Friday, April 12, 2013

Sons and Daughters of the Earth

“ Before, the rich people killed us with guns, today they allow us to starve to death.”


In the last ten years, the expansion of corporate sugarcane and oil palm plantations in northern Guatemala has encroached on the lands of Maya Q’eqchi’ indigenous people.

These plantations have already displaced hundreds of families—even entire communities—leading to increased poverty, hunger, unemployment, and landlessness in the region. The companies grabbing land are controlled by European-descendent Guatemalan oligarchs who are benefitting from rising global commodity prices for food, animal feed, and fuel (biodiesel and ethanol). Sugarcane, and especially oil palm plantations, are spreading throughout Guatemala’s northern lowlands—a region covering 47 per cent of the national territory across four departments: Alta Verapaz, Izabal, Quiché and Petén. Between 2000 and 2010, export revenues from sugar and palm oil shot up dramatically, increasing by 108 percent and 587 percent, respectively. Ethanol export revenues increased by 67 percent between 2006 and 2010. As of 2010, 70 percent of the sugar and crude palm oil and 90 percent of the ethanol produced in the country was exported, mainly to the European Union , the United States, and Mexico.

The benefits of this export boom are highly concentrated. Only 14 companies—owned by 14 oligarchic families—make up the powerful Sugar Producers’ Guild with control of over 80 percent of the country’s sugar plantations and 100 percent of the sugar mills. Five companies control all of the country’s ethanol production and eight families make up the influential Oil Palm Growers’ Guild which controls 98 percent of the harvested oil palm and 100 percent of the palm oil mills.

Corporate plantations also expand their control through contract farming. For example, the government’s Oil Palm Program, launched in 2009, aims to incorporate indigenous peasants as contract farmers while converting 10,378 acres of “idle” peasant lands to lucrative oil palm plantations. Peasants receive a $528 per-hectare credit from the government, which is transferred directly to agribusiness as payment for seedlings, transportation and agriculture extension services. The contracts do not include crop insurance—leaving peasants to assume the risks of production—nor do they specify who is to pay the high costs of restoring the soil after twenty-five years of oil palm production, the average economic life of a plantation. Oil palm and sugarcane plantations generate far fewer jobs than peasant farming systems. Oil palm, for instance, requires 52 working days per hectare per year, as opposed to maize, which requires 112 working days. Plantation work is also highly demanding, placing a tremendous burden on families: many plantation workers are assisted by their children to be able to meet their daily work requirements. Female heads-of-household increasingly struggle to grow food, meet their household responsibilities and mobilize against land and resource grabs. In fact, Q’eqchi’ women from the northern lowlands spend 10 to 15 percent less time tending to their physiological needs—such as sleeping, eating, and bathing—than their male counterparts. While peasant farming-generated wealth remains in the region, sugarcane and oil palm agribusinesses redirect their profits towards distant, non-farming classes (national oligarchy and international financial hubs).
Peasants who refuse to sell at non-negotiable prices are harassed; lands are enclosed within large plantations; and access rights are closed off, even to visiting government officials. Dozens of villages have been reduced to a small cluster of houses; and in at least four cases, entire villages—including houses, schools and churches—were gobbled up completely by plantations.
Debt plays a major role in the supposedly voluntary displacement of indigenous peasants. The private, individual property rights promoted by the World Bank in the 1990s may have given peasants’ access to bank credit, but annual interest rates of up to 26 percent led many to lose the land they had used as collateral. The system of individual land ownership also transformed once-sustainable collective Q’eqchi’ farming practices, making them dependent on external inputs for fertility. In a region with poor, rocky soils, this often means buying an increasing amount of expensive chemical fertilizers and falling further into debt.
In the face of violent expulsion and incorporation into an exploitative system, peasant families are struggling to access land and defend their resources as the basis of their collective identity as Q'eqchi' peoples or R'al Ch'och ("sons and daughters of the earth"). struggles against dispossession, for reclaiming grabbed lands, and for accessing new lands, are on the rise in northern Guatemala. Q’eqchi’ women are perhaps the most active group mobilizing against their partners’, fathers’, or communities’ participation in land deals with agribusinesses or ranchers In some cases, individual women have hidden land titles from their partners to prevent them from selling their lands. But normally, women act collectively: they join forces to subvert gendered hierarchies in community government institutions, where they are often the clearest and loudest voices against corporate middle-men and extractive development. Q’eqchi’ youth, elders, men, and women are organizing in a variety of rural social movements to challenge the dominant model of plantation agriculture.
These struggles often converge on the need to strengthen family and community-controlled models of agro-ecological food production. “Campesino a campesino” (farmer to farmer) knowledge-sharing networks are growing, with support from social movements. While Q’eqchi’ struggles employ non-violent strategies, they are routinely criminalized and violently repressed. In the face of threats to their lands and livelihoods, rural men and women—workers and peasants of all ages—in Guatemala’s northern lowlands are building increasingly well-organized grassroots movements in defense of their territories.

From here

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