to reproduce the conditions for peasant agriculture. Ultimately, I observe that the conservation of agricultural biodiversity and, consequently, global food security are contingent upon the ‘food sovereignty’ of peasant farmers.

Keywords:

• peasant livelihoods
• peasant differentiation
• Guatemala
• agricultural biodiversity
• food sovereignty

Introduction

As crop scientists have long recognised, the resiliency of the global food supply is highly contingent upon the persistence of peasant agriculture (Altieri 2004, Hernández-Xolocotzi 1993, Wilkes 1992). The subsistence-oriented agricultural practices of peasant farmers in the centres of agricultural biodiversity – which are overwhelmingly located in the global South – are central to the conservation of the crop genetic diversity that enables humankind's principal food crops to evolve in an ever-changing environment. Mirroring the common perception that the peasantry is a contemporary anachronism, however, there is a growing concern that rural livelihoods will evolve in a way that undermines the cultivation of crop genetic resources. In particular, there is a fear that the processes associated with neoliberal globalisation will unleash market forces that will displace peasant agriculture and, ultimately, erode a cornerstone of global food security.

In this paper I draw upon data from the Guatemalan highlands to investigate how peasant farmers' engagements with various realms of the market economy shape their conservation of crop genetic diversity in the Mesoamerican ‘megacentre’ of agricultural biodiversity. In particular, I focus upon how market forms of provisioning relate to the prevalence and relevance of the agricultural practice of ‘making milpa’– where farmers intercrop maize with legumes, squash, herbs, and other useful plants that are primarily destined for direct household consumption. To date, most of the research on market integration and the conservation of agricultural biodiversity does little to distinguish among different forms of market provisioning and it often fails to situate markets within their broader social contexts. I address the first gap in the literature by systematically investigating how different market-oriented activities shape the viability of the subsistence-oriented practice of making milpa. I address the second shortfall by investigating the political and cultural dimensions of peasants' livelihood strategies. In contrast to the widespread perception that markets are antithetical to the cultivation of agricultural biodiversity, I find that market forms of provisioning can complement – rather than substitute for – peasant agriculture. Even as peasants engage in a variety of income-generating activities, they institute practices that protect their subsistence-oriented practices from the potentially destabilising effects of the market. For various cultural, political, and economic reasons, many Guatemalan peasants prefer the self-sufficient practice of making milpa. Based upon these findings, I conclude that the cultivation of agrobiodiversity and, consequently, global food security, is contingent upon the ‘food sovereignty’ of peasant farmers.

The political economy of conserving agricultural biodiversity in integrated markets

Genetic diversity in humankind's major food crops is essential to a resilient food supply. A broad pool of germplasm enables domesticated plants to adapt to environmental change; the loss of crop genetic diversity renders crops vulnerable to evolving pests, emerging plant diseases, and climatic variation (Wilkes 1992, Maxted et al. 1997, Brush 2004). Given the importance of crop genetic diversity to global food security, it is a sad irony that the peasant farmers who sustain it are among the poorest and most marginalised populations in the world.

As the botanist N.I. Vavilov (1992) observed in the 1920s, the genetic diversity for humankind's principal food crops is concentrated in the global South. The centre of genetic diversity for wheat, for example, lies in the Fertile Crescent region of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Similarly, the vast majority of rice diversity is cultivated in the paddies of the Indian subcontinent, southwestern China, and in the southeastern Asia nations of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In the Americas, the Mesoamerican region of southern Mexico and northern Guatemala is the centre of genetic diversity for maize, while potato diversity is concentrated on the slopes of the Peruvian Andes. Although their contribution is seldom recognised, peasant farmers maintain much of this diversity in subsistence-oriented agricultural plots. The practices are certainly not universal, but many peasant farmers in Vavilovian Centres practice intercropping and diversity management, where they plant multiple varieties of the same crop in accordance with environmental characteristics (such as soil quality and rainfall) as well as desired traits (such as reliability, time of harvest, and taste) (Bellon 1996). In a name that is symbolic of their richness, botanists refer to these agricultural systems where domesticated species coevolve with one another, thereby generating a constant flow of new crop varieties, as ‘evolutionary gardens’ (Wilkes 1992).

In contrast to the rich genetic diversity cultivated by peasants employing traditional methods, modern agricultural practices are characterised by a high degree of genetic uniformity. In addition to the limited use of intercropping, industrial agricultural systems tend to be dominated by a small number of seed varieties (Pingali and Smale 2001). In the United States, for example, maize is the most widely grown crop, accounting for 80 million acres of agricultural land (FAPRI 2006), yet six varieties account for nearly half of the total maize area (Boyce 1996).

Modern agriculture is organised around so-called ‘high-yielding seed varieties’ (HYVs). As the name implies, scientific plant breeders design HYVs to maximise the output per unit of land.1 In the process of isolating desired traits for improved seeds, however, plant scientists eliminate ‘less desirable’ genes. The result is high yielding – or at least highly fertilizer responsive – seed varieties with a narrow genetic base. With a handful of improved seed varieties distributed across the majority of the agricultural landscape, modern agriculture is particularly susceptible to insect and disease epidemics (Pingali and Smale 2001).2 To combat the vulnerability of modern agriculture, plant breeders must release a constant stream of new varieties that incorporate genes for resistance to emerging pests and pathogens. Commercial seed varieties generally must be replaced every 5–10 years; indeed, some released varieties become obsolete in the very year that they are released (Wilkes 1992). The vast majority of the genetic raw material for this ‘varietal relay race’ (Boyce 1996, Soleri and Smith 1999) between plant breeders and nature is conserved by farmers in centres of crop genetic diversity.

The on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity cannot be separated from the social processes that govern peasant livelihoods. Unlike wild plants, crops are dependent upon humans to prepare their land, sow their seed, and ensure that they have sufficient access to nutrients and water through weeding and perhaps supplying fertilizer or irrigation. The farmers who maintain crop diversity, in turn, are subject to a variety of political, economic, and cultural forces that shape their livelihood strategies. Despite their invaluable contributions to long-term global food security, the small-scale farmers in Vavilovian Centres are often poor ethnic minorities who live in marginal environments and construct their livelihoods in the fringes of ‘the’ formal economy (Brush 1989, Altieri 2004).

In the current era of market integration, there is a growing concern among crop scientists that the purported homogenising forces of globalisation will transform rural livelihood strategies and displace the peasant agricultural practices that are fundamental to the in situ conservation of crop genetic resources (Altieri 2004, Altieri and Masera 1993, Wilkes 1992). A handful of researchers have attempted to answer this question empirically. Using distance from market centres as a proxy for economic isolation, for example, some economists have determined that exposure to markets is negatively correlated with the conservation of crop genetic resources (Van Dusen 2000, Van Dusen and Taylor 2005, Winters et al. 2006), but ecologists utilising the same measure have come to alternative conclusions (Aguirre-Gómez et al. 2000, Perales et al. 2003). Other researchers have investigated how the development of grain markets affects the level of diversity cultivated on the farm (Meng et al. 1998, Smale et al. 2001, Steinberg 1999, Perales 1998). Once again, however, the results were conflicting and inconclusive.

While insightful, the empirical studies on markets and the conservation of crop genetic diversity suffer from three limitations. First, they rarely distinguish among the different types of market engagements that constitute the diversified livelihood strategies of contemporary farmers. Small-scale farmers in the global South, particularly Latin America, have long supplemented their agricultural production with income from wage labour and the production and marketing of non-agricultural commodities (Deere 1990, Kay 2001, Bernstein 2009b). Along with the recent growth in transnational migration, these non-agricultural market activities continue to play an important role in rural livelihood strategies (Reardon and Germán Escobar 2001, Bebbington 1999, Deere 2005).3 Despite farmers’ widespread participation in a variety of non-agricultural markets, very little research has been conducted on how participation in distinct realms of the market economy relate to the conservation of crop genetic resources.4 The simple fact that peasants live closer to market centres or have greater exposure to agricultural markets does not necessarily mean that their overall livelihood strategies are more oriented towards market forms of provisioning.

A second gap in the empirical research on agrobiodiversity relates to the social context of markets. As economic anthropologists of the substantive persuasion have long argued, markets are not organic; they do not emerge naturally of their own volition. Instead, markets are identified as one of many possible forms of economic provisioning and their creation is contingent upon accommodating cultural and political processes (Polanyi 1958, Halperin and Dow 1977); should they emerge, markets will function differently according to the particular social processes that govern their exchanges (Gudeman 2001). The vanguard of substantivist economics, Karl Polanyi (1957, 132), maintained that market expansion is often part of a ‘double movement’, where its potentially deleterious effects are accompanied by social protections ‘aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization’. Assuming that Polanyi's logic is relevant in contemporary contexts, one could surmise that even as peasant farmers engage in market forms of provisioning they are simultaneously instituting social protections to reinforce their subsistence-oriented agricultural practices and the attendant conservation of crop genetic diversity. To date, very little empirical research has investigated whether such a dynamic is unfolding.

A third shortfall of the research on agricultural biodiversity is its failure to situate the conservation of crop genetic resources in the political economy of peasant agriculture. There is a long history of theorising about the viability of peasant agriculture. In the 1890s the eminent political economists Karl Kautsky (1988) and V.I. Lenin (1956) pondered how the expanded marketing of industrial manufactures would shape the socio-economic transformation of the European peasantry.5 In asking this so-called ‘agrarian question’, Kautsky and Lenin were primarily interested in the revolutionary potential of peasant farmers – would they ally with capital or labour in class conflicts – but their theories about the impact of capitalist penetration into rural areas have inspired important insights that are relevant to the conservation of crop genetic diversity in the twenty-first century.

A detailed theoretical analysis of the agrarian question is beyond the scope of this essay,6 rather my intent is to situate the agrarian question in its contemporary context. Although they allowed for some qualifications, Lenin and Kautsky's general premise is that the infiltration of capitalist markets into rural areas will unleash a process that will likely result in the dissolution of the peasantry, bifurcating it into a rural bourgeois landowning class and a landless proletariat. Their analysis is frequently contrasted with A.V. Chayanov's (1977) proposition that the viability of the peasantry is ensured by an internal logic of satisficing and rural institutions that are incompatible with capitalist forms of provisioning.

The translation – into English and then Spanish – of Chayanov and other foundational writings on peasant studies in the 1960s and 1970s unleashed a renewed debate about the viability of the peasantry (Watts 2009, Kay 2001). The debate was particularly lively in Latin America, where descampesinistas– or ‘depeasantists’– adopted the Leninist perspective that capitalist expansion into rural areas would ultimately brush the peasantry aside and into the dustbin of history while the campesinistas– or ‘peasantists’– postulated its viability. Invoking Chayanov, the campesinista Alexander Schejtman (1980) maintained that the particular economic motivations of peasants and the communitarian institutions shaping rural economies underpinned the resiliency of the Latin American peasantry. Warman (1980) maintained that the viability of the peasantry is further ensured by its functionality to capitalist enterprises: lacking sufficient land, peasants must participate in wage labour, yet their ability to produce a portion of their food needs enables capitalist enterprises to hire peasants at wages that are below subsistence. De Janvry (1981) referred to this mutually dependent relation between the peasantry and capitalist enterprises as ‘functional dualism’. Although there are intriguing arguments to the contrary (Bernstein 2009a, Brass 2003, Kearney 1996), several case studies have documented the viability of a ‘semi-proletarianised’ peasantry whose livelihoods are equally dependent upon subsistence-oriented agriculture and wage labour and other forms of market income (Deere 1990, Bryceson et al. 2000, Shelley 2003). In reference to the Latin American peasantry, Kay (2000, 132) surmises that most appear ‘to be stuck in a state of permanent semi-proletarianization’.

Food sovereignty and the agrarian question

Philip McMichael (2009) suggests that the contemporary relevance of the agrarian question requires one to situate the peasantry within the modern-day ‘globalised corporate food regime’. Instead of the traditional concern over capitalist integration spurring the socio-economic differentiation of peasants into a rural bourgeoisie and a landless proletariat, he maintains that the new problematic relates to the full-scale displacement of the peasantry. Particularly, he notes that the neoliberal restructuring of economies has changed the rules for provisioning food, requiring peasants to compete with subsidised industrial food producers from the North. Echoing the argument of the transnational peasant movement La Via Campesina, he observes that the movement of massive quantities of food through concentrated agro-food circuits is forcing the massive displacement of rural populations. Dismissing the common portrayal of peasants as ‘apolitical smallholders’ (Bryceson 2000), McMichael observes that many farmers are resisting the corporatized food regime and embracing the rights-based ideology of ‘food sovereignty’. In contrast to the principle of food security – which advocates the lofty goal of people always having access to safe, sufficient, and nutritious food, but is ‘agnostic about the production regime, about the social and economic conditions under which food ends up on the table’ (Patel 2007, 90) – the food sovereignty movement also advocates that people have sufficient access to food, but under the following conditions: (1) that food be produced through a diversified, farmer-based system; (2) that people have the right to determine the degree to which they would like to achieve food self-sufficiency and the ability to define terms of trade that are consistent with the sustainable use of natural resources and the health of local economies; and (3) that people not only have the right to sufficient calories, but also the ability to fulfill their nutritional needs with foods and practices that are culturally meaningful (Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005, Patel 2007, 2009).

Some scholars have portrayed the subsistence-oriented agricultural practices of peasant farming as a manifestation of food sovereignty. For example, David Barkin (2002, 2006) maintains that the expanded cultivation of maize via traditional methods in Mexico reflects the peasantry's rejection of the unstable and exploitative forms of capitalist provisioning that were imposed by the neoliberal restructuring of the Mexican economy.7 He posits that the cultivation of maize for subsistence purposes reflects a type of ‘post-capitalist politics’ (Gibson-Graham 2006) posited on the three pillars of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and productive diversification. Invoking the claims of Sen (1999), Escobar (1999), and Bebbington (1999) that the meaning of engaging in a particular form of economic provisioning can potentially be more important than the material or pecuniary returns, De Frece and Poole (2008) also maintain that cultivation of maize via traditional methods in Mexico is also valued as an expression of cultural identity.

Tom Brass (2003) and other skeptics claim that the framing of peasant agriculture as an ‘everyday form of resistance’ harms the peasantry by justifying its continued subjugation. Quijano (2001), for instance, argues that most subsistence forms of provisioning in Latin America should not be interpreted as an effort to construct post-capitalist alternatives. Instead, he maintains that they are more likely acts of desperation by poor people who have no other alternatives since trade liberalisation has eliminated traditional forms of employment. These criticisms of populist celebrations of the peasantry demonstrate the importance of critically questioning the motivations for engaging in subsistence forms of provisioning. They do not, however, eliminate the possibility that economic crisis in rural areas has catalyzed the (re)formation of genuinely progressive alternatives nor that the fortification of peasant agriculture can be liberating and empowering.

In this essay I draw upon empirical data to situate peasant agriculture and the cultivation of crop genetic resources in their political, cultural, and economic contexts. I explore the meanings and motivations that peasant farmers in the Guatemalan highlands attach to the various forms of economic provisioning that constitute their diversified livelihood strategies. In particular, I analyse the relevance of different types of market engagement in relation to subsistence-oriented agriculture. Why do rural Guatemalans embrace diversified livelihood strategies? Do their motivations for engaging in market activities differ from their reasons for practicing subsistence-oriented agriculture? Do they conceptualise market activities and peasant agriculture as substitutable or complementary activities? These are not merely questions of academic curiosity. The relative values ascribed to different forms of economic provisioning carry important implications for strategising development and the on-farm conservation of crop genetic resources, particularly in centres of agricultural biodiversity like the Guatemalan highlands.

Agricultural biodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands

Despite their common portrayal as ‘backward’ and an impediment to development, Guatemala's peasant farmers play a crucial role in safeguarding global food security. Along with neighbouring southern and central Mexico, northwestern Guatemala is known by ecologists as a ‘megacenter of diversity’ (Perales et al. 2005). The region is the historic centre of origin and the modern centre of diversity for a number of crops, including the common bean, squash, chilies, avocados, and, most importantly, maize (Wilkes 2004). Some 7,000 years ago, Mayan farmers in this Mesoamerican region domesticated what is now, along with rice and wheat, one of humankind's principal food crops. Over the millennia, the descendants of these Mayan farmers have developed a rich diversity of maize, yielding several thousand varieties adapted to a wide range of environmental microhabitats.

As they have done for thousands of years, Guatemala's peasant farmers practice a poly-cropping system known as milpa, where maize is intercropped with beans, squash, chilies, and other useful plants. While one might suspect such a time-honoured practice as making milpa to be stagnant, it is anything but. On the contrary, it is a highly dynamic system producing a constant flow of new maize varieties (Maxted et al. 1997, Louette 1999). Via the practice of diversity management, peasant communities plant many different varieties of maize, adapted to diverse local environmental conditions such as soil type and climate, and to desired traits such as reliability, time of harvest, and taste (Bellon 1996). The proximity of domesticated maize varieties to their wild and weedy relatives allows introgression – the back-and-forth hybridisation between related species – that along with natural mutation brings new raw material into the crop's genetic profile. Farmers identify desirable traits and encourage their development via selective breeding, seed exchange, and manipulation of the local environment. Under the combined pressures of human and natural selection in the face of new pests, emerging plant diseases, and changes in the climate, these ‘evolutionary gardens’ (Wilkes 1992) of milpa agriculture provide a steady flow of new maize varieties.

In addition to cultivating crop genetic resources in their subsistence-oriented milpa plots, farmers in the Guatemalan highlands also have high rates of participation in the market economy. In her study of northwestern Guatemala's regional economy, economic geographer Carol Smith (1989) observed that the archetypical self-sufficient peasant is far more often the exception than the norm in the country's highlands. Due to insufficient landholdings, most are reliant upon some form of market income. She documented that merchant activities and petty commodity production where artisans directly market their products were pervasive. Subsequent studies have documented the widespread prevalence of wage labour in rural areas (Botello 2004, World Bank 2003). In recent years, there has also been a dramatic increase in the practice of transnational migration (OIM 2002) and the small-scale cultivation of non-traditional agricultural export crops (World Bank 2003, Isakson 2007).

The empirical data for this study were collected from Nimasac and Xeul, two villages located in the heart of Guatemala's northwestern highlands. Nimasac is a hamlet in the Municipality of Totonicapán in the Department of Totonicapán; Xeul is a hamlet in the Municipality of Cantel, Department of Quetzaltenango. Both villages are predominantly K'iche' Mayan8 and situated in the area that Smith (1989) identified as the ‘core’ of northwestern Guatemala's regional market system. Indeed, located within 20 miles of Quetzaltenango (Guatemala's second largest city), both communities have relatively strong linkages with the market economy. I collected the majority of the data during intermittent stages of fieldwork between 2002 and 2006. The most important stages of the fieldwork included participant observation and open-ended interviews (January–July 2002); a detailed survey administered to a random sample of 59 households in Nimasac and 60 households in Xeul (February–April 2003); semi-structured and open-ended interviews (September–December 2003); and focus group exercises (July–August 2006).

Nimasac is located in a wide mountain valley just outside the town of Totonicapán. In K'iche' Mayan, Nimasac means ‘big field’. Like most highland communities, the distribution of farmland within Nimasac (with a Gini coefficient of 0.5) is significantly more egalitarian than the nationwide distribution (with a Gini coefficient of 0.84). The people of Nimasac are renowned for their strong indigenous culture and their merchant activities. Most households, however, participate in multiple forms of economic provisioning. Nearly two-thirds of all households have at least one community member who is engaged in wage labour in regional labour markets; more than a quarter of households receive remittances from a family member working in the United States. Since the Ministry of Agriculture established a small irrigation system in the village in the early 1980s, many farmers have received technical assistance and credit from agricultural extension agents who have encouraged them to cultivate snow peas, broccoli, and other ‘non-traditional’ crops for export. The crops have not fared well in Nimasac's harsh environment, however, and after several bouts with failure – and the withdrawal of the foreign support for the project – the majority of the participants in the programme have reverted back to growing milpa on their land.

In the dialect of K'iche' Mayan, Xeul literally means ‘beneath the mountain’. In reality, the village is located at the foot of a mountain some 10 miles outside of Quetzaltenago. With a Gini coefficient of 0.47, the distribution of farmland is comparable to that in Nimasac. The residents of Xeul are also active participants in the market economy. As chronicled in Manning Nash's Machine Age Maya (1958), the people of Xeul have a long history of labour market participation: a cotton textile mill that began operating in 1876 has been a major employer in the area for over a century. Petty commodity production is another important activity in the community. More than a quarter of households earn income from weaving the colourful wraps that are worn by many of Guatemala's indigenous women; another 20 percent of households have members who earn income from embroidering indigenous blouses and western-style clothing for export and domestic consumption.

Diversified livelihoods and socio-economic differentiation

Like their counterparts throughout much of rural Latin America, Guatemalan peasants incorporate a variety of economic activities into their livelihood strategies (Reardon and Germán Escobar 2001, Kay 2008). Without a doubt, this strategy is partly a reflection of limited economic opportunities. In Nimasac and Xeul, for example, the majority of households (53 percent) do not control enough land to be self-sufficient in maize,9 let alone cultivate a surplus to purchase additional consumption goods. At the same time, however, they have limited opportunities in labour markets, where competition is stiff and the predominantly indigenous population is subject to wage discrimination.10

In this section, I briefly document the ways in which rural households combine subsistence-oriented milpa agriculture with the rearing of farm animals and four types of market activities: (1) wage labour in the regional labour market; (2) petty commodity production;11 (3) the cultivation of commercial crops; and (4) wage employment outside of Guatemala as transnational migrant workers.12 The prevalence of these different economic activities and the monetary value of their contributions to annual economic well-being are described in Table 1. The data are presented for the overall sample of households and stratified into quintile groups according to the size of each household's arable landholdings. Following a common practice in economic analysis, I have calculated the monetary value of the agricultural products consumed within the household – here categorised as ‘milpa’– according the price of the crops in local markets.13 The annual returns from livestock are calculated as 10 percent of the animals' market value.

Table 1. Economic activities for different landholding groups, 2002.

Quintile groups by size of arable landholdings	Milpa	Livestock	Wage labour	Petty commodity production	Transnational migration	Crop sales	Total
Bottom quintile (N = 24)
% of HHs participating	83.3	62.5	62.5	79.2	12.5	12.5
% of economic production	1.4	0.2	36.8	53.3	8.2	0.0	100.0
Average value ($USD)	29	5	774	1,122	173	1	2,104
Avg. land size: 0.86 Cuerdas*
Lower-middle quintile (N = 24)
% of HHs participating	100.0	87.5	75.0	91.7	4.2	37.5
% of economic production	4.8	0.4	46.6	42.9	4.1	1.1	100.0
Average value ($USD)	86	7	831	766	74	19	1,785
Avg. land size: 2.55 Cuerdas
Middle quintile (N = 24)
% of HHs participating	100.0	79.2	62.5	75.0	8.3	20.8
% of economic production	4.5	0.1	58.6	32.0	4.6	0.1	100.0
Average value ($USD)	122	3	1,576	861	123	2	2,690
Avg. land size: 4.54 Cuerdas
Upper-middle quintile (N = 24)
% of HHs participating	100.0	91.7	83.3	91.7	33.3	41.7
% of economic production	4.9	0.1	64.2	18.9	11.3	0.5	100.0
Average value ($USD)	196	5	2,578	759	453	19	4,016
Avg. land size: 7.16 Cuerdas
Top quintile (N = 23)
% of HHs participating	100.0	95.7	78.3	87.0	21.7	78.3
% of economic production	5.9	0.4	57.1	21.6	2.5	11.7	100.0
Average value ($USD)	234	17	2,257	853	99	462	3,952
Avg. land size: 16.57 Cuerdas
Total sample (N = 119)
% of HHs participating	96.7	83.2	72.3	84.9	16.0	37.8
% of economic production	8.5	0.3	53.0	28.9	6.1	3.2	100.0
Average value ($USD)	251	7	1,557	850	180	95	2,941
Avg. land size: 6.24 Cuerdas
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.
Notes: *Average size of arable landholdings for each group; a cuerda is a local unit of measurement, equaling approximately 24 square meters or 0.112 hectares.

As indicated in the table, four of the six forms of economic provisioning are practiced by more than two-thirds of rural households: milpa agriculture, raising livestock, wage labour, and petty commodity production. A substantial share of households also earn income from agricultural sales and/or have members engaged in transnational migrant labour, though these activities are significantly less common. Despite the prevalence of market activities, nearly all (97 percent) of rural households cultivate milpa for direct household consumption; only households that lack arable land do not engage in the subsistence-oriented agricultural practice.

Also of note are rates of participation in the different market activities for each quintile group. Whereas participation rates in the more established practices of wage labour and petty commodity production are rather high and consistent across all quintile groups, participation in the more recent market activities of transnational migration and cash cropping is concentrated in the top two quintiles. The larger asset base of the more landed households likely accounts for their higher than average participation rates in the newly established markets. For instance, participation in transnational migration typically entails hiring a coyote to help workers into the United States (illegally), a service that cost upwards of $3,000 (USD) in 2003. Peasants typically finance their journey north by selling land or taking a loan out on it. Similarly, the cultivation of non-traditional export crops is practiced almost exclusively by households that control a ‘surplus’ of land that exceeds their subsistence needs, one reason being that the land serves as collateral for loans to purchase inputs and invest in costly infrastructure such as irrigation and greenhouses. Given the larger number of economic opportunities available to them, households with more land tend to have more diversified livelihoods (see the final column of Table 2), a finding that Reardon and Germán-Escobar (2001) observe is common in communities throughout Latin America.

Table 2. Off-farm income and degree of multi-activity for different landholding groups.

Size of arable landholdings (quintile groups)	Off-farm income as share of total economic activity (percent)	Average number of economic activities*
Bottom quintile	98.6	3.13
Lower-middle quintile	94.3	3.96
Middle quintile	94.8	3.46
Upper-middle quintile	94.9	4.42
Top quintile	81.6	4.61
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.
Notes: *In total, six economic activities were considered: milpa agriculture, livestock, wage labour, petty commodity production, agricultural sales, and remittances from transnational migrants.

An analysis of how livelihood strategies vary across the different landholding groups provides useful insights into whether a process of de-peasantisation is unfolding in the Guatemalan highlands. Table 2 documents the contribution of non-agricultural market activities to the economic well-being of each quintile. Not surprisingly, the data suggest that the extent to which peasant households are dependent upon non-farm market income is negatively correlated with the quantity of arable land that they control. The 20 percent of households that control the least amount of land are the most dependent upon off-farm sources of income. Combined, these households earn only 1.4 percent of their income on the farm. This is in marked contrast to the 20 percent of households with the largest landholdings, who generate 18 percent of their economic returns on the farm. Though not shown in the table, the 10 percent of households with the largest arable landholdings cultivate more than a quarter of their economic production on the farm. In general, the size of a household's arable landholdings is inversely related to the share of income that it generates from off-farm activities (Pearson r = −0.49).14 Based on these statistics, one cannot necessarily rule-out the descampesinista hypothesis of a socio-economic differentiation of the peasantry where land-poor farmers are heavily dependent upon wage labour while their wealthier neighbours obtain income from agricultural sales, but several cautions are in order. First, even if one were to try and apply the classical logic of the agrarian question to contemporary Guatemala, the empirical data in Table 1 alludes to two contradictions: (a) the practice of wage labour is prevalent among all quintile groups, not just the land poor; and (b) despite Kautsky's suggestion that the expansion of capitalist markets would undermine petty commodity production in the countryside, the practice is still widespread in the communities and is a relatively significant source of income for all quintile groups, particularly those with smaller landholdings. Secondly, as will be discussed in subsequent sections, Guatemalan peasants are not helpless victims of market forces, rather they are actively instituting protections that help to reinforce their livelihoods and the cultivation of milpa for direct household consumption. Thirdly, as Araghi (2009) and McMichael (2009) caution, social conditions have changed dramatically in the century since Lenin and Kautsky formulated the agrarian question and, consequently, it is inappropriate to apply their detailed contextual analysis to contemporary peasantries. Although the classic framing of the agrarian question may not be appropriate in contemporary Guatemala, that does not necessarily preclude the socio-economic differentiation of the highland peasantry. In fact, the differential access that peasants have to transnational migration and the cultivation of non-traditional export crops has the potential to exacerbate rural inequality. As discussed above, the 40 percent of farmers with the largest landholdings have disproportionately higher rates of participation in these relatively new arenas of market activity. While transnational migration and cash-cropping are riskier and more costly than the more traditional forms of market provisioning, they also have the potential to be highly lucrative. In the community of Nimasac, the families of transnational workers utilise income earned abroad to recoup land that they used to finance their migration and possibly even expand their landholdings. Moreover, analysis by Adams (2004) shows that international remittances tend to exacerbate income inequality for Guatemala's poorest and middle income families, even as they have an equalising effect among the richest. Similarly, Carletto (2000) found that the cultivation of non-traditional export crops in the central highlands of Guatemala has intensified the concentration of landholdings in the region over time and that the accumulation rates of large cash croppers were disproportionately high.15 Nonetheless, even though the new market activities may be contributing to a process of socio-economic differentiation, as the following analysis of livelihood strategies suggests, widening rural inequality is not necessarily synonymous with de-peasantisation.

Complementing milpa agriculture with market income

Given the highly diversified livelihood strategies of peasants in Nimasac and Xeul and the relatively low prices that markets ascribe to staple crops, one should not expect the market value of milpa agriculture to be an especially dominant contributor to household production. Indeed, it is not. Among the six categories of economic activity included in this analysis, agricultural production for direct household consumption only accounts for 8.5 percent of total production (see Table 1).16 The contribution of agriculture to household income is significantly constrained by the scarcity and unequal distribution of arable land in the highlands. Most highland families have a ‘surplus of labour’ in the sense that they do not own sufficient landholdings to provide all of their adult members with full-time employment in the cultivation of milpa. Moreover, since few families own enough land to be entirely self-sufficient in agriculture, most households require some form of non-farm income in order to purchase their necessary consumption goods.

Of particular interest are the ways in which peasant households combine various economic activities in composing their livelihood strategies. Do they prioritise one type of activity over another? If so, which activities are prioritised and why? What are the different types of values generated by various economic activities? Why is it that milpa agriculture is the most prevalent form of provisioning even though it is the least lucrative? Drawing upon empirical evidence, I discuss in this section how the residents of Nimasac and Xeul conceptualise and value different types of economic activities. Guatemalan peasants make qualitative distinctions between the rewards from subsistence-oriented milpa agriculture and the returns from market activities, despite their similarities as forms of economic provisioning. Whereas the income that is earned in the market helps to compensate for insufficient returns from milpa agriculture, the practice of making milpa should not be reduced to the market value of the output. While it may be methodologically possible to assign a price to the value of milpa crops, the subsistence-oriented practice of making milpa generates many entailments that cannot be captured by market values.17 Consequently, even though peasants are often willing participants in market activities, they also exemplify Polanyi's (1957) ‘double movement’ by placing boundaries on the market so that it does not preclude their cultivation of milpa.

Wage labour

Although wage labour provides the bulk of their monetary incomes, peasants in the Guatemalan highlands do not necessarily prioritise wage employment over milpa agriculture. In general, peasants do not allow their participation in the labour market to supplant their self-provisioning of food crops. The income that rural families earn in the labour market is rarely viewed as a substitute for the agricultural output that is produced with household resources; it is more adequately described as a complement. Thus, even though households engage with the labour market, they utilise a variety of strategies that allow them to continue cultivating milpa for household consumption.

The contribution of non-farm employment to rural livelihoods is extremely important. Not only does wage income account for the majority of economic production, it is also one of the more remunerative opportunities available to the peasant population. As illustrated in Table 1, nearly three-quarters of rural households have members participating in wage labour; the income that they earn accounts for more than half of the value of total production.18 Measured in market prices, the annual returns from non-farm employment are more than six times the market value of subsistence crops. Moreover, at $4.99 (USD) per day, the average returns from a day of wage labour are 39 percent greater than the $3.59 (USD) of value that is produced during the average day of farming maize (see Table 3).

Table 3. Daily returns from select economic activities.

	Average daily returns ($USD)
	Overall	Men	Women
Wage employment
All sectors	4.99	5.19	4.25
Agricultural sector	3.90	3.90	3.85
Manufacturing sector	4.69	4.86	3.69
Commerce/marketing sector	8.59	8.23	12.53
Service sector	5.59	7.56	4.25
Urban	6.01	6.43	4.09
Rural	4.64	4.73	4.30
Petty commodity production
Woven goods	5.52	5.52	n/a
Sewn goods	5.52	5.52	n/a
Shoes	4.49	4.49	n/a
Wood or clay goods	3.59	3.59	3.59
Embroidery by machine	3.85	n/a	3.85
Embroidery by hand	1.92	n/a	1.92
Amarradores	1.56	n/a	1.56
Maize agriculture*	3.59	3.59	3.59
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.
Notes: *The returns to maize agriculture only account for the value of the grain produced. These figures do not account for the value of other milpa crops (e.g. legumes, squash, medicinal herbs) that are often tended to during maize farming. Nor do they account for the non-grain use values of maize plants, such as the husks that are used for wrapping tamales, the cobs that are used for fuel, and stalks which are used as fodder and fencing.

Given the higher returns from wage labour, the neoclassical theory of economic ‘rationality’ would suggest that peasants should prioritise the more lucrative activity of non-farm employment over milpa agriculture. This, however, is not what they do. Despite the relatively higher returns of wage labour, over 60 percent of the households whose family members held jobs maintained that the two activities were equally beneficial to their family's welfare. Moreover, all but three of the 86 households that reported income from non-farm employment also grew maize; those three did not control any arable land. Expressing a sentiment that is shared by much of the rural population, a peasant from Xeul maintains that, ‘Without maize, one cannot eat. But one cannot eat without work either’. The income from wage labour is an extremely important component of campesino livelihoods, however, peasants typically are reluctant to participate in the labour market if their participation would not permit sufficient time to attend to their milpa plots. If non-farm employment does impede their ability to work in the milpa, peasants utilise various techniques such as hiring agricultural day labourers and squeezing in some of their agricultural duties before work and during their limited time off. In general, highland peasants do not substitute wage labour for the practice of making milpa. Instead, they persist in their self-provisioning of staple food crops while using their income from non-farm employment to purchase additional maize and consumption goods that supplement their insufficient level of agricultural output.

The pursuit of flexible employment is one of the more common strategies that peasants exercise in order to complement making milpa with a monetary income. Many working peasants express a preference for jobs that permit them a leave of absence in order to perform essential tasks in the milpa, especially tasks like planting and harvesting that need to be accomplished at specific times during the year. Some wage labourers must request the time off. Others – specifically those working for small-scale employers in the region – are automatically granted vacation time when key tasks should be performed in the milpa. Even those who hire-out their labour as agricultural field hands reserve days to perform essential duties in their own milpas (which, as a result of a common agricultural calendar, also occurs when their services are in greatest demand).

Of course, not all households are able to find off-farm employment that permits them to fulfill their agricultural duties in the milpa. Moreover, at eight percent there is a small but significant portion of wage workers (a group that is disproportionately female) who do not work on their families' farms. Among those who do work in the milpa, 36 percent report that their participation in the labour market impeded their ability to fulfill their agricultural responsibilities. Nonetheless, all of the households with members who reported that their jobs impeded their ability to perform their agricultural duties managed to grow milpa; fewer than 10 percent of them left a portion of their land fallow.

Peasants whose participation in the labour market impedes their ability to cultivate milpa have found several ways to overcome the constraints placed on them by their jobs. Many of them simply find a way to squeeze in more time on the farm. They perform agricultural tasks early in the morning before their work day begins, in the evening once they have returned home, or during their limited days off (most work five and a half days per week). As Amartya Sen (1975) has noted, this is a common practice of peasants throughout the world and thus, he maintains, wage employment is not necessarily in opposition to subsistence-oriented agriculture. Nonetheless, several peasants reported that their jobs did not provide them with enough ‘spare hours’ to properly maintain their milpa. For some households, participation in the labour market means forgoing certain agricultural tasks. The families plant milpa but do not perform less essential duties such as weeding, applying fertilizer, and possibly even mounding dirt around the plants so that they are less likely to lodge in the wind. Their failure to perform these tasks obviously results in lower yields; the campesinos are well aware of this. But they also understand that maize is a remarkably resilient plant that is able to withstand such neglect; they do the best that they can with the time constraints that are placed upon them by their wage employment.

Despite the milpa's ability to withstand neglect, its propagation still requires farmers to perform essential tasks such as preparing the land and planting at the proper times during the agricultural calendar. Rather than forgo cultivating maize entirely, working peasants with inflexible schedules often hire agricultural field hands known as mozos to cultivate their milpa for them. Among the households with members whose labour market participation had impeded their ability to work in the milpa, 60 percent had hired mozos to perform certain milpa tasks. The hiring of mozos was especially prevalent for essential duties: nearly two-thirds of the households reported hiring mozos to sow the seeds, and more than half had hired mozos to prepare the land and to harvest the maize. It is not as common to hire mozos to perform less time-specific tasks like weeding and applying fertilizer, since it is possible to spread such duties out over a longer period of time and it is easier to squeeze them in during ‘spare time’ away from work.

As will be discussed below, it is not economically ‘rational’ to hire mozos to cultivate milpa. Measured in monetary units, the average value produced by a day of working in the milpa is 24 percent less than the standard daily wage for the agricultural workers (i.e. the workers are paid more than the value of their product). Moreover, most of the wage workers who hire mozos earn a daily wage that is less than or equal to the $4.48 (USD) that is typically paid for a day of agricultural help.19 The common practice of hiring mozos to cultivate milpa, even when it would be more economical to purchase food in the market, suggests that the subsistence-oriented agriculture generates benefits beyond the market value of the crops.

Petty commodity production

The in-home production of artisan goods that can be exchanged in the marketplace is widespread in the Guatemalan highlands. Some 85 percent of the households surveyed in Nimasac and Xeul produced non-agricultural commodities in their homes in 2002, making this the most prevalent method of generating monetary income (see Table 1). However, given the low returns from certain forms of in-home commodity production and their frequent status as part-time endeavours, its overall contribution total to household income was disproportionately smaller. In relation to the five broad categories of economic activity examined in this chapter, petty commodity production accounted for 29 percent of economic production, second only to non-farm employment. More than half of the households surveyed earn 20 percent or more of their total household income from the sale of artisan goods; one-third of the households earn 50 percent or more of their income from the activity.

Petty commodity activities are decidedly gendered. Consider, for instance, the two most common forms of artisanal production: weaving skirts and ‘making ammaradores’ (which is the practice of wrapping the thread that is dyed and then woven into intricately patterned Mayan skirts). Making amarradores is an exclusively female task. Meanwhile, weaving the thread from the amarradores into the cuts of fabric that are used as skirts is an exclusively male occupation. As illustrated in Table 3, the difference in the returns from these activities is striking. A day of making amarradores earns the equivalent of $1.56 (USD) while the male task of weaving earns $5.52 (USD) per day, a return that is 250 percent greater.20 Though less dramatic, the petty commodities that are typically produced by men (e.g. textiles and shoes) consistently earn higher returns than the commodities that are produced by women (e.g. embroidery by hand and by machine).

From the peasants' perspective one of the most desirable qualities of petty commodity production is the flexibility that it provides its producers. Although several types of in-home commodity production might best be described as ‘cottage industries’, where buyers provide the raw materials and expect the peasants to produce a given level of output, most producers of artisan goods still have a large degree of control over their working hours. For women, the part-time making of ammaradores and embroidery provides them with an opportunity to earn income even as they attend to their traditional domestic duties like childcare and food preparation. ‘For me, they're both important’, one woman explained about milpa and amarradores. ‘For instance I can go to the mountain and work in the milpa in the morning. Then I can come home and make amarradores. I can eat the maize, but if I do not do amarradores, I cannot buy coffee. The amarradores allow me to earn money’. For men, the flexibility of petty commodity production is often lauded for the opportunity that it provides them to attend to their milpa. Several male informants who had previously participated in the labour market told me about how the inflexibility of their jobs had led them to purchase weaving looms so that they could more easily attend to their agricultural duties.

Although artisans frequently mention flexibility to work in their milpas as one of the principal benefits of their work, many of the households who generate income from petty commodity production employ mozos to perform agricultural tasks. Among the households earning at least half of their income from non-agricultural commodity production, 45 percent rely upon hired labour to perform at least some of their agricultural tasks; in general the hiring of mozos tends to decrease as households earn a larger share of their total income from petty commodity production. Compared to the 53 percent of households from the overall sample, artisans are less likely to employ field hands than the typical household. Nonetheless, mozos still perform a significant portion of their agricultural labour. Like the households dependent upon income from wage labour, petty commodity producers typically hire field hands to perform critical duties in the milpa such as preparing the land and harvesting; they are less dependent upon hired labour to perform non-essential tasks.

Given that one of the supposed benefits of petty commodity production is the flexibility that it provides peasants to attend to their milpas, an obvious question that emerges is why so many artisans employ field hands to perform agricultural tasks. One explanation that emerged during my field research is that certain forms of petty commodity production (e.g. shoe-making, weaving, textiles production) have returns that are significantly greater than the costs of hiring mozos. As a man who produced textiles from his home explained, ‘If I were to work in my milpa I would lose 45 quetzales [$5.77 USD], but if I hire a mozo I only have to pay 35 quetzales [$4.49 USD]. So, for me, it's better to work here in my home and to hire mozos to work in the milpa’. A shoemaker from Nimasac provided a similar explanation for hiring the labour power of agricultural workers, noting that, ‘Everyone has their job. My job is to make shoes where I can earn more money’.

The prevalent use of mozos among the artisan households is, in some respects, a testament to the enduring importance of growing milpa. Other than two households who do not control arable land, all of the households earning 50 percent or more of their total income from petty commodity production cultivate milpa; combined, they grew maize on 96 percent of their arable land. Moreover, it is important to note that the majority of these households take time away from lucrative commodity production in order to attend to their milpa. For example, one successful shoemaker in Nimasac forewent $287 (USD) in returns so that he could cultivate $164 (USD) worth of maize. As he explained it, ‘This is one of the benefits of my job, that I can take off time to work in the milpa’. Only a small fraction of the petty commodity producers (16 percent) had hired mozos to perform all of their tasks in the milpa.

The fact that rural residents hire others to attend to their food crops does not mean that they place more or less priority on petty commodity production than on the cultivation of milpa. But it does suggest that both activities are valued components in the overall livelihood strategies of rural Guatemalans. For most, the returns from artisan production are used to complement – or subsidise –milpa production, not displace it. For example, several artisans mentioned that the returns from their sales had allowed them to purchase more land and thereby expand their agricultural production.21 Some peasants prefer petty commodity production for the flexibility that it gives them to work in their milpas, while others commend it for the relatively high returns that allow them to hire mozos to cultivate their food crops for them.22 Whatever the case, nearly all peasant households have devised strategies that allow them to continue cultivating milpa even as they allocate significant household resources to the production of non-agricultural commodities.

Transnational migration and remittances

As discussed earlier, transnational migration is one of the most rapidly expanding livelihood strategies in rural Guatemala. The practice has grown especially quickly in Nimasac, where 45 percent of households have a family member living abroad, and more than one-quarter receive remittances. There is considerably less transnational migration in Xeul, where the practice is still a novelty: only 10 percent of households had a family member living abroad and only one of the 60 households surveyed had received remittances. Nonetheless, the male residents of Xeul are intrigued by the possibility of earning ‘mucho dólar’ in the United States and it is quite possible transnational migration will become more prevalent in the village.

Most transnational migrants are young males in their 20s or 30s. Given that these are often the family members who have the greatest responsibility for attending to the family milpa, one might expect that many households receiving remittances would abandon the cultivation of maize and simply purchase the grain in the market. This, however, is not the case. All of the households with a family member living abroad have continued to cultivate milpa. Moreover, the income earned abroad has allowed many returning migrants to purchase more land and thereby expand their agricultural production. Thus, rather than replacing the self-provisioning of food crops, the remittances from transnational migration have helped to fortify the practice.

To be sure, most rural migrants do not seek foreign employment for the sole reason of expanding milpa agriculture. In fact, many households – about 12 percent – sell plots of land in order to finance their journey, thereby diminishing their ability to engage in subsistence cultivation. Nonetheless, the standard practice for migrants is to work abroad for two to seven years and earn an income that will allow them to return to their communities and re-establish more or less ‘traditional’ livelihoods that always entail milpa agriculture. For most migrant workers, the principal objective is to expand consumption opportunities and to build larger and better homes. In other words, they look to transnational migration as a means of improving their material living conditions. But, the windfall returns that most peasants earn while working abroad is also what allows them to maintain their more traditional livelihood strategies. As a Mayan priest who was familiar with several communities in Totonicapán explained,

In villages like Buenabaj there isn't much migration. As a result, the people there have to find different ways to earn money. They grow tomatoes. … Or they find other alternatives. But, the people in the area of San Bartolo mostly practice traditional agriculture. They grow milpa. Remittances from the States allow them to do this. (emphasis added)

Rather than displacing peasant agriculture, remittances and other income earned while working abroad are thus employed in ways that help to maintain its conditions of existence. While they are away, migrants send remittances that enable their families to continue cultivating maize and other crops for household consumption. All of the families receiving remittances had continued to grow milpa in the absence of a family member; combined they grew maize on 92 percent of their arable land. For some households, the income from remittances means that certain household members are able to allocate their time to cultivating milpa instead of pursuing other income-generating activities. But for most households, particularly those where the husband or male sons are absent, remittances enable the household to hire mozos to farm the family's agricultural plots. Among the families receiving remittances, three-quarters hired agricultural day labourers to attend to at least some agricultural tasks; one-third hired mozos to complete all of their agricultural responsibilities. This stands in marked contrast to the overall sample: only half of the households hired mozos and 16 percent utilised the labourers to complete all of their farming duties. In general, households receiving remittances tend to substitute hired labour for family labour. They do not, however, substitute maize grown on family land with maize purchased in the market.

In addition to generating remittances that allow households with absent family members to continue cultivating maize, the income earned from employment abroad continues to subsidise milpa agriculture once migrants return to their home communities. Many returning peasants purchase capital goods like weaving looms and sewing machines that allow them to earn a relatively high income and provide them with the flexibility to either work in the milpa themselves or to hire mozos to work the land for them. Returnees also use their newly acquired wealth to purchase land. Some households are simply purchasing land to recoup plots that they sold to finance their members' migration. Other families view migration as means for augmenting their landholdings, which, as discussed earlier, may exacerbate rural inequality. As one recent returnee explained, ‘It's not possible to build a house or to buy more land unless one migrates’. Another migrant was using his income to pay for some 3.5 hectares of land that he had purchased on Guatemala's southern coast through the national government's market-led land reform. Whether they purchased their land inside the immediate community or beyond it, all migrants use their new landholdings to expand their cultivation of maize.

Commercial agriculture

As discussed earlier, commercial agriculture has been encouraged in Nimasac for two decades. Given the scarcity of land within the village, the adoption of cash crops necessarily translates into less land allocated to milpa agriculture. This section ponders the ways in which farmers combine cash cropping with milpa agriculture in their livelihood strategies and explores the possibility that farmers might substitute the income earned from agricultural sales for maize and other crops that are grown for direct household consumption.

Table 4 lists the prevalence and marketing characteristics for the crops (excluding fruit trees) cultivated in Nimasac and Xeul. The crops are listed in decreasing order of occurrence. Not surprisingly, the ten most widely grown crops are typical milpa crops, including maize, different species of legumes and squash, and a leafy green known as nabo culix that is a favourite ingredient in hearty soups. As milpa, most of these crops are consumed within the household; usually only the surplus that exceeds household consumption needs is sold in the market.

Table 4. Agricultural production for households with arable land, 2002.

Crop	Percentage of households that cultivate crop*	Percentage of cultivating households that market crop	Percentage of harvest marketed	Percentage of agricultural production (market value)	Percentage of total agricultural sales	Cash crop**
Maize	100.0	18.3	15.3	56.7	20.4
Scarlet R. Beans	46.1	5.7	6.3	2.3	0.3
Broad beans	39.1	15.6	36.3	3.2	2.7
Peas***	20.0	13.0	64.2	2.0	3.0
Hard squash	16.5	5.3	3.2	0.3	0.0
Chayote	14.8	29.4	50.1	0.6	0.7
Fig leaf squash	10.4	8.3	29.8	0.4	0.3
Nabo culix	9.6	36.4	3.4	0.2	0.0
Black beans	8.7	10.0	5.9	0.5	0.7
Zucchini	5.2	33.3	56.7	0.3	0.4
Cilantro	5.2	50.0	85.9	0.1	0.2	Y
Potato	5.2	83.3	57.5	2.9	3.9	Y
Onion	3.5	75.0	91.3	3.2	6.8	Y
Cauliflower	3.5	100.0	95.6	2.2	5.0	Y
Cabbage	3.5	100.0	91.2	2.5	5.4	Y
Tomato	3.5	100.0	92.6	9.8	21.2	Y
Broccoli	2.6	100.0	91.7	1.1	2.4	Y
Bell pepper	2.6	66.7	77.3	3.4	6.2	Y
Flowers	2.6	66.7	90.3	1.7	3.5	Y
Beets	2.6	100.0	87.3	0.6	1.2	Y
Carrots	2.6	100.0	94.6	1.0	2.3	Y
Chard	1.7	100.0	93.3	1.1	2.4	Y
Snow peas***	1.7	100.0	96.6	0.7	1.6	Y
Strawberries	1.7	50.0	58.3	0.7	1.0	Y
Mint	1.7	50.0	33.3	0.0	0.0
Chamomile	1.7	50.0	60.0	0.0	0.0	Y
Radish	1.7	100.0	77.8	0.0	0.1	Y
Celery	1.7	50.0	89.1	0.5	1.0	Y
Chile	0.9	100.0	75.0	0.0	0.0	Y
Green beans	0.9	100.0	85.0	0.5	1.0	Y
Spinach	0.9	100.0	83.3	1.2	2.3	Y
Parsley	0.9	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
Cassava	0.9	0.0	0.0	0.3	0.0
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.
Notes: *Excluding the four households lacking arable land. **Cash crops are here defined as crops where at least 50 percent of the output of that crop is sold in the market and at least 50 percent of the households that grow the crop sell it in the market. *** Some households may have reported the cultivation (and sales) of snow peas (which were classified as a separate crop) as peas. Thus, the statistics for peas may be over-represented and those for snow peas under-represented.

While the ten most widely grown crops are primarily destined for household consumption, the remaining crops can be described as ‘cash crops’. For this paper, a cash crop is so defined when half of the households that grow the crop sell a portion of it in the marketplace and at least half of the total output of the crop is sold. In other words, the crops are grown foremost as agricultural commodities. None of the thus defined cash crops are grown by more than five percent of the sampled households. Given the relatively small proportion of households cultivating cash crops, it is obvious that commercial agriculture has not made a significant dent into milpa farming in the communities.

Cash cropping is constrained, in part, by the limited acreage of irrigated land in the highlands. According to data from Guatemala's 2003 agricultural census, less than two percent of the farms in the municipalities where Nimasac and Xeul are located have irrigation on at least a portion of their land; an even smaller proportion of the total agricultural area is irrigated (INE 2005). Table 5 demonstrates the importance of irrigation to commercial agriculture. Among the 20 commercial crops identified, 14 are grown entirely on irrigated land, while only three of the crops were entirely rain-fed. Thus, while irrigation is not the only requisite, it plays an undeniably important role in determining the extent of commercial agriculture. The question, then, is whether the farmers who have access to irrigation prioritise cash cropping over making milpa.

Table 5. Cash crops and irrigation, 2002.

	Percentage of households cultivating	Percentage of crop grown on irrigated land
Cilantro	5.2	33.3
Potato	5.2	42.9
Onion	3.5	100.0
Cauliflower	3.5	100.0
Cabbage	3.5	100.0
Tomato	3.5	100.0
Broccoli	2.6	100.0
Bell pepper	2.6	100.0
Flowers	2.6	50.0
Beets	2.6	100.0
Carrots	2.6	100.0
Chard	1.7	100.0
Snow peas	1.7	100.0
Strawberries	1.7	100.0
Chamomile	1.7	0.0
Radish	1.7	100.0
Celery	1.7	0.0
Chile	0.9	0.0
Green beans	0.9	100.0
Spinach	0.9	100.0
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.

Among the 22 households who had received irrigation through the cash cropping initiatives in Nimasac, four were included in the random household survey. I worked in the fields with another two during the participant observation stage of my research. With the exception of one of the farmers, ‘José’, who has long been a champion of cash-cropping and spent several years promoting non-traditional export crops as an agricultural extension agent, all of the commercial farmers included in my study hold milpa agriculture in high esteem. Among those surveyed, all but José indicated that milpa agriculture was ‘very important to their family's food security’. They consumed slightly more maize than the average household and grew a sufficient quantity to fulfill all of their households' consumption needs. In short, cultivating cash crops had not reduced their reliance upon milpa agriculture, rather it was an activity that they practiced on ‘surplus’ land.23

Most of the farmers who cultivate cash crops tend to view market and milpa agriculture as distinct forms of economic provisioning. When I asked one commercial farmer why he did not grow cash crops on all of his land, he responded, ‘I grow vegetables to earn money. The milpa is for eating’. With the exception of José, the farmers do not substitute cash-cropping for milpa, rather they employ it as a strategy to earn an income that supplements and complements their subsistence production.

Even though farmers may currently conceptualise different roles for milpa farming and commercial agriculture, a note of caution is in order. The cash cropping of most farmers is constrained by the amount of land that they have irrigated. There is no guarantee that if given an opportunity to irrigate a greater share of their land, farmers would not shift land out of milpa and into commercial agriculture. Given most peasants' experience, however, expanded irrigation would have to be accompanied by higher prices for products and/or lower input costs, as well as some form of crop insurance to insulate farmers from the environmental and market uncertainties of commercial agriculture.

Testing the complementarity of market and milpa

Rather than supplanting milpa, I have argued that most market forms of income generation tend to complement the subsistence-oriented agricultural practice. The peasants of Nimasac and Xeul view the market and the milpa as important yet distinct forms of economic provisioning. The milpa secures the foundation of the rural Guatemalan diet while market activities provide the income to supplement any shortfalls in maize and beans and to purchase other consumption necessities.

Correlation coefficients provide a relatively straightforward approach for testing the hypothesis that milpa and market activities are complementary. Table 6 shows the Pearson correlation coefficients for the four forms of market provisioning considered in this paper and three different measures for the importance of subsistence-oriented agriculture to livelihood strategies. As hypothesised, participation in different market activities does not appear to displace milpa agriculture. The only strong negative correlation is between the proportion of land allocated to maize and the value of agricultural output sold per unit of land. The small absolute values for most of the correlation coefficients suggest that the quantity of resources allocated to market activities has little bearing upon the prevalence of milpa agriculture in peasants' livelihood strategies.

Table 6. Correlation of market activities with milpa agriculture (household level).

	Proportion of land allocated to maize	Proportion of maize purchased	Value of ag. production consumed per unit of land
Wage labour (Hours of wage labour per adult HH member)	0.05	0.00	0.09
Petty commodity production (Income share of petty commodity production)	−0.05	0.08	0.07
Transnational migration (Proportion of adult HH members working as migrant labourers)	−0.15**	−0.04	−0.16
Cash cropping (Value of agricultural production sold per unit of land)	−0.57***	−0.01	−0.01
Source: Survey data collected by author, 2003.
Notes: *** Significant at 1 percent level. ** Significant at 5 percent level.

As would be expected, the share of land dedicated to maize is negatively correlated with the value of agricultural sales per unit of land. Most maize is consumed within the household and it, along with all of the crops that typically accompany it in the milpa, commands relatively low prices in the market. Commercial agriculture necessarily requires that land be reallocated from milpa crops to cash crops that fetch a notably higher price in the marketplace. Cash cropping reduces the amount of land dedicated to milpa agriculture. Nonetheless, the income from commercial agriculture is not correlated with the consumption of maize and other milpa crops. Thus, even though cash cropping decreases the proportion of land allocated to milpa, it does not undermine the importance of subsistence-oriented agriculture in peasants' livelihood strategies.

Why cultivate milpa ?

As the discussion thus far suggests, rural livelihood strategies in the Guatemalan highlands are a complex mosaic of economic activities. Households earn income from several different forms of market provisioning – from wage labour to petty commodity production and from the cultivation of cash crops to transnational migration. Regardless of how they combine these various forms of market engagement, rural households are reluctant to become fully integrated into the market economy. Even as they embrace the market, nearly every peasant family retains some resources for the subsistence-oriented cultivation of milpa. An obvious question that emerges is why. The cultivation of milpa entails a significant opportunity cost: most maize farmers could earn greater returns from their land by cultivating cash crops (von Braun et al. 1989, Annis 1987) and, as shown in Table 3, greater returns to their labour by engaging in full-time wage employment or petty commodity production. Moreover, many campesinos use the income that they earn from market activities to subsidise their cultivation of milpa: they hire mozos when it would be more affordable to simply purchase their food crops in the market, or they allocate income to purchase arable land so that they can expand their cultivation of maize. Generally, the income that peasants earn from market activities tends to complement milpa agriculture, allowing them to maintain its cultivation despite low returns that are often insufficient to sustain all family members.

The widespread practice of cultivating milpa at an economic loss (either explicit or implicit) has long frustrated policy-makers and baffled development experts in Guatemala. As early as the 1950s the World Bank cautioned that milpa agriculture in the highlands ‘remains the central problem in Guatemalan agriculture’ (IBRD 1951, 29); in the 1960s development experts advised Guatemalan policy-makers to shift, ‘the agricultural production goal orientation of farmers to that of a market orientation’ (sic.) (Beal et al. 1967, 3). The anti-milpa bias is still prevalent. As an administrator for the Ministry of Agriculture explained,

Maize isn't profitable. We try to discourage its cultivation. We want the campesinos to diversify. We want them to switch to the cultivation of crops like tomatoes, avocados, and potatoes, crops that are more profitable to grow.24

The government's frustration with maize farmers was shared by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the region. For example, one foreign NGO whose purported objective was to improve food security in the highlands tried to implement a micro-credit programme in the department of Totonicapán. However, farmers only wanted to borrow so that they could raise chickens and grow more milpa for household consumption. Frustrated, the NGO's director complained that they would never be able to repay their loans by growing maize and abandoned the project.

The development experts are correct, growing maize is not profitable. Peasants are well aware of this. There is a common refrain, ‘No hay ganancia en sembrar la milpa’, it is not profitable to grow milpa. Several farmers provided detailed descriptions of the costs and benefits of engaging in the self-sufficient practice. The analysis varied from farmer to farmer, as households used different combinations of factor inputs, cultivated different crops and varieties of a given crop, and, as a result, achieved varying yields. When monetary values were assigned to the costs and benefits, most farmers broke even: the monetary costs were approximately equal to the monetary benefits. Some farmers who relied upon hired labour incurred losses (some of them quite substantial), and none incurred significant gains. After each analysis, I would ask the farmers why they grew maize. Many struggled for an answer. Indeed, when measured by the criteria of market prices, cultivating milpa is irrational; it would be more profitable to allocate resources to market production and simply purchase food in the market. I soon realised that the context of my question was inappropriate: in my attempt to quantify the value of milpa with a market price, I was mistaking measurement for meaning. While the market value of the maize and other crops is certainly an important value produced by cultivating milpa, it is only one of many. The practice generates multiple types of values, but only one of these – the use value of the food to be consumed – can be adequately measured in monetary units.

The pleasure of cultivating milpa

An obvious reason for cultivating milpa is the enjoyment that it offers. Like gardeners throughout the world, the Guatemalan peasants take pleasure in working the land, watching their crops grow, and seeing the fruits of their labour at harvest time. They take satisfaction in knowing that their tortillas and tamales were produced by the sweat of their own brow. Many milpa tasks such as planting and harvesting are family activities and oftentimes accompanied by picnic lunches. ‘I like harvesting maize with my family’, a peasant/artisan from Nimasac told me. ‘I get tired making shoes inside every day; this gives me a chance to be outside and breath the fresh air’. Like the shoemaker, many peasants do not evaluate the decision to cultivate milpa in strictly monetary terms. The joys of family, fresh air, and fulfillment are non-pecuniary and outside the realms of market logic.

The milpa as a guarantee of sustenance

The practice of making milpa is the foundation of food security in Nimasac and Xeul. Nearly all (99 percent) of the households surveyed maintained that the practice was important to their family's food security; two-thirds reported that the practice was very important. Milpa's contribution to the peasantry's food security represents much more than the calories it generates. It also provides a near guarantee that a family's basic sustenance needs will be met. Farmers are well aware of the potential to increase their returns from alternative economic activities. But doing so comes at a risk: the market is unstable. Cultivating milpa, in contrast, is a near certain guarantee that a family will not starve.25 Farmers repeatedly acknowledged the important role that milpa played in guaranteeing their family's sustenance:

Milpa is very important to us. It means security. If we don't have money, we can't buy maize. With milpa, it is certain that we will always have maize. It's a part of our lives. It's security for us indigenous people. My people have a secure future if we grow our own maize.

By growing maize, we are protecting ourselves. If I were to become ill, for instance, I would not be able to work and we would not be able to buy maize. We would go hungry. But if we have maize stored, we won't suffer.

It's not profitable to grow maize. But, no matter what, we are going to survive. It's not the same when you buy.

If we grow maize, we will always have it. I may not have any business in my pharmacy, but my family will survive without any problems.

Thank God that we do not have to buy maize in the market. Many families do not have enough land. They have to buy their maize.

If the market were to falter, we would not be able to buy our maize. But, if we grow our own maize, we will always have something to eat. Maize is more stable.

In part, milpa's guarantee of food security is due to the remarkably hearty nature of maize and its companion crops. As a crop originally derived from wild plant species in the Mesoamerican region, maize has many qualities that allow it to thrive in the Guatemalan environment. It is able to withstand limited applications of fertilizers, weeds, drought, and general neglect. ‘By planting corn’, Sheldon Annis writes of Guatemalan peasants, ‘a family might assure itself of poverty, and possibly even hunger – but it will not face starvation’ (1987, 33, emphasis in original).

The importance of making milpa to rural Guatemalans' food security is not only attributable to the biological resiliency of maize. It can also be ascribed to the central role that maize plays in communal safety nets (i.e. ‘social insurance’). It is a common practice for peasants in the Guatemalan highlands to gift excess maize production to the elderly, sick, and other community members who are in need. Similarly, many peasant households (86 percent) provide seed – or at least have expressed a willingness to provide seed – to neighbours who have lost their own seed stock to rodents, pests, or decay. The cultivation of milpa signifies membership in many rural communities. It also signifies that a household is able – and most likely willing – to participate in such reciprocal exchanges. Not growing milpa may signify withdrawal from the community, thereby forsaking the communal safety net that neighbours would otherwise provide.

The milpa as a meaningful form of sustenance

Not only is the practice of cultivating milpa a means of sustenance, it is also a meaningful form of sustenance. Maize has long played a central symbolic role in Mesoamerican cosmology. The Pop Wuj, the creation myth often referred to as the ‘Mayan Bible’, describes how Ixmucane, the Grandmother of Day, creates humans from maize.26 In the cultural life of the pre-conquest Maya, nearly every ceremony included maize, from birth when the umbilical cord was cut over a maize cob, to death when maize dough was put in the corpse's mouth before burial (Coe 1994). Recognising its religious and social importance, the arriving Europeans identified the grain as the equivalent of their own ‘staff of life’, and called it pan, or bread. Centuries later, maize remains a central icon of popular religion in Guatemala, having been incorporated into many Christian denominations (Valladares 1993).

Aside from these symbolic dimensions, milpa agriculture also serves as a social foundation for a shared community identity. Maize is often gifted as a means for fortifying social bonds. For example, many farmers provide cobs of maize exhibiting qualities that they are especially proud of (e.g. large grains, straight rows of grains) to their neighbours and family members. Nearly all of the peasant households surveyed (96 percent) provide grain as gifts to their neighbours who have suffered the loss of a family member; most (82 percent) have maize blessed in their church or on an altar; and more than three-quarters reported that they donate maize to community celebrations.

Milpa as a form of cultural differentiation

For many highland peasants, the cultivation of maize is an expression of their cultural identity. There is a common refrain in the area: ‘Somos hombres de maíz’, we are people of maize. In part, this is a reference to the aforementioned creation myth in the Pop Wuj. It is also a reference to the practice of cultivating milpa. As Annis (1987) suggests, the cultivation of milpa is the reification of indigenous peasant identity in Guatemala. Historically, the ethnic difference of Guatemala's indigenous campesinos was used as a justification for their economic subjugation. Indigenous Mayans had their land appropriated by European colonisers and they were forced to provide labour on the plantations of the ruling elite, a practice that persisted in various forms until the 1940s. The cultivation of milpa was a response to this subjugation. As the antithesis of accumulation, the practice does not generally produce any excess and the crops that it does produce are typically of limited worth in the marketplace. In short, the milpa was an asset that was not likely to be appropriated by the politically powerful.

The neoliberal era has, to some extent, inverted social relations. The indigenous peasantry no longer suffers overt economic subjugation as a result of their cultural difference. In fact, they are now receiving multiple invitations to participate in the market economy. Market-oriented development strategies such as cash-cropping, market-assisted land reform, and wage employment have inundated the countryside. Many peasants now have the option to become heavily integrated into the market economy. To do so, however, would require them to abandon a form of economic provisioning that has come to symbolise their cultural distinction from the Western world. Rather than being subsumed by the purportedly homogenising forces of the market, peasants continue to make milpa as an expression of cultural difference. As a response to what Escobar (1999) refers to as the ‘problematic of alterity’, milpa agriculture offers peasants the possibility to remain Mayan even as they embrace certain forms of the modern market economy. It can also be interpreted as a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott 1985), a small but symbolic way of resisting efforts by outside actors to convert the peasantry into full market citizens.

The rationality of cultivating milpa

In addition to the social, political, and psychological motivations for cultivating milpa, there is also a very practical reason for engaging in subsistence-oriented agriculture. Some resources – particularly the labour power of women and unirrigated land – have fewer opportunities in the market economy. Many women in Nimasac, for instance, complained that they suffer discrimination in the labour markets. Employers are reluctant to hire them and, due to their traditional household responsibilities that do not conform to the rigidity of most work schedules (e.g. childcare and meal preparation), women rarely search for wage employment. Moreover, as shown in Table 3, the returns to ‘female’ forms of market production are appreciably lower than to ‘male’ activities, an observation corroborated with data from Guatemala's 2000 Living Standards and Measurement Study (World Bank 2003). Given their limited opportunities in the labour market, for many the use of female labour power in the milpa represents a rational use of household resources. The economic returns of the subsistence agriculture are reasonably competitive with many forms of market activity, and milpa provides the flexibility to attend to other gendered responsibilities.

In addition to absorbing female workers who suffer discrimination in the labour market, milpa agriculture also represents a rational use of land that is poorly suited to commercial agriculture. As discussed earlier, the vast majority of land in the highland communities is not irrigated and, consequently, unsuitable for growing most cash crops. Most peasant households lack the resources to transform their land into a suitable growing environment for cash crops. Domesticated from weedy plants endemic to the highlands, milpa crops are undoubtedly better suited to the rain-fed growing environments and represent an agronomically practical use of arable land.

Conclusions

As this example from the Guatemalan highlands demonstrates, market-oriented livelihood strategies do not necessarily preclude the subsistence-oriented agricultural practices that are associated with the conservation of agricultural biodiversity. In fact, as the qualitative and quantitative analysis in this paper suggests, the different forms of economic provisioning can play complementary roles in peasants' overall livelihood strategies. As posited in Warman's (1980) analysis nearly two decades ago – and de Janvry's (1981) ‘functional dualism’ thesis of the same era – peasants in Latin American continue to rely upon their returns from market activities to complement their agricultural returns from farming plots of land that are too small to allow for self-sufficiency, while, at the same time, the returns from their subsistence-oriented agricultural activities provide a necessary complement to the low wages that they receive in the labour market. The resiliency of the Guatemalan peasantry, like its counterparts throughout the region (Deere 1990, Kay 2000, Bebbington 1999), is underpinned by its participation in multiple forms of economic provisioning.27

Many orthodox economists have explained the persistency of peasant agriculture as the result of ‘rational’ farmers responding to incomplete market integration (de Janvry et al. 1991, Fafchamps 1992, Goeschl and Swanson 2000). As the forgoing analysis suggests, there is indeed a certain rationality to allocating select resources to subsistence-oriented agricultural practices. The Guatemalan milpa, for example, can be understood as an activity that employs land that lacks irrigation and the labour power of household members who face discrimination and limited opportunities in the marketplace. Moreover, like many economists, peasants will sometimes use the language of market prices to discuss the costs of inputs and the value of outputs. Nonetheless, reducing milpa agriculture to the logic of economic rationality and the language of markets abstracts from – and ignores – the several non-market values associated with its cultivation. In addition to providing calories and a means of sustenance, the practice of making milpa also generates many entailments that cannot be quantified. It is a multidimensional asset; to reduce its value to the single rubric of a monetary price would sacrifice meaning for measurement.

The complementarity of milpa agriculture and market activities in the Guatemalan highlands offers valuable insights into the agrarian question raised by Kautsky and Lenin. In general, participation in the market economy does not appear to be associated with the dissolution of the peasantry; this is particularly the case with relatively established forms of provisioning like wage labour and petty commodity production. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that more globalised market activities like the cultivation of non-traditional export crops and the increasingly prevalent livelihood strategy of transnational migration could be exacerbating rural inequality and transforming social relations and land use practices in the Guatemalan centre of agricultural biodiversity. In the case of cash-cropping, my research in Nimasac and Xeul suggests that the practice is only viable when it is supported and subsidised by outside actors. This support has been wavering in the northwestern highlands, but research suggests that the active creation of agricultural export markets by powerful actors in Guatemala's central highlands is associated with the concentration of landholdings (Carletto 2000) and the displacement of milpa agriculture and the loss of crop genetic resources (Isakson 2007).

Like non-traditional export agriculture, the recent practice of transnational migration is likely spurring socio-economic differentiation in highland communities. Its impacts on the cultivation of agrobiodiversity are more questionable. With their larger holdings of land and other assets, wealthier households have a greater ability to engage in the costly – yet often highly remunerative – practice of working abroad. The returns from transnational migration are typically allocated towards fortifying rural residence, which invariably entails the cultivation of milpa for direct household consumption, thereby helping to ensure the continued cultivation of crop genetic resources. The practice also creates employment for poorer community members, as the families of migrants hire them as field hands, construction workers, and domestic labourers. Nonetheless, even as the practice generates wage labour for poorer community members, transnational migration tends to exacerbate income differences between the rich and the poor (Adams 2004) and could possibly be spurring the concentration of landholdings within rural communities. Despite these preliminary insights, the impacts of transnational migration upon the socio-economic dynamics of peasant agriculture – and the conservation of crop genetic resources – are deserving of further research.28

In addition to investigating the viability of Guatemala's highland peasantry, this research also addresses McMichael's (2009) concern that the contemporary relevance of the agrarian question is rooted in the politics of food production. While they do not employ the language of food sovereignty per se, farmers from Nimasac and Xeul construct milpa agriculture as a type of post-capitalist politics (Gibson-Graham 2006). That is, even though the Guatemalan peasants compose livelihood strategies that include capitalist and non-capitalist forms of market engagement, they also actively embrace milpa agriculture as a preferred form of food provisioning, even though it might be considered ‘irrational’ to do so. Rather than becoming fully subsumed into a globalised corporate food regime, Guatemalan peasants are committed to maintaining a high degree of self-sufficiency in the production of maize, beans, and other milpa crops. This is not to suggest that peasants are completely isolated from capitalist relations; most agricultural households complement their subsistence-oriented agriculture with income from capitalist activities like wage labour and transnational migration. But even as they incorporate various capitalist and non-capitalist market activities into their livelihood strategies, Guatemalan peasants institute protections that enable their continued cultivation of milpa. Although Kay (2008) has dismissed such livelihood strategies for their dependence upon income from capitalist activities, the evidence from Guatemala suggests that milpa agriculture is not subordinate to market forms of provisioning. On the contrary, peasants conceptualise market and non-market forms of provisioning as important but distinct forms of provisioning that generate different values. The common refrain, ‘No hay ganancia en la milpa’, reflects the peasantry's awareness that making milpa is not a lucrative activity. Yet they continue to cultivate it. Regardless of the quantity of land that they control, peasants residing in the core of western Guatemala's market economy dedicate nearly all of their arable holdings to the cultivation of maize and other crops for direct household consumption.

Although making milpa is often necessary to ensure that peasant households will have access to a secure and nutritious diet, this subsistence provisioning is not necessarily the same as the acts of desperation described by Quijano (2001). Instead, Guatemalan peasants cultivate milpa as an expression of cultural identity, as a medium for fortifying social bonds, as a form of food provisioning that offsets the vagaries and uncertainty of the market, and as a rejection of the complete commodification of food. Even as they participate in various realms of the market economy, Guatemalan peasants strive for autonomy in the provisioning of maize and other staple crops and demonstrate the viability of non-capitalist alternatives.

Even though the Guatemalan peasantry has constructed diversified livelihoods that complement the making of milpa and has instituted various protections to ensure its continued practice, there is no guarantee that it will remain a viable livelihood option. The rural farmers construct their livelihoods within a broader social context that is biased towards modernisation and rife with anti-milpa tendencies. In addition to the potentially destabilising dynamics introduced by transnational migration, there are several processes working against the autonomous provisioning of food. These include development policies aimed at shifting peasants' production strategies towards cash crops and non-traditional exports, trade liberalisation policies that allow the influx of cheap subsidised food and facilitate the entrance of oligopolistic grain processors and distributors, the country's highly unequal distribution of land combined with limited reproductive rights in rural areas, and the current strategy of market-led agrarian reform. The combination of these processes could undermine the conditions of existence for peasant agriculture in Guatemala, thereby displacing the politically empowering, economically secure, and culturally meaningful livelihood strategy of making milpa. The dissolution of peasant agriculture in the Guatemalan highlands would also undermine the conservation of crop genetic resources in the Mesoamerican megacentre of agricultural biodiversity, thereby eroding a cornerstone of global food security. Thus, in many respects, the security of humanity's food supply is rooted in the food sovereignty of peasants in Guatemala and other centres of agricultural biodiversity. While the cultivation of agrobiodiversity is in many respects a choice that is made by peasant farmers, their livelihood decisions are shaped by broader political and economic processes. In place of economic policies and development practices that condemn milpa as backward and inefficient, social conditions that are conducive to the subsistence-oriented agricultural practice should be instituted. Doing so will reinforce the food rights of Guatemalan peasants and help to ensure humankind's access to a resilient food supply for generations to come.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. Ryan Isakson

I would like to thank Saturnino M. Borras, James K. Boyce, Carmen Diana Deere, Jacqueline Morse, and two anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments that they provided on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants at the Latin American Studies Association's XXVIII Congress in Rio de Janeiro who provided helpful comments on a presented version of this research. Lastly, I am grateful for research assistance from Yolanda Menchú Tzul and funding from the Political Economy Research Institute.

Notes

¹However, as research by Perales et al. (1998) has shown, the yields (and net income returns) from modern seed varieties are not necessarily superior to traditional landraces.

²Improved seed varieties are bred for superior resistance. Nonetheless, as pests and diseases evolve to overcome plant resistance, genetic uniformity increases the likelihood that such a mutation will eventually prove harmful to a crop. Uniformity of varieties across the landscape means that the evolved pest or disease can damage a greater proportion of overall crop acreage, a phenomenon known as genetic vulnerability.

³The widespread prevalence of diversified livelihood strategies is a major theme in the ‘new rurality’ literature discussed in Kay (2008) and the ‘livelihoods' literature discussed in Scoones (2009) and Bebbington (1999).

⁴Van Dusen and Taylor's (2005) consideration of transnational migration and the hiring of agricultural field hands in southern Mexico is a notable exception.

⁵According to Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009b), Friedrich Engels raised similar question in his 1894 publication The peasant question in France and Germany, when he speculated that European farmers would not be able to compete with the importation of cheap grain produced abroad.

⁶For a more in depth treatment of the agrarian question, see Deere (1990), Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009a), and Bernstein (2009b).

⁷It should be noted, however, that Barkin does not explicitly employ the term ‘food sovereignty’ nor does he discuss the issue of crop genetic diversity.

⁸Among the 119 households surveyed, 99.4 percent of the inhabitants of Nimasac and 97 percent of the inhabitants of Xeul identified themselves as indigenous.

⁹Adjusted for the number, age, and sex of family members, the median household controls sufficient land to cultivate 73 percent of its annual maize consumption.

¹⁰As data from Guatemala's 2000 Living Standards Measurement Study indicate, the average wage rates for indigenous Guatemalans are half that of their non-indigenous counterparts. According to analysis by the World Bank (2003), 95 percent of this gap can be attributed to discrimination.

¹¹In this paper, petty commodity production is defined as production by independent craftspeople and independent, small-scale merchant activities.

¹²This is certainly not an exhaustive listing of all forms of economic activity in the Guatemalan highlands, nor is it necessarily an inventory of the most important forms of economic provisioning. For example, this taxonomy does not account for many forms of uncompensated ‘reproductive labour’, including childcare, food preparation, and the collection of firewood.

¹³As I discuss in later sections, there are several problems with this methodology.

¹⁴With a t-statistic of −6.161, the correlation coefficient is statistically significant at the 0.0001 level.

¹⁵Bernstein (2009b) makes a similar argument, observing that although peasantries worldwide compose diversified livelihood strategies, the outcomes are not identical. Wealthy peasants tend to engage in activities that facilitate investment and accumulation, while the diversified livelihoods of middle and poor peasants do little more than enable their continued survival.

¹⁶Even with the inclusion of agricultural sales, agricultural production accounts for less than 10 percent of total economic production. This is significant drop from 1974, when agricultural production accounted for more than three-quarters of family income in rural Guatemala (Deere and Wasserstrom 1981).

¹⁷Some economists contend that the contributions of crop genetic diversity to food security is a ‘positive externality’ that can be measured in market prices (Swanson 1996). It would be a significantly more challenging and problematic task to consolidate many of the social values that will be subsequently described into a single rubric.

¹⁸The pervasiveness of wage labour in the study area is significantly higher than the national average. In Guatemala's 2003 agrarian census, 21 percent of respondents reported that they engaged in non-farm employment. This was significantly lower than the rates of 57 percent in the municipality of Totonicapán and 52 percent in the municipality of Cantel (where Nimasac and Xeul are respectively located) (INE 2005).

¹⁹46 percent earn more than mozos; 46 percent earn less than mozos; the remaining 8 percent earn the same wage as mozos. These figures do not account for the fact that most mozos are provided lunch when they work, while other wage employees do not usually receive this benefit.

²⁰The varying returns might be attributable to different capital requirements. Weaving requires a loom that costs some $330 (USD), while making amarradores requires little capital investment. Nonetheless, it is highly likely that the varying returns are also attributable to a devaluing of female labour.

²¹Several of these informants noted that they had been able to purchase more landholdings by hiring mozos at a wage rate that was lower than their returns from commodity production. This, of course, is reminiscent of the Leninist theory of the social differentiation of the peasantry: the wealthier peasants employ the poorer peasants at low wages and thereby accumulate more land at the expense of poorer peasants. The slight variation is that the field hands do not produce any surplus value since the $3.59 (USD) worth of maize that is produced by the typical day of working in the milpa is less than the $4.49 (plus lunch) that is typically earned by mozos. Nonetheless, the higher wages of the wealthier peasants are largely attributable to their ownership of capital such as shoe-making equipment, weaving looms, and sewing machines.

²²It would, however, be cheaper to purchase maize in the market. It costs about $12.82 (USD) to have a mozo cultivate a quintal of maize, while a quintal of maize in the market only costs $10.25 (USD).

²³While the cash croppers were not necessarily the wealthiest families, they certainly were not the poorest either. As the World Bank (2003) and others (Carletto 2000) have observed, the poorest families in Guatemala tend to be excluded from the cultivation of non-traditional cash crops.

²⁴Personal interview, Guatemala City, February 2003.

²⁵This logic is very much akin to the ‘safety first decision rule’ articulated by Michael Lipton (1968).

²⁶Originally, Ixmucane created humans from mud, but they fell apart. Next, she created them from sticks, but they were dumb. Only when she created humans from maize were they ‘good’ and ‘whole’. She used white maize for the bones, yellow maize for the flesh, black maize for the eyes and bile, and red maize for blood.

²⁷Razavi (2009) has developed a similar thesis, maintaining that various non-market forms of economic provisioning are essential to the reproduction of contemporary peasantries.

²⁸Elizabeth Fitting's (2008) research on how the practice has shaped intergenerational attitudes towards traditional maize agriculture in Mexico is a laudable first step towards this objective.