Food security, food sovereignty, and local challenges for transnational agrarian movements: the Honduras case

Abstract

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• food security
• local/transnational agrarian movements
• agrarian reform
• farmer-to-farmer networks
• Honduras

Notes

This is a revised version of the paper ‘Food Security, Food Sovereignty and the Invisible Agrarian Question in Neoliberal Honduras’ presented at the 28^th International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro. I thank Jun Borras and the three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Peasant Studies, Annette Desmarais, Marc Edelman, and James Wessman, who all gave helpful comments. Wilfredo Cardona sent vital information from Honduras. I also acknowledge the social movements study group at UNC-Chapel Hill, and especially Professors Arturo Escobar and Dorothy Holland.

¹La Vía Campesina or ‘The Peasant Path’ is its official title. In this paper, I drop the ‘La’ simply because ‘Vía Campesina’ is how Honduran speakers generally refer to this organisation.

²I visited Honduras from 1–9 August 2009 as part of a human rights delegation sponsored by the Quixote Center/Quest for Peace, Brentwood, MD, USA.

³This Spanish term for peasant in Honduras refers to subsistence cultivators, whose production for use values still trumps their production for markets, and who remain the predominant carriers of the society's agrarian regional cultures and technologies. Small farmers usually share some of these characteristics, but produce mostly for commercial ends.

⁴Prensa Radio Progreso (North Coast Jesuit media, 28 August 2008; Vía Campesina internet letter writing campaign, 7 August 2008). The Guadalupe Carney peasant group is a local of the union National Congress of Farmworkers (CNTC), with ties to the Honduran Coordinating Council of Peasant Organizations (COCOCH), which in turn is affiliated with Vía Campesina.

⁵See the Jesuit J. Guadalupe Carney's, To be a revolutionary: an autobiography (1987).

⁶Although congressional initiatives have attempted to rescind the neoliberal, anti-agrarian Agricultural Law (1992, see below), to restart agrarian reform, and to force the government to settle the almost 1000 petitioned land disputes that have accumulated since 1992, the political right continues to block such legislation (COCOCH-FOSDEH 2009, 155; correspondence with agricultural economist Wilfredo Cardona, June 2009). FOSDEH is the Honduran Social Fund for Foreign Debt.

⁷In 1974, the percentage of rural landless families had expanded from 20 percent in 1952 to a third of rural families. The percentage of families with less than one hectare of land rose from 10 percent to 17 percent during that same period (Rhul 1984, 49). By 2008, the share of rural landless had dropped to 25 percent of rural families (161,000 families), but the percentage of families with less than one hectare increased slightly to 18.2 percent or 116,000 families (estimates based on agricultural census data through 1993 and an INA study in 2004, COSDEH-FOSDEH 2009).

⁸COCOCH-FOSDEH (2009), using the National Statistical Institute (INE) data, reports that the average Honduran farmer in 1952 dedicated 28 percent per hectare for basic grain production; this percentage had declined to 15 percent in 2003. During the 1999 to 2006 period, maize imports increased from 2.5 million qq. to 5.6 million qq., bean imports increased from 42,000 qq. to 186,000 qq., and rice imports rose from 1.8 million qq. to 2.2 million qq. (2009, 137–8). One quintal (qq.) = 100 lbs.

⁹COCOCH played a key role in the creation of Via Campesina in 1992–1993, through the then active Association of Central American Peasant Organizations for Cooperation and Development (ASOCODE).

¹⁰See especially Desmarais' comprehensive study (2007), and articles by Borras (2008a, 2008b), Borras and Franco (2009), Edelman (2003, 2008), and McMichael (2008).

¹¹See Desmarais' suggestive title to La Vía Campesina's fifth chapter, ‘A Fine Balance: Local Realities and Global Action’ (2007, 135).

¹²See Berger et al. (1974) and Berger (1976).

¹³Just a sampling of this early literature includes Gill (1963), Dumond (1966), Mosher (1966), and Roy et al. (1968).

¹⁴Cristóbal Kay's (2009) comprehensive review of this pre- and postwar development literature as it engaged wider considerations of industrialisation and the agrarian question. These works included neoclassical industrialists, who saw little role for agriculture in modern industrial development, versus the neoclassical agrarians and early neoliberals, who embraced the need for modern, large-scale, and productive agriculture. The pre- and postwar development strand demanding culturally and ecologically sensitive support for peasant and small farm agriculture were the neopopulists of their day.

¹⁵I purposely borrow from economist Robert Williams' suggestive title (1986), capturing a major issue of the postwar agrarian struggles across the isthmus and beyond.

¹⁶In 1950, less than half of the national territory was titled and in private hands; the majority was either national lands or municipally held ejido lands that mestizo and indigenous peasant families utilised for subsistence needs and production for local markets (Rhul 1984, Posas 1981a, 4). Honduras' agrarian system of land tenure had the highest proportion of publicly and communally held lands in Central America.

¹⁷See Boyer (1984, 1986), DeWalt and Stonich (1985), Stonich (1993), and White (1977).

¹⁸See Boyer (1986) and Stonich (1993) for descriptions of the increasingly forbidding circumstances surrounding peasant agriculture in southern Honduras from the 1960s into the 1980s. See also Robert White's (1971, 1972) study of the Catholic Social Movement's radio school movement in rural Honduras. This movement utilised Paulo Friere's (1973) ideas to make popular education relevant through the identification of key words and core cultural frameworks of peasants and indigenous peoples in Latin America.

¹⁹The two rival national peasant unions were the AFL-CIO influenced National Association of Honduran Peasants (ANACH) and the National Peasant Union (UNC) with ideological ties to the Latin American Catholic Labor Organization (CLASC). A third union, the Honduran Federation of Agrarian Reform Cooperatives (FECORAH), closely supervised by the government officials at INA, was organised in part to advance industrial agriculture, and also as an attempt to control the other two unions. However, the remarkable cross-union solidarity and steady pressure on the populist military regime of López Arellano promulgated the comprehensive agrarian reform law in 1975. See also Posas (1981a, 1981b), White (1977), Brockett (1987,1998), Kincaid (1985), and Stringer (1989).

²⁰White (1977); author fieldnotes 1979–1981.

²¹Brockett (1998, 194) cites a USAID estimate that 40 percent of original settlers had abandoned reform sector settlements by 1982. I should note that this high figure supports USAID's rationale to move forward with their land titling scheme. See also Boyer (1993) on the consequences of US militarisation during the 1980s in the Honduran countryside.

²²See also Brockett (1987), Ruben and Funez (1993), and Jansen and Roquas (1998).

²³See USDA, ‘Food security: measuring household food security’. Available from: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/measurement.htm [Accessed 14 May 2009].

²⁴See Chalmers et al. (1997, 21–30); Sandbrook et al. (2007, 50–4).

²⁵See Williamson (1989).

²⁶It identifies this sector as including all cooperatives, worker-owned enterprises, peasant and labor union associations and federations, communal banks, consumer stores, and public employees.

²⁸Interview with Ines Fuentes, May 1998.

²⁷República de Honduras (1995); Autodesarrollo (1997, 10–12); Comunica (1998).

²⁹See unpublished reports to INA by Thiesenhusen (1980) and Dorner (1980).

³⁰UNC is La Unión Nacional Campesina, the Catholic Social Movement's National Peasant Union.

³¹EDRRA is Escuela para Dirigentes Roque Ramón Andrade.

³²Following Sánchez's death in 2001, Honduras' Congress publicly honoured him with the ‘father of sustainable agriculture’ tribute (Boyer 2003).

³³Holt-Giménez fairly skips over Honduras in his urgency to show the movement's revolutionary trajectory, beginning in Guatemala and southern Mexico, then arriving in Sandinista Nicaragua and finally, on to Cuba (Boyer 2007a). See Adriance (1995) for a brief overview of Honduras' small farmer network for sustainable agriculture.

³⁴See Altieri (1995) for an overview of the science of agroecology.

³⁵See Smith (1994); fieldnotes 2006, 2007.

³⁶Interviews with Roberto Rodriguez and Monica Hesse, PROCONDEMA heads, 1992 and 1993; with Elías Sánchez in 1997, 1998 and 1999; with Roland Bunch in 1998. See also Jim Adriance (1995). Interestingly, the PROCONDEMA officials openly spoke about keeping the doors open with peasant unions while working mostly to create their independent network of peasant learners and practitioners across the south.

³⁷CEAS is Centros de Enseñanza para la Agricultura Sostenible.

³⁸Interviews with Milton Flores in 1990 and 1992 about his extensive programme of cover crop research.

³⁹They are usually called agrónomos empíricos/as, or ‘empirical agronomists’.

⁴⁰Rhul (1984, 53–6, 61), 1992 Honduran Agricultural Census.

⁴¹The Comité de Apoyo al Desarrollo Econónico y Social de Centroamérica (see Edelman 1998, 57, 2003, 190).

⁴²1996 proved to be an eventful year for Via Campesina and a telling one for a national gathering of Honduran peasant leaders, including Alegría. Presiding over Vía Campesina's second annual meeting in Tlaxcala, Mexico in April, he discussed the network's global trajectory: ‘From the Vía Campesina's point of view, the neo-liberal model is causing the collapse … of this peasant economy. It is destroying natural resources and the environment. It is also undermining our own peasant movements around the world. … it is important that we have an international organization like the Vía Campesina, so that we can come together on issues we are facing and bring together together our aspirations and ideals that have not yet disappeared from this world. … Creating a global response is the very reason for the Vía Campesina's existence. Alegría went on to stress that the major achievement of Vía Campesina was to be able to negotiate at all levels, and he especially emphasized the international level’ (Desmarais 2007, 32–3).

⁴³The most important of these agencies is the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which has sponsored the well known annual assessments of human development indicators in 179 countries over the last quarter century. The UNDP has adopted the FAO's definition of food security in their analysis. In contrast, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) seemed incapable of resisting the neoliberal pressures of the US, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and major transnational corporations (TNCs) from the beginning, and has not officially taken up the food security/sovereignty debate (see Bruno and Karliner 2002, Schroyer and Golodik 2006).

⁴⁴In June 1996, J. Ramón Velásquez Nazar hosted this workshop at EDDRA. The peasant leaders were Rafael Alegría (CNTC, COCOCH, Marcotulio Cartagena UNC), Inés Fuentes (ACAN, COCOCH), Santos Valeriano Ordoñez (ANACH), Pedro Mendoza (UNC), Faustino Rodriguez (ACAN), and Teófilo Trejo (CNTC). Campesino movement educators were Antonio Casasola and Elsa Vargas, also an EDDRA administrator. I taped this two-day session with the help of Robert Trudeau, and assistance from photographer Be Gardiner (see Boyer 1998).

⁴⁵The indigenous groups, the highland Mesoamerican cultures, and the lowland and coastal Caribbean groups, including the Afro-Caribbean populations together, constitute no more than 10 percent of Honduras' population. Hale (2004) argues that the recent recognition of indigenous land and other rights in Latin America often masked neoliberalism's paternalism that has further divided and conquered these very indigenous groups. Most of the national peasant leaders gathered at the mentioned 1996 workshop saw this as the government's political media ploy to ‘divide and conquer’, helping the minority while walking way from the plight of the rural majority.

⁴⁶Interviews include the directors of World Neighbors, CIDICCO (cover crop research), PROCONDEMA, and the director of the ‘Semillas del Progreso’ Center near Siguatepeque, and EDDRA in 2001. In 2008 and March 2009, with a new centre director near Gracias, with economist Wilfredo Cardona, and again with the ‘Semillas …’ director.

⁴⁷Borras (2008a, 109) identifies radical agrarian populism, various Marxist strands, groups with strong anarchist political tradition and leaning, radical environmentalists and feminism as all co-existing uneasily within the broad coalition that is Vía Campesina. Balancing these tendencies within national coalitions like COCOCH and across the transnational arena is understandably difficult.

⁴⁸Jon Carter (2008) argues that Honduras' youth gangs call themselves ‘sovereign’ in part as a rejection of the Honduran state's supreme law making authority over their lives. They also use the word as personally embodied, a kind of defiance against the physical violence that they encounter in everyday street life (email correspondence 18 November 2009).

⁴⁹The centrality of land and food security is explicit in all the cited research of the southern region, including Stares (1972), Del-Cid (1977), DeWalt and Stonich (1985), and Stonich (1993). It is also explicit in Jansen (1998) and especially Jansen and Roquas (1998) for the central-western region, and in Kramer (1986) for the western region. Land and food security and insecurity are found repeatedly in Bonta's (2001) comprehensive cultural geographic study of central eastern Olancho. On the North Coast, land and food security resonates in the recent study reported by Nygren and Myatt-Hirvonen (2009). And it is found in various regions in the writings of Brockett (1987), Del-Cid (1989), Posas (1981a, 1981b), Stringer (1989), and Thorpe (1991), as well as my 2007 interview with pioneering INA director, Rigoberto Sandoval. It is also worth noting an unusual commonality among many Honduran intellectuals, whether literary writers, historians, or folklorists, who repeatedly express agrarian themes such as food sufficiency and life's insecurities in the countryside. These are also central themes of traditional music and folklore. A handful of examples are writers Ramón Amaya Amador, and Froylán Turcios; historians Mario Argueta, Héctor Leyva, and for ‘the agrarian in the colonial urban’, Leticia de Oyuela; folklorists Alfonso Carranza R. and the published humorous tales of CNTC leader Teófilo Trejo; and the many ‘sique dances’ and folksongs like ‘The Indians of Picacho’ (‘Los Inditos de Picacho’) and ‘The Rain Poncho’ (‘a la Capotín’), translation mine.

⁵⁰In Mesoamerica and the Caribbean see especially Brockett (1998), Edelman (1999), Gudeman (1978), Williams (1986), A. Bartra (1982, 2004), Nash (1994), Roseberry (1976, 1993), and Wessman (1978). For world regions within and beyond Latin America, see Wessman (1981), Wolf (1966, 1969), Isaacman (1993), Netting (1993), Scott (1976, 1985), and Edelman's (2005) evaluation of James Scott.

⁵¹Writing about both pre- and postwar eras, Eric Wolf (1966, 1969, 1981) actually came closer to attending the security/insecurity nexus for peasants and indigenous peoples on both sides of Marx's humanity-nature/human-human double dialectic.

⁵²Food First (2005) lists the following basic principles encompassed by food sovereignty: (1) food: a basic right, (2) agrarian reform, (3) protecting natural resources, (4) reorganising food trade, (5) ending the globalisation of hunger, (6) social peace, and (7) democratic control.

⁵³For instance, Philip McMichael (2008, 47–50) writes enthusiastically that food sovereignty has become the new agrarian question, shifting epistemological gears from production to social reproduction.

⁵⁴Annette Desmarais' lecture to the social movements forum, UNC-Chapel Hill, 3–4 April 2009.

⁵⁵Most older professionals of the sustainable agriculture network well recall the food self-sufficiency heritage in that strain of the early postwar development paradigm mentioned above. Several volunteered that defending this heritage is what initially inspired then to engage in development work.

⁵⁶July 2001, Concepción de María, Choluteca, Honduras. Translation mine.

⁵⁷See Boyer (2007b).

⁵⁸By gifted leadership, by no means am I limiting that quality to charismatic leaders. Increasingly, those people who are skilled at the give and take of shared leadership and collective decision-making are in high demand, particularly in social and labour movements emphasising equality, democracy, and inclusiveness throughout the world. See the Highlander Center Newsletter at http://www.highlandercenter.org [Accessed 19 May 2009].

⁵⁹The important exception to this trend is World Neighbors; its founders were an ecumenical branch of midwestern Mennonites in the US.

⁶⁰I have fictionalised this individual's name upon his request; his interviews occurred March 1998 and May 2001.

⁶¹Interviews with Roberto Rodriguez and Monica Hesse, PROCONDEMA heads, 1992 and 1993; with Milton Flores in 1990 and 1992; with Elías Sánchez in 1997, 1998, and 1999; and with Roland Bunch in 1998.

⁶²There is disagreement about this total number. Wilfredo Cardona insists that almost 30,000 small producers receive some kind of training, support, or contact by CEAS annually. I respectfully question these high figures. Significant teaching contacts with rural cultivators cannot be many more than the annual 10,000 cultivators. Clearly, a comprehensive evaluation of CEAS is long overdue.

⁶³This necessary class analysis obviously includes our work as agrarian scholars. See Edelman (2009a) and Hale (2008).

⁶⁴See Borras (2008b) for an excellent discussion of the often contradictory relationships between agrarian movements of and by peasants and small farmers and wealthier NGO funders and staff professionals.

⁶⁵Although coffee is one of the oldest Central American exports, Honduras' coffee production was mainly for domestic consumption before World War II, and only became a significant export crop after the mid-1960s (Williams 1994, 1986, Del Cid 1977).

⁶⁶Euraque (1996) has carefully traced the emergence of this capitalist class since the Christian Arabs, fleeing Ottoman repression in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, settled in Honduras' North Coast at the beginning of the twentieth century.

⁶⁷See Banco Central de Honduras (1984, 3), Robinson (2003, 255–6).

⁶⁸Here Honduras ranks third, after Guatemala (22.8 percent) and Nicaragua (17.9 percent).

⁶⁹This last figure virtually ties with Guatemala's 36.2 percent as the highest levels in the isthmus.

⁷⁰Honduras is ranked third, after Nicaragua (8 percent) and Guatemala (6.4 percent). Coffee, especially in Honduras, is an important income source for small producers and part-time wage labourers.

⁷¹ Caudillos is the Spanish term for traditional political leaders whose basis of power derived from familial control over land and labour, which generally conferred hierarchical status and privilege. This form of authoritarian, charismatic power was and remains far more personal than partisan and ideological, and operates through ties of loyalty between caudillo leaders and their followers. Caudillo politics dominated traditional power relations in Honduras, Central America, and much of Latin America since Independence (Carías 2005, Chasteen 2001). The postwar peasant movements described herein have both battled and sometimes incorporated caudillo elements into their own contemporary organisations and leadership patterns (White 1977).

⁷²CIA FactBook. Available from: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ho.html[Accessed 20 November 2009]. See also Boyer and Carter (2002).

⁷³Formal analysis of successive historical food regimes examines the social and material effects (and transformations) of capitalism's progressive commodification of food, and its production and distribution systems. Following Harriett Friedmann's initial formulation (1978) and Friedmann and Philip McMichael's subsequent refinement of food regime analysis (1989), and especially McMichael (2009), there is general agreement around the timing and characteristics of the first two food regimes. The first (1870–1930s) combined colonial tropical imports (monocultures) to Europe with grains and livestock from settler colonies to feed Europe's industrial workers and British imperial and industrial expansion; the second food regime (1950s–1970s) not only rerouted US surplus foods to Cold War dependent allies but also encouraged widespread national economic development projects through Green Revolution technologies and land reform to dampen peasant unrest. The timing and effects of the third global corporate food regime (late 1980s to present) are still under discussion and debate.

⁷⁴Just one of several Christian Arab investment groups is that of the Miguel Facusse family, who have established a complex of agribusinesses and agro-industries. They also command majority ownership in the ISSIMA brand and mixed control (with Salvadoran capital) of the DINANT brand of convenience foods sold throughout the country. By the late 1990s, they were widely touted as Honduras' wealthiest family (Boyer 2008).

⁷⁵Centro de Documentación de Honduras.

⁷⁶See Meza et al. (2009), Salomón (2008), Meza et al. (2002), and Salomón (1999).

⁷⁷See Salomón's (2009) ‘alert’ article, ‘Honduras. Políticos, Empresarios y Militares: Protagonistas de un Golpe Anunciado’, placed on CEDOH's website just a day after the coup.

⁷⁸My translation of Instituto de Investigaciones Socio- Económicas (IISE).

⁷⁹The one exception was the 8.8 percent inflation rate in 1992 (IISE 1999, 5).

⁸⁰Honduras was declared one of the 40 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIBC) by the World Bank and IMF, which made it eligible for debt relief in 2005: $2.2 billion distributed over 15 years. This annual transfer equals 8 percent of national income and 1.7 percent of the GDP in 2006 (Velázquez 2008, 12–13).

⁸¹See the full BBC Business Report, released 15 October (Plummer 2009). The confidence of Honduran citizens in the willingness and capacity of national institutions, and especially their government, to meet basic needs has been low, even by Latin American standards, for some time (PNUD 2006).

⁸²See J. Carter (2008), L. Gutiérrez (2009), and A. Pine (2008) for recent research on the nexus of youth gangs, narco drug trafficking, and ex-military illicit activity in Honduras.

⁸³This strategic view is also held by Desmarais (2007), Borras (2008a, 2008b), Borras and Franco (2009), and McMichael (2008). Such ‘below and above’ pressures have been crucial for relatively successful redistributive policies and social democracy for four societies (Kerala, Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Chile) in the global periphery (Sandbrook et al. 2007). See also the detailed account by Rosset et al. (2006) about successfully instituted agrarian reforms that increased equity, control over food, and improved livelihoods for peasants and small farmers.

⁸⁴See especially Holt-Giménez (2006), chapters 3 and 5.

⁸⁵See Charles Hale's edited volume on activist scholarship around the world (2008) and Edelman's recent essay on politically engaged researchers and rural social movements (2009a). Just one example of an earlier collaboration was the continual information sharing that took place between peasant leaders, organisers, and the national-international team of more than a dozen scholars and fieldworkers headed by rural sociologist Robert White, S.J., in 1970–1971. I began my research career with this team, as we carried out extensive studies of the rise of the national peasant movement for rural development, agrarian reform, and ‘material/spiritual liberation’.

⁸⁶Cited in Desmarais (2007, 135).

⁸⁷Email correspondence, 4 April 2009.