RENEGOTIATING PEASANT ECOLOGY: RESPONSES TO RELOCATION FROM CELAQUE NATIONAL PARK, HONDURAS
Benjamin F. Timms
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department Geography, Indiana University April 2007
Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
______________________________ Dennis Conway, Ph.D.
______________________________ Charles Greer, Ph.D.
______________________________ William McConnell, Ph.D.
______________________________ Emilio Moran, Ph.D.
March 2nd, 2007
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DEDICATION To my wonderful wife Erika, whose support through everything made this possible.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my dissertation committee. My advisor, Dennis Conway, gave me guidance and granted me the freedom to make this work truly my own. Emilio Moran’s exceptional expertise and support was instrumental in my successfully completing my graduate career. Bill McConnell and his extraordinarily detailed critiques were indispensable in making this dissertation a much better piece of research. And to Charles Greer and his sage advice throughout, I am truly grateful. In addition I would like to thank all of my graduate colleagues at Indiana University. While too numerous to thank individually, please accept my thanks and know that I will always cherish our porch gatherings. Finally I would like to acknowledge those without whom none of this would have been possible. The Tinker Foundation provided funding which allowed me to get into the field and the people of the Celaque Mountains who were incredibly hospitable, in particular my guides Florentino and Walter.
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Benjamin F. Timms
RENEGOTIATING PEASANT ECOLOGY: RESPONSES TO RELOCATION FROM CELAQUE NATIONAL PARK, HONDURAS
National parks are not islands, but are tied to their surroundings ecologically, politically, socially, economically, and culturally. Acknowledging these relationships, this dissertation researches the impacts Celaque National Park in western Honduras has had on the Lenca populations relocated from within the boundary of the park. By situating the results within a peasant ecology theoretical framework, it is argued that the global model of exclusionary nature conservation has had social and ecological ramifications inimical to both the conservation of nature and the welfare of local populations. In the face of growing pressures on the natural systems of the earth, the conservation of natural landscapes is indeed essential; yet the realized impacts on local human populations are often treated as collateral concerns. The regulations imposed on local populations can have negative impacts including limited access to natural resources and even physical relocation of local communities. Further, the creation of protected areas can serve as a magnet for increased development activities that threaten conservation goals. Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a representative case as park regulations and policies have led to resident relocations, altered livelihood and landuse strategies, and resultant expansion of commercial agricultural activities encroaching within the park itself. As the global conservation movement and its practice of exclusionary nature
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protection becomes increasingly connected to the global political economy, it serves as a powerful vehicle for a new round of primitive accumulation. The result is the creation of land scarcity, semi-proletarianization of the peasantry, and the expansion of capitalist social relations of production in marginal peripheries of the world. Further, the practice of exclusionary protected areas disrupts the ecological relations of production of the peasantry, creating ecopolitical conflicts antithetical to the proffered goals of protected areas. Utilizing a peasant ecology framework, the broad objective of this study is to determine the alteration in the social and ecological relations of production for affected indigenous Lenca peasant communities relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras.
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Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction I. Introduction Box I. Celaque National Park, Honduras and Lenca Relocation II. Parks and People: The Heart of the Matter A. The Parks and People Debate B. The Political Ecology Perspective C. The Addition of Peasant Ecology III. Research Questions and Methodology IV. Relevance
1 1 2 4 4 6 8 10 11
Chapter 2: Political Ecology and Protected Areas I. Introduction: Political Ecology Defined II. The Elements of Political Ecology A. Critical Political Economy Perspective B. Multiple Scale and Actor Analysis 1. Global Scale 2. Regional Scale 3. Local Scale C. Ecological Component III. The Political Ecology of Celaque National Park, Honduras IV. Conclusion: The Structural Contributions of Political Ecology
12 12 13 13 19 20 24 26 28 32 35
Chapter 3: From Peasant Political Economy to Peasant Ecology I. Merging Political Ecology with Peasant Political Economy II. Peasant Political Economy A. Introduction: Defining Peasants B. Classical Peasant Political Economy 1. Marx and the Peasantry 2. Lenin's Demise of the Peasantry 3. Kautsky's Persistence of the Peasantry 4. Chayanov's Demographic Model 5. The Capitalism/Peasant Dialectic C. Peasant Political Economy in Central America 1. The Colonial Period (1521-1821) 2. Independence, Functional Dualism, and Semi-Proletarianization 3. The Relationship between the State and the Peasantry 4. The Impact of Neo-Liberal Reforms on the Peasantry D. The Fate of the Peasantry III. Peasant Ecology A. Antecedents from Political Ecology B. A Peasant Ecology C. Peasant Ecology in the Central American Context IV. Conclusion: Peasant Ecology and Parks
37 37 38 38 38 38 41 41 43 44 45 45
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46 49 52 54 55 55 57 60 64
Chapter 4: The Study Area – Celaque National Park, Honduras I. Introduction: Setting the Scene II. A History of Agrarian Social Relations in Honduras A. The Colonial Context B. The Early Independence Era C. Agrarian Tensions in the Twentieth Century D. Protected Areas and People in Honduras III. Study Site – The Physical and Cultural Landscape of Celaque National Park A. The Natural Landscape B. The Cultural Landscape C. Disembodying the Cultural Landscape D. Conclusion IV. Research Objectives
66 66 67 67 68 70 74
Chapter 5: Research Questions and Methodology I. Introduction II. Research Questions A. How Has Relocation Affected Access to Land? B. How Has Access to Land Affected Land Use Intensity? C. How Has Land Use Intensity Affected Income Earning Activities? II. Methodology A. Data Acquisition B. Data Analysis
93 93 94 94 96 98 100 100 102
Chapter 6: Quantitative Analysis I. How Has Relocation Affected Access to Land? A. Land Ownership B. Number of Land Parcels C. Soil Quality Perception D. Summation II. How Has Access to Land Affected Land Use Intensity? A. Percent of Land Owned Under Cultivation B. Number of Animals Owned C. Agrodiversity D. Purchased Fertilizer Use E. Biocide Use F. Summation III. How Has Land Use Intensity Affected Income Earning Activities A. Number of Income Earning Activities B. Market Activity for Selling Animals C. Market Activity for Selling Crops D. Number of Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas E. Number of Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas F. Summation IV. Conclusion
104 104 104 105 107 109 109 109 110 111 112 113 114 117 117 118 119 119 120 121 124
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78 78 80 86 90 91
Chapter 7: Empirical Generalizations and Theoretical Implications 125 I. Introduction 125 II. Empirical Generalizations 125 A. Contrasting Experiences in Access to Land 125 1. Otolaca and Structurally Imposed Resettlement 126 2. Los Horcones and Self-Determined Resettlement 128 3. Parallels and Divergence in Resettlement Experiences 132 B. Land Use Intensity 134 C. Income Earning Activities 138 D. National Parks, Semi-Proletarianization, and the Coffee Industry 144 III. Theoretical Implications – Renegotiating the Peasant Ecology 146 IV. Conclusion 150 Chapter 8: Conclusion – Parks and Peasants I. Introduction II. Empirical Summary III. Theoretical Contributions IV. Relevance to the Parks and People Debate V. Further Research VI. Concluding Thoughts
153 153 154 157 160 163 164
Bibliography
167
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Lists of Tables
Table 1: Population, Land, and Density Data for Central American States Table 2: Change in Mean Amount of Hectares of Land Owned Table 3: Change in Mean Number of Separate Land Parcels Owned Table 4: Perception of Change in Soil Quality Table 5: Change in Percent of Land Cultivated Table 6: Change in Mean Number of Animals Owned Table 7: Change in Mean Number of Crop Varieties Grown Table 8: Change in Percent of Households Using Purchased Fertilizer Table 9: Change in Percent of Households Using Biocides Table 10: Change in Mean Number of Income Earning Activities Table 11: Change in Percent of Households Selling Animals at Market Table 12: Change in Percent of Households Selling Crops at Market Table 13: Change in Mean Number of Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas Table 14: Change in Mean Number of Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas Table 15: Perception of Change in Housing Quality Table 16: Number of Households Growing Crop Varieties Table 17: Number of Households Engaged in Income Earning Activities Table 18: Spearman’s rho with the Amount of Land Owned
67 105 106 107 110 111 112 113 113 118 118 119 120 121 133 136 140 149
List of Figures Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4: Figure 5: Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8: Figure 9:
Location of Celaque National Park, Honduras Relief Map of Celaque National Park with Settlements and Roads Land Ownership Histograms (bin sizes in 0.7 ha increments) Percent of Land Cultivated Histograms Animal Ownership Histograms Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas Histograms Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas Histograms Honduran Coffee Exports, 1986-2004 Prices Paid to Honduran Coffee Growers, 1986-2004
78 87 108 115 116 122 123 143 143
List of Appendices Appendix I: IUCN Protected Area Categories Appendix II: Questionnaire Appendix III: Human Impacts Study Information Sheet
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183 184 189
Chapter 1 Introduction I. Introduction National parks are not islands, but are tied to their surroundings ecologically, politically, socially, economically, and culturally. Acknowledging these relationships, this dissertation investigates the impacts Celaque National Park in western Honduras has had on the Lenca populations relocated from within the boundary of the park. By situating the results within a peasant ecology theoretical framework, it is argued that the global model of exclusionary nature conservation has had social and ecological ramifications inimical to both the conservation of nature and the welfare of local populations. Protected areas are intended to preserve biological diversity, maintain ecological services, and conserve a representative sample of the remaining natural landscapes of the world. In the face of growing pressures on the natural systems of the earth, such conservation is indeed essential; yet the realized impacts on local human populations can have negative impacts including limited or banned access to natural resources and even physical relocation of local communities. Further, the creation of protected areas can serve as a magnet for increased development activities that threaten conservation goals. Celaque National Park in the mountains of western Honduras is representative of such processes as park regulations and policies have led to resident relocations, altered livelihood and land-use strategies, and expansion of commercial agricultural activities encroaching within the park itself.
Box I. Celaque National Park, Honduras and Lenca Relocation Celaque National Park, located in the western highlands of Honduras, was formally established in 1987 to protect ecological water services (Portillo 1997). Resident populations were allowed to remain with the park’s boundaries as long as no new forest clearance occurred (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). However, structural adjustment reforms instituted by the Honduran state in the 1990s denied adequate funding and ceded management of protected areas to non-state interests (Beltrán and Esser 1999). In 1997 the management of Celaque National Park was turned over to the NGO Proyecto Celaque, which was created and funded by the German agency (GTZ) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) (GEF 1999; GTZ 2002). In line with national park objectives of exclusionary protection, Proyecto Celaque’s park management plan called for resident relocation (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras in 1998 and provided an opportunity for Proyecto Celaque to implement the new policies through conditional aid households (Oviedo 1999). Assistance to affected households within Celaque National Park was conditioned on relocation to two settlements located on the outside edge of the park’s boundaries, which 61 of an estimated 400 households in the park accepted. The process of relocation exemplifies the political ecology critique whereby a global exclusionary protection model was imposed through the political economy of international debt, transferring funding and management to foreign groups. It is within this structural context that the overall research objective of this dissertation is located; to determine the alteration in the social and ecological relations of production for affected peasant communities relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras.
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This dissertation contributes to the study of the impacts of protected areas on local human populations through a comparative analysis of relocated settlements before and after displacement from Celaque National Park. Employing household surveys and semistructured interviews, the analysis will address three main research questions; (1) how has relocation affected access to land; (2) how has access to land affected land use intensity; and (3) how has access to land and altered land use intensity affected income earning activities. The three research questions will be answered within the theoretical framework of peasant ecology as it applies to the Central American context. In addition to contributing to the theoretical debate over the persistence of the peasantry through peasant ecology, this dissertation adds to the empirical and theoretical knowledge of the impacts protected areas have on local populations. In traditional peasant political economy studies, the fate of the peasantry is tied to unequal power relations and primitive accumulation from capitalist expansion which leads to semi-proletarianization and, eventually, full proletarianization through social differentiation. However, the persistence of the peasantry in the face of such odds remains a point of debate. In this study the adoption of peasant ecology addresses both the social relations of production and the ecological relations of production of the peasantry. It is argued that the nexus of these relations is the key to the survival of the peasantry and the upsetting of this nexus leads to environmental degradation and social impoverishment. In the process, theoretical peasant studies will be applied to another vehicle of primitive accumulation from political ecology, environmental conservation. As the global environmental movement and its practice of exclusionary nature protection have diffused around the globe it has become a vehicle for a new round of
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primitive accumulation. The result is the creation of land scarcity, semiproletarianization of the peasantry, and the further expansion of capitalist social relations of production in marginal peripheries of the world. Further, the practice of exclusionary protected areas disrupts the ecological relations of production of the peasantry, creating ecopolitical conflicts antithetical to the proffered goals of protected areas. Utilizing a peasant ecology framework, the broad objective of this study is to determine the changes in the social and ecological relations of production for affected indigenous Lenca peasant communities relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras.
II. Parks and People: The Heart of the Matter A. The Parks and People Debate During the 20th century over 100,000 protected areas, covering approximately 11.5% of the earth's land surface, were created to serve the conservation goals of biodiversity preservation, maintenance of local and global environmental services, as well as other spiritual, intrinsic, and aesthetic values (McNeely 1990; IUCN 1992; 1993; 1994; Chape et al. 2003). While the conservation of natural places and their associated biodiversity is important, the process by which it occurs has not always been socially benign (Wilshusen et al. 2002). From the violent history of American eradication of native peoples from national parks (Germic 2001) to the modern livelihood and land use impacts created by loss of access to resources, regulated land-use, altered land tenure regimes, introduction to commercial agricultural systems, and physical relocation of local populations (Katz 1998; Neumann 1998; Bates and Rudel 2000; Smethurst 2000), there
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exist intertwined socio-economic factors that are masked by the conservation focus of protected areas (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; O'Connor 1998; Zimmerer 2000). When such concerns are addressed it becomes apparent that nature conservation is not just an ecological endeavor but has a multitude of social dimensions as well. As a result the social and ecological issues revolving around the conservation of nature have become a source of contention between proponents of rural development and those for conservation, particularly in the global South 1 (Brandon 1998; Wilshusen et al. 2002). Since the vast majority of areas appropriate for nature conservation exist in rural areas it creates conflict between the two factions (Smethurst 2000; Brockington et al. 2006). The recognition of the untenable nature of separating rural development and conservation has sparked efforts to reconcile the relationship (McNeely and Miller 1984; Machlis and Tichnell 1985; FAO 1988; West and Brechin 1991; IUCN 1992). Calls have been made for the participation of local people in conservation through inclusion in the decision-making process for management of protected areas and appropriate development in surrounding hinterlands (Wells and Brandon 1992; IUCN 1993; Brown and Mitchell 1997; Nelson et al. 1997). The goal was to alleviate local resistance to what was seen, at least by locals, as externally imposed restrictions on their livelihoods and to make protected areas a positive development for the welfare of the local populations. However, the realization of these ideals has left much to be desired. Local participation in the conservation process has been reported to be more myth than reality, often consisting of informing locals rather than including them in the process (Cernea 1991; Sanderson and Bird 1998). ‘Appropriate’ development in areas surrounding 1
In keeping with a Political Ecology perspective, terms such as “Less Developed Countries” or the “Third World” will be replaced with the “global South” and terms such as “More Developed Countries” or the “First World” will be replaced with the “global North”.
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protected areas has been criticized by the IUCN as it has “not been based on a sound understanding of social and economic issues and have not applied the lessons learned from rural development” (1992, 153). These critiques exhibit the need for further theoretical and empirical study of the interaction between parks and people, both positive and negative, as petitioned for by numerous sources (Hough 1991; IUCN 1992; Wells and Brandon 1992; 1993; Nelson et al. 1997; Brockington et al. 2006; Wilkie et al. 2006). A current debate in the conservation community has advocated a return to strict enforcement of protected areas and exclusion of resident populations, igniting the conservation versus development dispute (Kramer et al. 1997; Brandon 1998; Terborgh 1999). Arguing that attempts at integrating conservation and development have been ineffective, the resurgent protectionist movement claims global conservation goals supersede local interests (Terborgh 1999). However, conservation efforts cannot be simply disengaged from local social and political contexts; their fates are tied together (Wilshusen et al. 2002).
B. The Political Ecology Perspective The syncretic field of political ecology addresses the division by inter-relating the social transformations that arise from the political economy of capitalist development with their environmental repercussions. Political ecology adopts a critical perspective whereby the imposition of global conservation models in the form of protected areas to the global South has been historically implicated in the conditions of poverty and underdevelopment that surround these landscapes (Neumann 1998). Protected areas play a role in reinforcing and legitimating state control over land, resources, and marginal
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populations. Further, protected areas can be viewed as consumptive landscapes for the benefit of foreign tourists and the elite of society at the expense of the politically and economically disadvantaged rural residents (Katz 1998). National parks, the category of protected areas focused upon in this research, includes the objective “to eliminate and thereafter prevent exploitation or occupation” (Davey 1998, 52). Such a definition effectively separates humans from nature and treats people as a management problem, in some cases leading to forced relocation of residents from within park boundaries (McNeely and Miller 1984; Machlis and Tichnell 1985; FAO 1988; Geisler and de Sousa 2001; Brockington et al. 2006). When residents are relocated to the park’s hinterland, the land-use and land-cover changes concentrate resource pressure on the edges of parks (McNeely 1990). The result is an island effect where conservation occurs within protected areas and development occurs on the outside, with only the protected area boundary conceptually existing to separate the two (Feinsinger 2001). In doing so, the goals of each are jeopardized as external development pressures to exploit the natural resource base infringes upon the boundary of the protected area, while internal conservation efforts fight to limit such activity. Further, parks can serve as a catalyst for increased access to services and financial resources in areas adjacent to parks. Hence, park creation leads to a host of development issues, complicating the conservation mission of parks (Scudder 1991; Brandon 1998; Smethurst 2000; Liu et al. 2001). Political ecology serves as an appropriate lens through which to examine protected areas as elements of control, power, and appropriation of environments and people. The structural elements of global conservation models are critiqued as lacking
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local context. However, the structural and critical arguments of political ecology can also be viewed as overly deterministic and lacking in theoretical vigor at the local level (Bernstein and Byres 2001; R. R. Chowdhury and Turner II 2006). To address these concerns, and to add to the field of political ecology, a more clearly defined peasant ecology is adopted and advanced in order to specify the structural limitations imposed upon local peoples and the ways in which local actors are able to respond.
C. The Addition of Peasant Ecology In classical political economy peasants are defined as rural households that rely in part on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods and are partially engaged in the wider economic system through market activities and wage labor (Ellis 1988). In peasant ecology the theoretical framework is expanded by specifying the relationship between the peasants’ social relations of production and the peasants’ ecological relations of production (Shrestha and Conway 1996). Social relations of production, which determine class structure (Yapa 1980), are defined for peasants through survival and reproduction which negate (or limit) social differentiation. The ecological relations of production are how peasants use natural resources to maintain their social relations of production. The subsistence focus of the peasantry creates a symbiotic relationship whereby lack of capitalist forms of accumulation and exploitation maintain environmental and social relations over time. When the relationship between the social and ecological relations of production is altered the results can create “ecopolitical conflicts pitting the peasant population against the environment" (Shrestha and Conway 1996, 316). In Central America access to land
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has historically been curtailed and ecopolitical conflicts take the form of decreased fallow periods and intensified land use, clearance of forested hillsides, land invasions, and an increase in cheap wage labor on export-oriented capitalist farms. Traditionally the loss of access to land in Central America has occurred due to a variety of forces such as colonial land grants, repressive state policies, or the expansion of capitalist agriculture (Brockett 1991; Faber 1992; 1993). Here it is argued that the imposition of a global national park model serves as another vehicle of primitive accumulation affecting access to land and upsetting the peasant ecology with negative social and environmental repercussions. While ecopolitical conflicts have been viewed as a one-way outcome of structural forces, here it is argued that peasant struggles to regain access to resources are acts of agency to renegotiate the peasant ecology. The local actors are not merely passive bystanders to global structural processes; they are actively resisting their social and ecological marginalization. By employing the peasant ecology framework at the local level a more theoretically coherent understanding of the impacts protected areas have on the peasantry in Central America is achieved. The context of this dissertation is the implementation of the global national park model based on exclusionary principles. The focus is upon policies leading to the relocation of peasant households from the park, which has upset the peasant ecology relationships. However, beyond chronicling the increased social and ecological marginalization of the affected households, the goal is to understand the responses of Lencan households to the structural forces impacting upon them. The dissertation employs a political ecology perspective to understand the structures of global
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conservation forces and adopts a peasant ecology theoretical framework at the local level to investigate how actors exploit spaces left available to them.
III. Research Questions and Methodology The research methodology consists of a comparative analysis of relocated settlements before and after displacement from Celaque National Park. Stemming from the research objective are three main quantifiable research questions; (1) how has relocation affected access to land; (2) how has access to land affected land use intensity; and (3) how has access to land and altered land use intensity affected income earning activities. The three questions address changes in the ecological relations of production, revolving around land, and the social relations of production to determine the alterations of the Lenca peasant ecology in response to expulsion from Celaque National Park. Fieldwork was carried out over the course of two summers in Honduras by the author and two local guides. Household surveys were conducted with a structured questionnaire to collect comparable quantified social and economic data and how they changed from before relocation to present (Appendix II). Additionally, open ended interviews were conducted seeking responses about the experience of Hurricane Mitch, the process of relocation, and the major problems and prospects for the households. The information gathered from the structured questionnaire surveys allowed for a quantitative time series analysis of the effect relocation has had on households in terms of access to land, land use intensity, and income earning activities (Cernea 1991; Hough 1991; Scudder 1991; Machlis and Soukup 1997). The results of the quantitative time series analysis is elaborated upon with qualitative data and placed within the theoretical
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framework of peasant ecology. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to theory through specifying a Central American peasant ecology and adds to the empirical and theoretical knowledge of the impacts protected areas have on local populations.
IV. Relevance In light of the ‘peoples and parks’ debate, there exists a need for more empirical study and theoretical understanding of the interaction between protected areas and people (Hough 1991; Wells and Brandon 1992; 1993; Nelson et al. 1997; Brockington et al. 2006). Arguments focusing on the negative impacts of parks on people are critiqued for lacking empirical evidence. For example, Wilkie et al. (2006) claim that post facto studies on the negative impacts of protected areas are flawed in “that merely showing that local people around parks and reserves are often poor and marginalized from national society says little about the role of parks in their poverty and marginalization” (Wilkie et al. 2006, 247). Yet others point out that populations relocated from protected areas, estimated in the tens of millions globally (Brockington et al. 2006), are negatively impacted and make up a new class of environmental refugees (Geisler and de Sousa 2001). But as the IUCN points out (1992), there is a dearth of social science research into the social and economic effects of protected areas on local people, particularly in Latin America. In this regard, the advancement of peasant ecology and the empirical study of the impacts relocation from Celaque National Park, Honduras, have had on the Lenca peasantry answers the call for further research and contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between protected areas and local populations.
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Chapter 2 Political Ecology and Protected Areas I. Introduction: Political Ecology Defined The study of political economy centers on the interplay between politics and economics, particularly in regards to the evolution of the global capitalist system and the social transformations that have occurred as a result (Heilbroner 1961). Ecology, on the other hand, seeks to understand the workings and interconnectedness of natural systems (Zimmerer 1996). While at first glance the two may appear to be quite distinct, elements of each have recently been combined in a new field of inquiry labeled political ecology. The study of political ecology addresses not only the social transformations of critical political economy, but includes the ecological transformations arising from the spread of capitalism as well. However, while each of these can be studied separately, the key to the uniqueness of political ecology is the focus on the ties between the social and ecological repercussions of the development and diffusion of global capitalism. While the theoretical antecedents to political ecology have been traced in various disciplines (Vayda 1983; Bryant 1992; Zimmerer 1996), the cultural ecology of the 1960s and 1970s stand out as the major precursor with a focus on agent-based decision-making as the main determinant in landscape change (R. R. Chowdhury and Turner II 2006). The agent-based theory of cultural ecology was criticized by critical theorists for downplaying the structure of political economy in explaining human-environment relations. Influenced by these two arguments, political ecology emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to address both the agent-based emphasis of cultural ecology with critical theory to tie
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social issues, such as oppression, with environmental degradation from a political economy perspective. The benchmark work for political ecology was Blaikie and Brookfield’s Land Degradation and Society (1987), which addressed soil degradation as both a physical and social process influenced by history, politics, and economics. For Blaikie and Brookfield "[t]he phrase 'political ecology' combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy" (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 17). In addition to addressing the structure of critical political economy, political ecology employs a multiple-scale analysis of agents and their respective roles in environmental degradation (Bryant 1997). In doing so, the concepts of political economic class struggles are brought into ecological struggles as the environmental consequences of global capitalism intensify (Castree and Braun 1998; O’Connor 1998). This chapter is organized around three common elements of political ecology that bind it into a coherent field of inquiry; (1) a critical political economic perspective; (2) multiple scale and actor analysis, and (3) a central ecological component. The inclusion of political ecology contributes to the understanding of the structural forces spreading the protected area ideal around the globe with resultant social and ecological impacts on local populations.
II. The Elements of Political Ecology A. Critical Political Economy Perspective Owing to the influence of Marxist political economy, political ecology adopts a critical perspective addressing the political and economic impacts of uneven power,
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control, and capitalist processes on social classes and the environment (Bryant and Bailey 1997). This is strongly influenced by a historical perspective on the global capitalist system, particularly in the origins of capitalism and its ties to colonialism and imperialism that have appropriated and exploited the human and natural resources of the ‘global South’ to serve the interests and needs of the ‘global North’ (Bryant and Bailey 1997). The colonial legacy of subjugation continues in neocolonial form to perpetuate economic dependency, social differentiation, and environmental degradation (Grove 1990). The key addition that political ecology contributes is the application of Marxist theory to environmental issues. While past critics believed Marx ignored the environmental repercussions of capitalism, more recent interpretations ferret out concepts from Marx upon which to build an environmental component (Smith and O’Keefe 1980; Daniels 1989; Faber 1993; O’Connor 1998). For example, the classic Marxist concept of primitive accumulation, one of the essential building blocks upon which capitalism evolved, separated humans from their means of production through the enclosure and seizure of communal lands which created a landless proletariat to serve as wage laborers in the capitalist system (Marx 1867). From a political ecology perspective, the same process of primitive accumulation can be further interpreted as having turned land and natural resources into commodities as private property, making possible more ecologically damaging production methods such as intensive industrial farming (Harvey 1974; Sessions 1991; O’Connor 1998). Capitalism developed in the global North during the era of colonial and imperial control of the global South (Escobar 1995). The expansion of global capitalism resulted
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not only in the creation of uneven development but also widespread environmental degradation (Smith 1984). According to O’Connor: “Economic growth and material abundance in the North are thus contradictory in the sense that capital has overcome scarcity while degrading the environment in the North and South. The North owes a major if unknown part of its living standards to the depletion of nonrenewable resources, the degradation of renewable resources, and the despoilment of the global commons.” (O’Connor 1998, 8) Just as Lenin (1917) advanced Marxist critiques of capitalism through the addition of imperialism, critical fields of inquiry such as political ecology have contributed to theory with the addition of environmental degradation. It was not until the environmental ramifications of global capitalism began to merit attention that it could be captured in an ecological Marxism and adopted by political ecology (O’Connor 1998). Studies on the Green Revolution provide excellent empirical examples of political ecology’s linking of social and environmental issues that arise from a capitalist conception of development. Green Revolution technologies were advanced as the panacea to avoiding Malthusian predictions of global starvation and conflict (Baker 1993; Osmani 1993). While agricultural yields did increase in many parts of the global South, the diffusion of agrarian capitalism associated with the Green Revolution also carried social and environmental costs (Yapa 1979). Producers who adopted the technological package of improved crop varieties requiring increased inputs such as irrigation systems, pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery became locked into selling their products on the market in order to pay for the technology and to meet debt payments. In the process social differentiation occurred as less successful farmers were dispossessed of their land while more successful farmers were able to accumulate the land and labor of the newly dispossessed (Ellis 1988; Lipton and Longhurst 1989; Sharma and Dak 1989; Osmani
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1993). Further, environmental degradation intensified with the new capitalist farming system as soil salinity rose and water tables lowered due to irrigation, pollution of surface and subsurface waters from chemical runoff and seepage, and increased soil erosion from large scale soil tillage (Shiva 1991). Hence, in the political ecology framework struggles for social and economic justice are explicitly tied to environmental struggles, the root causes of which lie in the expansion of capitalism. Protected areas serve as another example of how political ecology can bring a critical political economy perspective to bear in addressing the ties between environmental and social issues. While protected areas are viewed as preserving natural landscapes from the spread of environmental damaging human activities (Davey 1998; Chape et al. 2003), they have a long history of land appropriations with social impacts tied to the evolution and spread of capitalism. The first recorded formal efforts for the creation of protected areas stemmed from elite appropriation of 'natural areas' for their own pleasure and use, such as the claiming of forests in Europe for elite game parks and the Enclosure Act of the Tudors (Wright and Mattson 1996). Marx (1867) even recorded the appropriation of common sheep herding lands for the purpose of creating deer parks for hunting by the elite. The appropriation of forest lands was the culmination of the shift from common property to private or state property, which advanced part and parcel with the rise of capitalism (Cosgrove 1985; Neumann 1998; Scott 1998; Zmolek 2001; Albritton 2004). During the colonial and imperial era expanding European states acquired global control over natural resources (Grove 1990). Scientific developments in archaeology, geography, geology, and biology served imperial rule with their provisions of an accurate
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resource inventory (Stafford 1990). The foundation of economic botany and botanical gardens in the eighteenth century serves as one example where economically valuable and viable crops were propagated to be grown in the colonies for consumption in the metropole, particularly plantation crops (MacKenzie 1990; Escobar 1998). At the same time, environmental degradation created by the European-imposed plantation system in the islands of the Caribbean formed the basis for the first formal forest reservation and soil erosion prevention measures in the British Empire (Grove 1990). These measures for preventative management to control environmental degradation had their origins in the maintenance of, and contributions to, the economic viability of the emerging capitalist European state. The expansion of state control in the colonies through the conservation landscapes of forest reserves had the same effect on indigenous residents and other marginalized populations that medieval hunting parks had on commoners; namely exclusion as the means of appropriation. Toward the end of the 19th century the creation of the first designated ‘National Parks’ in western North America began with the establishment of Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. The creation of national parks in the United States also relied on a geography of exclusion (Mitchell 2001); "On the one hand, the reservation of 'nature' required and facilitated reservations for various Native nations" (Germic 2001, 9). The manifestation of national parks was deeply imbedded in the expansion of power and control of the central state over frontier territories and populations at the margin of the state’s sphere of influence (Patin 1999; Smethurst 2000). However, these were not to be “an area of land protected from human exploitation and occupation” (Brechin et al 1991, 7), as idealized by the National Park Service. The
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American national park owes much of its existence to the economic interests of railroad companies (Patin 1999), and as implemented had their origins in the design of urban parks by Olmstead who approached the preservation of Yosemite from the perspective of landscape architecture (Carr 1998; Grusin 1998; Neumann 1998). Yosemite was designed for accessibility and profit through railroad, road, and hotel construction while maintaining aesthetics through landscape architecture. The end result is a reproduction of Yosemite as ‘institutionalized nature’ for humans to aesthetically consume and for the creation of wealth. While there had existed forest reservations in the colonies of the British Empire and national parks in South Africa, the global spread of the concept of protected areas took on new emphasis after the creation of the International Union for the Protection of Nature in 1948. Today known jointly as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and the World Conservation Union, it has served as a promoter for the exponential rise in protected areas around the globe. In 1962, the first list of protected areas contained a mere 1,000 sites. By 2003 it had grown to over 100,000 protected areas covering approximately 11.5% of the earth’s land surface, roughly the size of the South American continent (Chape et al. 2003). Of the six IUCN categories for protected areas (Appendix I), 23.6% of the total area covered is comprised of national parks; defined as: “Natural area of land and/or sea, designated to (a) protect the ecological integrity of one or more ecosystems for present and future generations, (b) exclude exploitation or occupation inimical to the purposes of designation of the area and (c) provide a foundation for spiritual, scientific, educational, recreational and visitor opportunities, all of which must be environmentally and culturally compatible.” (Chape et al. 2003, 12)
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Included in the management objectives for national parks is the stated goal “to eliminate and thereafter prevent exploitation or occupation” (Davey 1998, 52). The exclusionary principle is based on the American experience of national parks and the importation of this model to the global South has resulted in the denial of natural resources required for sustenance by vulnerable populations excluded from the process (Wells and Brandon 1992). Questions arise, however, as to whether or not the affected local populations are indeed the true threats to conservation goals and whether or not the costs and benefits are equitably distributed. Viewing cases such as this from a critical political ecology perspective, the global diffusion of the exclusionary national park model may entail a ‘new enclosure movement’.
B. Multiple Scale and Actor Analysis Political ecology adopts a multiple scale analysis addressing interconnections from the local to the global. Three such contexts, or scales, are the global, regional, and local; albeit, other scalar perspectives are also valid. At a global scale, environmental issues in the global South are related to the actions and influence of powerful actors from the global North. Whether such actors represent political, economic, and/or environmental interests, their respective roles are addressed in how they impact actors and processes at other scales (Watts 2000). At a regional scale, actors such as the state serve as an intermediary tie between the global and local. The state often has a contradictory role in attempting to mediate self-sustaining political interests, the economic and power interests of the elite, and global capitalist interests (Peek and Standing 1982; Smethurst 2000). Finally, at the local scale, political ecology emphasizes
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empirical inquiry into institutions and local actors with emphasis given to questions of social and environmental justice and conservation (Rocheleau et al 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Katz 1998; Stott and Sullivan 2000; Wells and Lynch 2000).
1. Global Scale Political ecology addresses the global capitalist system through the lens of political economy. Of specific importance are the international actors that promote “global” objectives which have socio-economic and associated environmental repercussions at other scales. While political ecology criticizes global political and economic organizations representing the interests of capitalism, it is important to understand how it critiques organizations seeking to conserve the environment. Katz (1998) discusses how post-World War II decolonization, the rise of environmental movements, and the oil shocks of the 1970s created an environmental crisis for capitalists in that resources could not be assumed to be easily accessible. One strategy to address the new reality is for capitalist interests to co-opt environmentalism, making nature an accumulation vehicle for capital (Peluso and Watts 2001). The contradiction of capital’s need for resources during a time of resource contestation and scarcity can then be overcome by subjecting environmentalism to the dictates of capital (Smith 1998). For example, ‘debt for nature swaps’ lead to effective privatization of nature (Faber 1993; Katz 1998). O’Connor elaborates: “But at a deeper level, corporations construct the problem of the environment in a way that is the polar opposite of that in which Greens typically think about reform, namely, the problem of how to remake nature in ways that are consistent with sustainable profitability and capital accumulation. 'Remaking nature' means more access to nature, as 'tap' and 'sink,' which has political and ideological as well as economic and
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ecological dimensions, for example, the assault on the lives of indigenous peoples.” (O’Connor 1998, 238; italics in original) A motive of nature accumulation in the form of conservation and preservation has been promulgated, which Katz goes so far as to claim; “has betoken a whole new regime of imperial exploitation camouflaged as environmentalism. There is big money to be made from 'preserving' nature, and the current transnational political ecological relations by and large ensure that the eventual profits will flow North" (1998, 50). The human production of nature as a commodity to be accumulated by the dominant global North has its roots in colonialism and imperialism, with transnational environmental groups currently serving as both accumulator and accumulation vehicle (Grove 1990; Stafford 1990; Bryant and Bailey 1997). But in addition to the traditional natural resource commodities such as timber can be added conservation, scientific study, pharmaceutical interests, and even eco-tourism (Castree and Braun 1998; Escobar 1998; Katz 1998; Zimmerer 2000). Further, the accumulation of nature has been implicated in the transformation of nature under capitalism on a global scale where even the most geographically remote regions (particularly protected areas) are included in the process of uneven development (Smith 1984). As Yapa claims, “Value is created not only through the appropriation of labor but also through the appropriation of nature” (1989, 12). International conservation organizations have become a major global vehicle for nature accumulation. Conservation organizations influence state policy in the global North through direct political pressure. But in the global South, these same conservation organizations influence state policy through political pressure on international lending organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which then make
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certain loans contingent on the provision of environmental protection (Katz 1998; Bates and Rudel 2000; Watts 2000). Hence, they are instrumental in defining the environmental policies of states that, in turn, influence actions at the local level. Many of the larger transnational conservation NGOs have been transformed by market-driven and political forces into what Watts calls “in-house corporate environmentalism” (2000, 269). Chapin (2004) discusses the relatively recent consolidation of the international environmental movement by three large international organizations; the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Conservation International (CI). Funding for environmental conservation has decreased 50% from the mid-1990s until present. Yet the amount, in both relative and absolute terms, devoted to the WWF, TNC, and CI has increased. Much of this funding now comes from corporations, which raises conflict of interest questions: “Each of the large conservation NGOs has close financial and political ties to the governments, bilateral and multilateral agencies, and multinational corporations operating throughout the Third World, and is reluctant to oppose them. This has given rise to the ironic observation that the large international NGOs are allying themselves with forces that are destroying the world’s remaining ecosystems, while ignoring or even opposing those forces that are attempting to save them from destruction.” (Chapin 2004, 26) And, as funding becomes further centralized, funds for local organizations become channeled through the large international conservation organizations who determine disbursement based on their objectives. Such asymmetric power relations alter program actions at the local level to fit in with global conservation goals (Romero and Andrade 2004). Bebbington (2004) similarly addressed the ‘aid-chain’ as an international network of relationships based on funding that further represents unequal power relations. As aid
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sources are reduced, NGOs must seek out sources that generally have a thematic and geographic focus imbedded within them (Halpern et al. 2006). Increasingly these foci have neo-liberal undertones with market-based approaches to development, making NGOs less radical politically. As major donors, environmental corporations hold important sway and can force ‘green’ issues such as protected area creation over ‘brown’ issues like urban pollution which may be of greater concern to local groups and individuals (Bates and Rudel 2000). There is an inherent tension in the imposition of conservation imperatives by interests in the global North on areas in the global South (Escobar 1998). The industrialized North went through a large phase of appropriation of natural resources until the negative consequences of environmental degradation posed dilemmas (O’Connor 1998). As a result, this initiated the movement to preserve and offset the past indiscriminate appropriation of resources through wilderness preservation. However, the ideal place to implement wilderness preservation today is in underdeveloped countries, where - in part because they are underdeveloped - large portions of relatively pristine nature remains. Since these areas are next in line for capitalist appropriation, they are in need of preservation (Michael 1995). This leads to a division of the world into ‘nature importing’ countries of the global North, where urbanization and industrialization have created valuation of undisturbed nature, and 'nature exporting’ countries of the global South which due to their lack of development have an assumed overabundance of nature (Nuemann 1998). The extension of control over nature in the global South through the implementation of asymmetric power relations has been called "ecological colonialism" (Wood et. al 1989, 22).
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2. Regional Scale The state plays an important role in serving both as an intermediary between global economic and local livelihood interests, while at the same time serving its need for power, succession, security, and occasional personal enrichment (Warner 2000). From a global perspective, neo-liberal political and economic policies undermine states’ power to govern their territories through the retrenchment of states’ abilities to regulate trade and provide public services due to cuts in government spending imposed by fiscal restraints (Potter et al. 2004). As the states’ power recedes, international influence grows with increased access to the states’ territory, including natural resources, and people, the states’ human resources. For states of the global South, the mechanism of foreign debt has proven to be a powerful vehicle for the diffusion and adoption of such neoliberal policies; a.k.a. structural adjustment. As fiscal constraints force states to cut back funding for local environmental regulation in such areas as water and air pollution, international conservation organizations have influenced international lending agencies and aid institutions to attach conditions on loans and aid packages which include global conservation programs such as protected area creation (Bates and Rudel 2000). For example, ‘debt-for-nature’ swaps create protected areas in regions such as Central America. In doing so access to land is curtailed in a region where the ecological crisis has been created by unequal land distribution (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). As Faber relates: “Most commonly, a debt-for-nature swap is initiated when a northern environmental organization purchases debt at a substantial discount from a private bank and converts the debt into local currency to be administered by an in-country conservation organization. However, the debt swaps fail
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to address the systemic roots of ecological crises in Central America, and in many circumstances, actually worsen the problem.” (Faber 1993, 232) However, states must also serve their own populations in order to survive politically. Throughout Central America, for example, states with extreme inequalities in land distribution have made attempts at agrarian reform to appease marginalized rural populations (de Janvry 1981; Brockett 1991; Bryceson 2000b). Yet many of these attempts at agrarian reform have been counterproductive in achieving the goal of redistributing land to the marginalized masses (de Janvry et al. 2001). Instead, agrarian reforms in Central America have served as an instrument of power for dominant classes and created policies which further elite accumulation while exploiting less powerful and marginalized classes. Instruments applied to assure elite accumulation include land appropriation through property rights and land tenure legislation, food and taxation policies, and even the criminal justice system (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; O’Connor 1998). Further, in deference to pleas for land redistribution, states often promote new land colonization for landless classes (Schwartz 1995). In the process, the political power of the state is increasingly spread into remote areas on the margins of the state’s sphere of influence. Environmental conservation of nature reserves is a ripe area for state intervention as protected areas have historically been located in such areas marginal to state control, notably near borders in less accessible topographic conditions (Smethurst 2000). It is this very marginality that provided isolation and created the relatively more pristine natural conditions so sought out by protected area development. State policies, such as land reform and creation of protected areas, have facilitated the extension of state influence into areas with significant natural resource wealth but limited political or economic
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power (Zoomers and van der Haar 2000). The result has often been substantial alterations to local livelihoods in terms of land tenure and appropriation, altered livelihood strategies, disrupted access to natural resources, and even environmental degradation (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Smethurst 2000; Liu et. al 2001). Yet these disruptions are justified through an environmental discourse that has ties to the international scale with the state serving as a proxy for global interests.
3. Local Scale Empirical work in political ecology is focused at the local level, with more conceptual work at the state and international scales (Bryant and Bailey 1997). It is at the local level that specific socio-economic and environmental issues such as marginalization, gender, local institutions, land tenure, environmental degradation, environmental justice, and local resistance and adaptation are examined that are influenced by processes at higher scales. While work at wider scales focuses more heavily on structural factors, at the local level the agency of actors to work within these structures becomes the focus of empirical work (R. R. Chowdhury and Turner II 2006). Marginality is of great concern to political ecologists at the local level. In ecology the margin is the natural conditions where a plant or ecosystem will just survive, and for political economy the margin is "a whole class of people who are excluded from employment, services, participation in decision-making, opportunity and secure housing" (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 21). People and environments become increasingly marginalized as they are brought further into capitalist modes of production, with resultant livelihood changes and environmental ramifications of intensified production
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and accumulation (O’Connor 1998). Smith and O’Keefe (1980) argue the division of labor that comes with capitalism creates unequal access to nature and differential environmental consequences in terms of vulnerability to hazards and local degradation. Hegemonic discourse over the environment at macro scales can also make marginalized populations on the global periphery scapegoats for environmental degradation. As Escobar states: “Popular and scholarly texts alike are populated with representations of dark and poor peasant masses destroying forests and mountainsides with axes and machetes, thus shifting visibility and blame away from the large industrial polluters in the North and South and from the predatory way of life fostered by capitalism and development to poor peasants and 'backward' practices such as swidden agriculture.” (Escobar 1995, 195) The result of such discourse is realized in the management objective of national parks which seeks “to eliminate and thereafter prevent exploitation or occupation” (Davey 1998, 52). Local peoples, often comprising the rural poor with little political or economic power, are asymmetrically impacted by such policies. The establishment of protected areas in marginal locales results in the dispossession and relocation of residents (Shafer 1990; Cock and Figg 2000) which effectively transfers the ownership of resource rich but marginally located landscapes from local people to the state and global interests (Smethurst 2000). For areas that have historically been outside of the state and foreign spheres of influence, their very insularity may be the prime reasons the natural environment has escaped degradation. However, once an area has been formally declared a protected area this insularity is reduced as roads are built, institutions created, and outside influence increased. These ventures are often formulated as development projects, preservation of unique
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environments, or the 'modernization' of people who live on the periphery (Smethurst 2000). The impacts on the local residents can include loss of access to resources, regulated land-use, altered land tenure regimes, introduction to commercial agricultural systems, and physical relocation (Katz 1998; Neumann 1998; Bates and Rudel 2000). The marginalized are not passive bystanders, however, and political ecology seeks to understand how they resist domination from above and create spaces for their own livelihoods (Scott 1985; Redclift 1992). This can be done by passively choosing not to cooperate or actively resisting through group mobilization and exploiting niches that are created by the process (Bebbington 2004). While the structure of global and state influences are seen as overpowering, agency at the local level can find niches within which to act and adapt.
C. Ecological Component While Blaikie and Brookfield’s definition of political ecology included “a broadly defined political economy" (1987, 17), the same can also be said of the ecological component. In Blaikie and Brookfield’s Land Degradation and Society the ecology of soil degradation is clearly evident. However, in more current literature the ecological component often serves as an issue around which to address political economy topics. Yet, in a different vein of thought, ecology has informed political ecology to a great extent. Ecology has long been interested in finding the regulatory mechanisms of nature such as succession, equilibrium, carrying capacity, and area-biodiversity relations. Human geography has long been interested in adopting these ideals, such as in the study of human ecology. However, more recent movements in ecology have questioned and
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even replaced these conceptions and it is argued by some that human geography has been slow to follow suit (Zimmerer 1994; 2000). The 'old ecology' assumed spatial homogeneity of environments in order to derive universal laws and models of nature. In contrast, ‘new ecology’ recognizes heterogeneity of environments. Such a view can lead to complete subjectivity, which is problematic in the inability to come up with universal laws and models. However, this has actually become an advantage as alternative progressive scientific views have been allowed in, such as chaos theory and biocomplexity. An early contributor to the new form of ecology, C.S. Holling's (1973) resilience theory allowed for an ecological system to absorb and even benefit from change. For example, ‘natural disasters’ such as hurricanes can be considered a disturbance of an ecological community, allowing for greater biodiversity and a new successional cycle (Reice 2001). Hence, the new ecology can recognize the unequal capacities of organisms to respond to different environments just as human geography recognizes that people respond differently to environmental modification in light of their socially constructed capacities (Byrant 1992). As Watts (2000) explains, "[m]arginalization, surplus appropriation, relations of production, and exploitation displaced the old lexicon of selfregulation, adaptation, homeostasis, and system response" (261). The focus on change is important as the new ecology acknowledges that disturbance can actually enhance and shape biodiversity (Levin 1999; Maurer 1999). Both ecological systems and human geographies are dynamic, and no species or cultural group can interact with the environment without changing it (Zimmerer 1994). Hence,
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by blending the new ecology with human geography, political ecology can foster new perspectives on cultural landscapes and environmental modification. Since change can now be considered a constant, policies based on the ‘old ecology’ are coming into question. For example, creating islands of biodiversity in parks where human attempts to preserve nature from change is contradictory, in that nature (and its compatriot, evolution) is forever changing as a dynamic system. So, attempts to preserve nature in its current state can be considered paradoxical (Pletsch 1993). Examples abound of the difficulties of such an enterprise, such as how 100 years of fire suppression have resulted in socially constructed intensified wildfires in the contemporary American west or The Nature Conservancy environmental strategy which believes nature can be "located, fixed, and preserved outside of culture…they read generations of social actors out of the 'nature' they preserve, denying any social history of landscape" (Katz 1998, 55). The last quote points out that few, if any, ‘natural environments’ are without a social history (Stevens 1997b; Redford et al. 2006). Further, the very precept of nature conservation upon which protected areas are created has come into question. But environmental groups have further rationalized protected areas through economic arguments (IUCN 1993). Rural development, profits from eco-tourism, pharmaceutical discoveries, and even the attraction of foreign aid money are used to justify the creation of protected areas (Furze et al. 1996). However, in contrast to the protection of nature for its own sake, capitalism treats nature as a utilitarian object to be turned into a consumptive product, be it timber or tourism. And, with the spread of capitalism and its pressure on the natural world comes the necessity to preserve nature in national parks, which creates a paradox in that nature must be given
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some utilitarian value for it to be deemed worthy of protection from capitalist exploitation. In this view, creation of the park creates the very circumstances upon which the degradation occurs; including road development, migration, extension of intensive commercial agriculture, tourism, logging, and mining. Protected areas are stated to protect natural areas, whereas the process of creating them leads to their own appropriation within the capitalist system through either resource extraction or the management for an aesthetic consumptive landscape. Further, the channeling of conservation efforts at the inside of parks allows for the intensification of capitalist appropriation on landscapes outside the parks which can create small islands of “nature” in a sea of degraded and appropriated landscapes: “In focusing the majority of our attention on protected areas (as important as they are), are we largely ignoring wider landscapes inhabited and worked by diverse peoples that also contain significant biological diversity” (Wilshusen et al 2002, 35)? In the new ecology the roles of many actors are included in shaping biodiversity, including fragmented landscape patterns and “semi-natural mosaics” consisting of matrices of natural and human impacted landscapes (Feinsinger 2001). If biodiversity is the key element in conservation, then, we must also look at how agricultural systems can either negatively or positively influence biodiversity (Phillips 1997; Sanford 2006); a concept termed agrodiversity (Brookfield 2001). As is evident in this discussion, the ecological component in political ecology does not necessarily have to subscribe to traditional ecological principles. One of the strengths of political ecology is its ability to include alternative and radical viewpoints that question the status quo. Hence, political
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ecology can serve as a common forum where various disciplines concerned with political economic and ecological issues can interact (Greenberg and Park 1994). “Preservation is problematic because nature is a volatile, dynamic system that does not lend itself to preservation in the sense that we preserve works of art. So even as we attempt to prevent ourselves from ruining what is left of pristine nature, we are afflicted by doubts about whether what we do makes sense.” (Pletsch 1993, 4)
III. The Political Ecology of Celaque National Park, Honduras The structure of global environmental conservation, as practiced in the creation of national parks, is critiqued from a political ecology perspective for its consonant exclusionary model which seeks to protect nature from human activity by fencing it in and denying human occupation. Further, the application of unequal power relations is implicated in the diffusion of this model from the global North to the global South. In the process social and environmental consequences arise for local populations whose interests become superseded by global interests. Celaque National Park, as the focus of this dissertation, serves as a representative case whereby structural elements have dictated the penetration of global environmental protection interests into the western highlands of Honduras through the imposition of a national park model. The implementation of the exclusionary principle of the model has led to relocation of Lenca peasants and created local social and environmental consequences. Celaque National Park was created in 1987 by the Honduran state for the purpose of protecting the provision of water through the conservation of highland forests (Herlihy 1997; Portillo 1997). In contrast to the American model of national parks, resident populations were allowed to remain within the park’s boundaries (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The allowance of continued occupation reflected the domestic political climate
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in Honduras surrounding agrarian relations where peasant groups had been active in struggles over land distribution (Brockett 1991). However, a fundamental change occurred in the 1989 which decreased the Honduran state’s role in Celaque National Park. Heavy state indebtedness resulting from the economic depression of the 1980s led to international financial organizations placing Honduras on the ineligible country list for new loans (Jansen 2000). As a result, a sweeping neoliberal structural adjustment program was imposed on Honduras which included an environmental component, the General Law of the Environment. Passed in 1992, it formalized 107 protected areas covering 24% of Honduran national territory (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). While creating a formal protected area system, the structural adjustments contradictorily applied fiscal restraints that denied adequate funding for the management of the system. To alleviate the funding mismatch, a 1993 Executive Agreement ceded the management of these public protected areas to NGOs, community groups, and private interests (Beltrán and Esser 1999). The result has been the shift of control of protected areas in Honduras from the state to interests funded by international aid agencies, multilateral banks, and NGOs. The shift of control from the state to global interests occurred for Celaque National Park in 1997 when the German development agency GTZ, in conjunction with the Global Environment Facility’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor program, funded and created the NGO Proyecto Celaque to manage the park (GEF 1999; GTZ 2002). Proyecto Celaque produced a park management plan that called for the promotion of resident relocation, a reversal of the original policy established by the Honduran state in
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1987 (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The shift in management policies from a domestically sensitive policy allowing for continual occupation to a global national park model policy stressing exclusion was facilitated by the structural political economy of debt induced neoliberal reforms. As Proyecto Celaque took over management of Celaque National Park, Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras in 1998 leaving widespread devastation throughout the country. Requests for assistance by the affected Lenca peasants residing within the park were denied unless they relocated to settlements outside the park’s boundaries, and 61 of an estimated 400 households living within the core boundaries of the park accepted this offer to ‘voluntarily’ relocate (Oviedo 1999). While the proximate cause of relocation was a natural disaster, the ultimate cause was the implementation of a global national park model based on the exclusion of human occupation. Ecologically, the focus of the management of Celaque National Park on the issue of human habitation as a threat to the park’s ecological goals takes emphasis away from other threats deemed to be of more importance by recent research. Research has shown that within the higher reaches of Celaque National Park, near the Lenca communities, mature forest over 20 years old increased from 35.4% in 1987 to 46.6% in 1992 and 57.3% in 1998 (Aguilar 2003, 11). Hence, the original park policy allowing the Lenca to remain within the park without further forest clearance actually resulted in an increase in mature forests between the year of the park’s inception, 1987, and the year of relocation, 1998. Within this same time period other research has found evidence of the expansion of coffee production within the region which is encroaching into the park itself, forming a significant threat to the ecological goals of the park (Southworth et al. 2002a, 2002b;
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Bass 2006). The evidence does not support the assumption that Lenca people were degrading the forest but, in fact, suggests otherwise. The political ecology of Celaque National Park provides the structural context within which the empirical work of this dissertation is framed. Yet within this structural framework local actors are able to mitigate the effects through bottom-up agency. In this context the overall research objective is posed; to determine how the imposition of a global national park model has impacted Lenca peasant households relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras. In the following chapter peasant ecology will be introduced as the theoretical framework with which to empirically address the ability of local actors to adopt, adapt, and react to the changing structures imposed upon them.
IV. Conclusion: The Structural Contributions of Political Ecology In political ecology there can be no distinction between humans and nature because they are inextricably linked. Marx’s treatment of nature exhibits the humannature relationship as unified through the labor process; "We cannot know nature as external; we can know it only by entering into a relation with it" (Smith and O'Keefe, 1980, 32). Hence, any attempt to treat humans and nature as separate is contradictory, as exemplified by the critical analysis of conservation and preservation. Political ecology, as a syncretic field, is well suited to address this contradiction by focusing on the ties between the social and ecological transformations created by the development and diffusion of global capitalism. This section drew upon the theoretical development of protected areas as representative of a western, but globalizing, treatment of environmental conservation.
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Protected areas are an outcome of this perspective and serve as instruments for the appropriation of environments and people from the local to the global scale. In this dissertation it is argued that the creation of protected areas is not just a response to the spread of environmentally degrading capitalist development, but has served as a vehicle for its expansion and can be implicated in the development of underdevelopment for regions of the global South. As states in the global South relinquish their authority to the dictates of global interests, be they corporations or transnational environmental organizations, local peoples and environments are increasingly exposed to capitalist processes and the associated social and environmental transformations. However, while the political ecology literature on protected areas and people provides structural context, the theoretical treatment of agency at the local level leaves much to be desired (Bernstein and Byres 2001). In regards to protected areas such as national parks, exclusion from natural resources not only impoverishes populations but replicates the classic Marxist concept of primitive accumulation. In the process the expansion of capitalist development to marginal regions is facilitated, resulting in socially and environmentally damaging capitalist activities. But local people do not merely accept these structural ramifications, they adapt to new circumstances. The following chapter will develop this concept through peasant ecology, adding a more theoretically rigorous treatment of the structural limitations imposed upon local peoples and the ways in which local actors adapt.
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Chapter 3 From Peasant Political Economy to Peasant Ecology I. Merging Political Ecology with Peasant Political Economy To address the critique of political ecology as lacking a central theoretical basis (Turner II 1989; Peet and Watts 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Escobar 1999; Vayda and Walters 1999; Zimmerer 2000) this study will employ the ‘peasant ecology’ of Shrestha and Conway (1996) in blending the rich Marxist peasant political economy (peasant studies) literature with the environmental focus of political ecology. The importance of the endeavor can be seen in the need for a more theoretically grounded political ecology and the call by Bernstein and Byres (2001) for an ecological component to peasant political economy. This chapter provides a theoretical review of the study of the political economy of peasants and concludes with a framework for a peasant ecology rooted in the Central American context. The building of a Central American peasant ecology from the theoretically informed peasant political economy and environmental concerns of political ecology will contribute to the advancement of all three subfields and provide the theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of the impacts relocation from Celaque National Park has had on the affected Lenca peasant households. Whereas political ecology has provided the role of structure in relocating the households based on a global national park model, addressing the changes in their livelihoods from a peasant ecology perspective will better address the role of agency at the local level in responding to these structural elements stemming from the global level.
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II. Peasant Political Economy A. Introduction: Defining Peasants “Peasants are farm households, with access to their means of livelihood in land, utilising mainly family labour in production, always located in a larger economic system, but fundamentally characterised by partial engagement in markets which tend to function with a high degree of imperfection.” (Ellis 1988, 12; italics in original) Ellis’ definition of peasants is applicable to the Lenca populations residing in the western mountains of Honduras (West 1958; Jansen 1998; Brady 2003). Lenca households rely on subsistence agriculture performed on small areas of land using family labor. While the majority of production is for household use, surplus products and craftwork are sold at markets for supplemental income. Further, Lenca households engage in seasonal wage labor to earn additional income to support household subsistence, exhibiting their participation within the larger economic system. Within this dissertation the classification of Lenca households as peasant requires the inclusion of peasant literature from a political economy perspective, upon which their peasant ecology will be based.
B. Classical Peasant Political Economy 1. Marx and the Peasantry Peasants were generally considered by Marx as small farmers working the land for their own subsistence. In the historical account of the rise of capitalism in England, by the last part of the 14th century wage laborers were also partly peasants in that labor was spent working on larger farm estates while simultaneously farming independently on land provided for them (Marx 1867). The dual nature of the population created a
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paradoxical view of peasants by Marx; peasants were a class with a distinct way of life from other classes, but not a class as their way of life separated and isolated themselves from each other. To further the complexity of the topic, peasants were partly both bourgeois and proletarian, but not completely either one. The reason for the confusion lies in Marx’s belief that the peasantry was a transitory phase between the end of feudalism and the full adoption of capitalist social relations. With the full adoption of capitalist agriculture the peasantry would cease to exist as it fully transformed into the proletariat. The demise of the peasantry begins with the fundamental change in social property relations required for the rise of capitalism (Albritton 2004). Labeled primitive accumulation since it occurred prior to the capitalist mode of production, these changes alienated the producer from the means of production; specifically land (Marx 1867). In England the expropriation of lands occurred in a variety of ways during the 15th and 16th Centuries, such as royal decrees allowing feudal lords to seize common lands and evict peasants from land (Marx 1867). Associated with this round of primitive accumulation was the creation of elite hunting parks and promotion of commodity production to serve national and international markets (Zmolek 2001). The process continued to the point that by 1750 the peasantry in England had completely disappeared (Marx 1867). The expropriation of land from the peasantry created wage labor for the capitalist mode of production. In pre-capitalist society, peasants had access to land from which to produce their subsistence using mainly family and communal labor. Once dispossessed of land, they became proletariats as wage labor replaced direct production from the land as their means of subsistence. For the owner of the means of production, be it a factory
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or capitalist farm, wages would ideally remain at a worker’s subsistence level while technological advances would result in greater productivity and create capital accumulation for the capitalist. Keeping wages at subsistence level required the constant reproduction of excess wage laborers which further degraded the condition of the proletariat; "The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" (Marx 1867, 798; italics in original). The demise of the peasantry did not occur simply as a downward process tied to changes in internal social relations of production. In addition, their demise represented a cyclical change over time tied to changes in the external English agricultural economy as it responded to foreign demand. The enclosure of the common lands and evictions from feudal lands occurred when the English economy shifted from crops to cattle (Marx 1867), as exemplified by the need for sheep pasture to supply the wool industry in Flanders (Zmolek 2001). Conversely, when demand for wool and cattle declined the numbers of peasants would rise again as they took over abandoned grazing land, albeit in smaller numbers and a worse condition. Hence, the demise of the peasantry in England did not come completely from changes in agriculture, but instead was attributed to the development of industry which facilitated the full adoption of commercial agriculture (Albritton 2004). “A consistent foundation for capitalist agriculture could only be provided by large-scale industry, in the form of machinery; it is large-scale industry which radically expropriates the vast majority of the agricultural population and completes the divorce between agriculture and rural domestic industry, tearing up the latter’s roots, which are spinning and weaving. It therefore also conquers the entire home market for industrial capital, for the first time.” (Marx 1867, 912-913)
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2. Lenin's Demise of the Peasantry Lenin (1899) furthered the study of European (Russian) peasants from a Marxist political economy perspective by identifying the process of social differentiation leading to the demise of the peasantry. For Lenin, peasants existed in several rural land working classes; defined broadly as rich peasants, middle peasants, and poor peasants. Rich peasants were rural capitalists who owned land and employed labor of the middle and poor peasants on their farms. In the process they appropriated surplus labor value to accumulate capital which was reinvested in productive capacity. The middle peasants were the rural petty bourgeoisie who owned land and applied only family labor upon it for subsistence needs, yet had to engage in wage labor for the rich peasants in order to supplement their livelihoods. Over time it became more difficult for the middle peasants to achieve subsistence without increasing their reliance on wage labor on the farms of the rich peasants. In the end they would become poor peasants, who were the rural proletariat completely dispossessed of the means of production (land) and therefore subsisted entirely on wage labor. Lenin believed the peasantry would eventually disappear through social differentiation as capitalism advanced in rural regions, leaving only rural capitalists who owned the means of production and the poor rural proletariat subsisting on wage labor.
3. Kautsky's Persistence of the Peasantry Writing at the same time as Lenin, Kautsky took a different view on the fate of the Russian peasantry. Since the peasantry served as the source for rural labor there was a functional role of the peasants for capitalist farms as agrarian capitalism spread through
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the countryside (Shanin and Alavi 1986). The complete demise of the peasantry would not be in the best interest of agrarian capitalism in its early stages; “Increase in the number of large farms relative to small curtails the rural source of supply of labour power while, at the same time, increasing the demand for it. That contradiction limits the general scope for wholesale displacement of the small farms by the large” (Shanin and Alavi 1986, 254-255). Hence, it was assumed, the slow spread of agrarian capitalism in relation to the rapid spread of industrial capitalism could be seen as a balancing act where the decline in the available supply of labor in rural areas (full proletarianization for industry labor) would be offset by allowing the persistence of the peasantry. Allowing the peasantry to persist ensured the continual reproduction of rural labor to meet the growing demands of the large capitalist farms (Shanin and Alavi 1986), as opposed to losing much of the proletariat labor to industrial factories. While economic and political pressures for state intervention could be used to solve this contradiction, the outcome also rested on the nature of the peasant mode of production based on survival and reproduction. During times of stress, such as drought or land scarcity, the peasants could survive through under-consumption (eating less) or increasing their wage labor on capitalist farms. The capitalist farms welcomed the lower wages the peasantry would accept in relation to permanent wage-workers. In this way extra surplus value flowed to the capitalist farms and the national economy while allowing the peasantry to survive in a continuous primitive accumulation mode (Shanin and Alavi 1986). While the peasantry existed in extreme poverty under such conditions, it would survive and continue to provide rural labor. According to Kautsky, the eventual disappearance of the peasantry did not come from capitalism itself but through
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technological change which would reduce the demand for rural labor, irrespective of whether it occurred under capitalism or socialism (Shanin and Alavi 1986).
4. Chayanov's Demographic Model A counterargument to the view of Marx and Lenin came from Chayanov’s (1925) theory of the peasant economy, which focused on demographics and not social differentiation. Addressing Russian peasants in the first quarter of the 20th century, Chayanov's peasant farms were a non-capitalist economic system without wages reproducing itself through the differential use of family labor. Since the goal of the peasant farm was simple reproduction and not profit, capital accumulation would not occur and social differentiation would be non-existent. In contrast to Marx and Lenin, but in concert with Kautsky, Chayanov believed the peasantry would continue to persist through the self-exploitative advantages it held over capitalist farms. For example, peasants have the option to work longer hours or survive with no net surplus, conditions which eventually could lead capitalist farms to go bankrupt (Thorner 1966). Another demographic contribution to the survival of the peasantry, while not from Chayanov, is that as the Industrial Revolution took peasants out of the agrarian sector it also swelled their numbers. With technological innovations and increased production, deaths from famines and disease fell (Bryceson 2000b). The peasant model of Chayanov focuses on “utility maximization” where the household determines the amount of family labor to apply to production (cost) to meet subsistence needs (benefit) (Ellis 1988, 106). While including factors such as land holdings, soil quality, crops grown, livestock, crafts and trades, among others, the major
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determinant in this cost-benefit decision is the total members of the household (Chayanov 1923). The larger the number of working members of the family, the more land would be needed for subsistence balanced by the desire to advert the drudgery of work. In this way it becomes a demographic model of labor as it assumes no labor market and flexible access to land for cultivation (Thorner 1966; Ellis 1988). The assumption of flexible access to land is important, however, and Chayanov claims in situations where the assumption is not met “the relationship between land and family is regulated by a change in the amount of labor hired or hired out,” and the process of capital accumulation and social differentiation would be more likely (Chayanov 1923, 112).
5. The Capitalism/Peasant Dialectic Peasantries have proven to be remarkably resilient as they exploit spaces created during the transition to capitalism. With one foot in traditional subsistence and the other in the larger economic system, the relationship between the peasantry and capitalism has always been a contradictory one. On the one hand, the peasantry is created during the development of capitalism and is therefore dependent on it. Yet it is with the full adoption of capitalism that peasant groups disappear. While the reviewed classical peasant political economy literature is based on the experience of European peasantries, the global diffusion of capitalism has created new peasantries with varied regional contexts. Central American peasantries are the case in point where Chayanov’s assumption of flexible access to land has not been met. Hence it is necessary to conceptualize a peasant political economy specified to the geographical region but built upon the classical elements of peasant studies.
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Agrarian capitalism has advanced through various processes centered on the dispossession of land and loss of pre-capitalists modes of production (Zmolek 2001). Marx focused his historical analysis on England since it progressed to completion, calling it the classical form. Yet Marx noted the process and timing by which capitalist transformation occurs differs from place to place, beginning with primitive accumulation (Marx 1867). The process of primitive accumulation in Central America is one such example that differed from the classical form, partially due to its colonial and postcolonial development on the periphery of the global economy which has yet to progress to Marx’s logical completion of a fully developed capitalist society.
C. Peasant Political Economy in Central America 1. The Colonial Period (1521-1821) The Spanish conquest of Central America, which occurred prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism (Bernstein and Byres 2001), decimated indigenous populations through warfare, disease, slavery, and disruption of agricultural production systems. Large haciendas granted to settlers by the Spanish Crown used servile labor created from the encomienda and the related repartimiento systems (Acker 1988; Brocket 1991; Kay 2000). Hacienda grantees were given control over large areas of land and the right to demand labor from the resident indigenous communities (Faber 1993). Formally lasting into the 18th century, but in practice enduring until the end of the 19th century, the encomienda/repartimiento system forcibly resettled indigenous populations into concentrated villages, called reducciones, for the ease of religious conversion and provision of labor (Newson 1982; Acker 1988; Brockett 1991). The haciendas and their
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attached indigenous populations have been described as a semi-feudal system as it cycled between the requirements of labor to produce export crops during times of foreign demand and, alternately, switched to the production of subsistence crops when foreign demand waned (Acker 1988). Beyond agrarian needs, the silver and gold mines necessitated forced resettlement of indigenous populations into reducciones to provide labor through the encomienda and repartimiento systems (Newson 1982; Stonich 1993). The need for servile labor was tied to the boom-bust cycles for export plantation crops and minerals. During downturns in the boom-bust cycle, the lessened labor requirements resulted in the return of workers to remote highlands where they formed the subsistence producing peasantry (Bryceson 2000a). However, during upturns in the boom-bust cycle for export products, the demands for labor required colonial and post-colonial policies to forcibly extract labor from the peasantry (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). The process is reminiscent of Marx's (1867) observation of the English peasantry declining during times of wool and cattle export booms and re-emerging when the foreign demand for these products subsided.
2. Independence, Functional Dualism, and Semi-Proletarianization In 1821 the Central American provinces broke with Spain and by 1838 the states we currently recognize had been formed. Independence did not end the pattern of peasant land expropriation and 'coerced' labor extraction for the haciendas, mines, and plantations in response to the boom-bust cycles of export products (Kay 2000). The result was deformed capitalist development in Central America with dependent economies exhibiting the inequalities of the global capitalist system (Frank 1967;
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Wallerstein 1974; Amin 1977; Taylor 1986; Escobar 1995). The spatial nature of unequal development is defined by dominant core areas at an advanced stage of capitalist development tied to peripheral areas where capitalism is underdeveloped, in part through surplus extraction by the former (Amin 1977). As de Janvry states, "[d]evelopment and underdevelopment thus constitute a single dialectical unity and are the joint outcome of accumulation on a world scale" (1981, 1). A fundamental characteristic of developed capitalist societies is an articulated economy, and conversely in underdeveloped regions a disarticulated economy. The existence of articulated and disarticulated economies is created by global surplus extraction to the core from the periphery and, within the periphery, from peasants to capitalists. In an articulated economy, such as in the core regions of the global North, linkages are highly formed between production and consumption where increased consumption creates the need for increased production. In turn, increased production necessitates further consumption and the cycle perpetuates itself. The key to keeping the cycle in working order is the existence of a social articulation between capitalists and laborers where wages remain high enough for consumption to occur and result in accumulation by the capitalist producer. Market expansion is created from rising national wages which are recycled through consumption to capital that drives production (de Janvry 1981). Further, an articulated economy contains a labor force that is fully proletarian due to the contradictory need for cheap labor and, simultaneously, the creation and expansion of a market to consume increased production through rising wages. Disarticulated economies in peripheral regions like Central America are defined by incomplete linkages between sectors of the domestic economy; instead linkages are
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external, both in terms of production (inputs) and consumption (the market) (Faber 1993). Imported inputs are paid for by export earnings which depend on foreign markets, so increases in production are tied to market expansion abroad. Domestically, where production is not based on supplying the local market, there is a disincentive to raise wages since it only amounts to a loss for the capitalist. Instead, rising labor productivity ends up as an increase in excess surplus value extracted from labor (Amin 1977). Hence, the full proletarianization of labor is not advantageous in a disarticulated economy since there is no need to create or expand the domestic market with higher wages. Instead, only the maintenance of low labor costs is required. The result is semiproletarianization through functional dualism (de Janvry 1981). Functional dualism allows the peasant sector of the economy to co-exist with the modern sector, creating low cost labor and simultaneous production of cheap food. Peasants in Central America have one foot in the traditional subsistence agricultural sector by producing for their own subsistence and for local markets. But they also have one foot in the modern sector where they perform wage labor, be it on commercial farms or in industry (Wolf 1966). Since members of the semi-proletariat partially produce their own subsistence through food production, wages can be kept below the cost of subsistence. Further, the cost of semi-proletarian labor can be reduced through seasonality where employment can be limited to times of need such as harvest. When peasants become semi-proletariats and earn part of their subsistence through the wage labor process they create "surplus value in the orthodox Marxist sense as applied to capitalist production" (Ellis 1988, 54). It is in this process that capitalism truly exploits peasants, yet at the same time ensures their survival in the disarticulated
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economies of peripheral regions through functional dualism. “It is this extended period of primitive accumulation, in which a surplus is extracted from the traditional sector via the labor and wage-foods markets and in which the traditional sector gradually decomposes while sustaining rapid accumulation in the modern sector, that can be properly labeled the development of underdevelopment.” (de Janvry 1981, 37) However, functional dualism is only a phase, and as capitalism develops the semiproletarian nature of peasants is predicted to give way to proletarianization through full primitive accumulation and social differentiation. Marx (1867) acknowledged the process when he claimed the peasantry arose during the transitory phase between the feudalism and capitalism. Further, it formed the basis of Lenin's (1899) prediction of the disappearance of the peasantry through social differentiation as agrarian capitalism advanced and completely replaced the peasant mode of production. Kautsky disagreed that capitalism by itself would lead to the demise of the peasantry, yet acknowledged that technological advances in production, be it under capitalism or socialism, would signal the end of the peasantry (Shanin and Alavi 1986). Chayanov (1923; 1925) dismissed the demise of the peasantry under capitalism as long as flexible access to land existed, but also acknowledged that under conditions where this assumption was not met capital accumulation and social differentiation could occur along the lines of Lenin’s view.
3. The Relationship between the State and the Peasantry Central America is one such case where flexible access to land has been constrained. In both the colonial and post-colonial eras, policies creating the latifundiominifundio system resulted in a small elite minority controlling vast areas of territory while the large rural population was relegated to small marginal land holdings (Faber
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1993). The state has played a large role in the maintenance of the model, mediating its position as subservient to the interests of capital and its self-serving need for survival. The coffee industry, introduced into Central America in the mid-19th century, serves as an important example of the state’s role in serving the needs of capital. Costa Rica’s smallholder coffee industry experienced an almost complete “peasant to farmer” transition with the creation of a propertied employer class and a landless laboring class (Gudmundson 1995, 113). However, the situation differed considerably for Guatemala where large coffee farms, or fincas, dominated in areas with lower peasant populations and labor availability proved to be the most vexing concern, termed the “falta de brazos” (lack of arms) (Roseberry 1995, 5). In Guatemala, where the highland Maya had access to adequate land to provide their own subsistence, rural populations chose not to perform wage labor. In order to acquire enough labor for the booming coffee industry the state used vagrancy laws, individual debt, and labor drafts to force the indigenous Maya to work on the large coffee fincas well into the 20th century (McCreery 1995). In El Salvador coffee fincas spread into heavily populated during the 1880s as traditional indigenous lands were appropriated, workers were settled into coffee company towns, and a semi-proletariat workforce was created which labored seasonally on the coffee fincas and worked small plots of land for subsistence in the off-season (Stolcke 1995). In both Guatemala and El Salvador, the state played an important role in creating and maintaining labor for the export oriented coffee industry. The peasant and worker movements of the 1950s and 1960s are examples of the dualistic role of the Central American state. Peasant demands for access to land and
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improved conditions, along with the revolutionary fever culminating in the Cuban revolution of 1959, forced Central American states to adopt agrarian reform programs. The promise of land redistribution was used as a defense against revolution and the spread of communist ideology that threatened the states’ very survival. Once the dissent weakened, however, the state would reverse, or fail to implement, the reforms (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). The reforms that were put into practice served the interests of capital. The global economic depression of the 1930s decimated the liberal agricultural export sector in Central America and ushered in the Keynesian import-substitution-industrialization model (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). Part of the model included the modernization of the agricultural sector, and agrarian reform became a tool in accomplishing this goal. As such, land was primarily redistributed not from the large landholders (such as foreignowned banana plantations) to the peasantry, but among the traditional peasantry itself (de Janvry et al. 2001). True to Lenin's predictions, social differentiation occurred through redistributing land among the peasantry where a small number of 'rich' peasants turned into rural capitalists, a semi-proletariat middle peasantry able to produce subsistence food and excess for the domestic market for cheap food, and a landless full proletariat which sparked internal rural-to-urban migration (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). It was during the agrarian reform period, and included in its’ modernization push, that 'Green Revolution' technology was advanced as the panacea to the predicted and perceived overpopulation dilemma. While agricultural output did increase due to the adoption of this technology, it also came with costs to the peasantry. Producers who adopted the technological package became locked into selling their products on the
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market, regardless of their profit margin, in order to pay for the technology and to meet debt payments. In the process, social differentiation occurred as some farmers were dispossessed of their land while more successful farmers were able to accumulate land and labor of the newly dispossessed (Ellis 1988; Osmani 1993). The impact of the ‘Green Revolution’ follows closely Kautsky's demise of the peasantry through technological innovation.
4. The Impact of Neo-Liberal Reforms on the Peasantry The global oil and financial debt crises of the 1970s signaled a new turn in the global capitalist system whereby Keynesian state-driven modernization models were abandoned and neo-liberal economic development rose to prominence (Thrift 1986; Peet 1991). Central American states were coerced into accepting structural adjustment policies imposed by international lending organizations due to chronic indebtedness. Structural adjustment policies included reducing government expenditures and raising revenue, removing trade barriers to encourage efficiency through competition, devaluing local currency to make exports cheaper, increasing costs of services to raise government income, and promoting land reform policies based on privatization and land titling to create an efficient land market (Potter et al. 2004). The impact of these neo-liberal reforms on the peasantry has become an area of intense interest (Bryceson 2000a). In particular, the land market has created a new round of primitive accumulation whereby higher land prices and taxes have led to landlessness among many and the accumulation of land by more efficient farmers, creating the possibility of social differentiation and the demise of the peasantry (Bryceson 2000b; Kay
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2000; Jansen 2000; Zoomers and van her Haar 2000). At the same time, the focus on export markets propagates the disarticulation of Central American economies by enhancing external linkages and severing domestic ones, which as argued earlier can create conditions conducive to peasant survival through the need for cheap labor and cheap domestic food production. However, the lowering of trade barriers has led to a flood of cheap agricultural imports from the subsidized agricultural sectors of countries in the core, such as the United States and Europe, reducing the role of the peasant producer in the production of food for the domestic market (Goodman and Redclift 1990). The outcome of neo-liberal reforms on the peasantry is still to be determined, but does place renewed emphasis on the debate over the persistence of the peasantry in light of increasing pressures. In this dissertation a new pressure is introduced to the debate over the survival of the peasantry; the global diffusion of protected areas. Neoliberal reforms have, at times, included components of environmental conservation such as the creation of national parks. The imposition of the exclusionary model of national parks through asymmetric power relations of the global political economy effectively appropriates territory from local populations and serves as another form of primitive accumulation. However, the use of protected areas in primitive accumulation is not a new phenomenon. It has precedent in the original round of primitive accumulation in Europe whereby common lands were appropriated for hunting parks (Cosgrove 1984; Cox 1905; Grove 1990; Harrison 1992; Marx 1867).
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D. The Fate of the Peasantry In light of the all the pressures on the peasantry brought about by the advance of capitalism, the resonant question concerns the future of the peripheral peasantry and how they have managed to survive (Shanin 1990; Anderson 1994; Bryceson 2000b; Kay 2000). In addition to the often contradictory views of Marx, Lenin, Kautsky, and Chayanov, Scott's (1976) "moral economy" claimed social norms of reciprocity rule over individual capital accumulation in peasant societies which inhibits social differentiation and allows for survival of peasant groups. Jansen (2000) counters from empirical work in Honduras that social differentiation through "nickel-and-dime capitalism" (196) allows some peasants to accumulate and prosper through the exploitation of other peasants in a process that hardly looks like capital accumulation to the political economist but nonetheless does represent exploitation from within the peasantry. In addition to the issue of persistence in the face of forces acting upon them from the local to the international scale, the peasant studies literature has addressed the power of the peasantry to change and use these forces to their advantage (Scott 1985; Shanin 1990). Peasants are not passive bystanders and can exploit niches available to them in order to maintain their survival and, at times, improve their conditions. Hence, the peasantry is never stagnant: “The belief system of the peasant community subscribes to rationality, responsibility, and relative egalitarianism, all with an eye to maintaining interdependence and survival. Within that belief system, there is room for tradition as well as for change and adaptation. Between tradition and change, the choice is always for facilitating survival, both that of the group and that of the individual. Where tradition protects survival, traditional claims, such as on landlord reciprocity, will prevail. Where change best protects survival, new norms, such as an appeal to national and international agencies, will become the order of the day.” (Anderson 1994, 13)
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The central question over the persistence of the peasantry centers on social differentiation and/or adaptation of the peasantry to changing conditions. Bryceson (2000b), while noting the relative dearth of peasant study in the 1990s, wonders whether peasantries are disappearing or just being ignored. Either way, “[t]he long-debated question of whether the peasant economy can survive has been given new urgency by neo-liberalism” (Kay 2000, 131). A particularly important question is who will benefit and who will lose due to economic change (Jansen 2000)? In this dissertation, the question of peasant differentiation and adaptation is addressed, but not necessarily as an outcome of purely political economy forces.
III. Peasant Ecology A. Antecedents from Political Ecology Political ecology’s broad linking of environmental issues with political economic processes has been criticized for its lack of theoretical grounding (Turner II 1989; Peet and Watts 1996; Escobar 1999; Vayda and Walters 1999), particularly at the local scale where the focus has been on empiricism (Bryant and Bailey 1997). Bernstein and Byres (2001) concur with the need for theoretical rigor at the same time they lament the lack of ecological themes within the study of peasant political economy: “The charge is undeniable, and indeed a central concern of most articles on ecological themes that appeared, belatedly, in the 1990s was the critique of environmentalist discourses… While ‘political ecology’ is (or aspires to) a particular analytical approach, as well as proclaiming an ideological or political stance, and necessary as discursive critique might be, the Journal of Agrarian Change will welcome theoretically and/or empirically rigorous contributions from any perspective that can help reduce the intellectual deficit of agrarian political economy on ecology and environmental issues.” (Bernstein and Byres 2001, 28)
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Yet to say environmental ramifications have been completely ignored in the study of peasants would be misleading. Boserup’s The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965) claims demographic pressure on the peasantry from population growth creates land scarcity and loss of soil fertility, causing increasingly intensive agricultural production systems to raise agricultural output. Environmental degradation was included in de Janvry’s (1981) exegesis of the contradictions of functional dualism induced semiproletarianization. Functional dualism allowed for the survival of the peasantry due to the need for cheap food labor while, at the same time, leading to the demise of the peasantry through demographic growth and ecological collapse as they attempt to wrest a living from ever smaller and more marginal parcels of land. More explicitly, Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) addressed soil degradation as a result of land inequality, short-term profit maximization by capitalist land users, commercialization leading to the breakdown of traditional resource management systems, and relegation of indigenous peoples to marginal hill areas prone to soil erosion and degradation. Netting (1993) adds an important contribution to the discussion based on the study of intensive smallholders who practice permanent diversified agriculture in areas of dense population. According to Netting intensive agriculture by smallholders can be sustainable and highly productive, but depends on “relatively high annual or multicrop yields from permanent fields that are seldom or never rested, with fertility restored and sustained by practices such as thorough tillage, crop diversification and rotation, animal husbandry, fertilization, irrigation, drainage, and terracing” (Netting 1993, 3). An important caveat acknowledged by Netting is the reliance on knowledge that has been passed down and built upon over several generations. Further, when local energy applied
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to the agricultural system such as manual labor and animal inputs are replaced with external energy sources such as chemical fertilizers and biocides the sustainability of the system is threatened. However, environmental degradation is often treated purely as an outcome of political and economic forces at multiple scales exerting power and control on the actors at the local level. Few studies have attempted to theoretically link the peasants and the environment into a holistic entity. Such endeavors are often criticized as romantic exaggerations of more traditional peoples’ ‘oneness with nature’, particularly since traditional peoples have not always been perfect stewards of the environment (Redford 1991). Shrestha and Conway (1996), in coining the term peasant ecology, created a theoretical framework which addresses the either/or differences between the romantics and the critics.
B. A Peasant Ecology Peasant ecology embraces the political ecology framework of a multiple scale analysis of political and economic forces impacting environmental degradation at the local scale. However, peasant ecology advances the theoretical grounding at the local scale through specifying the intricate relationship (nexus) between the peasants’ social relations of production and the peasants’ ecological relations of production (Shrestha and Conway 1996). Peasant ecology is based on Yapa’s ‘ecopolitical economy’, defined as “the study of the modes of production in their ecological relationships” (Yapa 1980, 101). While neo-classical economics focuses on the material aspects of productive forces and political economy includes the social relations of production, the ecopolitical economy
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adds ecological relations of production (peoples relationships with nature) to the equation (“production forces + social relations + ecological relations”) (Yapa 1979, 371). Ecopolitical economy has been used to analyze various systems, such as the unsustainability of the Green Revolution (Yapa 1979; 1996). In this case it is applied to peasant systems as peasant ecology. The social relations of production define control over the means of production; what is produced, how the production is distributed, and the exchange of goods and values. Property relations, particularly in agrarian areas, are an important facet of the social relations of production as the process of primitive accumulation leading to social differentiation exhibits. In turn, social relations of production determine class structure (Yapa 1980). Social differentiation occurs when a group, or class, extracts surplus labor value from another. Differentiation is evident in capitalist social relations between the owner of the means of production and the wage laborer. Peasant social relations of production are defined through survival and reproduction which limit social differentiation. Within peasant systems there is a lack of internal surplus extraction, and hence social differentiation between members of the peasantry does not occur. The reliance on family labor and the social norm of reciprocity between members limits individual capital accumulation (Scott 1976). However, since peasants in many societies do work for wages the extraction of surplus labor value does occur. But it accumulates externally to the peasantry; for example to the owners of large farms that hire peasants as wage laborers. The ecological relations of production include the creation of value through the appropriation of nature (Yapa 1989). Neo-classical economics and political economy
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treat the production of value primarily in terms of labor and capital, but largely ignore the provision of ecological services (Yapa 1989). Peasant ecological relations of production entail how peasants use natural resources to maintain their social relations of production. The subsistence focus of peasant systems creates a symbiotic relationship where the lack of capitalist forms of accumulation and exploitation maintain environmental and social relations over time, particularly in the extent and intensity of land use. As such, peasant ecology ties the social relations between people with their ecological relations with nature (Shrestha and Conway 1996). However, as opposed to a purely romantic viewpoint, when the relationship between the social relations of production and the ecological relations of production are upset tensions are created which can lead “to ecopolitical conflicts pitting the peasant population against the environment" (Shrestha and Conway 1996, 316). The impetus for such alterations can be internal, such as demographic growth which increases pressure on a limited resource base. In addition, the catalyst for the imbalance is external such as the spread of capitalist development which can induce social differentiation and alter access to resources like land, water, wildlife, or forests. For Shrestha and Conway (1996), the ‘ecopolitical conflicts’ in the Tarai frontier of Nepal pitted peasants against the state and the environment, for “as long as the security of peasant subsistence remains in doubt, there is little environmental security…When peasants are forced to traverse the space of vulnerability – a situation in which their immediate survival is under threat – they are detached from their ecological roots” (326). Yet the peasant ecology can be renegotiated and peasant struggles to gain access to resources, whether it is land invasions or uprisings for agrarian reform, are often based on attempts to do so.
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C. Peasant Ecology in the Central American Context In Central America both the ecological and social relations of production have been altered, upsetting the peasant ecology and resulting in widespread deforestation and soil degradation. The main factor upsetting the peasant ecology has been access to adequate and appropriate land resources, which has been curtailed from the colonial era through to the present. Whether from colonial land grants, appropriation of peasant lands for coffee production, the plantation system, capitalist agriculture and coincident privatized land tenure, contradictory agrarian reform, or as argued here the enclosure of protected areas the creation and modern intensification of the latifundio/minifundio pattern of land distribution in Central America has been a source of environmental degradation and social unrest. The ecological relations of production for the Central American peasantry require access to adequate amounts of land to subsist through the traditional milpa system. The milpa is based on the symbiotic production of corn 2 and beans, along with a variety of secondary agricultural products to supplement nutritional needs and provide ecological services. Corn provides carbohydrates and uses nitrogen from the soil. Beans, as a legume, are a source of dietary protein and complementarily fix nitrogen from the atmosphere to the soil using the stalks of the corn as a trellis system. Ground crops are intercropped which prevent splash erosion and reduce soil erosion while supplementing dietary needs with nutrients. The maintenance of this system relies on a rotating swidden fallow system, whereby a unit of land is cut and burned with low intensity fire and cultivated while other
2
Corn is properly referred to as maiz in Central America, but will be referred to as corn in this dissertation. The term corn refers to the many intraspecific varieties of maiz grown in the region.
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units are left to pasture and/or to regenerate as bush or forest. The use of fire cycles vegetative nutrients back into the soil and clears the land of weeds, pests, and crop diseases (Netting 1993; Jansen 1998). Fallowed land often supports animal husbandry which provides dairy and meat products to the diet, fertilization of the land from their waste, and “hooved bank accounts” to mitigate times of economic pressures (Brady 2003, 66). Over time this system has persisted as the main livelihood strategy for Central American peasant households. A reduction in the availability of land resources, both in quantity and quality, upsets these ecological relations of production with ecological and social repercussions. The maintenance of the system is threatened when there is not enough land to practice the fallow system (Faber 1992). With a declined or absent fallow period, the maintenance of soil fertility necessitates the use of agricultural inputs such as purchased fertilizers (Loker 1996). Further, without fallow the use of fire is curtailed which necessitates additives for soil fertility and requires either extra labor or the application of herbicides to prevent weed invasion and the application of chemical pesticides for pest control. The decrease in land can also lead to a greater reliance on a few staple crops, reducing agrodiversity, which facilitates pest invasion (Murray 1994). The loss of access to land below levels at which the fallow system can be maintained leads to soil degradation through overuse, erosion, and land and water pollution from the application of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides (Murray 1994). When the ecological relations of production are disrupted the peasantry struggles to maintain social relations of production. Income is required to purchase the additional agricultural inputs and for supplemental food purchases if production falls below
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subsistence needs. To acquire income peasants may have to increase their reliance on wage labor which increases their semi-proletarian nature. Faber (1992; 1993) provides an important addition to understanding the essential tie between the ecological relations of production and the social relations of production of the peasantry in Central America; “(D)isarticulated capitalist development in Central America not only produces severe ecological exploitation, but depends on it for the subsidized reproduction of semi-proletarian labor and generation of a larger mass of surplus value” (Faber 1993, 63; italics in original). In addition to environmental damage from export oriented extractive industries, the creation of semi-proletarian labor force for these industries creates ecopolitical environmental damage as the peasantry attempt to eke out a livelihood on less land. The key to environmental damage leading to an increasingly semi-proletariat class is to create and maintain the imbalance between the social and ecological relations of production for the peasantry by limiting access to land. One of the major foci of peasant problems is demographic growth. With limited access to land and large families, the subdivision of land to heirs results in upsetting the ecological relations of production. Hence, a focus for development activities for solving the problems of Central American rural poverty has been to reduce population growth rates as opposed to meaningful agrarian reform. However, there is a high correlation between poverty and natural increase rates and attempts to reduce natural increase rates without addressing poverty and exploitation can be seen as “treating a symptom instead of the cause” (Faber 1993, 33). As the peasantry is further impoverished, larger families are seen as a strategy to fulfill the livelihood needs of the household, leading to what Carmen Deere calls
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“superexploitation” of familial labor (in Faber 1993, 74). Such a process is the outcome of functional dualism by which the reproduction of cheap semi-proletarian labor is ensured (Bryceson 2000b). Hence, in a region such as Central America with extreme inequalities in land ownership, population growth is not the only reason for poverty and ecological degradation. The connection between the exploitation of labor and the environment through functional dualism is an important addition to what Shrestha and Conway (1996) term peasant ecology, particularly in Central America. Faber argues the survival strategies of impoverished peasants creates environmental degradation and is a reflection of “the class privileges and power of Central America’s ruling oligarchies and agrarian bourgeoisie” (1992, 27); which represents an ecopolitical conflict. However, Faber’s model can be considered overly fatalistic and deterministic as the only result is peasant destruction of the environment. Further, Faber’s thesis places the emphasis on domestic forces which profit at the expense of the peasantry and the environment. Here is it argued that the survival strategies are attempts to renegotiate the peasant ecology, which if given the opportunity may be successful and mitigate ecological degradation (Shrestha and Conway 1996). Further, in addition to the traditional actors of the state and export oriented agricultural industries, a new ‘export’ driven actor is introduced; the global environmental model. The amount of land appropriated through conservation can be substantial. In Central America 21.1% of the total land areas has been included in over 420 protected areas (GEF 1999, 7). Celaque National Park in Honduras is a reflection of this process, and the main objective of this dissertation is to determine the changes in the Lenca peasant ecology resulting from park expulsion.
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IV. Conclusion: Peasant Ecology and Parks In traditional peasant political economy studies the fate of the peasantry is tied to unequal power relations and the primitive accumulation from capitalist expansion, which leads to semi-proletarianization and eventual disappearance of the peasantry through full proletarianization (Marx 1867; Lenin 1899; de Janvry 1981; Ellis 1988; Faber 1993; Zmolek 2001). However, the survival of the peasantry in face of such odds remains a point of debate (Shanin 1990; Anderson 1994; Bryceson 2000b; Kay 2000). In this dissertation, the adoption of peasant ecology addresses both the social relations of production and the ecological relations of production of the peasantry. It is argued here that the nexus of these relations is the key to the survival of the peasantry, and the upsetting of this relationship leads to ecopolitical conflicts that result in both environmental degradation and socio-economic impoverishment. However, the ecopolitical conflicts that ensue can be interpreted as attempts to renegotiate the peasant ecology. In this dissertation theoretical peasant studies is introduced to another vehicle of primitive accumulation from the political ecology literature; the global environmental conservation movement. The implementation of the global national park model is criticized for its’ universal model which seeks to protect nature from human activity by fencing it in and excluding human occupation. The diffusion of the national park model from the global North to the global South has been facilitated by unequal power relations exercised through the global political economy structure, which transfers power from local to global interests. In the process exclusionary nature protection serves as a powerful vehicle for primitive accumulation creating conditions of land scarcity, semi-
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proletarianization of the peasantry, and facilitating the expansion of capitalist social relations of production in the marginal peripheries of the world. Further, the practice of exclusionary protected areas disrupts the ecological relations of production of the peasantry, creating ecopolitical conflicts antithetical to the goals of protected areas and leading to growing impoverishment of nature and the peasantry. Yet as structural elements dictate the top-down penetration of global environmental interests into localities such as the western highlands of Honduras, local actors are able to mitigate the effects through the use of bottom-up agency. The peasant ecology framework addresses the ability of local actors to adopt, adapt, and react to the changing structures imposed upon them. From the peasant ecology framework, the main objective of this study is to determine the changes in the social and ecological relations of production of indigenous Lenca peasant communities relocated from Celaque National Park in the western highlands of Honduras.
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Chapter 4 The Study Area – Celaque National Park, Honduras I. Introduction: Setting the Scene The contextual structure of this research is framed by the political ecology analysis of protected areas, where the diffusion of the national park ideal based on exclusionary conservation principles to countries in the global South has served as a vehicle for capitalist intrusion into frontier regions on the global/state periphery. Through this round of primitive accumulation, social relations of production and ecological relations of production have been altered leading to increased impoverishment of the people and environmental degradation, subverting both the conservation goals of national parks and the survival of the peasantry. However, through employing the peasant ecology theoretical model the strategies of peasants are seen as attempts to renegotiate the ecological and social relations of production. In this chapter the theoretical analysis is tied to the geographical characteristics of the study area: Celaque National Park, Honduras. First the history of agrarian social relations in Honduras is described, from the semi-feudal system of the colonial era to the recent advent of neoliberal reforms and their role in protected areas. Following the historical context, the study area of Celaque National Park in the western highlands will be described in detail, including the relationship between the physical and cultural characteristics of the cultural landscape and how the exclusionary principle of the national park model has been imposed. In conclusion the chapter will introduce the research objectives of the dissertation and the three main research questions to be addressed.
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II. A History of Agrarian Social Relations in Honduras “Honduran peasants are not asking for what they never had; they are demanding what once was theirs under a system of land ownership that was not seriously threatened until the beginning of the twentieth century.” (Acker 1988, 89) A. The Colonial Context Honduras is geographically situated in the heart of Central America and has traditionally been among the most underdeveloped of the Latin American states. This is in part due to its geographical site factors, with rugged terrain limiting transportation and a geologic legacy of poor soils. The Central American Volcanic Axis, which runs through the neighboring states and provides fertile volcanic soils, essentially bypasses Honduras with only an extinct volcanic plateau existing in the western highlands of Honduras. In lieu of fertile volcanic soils, the vast majority of Honduras consists of remnants of the "Old Antillia" formation with an extremely rugged topography, mineral wealth, and largely infertile soils. The lack of fertile soils partly explains the relatively low pre-Columbian population of Honduras (Acker 1988; Portillo 1997). The lack of arable land still plagues Honduras, as is evident in relatively low current population densities. TABLE 1: Population, Land, and Density Data for Central American States Population El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua
6,822,378 12,293,545 7,326,496 5,570,129
Land Area (km) 20,720 108,430 111,890 120,254
Arable Land (%) 31.37 13.22 9.53 14.81
(Data source: CIA 2006) * Population per square km of land ** Population per square km of arable land
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Arithmetic Density* 329 113 65 46
Physiological Density** 1050 852 687 313
While the geologic base of Honduras is responsible for its relatively poor soil quality, it has provided mineral wealth. After the Spanish conquest of the indigenous Lenca in 1539, the city of Gracias was founded in what is today the department of Lempira. With gold reserves in the mountains surrounding Gracias it became the first audiencia (seat of colonial government) for Central America in 1544. However, when the gold supply was exhausted the audiencia was moved to Antigua, Guatemala in 1549. Deposits of silver would from time to time bring Honduras notoriety, but it remained for the most part a ‘backwater’ in the Spanish colonial empire (Brockett 1991). During colonial boom cycles for gold and silver the Lenca of the western highlands were forced into reducciones to provide labor for the mines (Finney 1978; Newson 1982; Stonich 1993). In the initial phase 50% of the Lenca employed in the mines around Gracias perished during the single year of 1539 (Newson 1982). While the decimation of the indigenous population is largely attributed to disease and warfare, it was also due to overwork and the disruption of agricultural production (Brockett 1991). When the mineral veins were exhausted the Spaniards retreated to the cattle-ranching haciendas where pseudo-feudal social relations developed with the Lenca populations. During bust cycles in mineral exports the Lenca drifted back into the remote mountainous highlands and formed the subsistence peasantry (Brockett 1991; Bryceson 2000b).
B. The Early Independence Era The split from Spain in 1821, and withdrawal from the United Provinces of Central America in 1838, resulted in independence for Honduras but failed to alter the socio-economic situation. With poor soils, unproductive haciendas, and poor
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transportation, the subsistence peasantry became the basis for the Honduran economy until the end of the nineteenth century (Acker 1988; Kay 2000). Combined with political turmoil, Honduras was largely disconnected from the trans-Atlantic economic system during the 1800s (Finney 1978). A silver boom in the late 19th century resulted in the granting of concessions to 276 foreign mining companies (Acker 1988). During this boom period in silver exports the Honduran government, under influence from foreign mining companies such as the U.S. based Rosario Mining Company, employed forced draft labor to create workers from the subsistence peasantry with the military used to capture fleeing draftees (Finney 1978). Further, in what has been referred to as an "enclosure movement", mining companies were given land concessions that included peasant settlements resulting evictions and the creation of a landless proletariat to provide labor (Finney 1978, 100). The silver boom of the late 1800s brought Honduras back into the world economic system. However, the subsequent decline in the silver market around 1900 brought an end to the need for mining labor in the highlands and the peasantry again returned to subsistence production in highland settlements. The decline of silver production coincided with the rise of the banana industry controlled by U.S. interests such as Standard Fruit and United Fruit, turning Honduras into the quintessential ‘Banana Republic’ where political and economic power essentially rested with the fruit companies (Acker 1988). The banana boom of the early 1900's appropriated a vast amount of tropical lowlands but were far removed, both in distance and accessibility, from the western highland farming areas and had little effect on the subsistence peasantry in these areas (Durham 1979).
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C. Agrarian Tensions in the Twentieth Century A significant development in agrarian social relations for Central America centered on the coffee boom between 1880 and 1930. Due to poor transportation infrastructure and lack of investment capital in the country, the coffee industry bypassed Honduras while entrenching itself in neighboring Central American countries (Durham 1979). The Great Depression of the 1930s resulted in a collapse of the industry, which recovered quickly after World War II. During the recovery the greatest growth in coffee production occurred in Honduras (Brockett 1991). While the banana industry was relatively distant with minimal impact on the traditional peasantry in the western mountains of Honduras, the highland ecological niche for coffee placed it in direct competition for land with the subsistence peasantry (Faber 1992). The ‘agro-elite’ confiscated land and used coercive labor to expand coffee for export, what Brockett refers to as “the repressive agro-export development model” (Brockett 1991, 37). Land and labor conflicts arising from the increase in export coffee production and the expansion of banana plantations resulted in the organization of peasant unions in Honduras during the 1950s (Jones 1990). With the rise of communist movements throughout Latin America, highlighted by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the U.S. development program Alliance for Progress was initiated in 1961 to thwart the rural communist groundswell (Schulz and Schulz 1994). One of the main tenets of the Alliance for Progress was agrarian reform. While claiming to be progressive in theory to address social and economic inequalities, in practice it increased tensions between liberal and conservative political forces which became repressive and, eventually, contributed to violent conflict throughout Central America.
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Previously in Honduras the land laws of 1836, 1870, and 1936 gave ejidal land grants to communities to help maintain the small subsistence peasant’s access to land, although during times of export product booms these laws were ignored (Durham 1979). In concert with the Alliance for Progress, the liberal Honduran president Ramón Villeda Morales pushed an agrarian reform law allowing confiscation of uncultivated land from the large U.S. fruit companies. In retaliation a conservative military coup in 1963, backed by U.S. banana companies, placed Colonel Arellano in power. Labor and peasant unions were crushed and agrarian reform effectively terminated (Brockett 1991). Concurrently, large conservative landholders expanded their holdings by fencing in ejidal and national land to produce export products such as beef, sugar, cotton, and coffee for the U.S. market (Shulz and Shulz 1994). The agro-export focus severely curtailed the rights of the peasantry and forced them ever further into isolated enclaves in the highlands (Brockett 1991). Ever worsening conditions for the rural peasantry led to the re-mobilization of peasant groups with the help of the Catholic Church (Shulz and Shulz 1994). Massive land invasions by peasants in the late 1960s created a crisis for large landholders. The government in conjunction with large conservative landholders created a campaign to blame land scarcity on Salvadorian immigrants, who had come to make up 20% of the Honduran peasantry (Durham 1979; Brockett 1991). The shift of blame from large landholders to Salvadorian immigrants, and subsequent expulsion of the Salvadorians, triggered the infamous “Soccer War” of 1969 during which 2,000 Honduran peasants died and 100,000 were displaced. While raising nationalistic sentiment among the
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Honduran population the episode shifted attention way from land inequality that marked both Honduras and El Salvador, the underlying cause of the conflict (Durham 1979). The repression of Honduran peasants by the state and large landholders increased in the aftermath, which in turn spurred peasant unrest and a 1972 coup replacing the conservative president with Colonel Arrelano (once again), but this time as a populist leader forced to turn to agrarian reform to appease the masses. During Arrelano’s brief second tenure agrarian reform laws created new settlements and redistributed state land (Shulz and Shulz 1994). However, small farmers with less than 5 hectares were not eligible for titles and land producing commercial export crops was exempted from redistribution. While the opening up of state lands to peasant settlements was more successful than reforms in neighboring countries of Central America, landlessness continued to increase due to inadequate reform and a high natural increase rate. Further, the majority of the land redistributed was in remote mountainous areas of poor soil quality and steep slopes. The reforms were effectively terminated in 1975 when Colonel Arellano was overthrown by the military and peasant groups were again repressed. For example, ‘antiterrorist’ laws were created which criminalized peasant land invasions with jail terms of between 5 and 25 years (Brockett 1991). The ‘Lost Decade’ of the 1980s saw a declining GDP per capita, falling wages, and rising debt; common throughout Latin America at the time (Brockett 1991). Further, the conflicts in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala, and especially Sandinista controlled Nicaragua made Honduras an important strategic location for U.S. counter-communist activities. To counter populist opposition to the presence of the U.S. backed Contras in
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Honduras, from where they carried out operations in Nicaragua, large amounts of U.S. money was supplied to the Honduran economy to keep it afloat and neo-liberal structural adjustment policies to counter rising debt were kept at a minimum (Jansen 2000). By 1989, with conflicts waning, the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank put Honduras on the ineligible country list for new loans due to overdue payments and reluctance of the liberal government to implement structural adjustment programs (Brockett 1991; Jansen 2000). In 1990 the conservative Callejas administration came to power and passed a sweeping structural adjustment program which devalued the currency, cut protective import tariffs, simplified foreign investment regulations, decreased public spending, eliminated subsidies, and increased public service prices (Shulz and Shulz 1994; Stonich 1993). The associated Agricultural Modernization Law of 1992 was initiated with the intent of expanding private property to the most efficient users, as well as eliminating any expropriation of large farms in order to protect the agro-export sector (Jansen 2000; Carter and Salgado 2001). Included in this law was the opening up of communal ejidal lands to subdivision into distinct private property parcels, with formal land titles and increased land taxes (Zoomers 2000). As a result of the 'Lost Decade', along with the impacts of the newly instituted structural adjustment programs, social conditions deteriorated. The agricultural census in 1994 had 317,999 producers in Honduras, of which 72% owned less than 5 ha and 83% owned less than 10 ha (Jansen 2000, 194). Further, 33% of the rural population was landless and 75% lived in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 a day (Shulz and Shulz 1994). With increases in land taxes, rising input prices, and skyrocketing
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interest rates, peasant communities were dispossessed of their lands as export-oriented agricultural producers switched from contractual buying to direct ownership of lands throughout Honduras (Baumeister 2000; Thorpe 2000). The result has been expansion of capitalist modes of production into remote areas of Honduras, particularly as export production expands at the expense of domestic food production (Brockett 1991; Fandino 1993; Shulz and Shulz 1994; Kay 2000). The past century has seen increased pressures placed on the peasantry in Honduras. The impetus for the impoverishment of the peasantry has been the rise of the “the repressive agro-export development model” (Brockett 1991, 37). Whether it has been the need to provide labor for mining, coffee or cattle production, or the more recent structural adjustment programs initiating capitalist agrarian relations, both external and internal forces have been stacked against the peasantry. However, another force based on the export of nature has become increasingly important in the impoverishment of the peasantry – namely environmental conservation.
D. Protected Areas and People in Honduras Concurrent with the rise of agro-export coffee production and rising agrarian tensions, the first attempts at protected areas in Honduras began in the 1950s with forest reserves and historic monuments. The 1971 Forestry Law created a Secretary of Natural Resources in charge of park and reserve development, which in 1974 was transformed into two departments; the Honduran Forestry Development Corporation (COHEDFOR) responsible for forestry and the Department of Renewable Natural Resources (RENARE) for protected areas (Jones 1990). However, these attempts were ineffective due to
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political instability, a corresponding ebb and flow in funding, and tensions created from the volatility of agrarian reform attempts which conflicted with the setting aside of public lands in the face of extreme land inequities. In 1987 the government passed the Cloud Forest Law protecting all lands over 1800 meters in elevation for the provision of water through the conservation of highland forests (Herlihy 1997; Portillo 1997). The law created the legal foundations for 36 protected areas throughout Honduras. One important aspect of the law was the allowance of resident populations to reside within park boundaries as long as no further forest clearance occurred (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). In 1992, during neoliberal reforms, the General Law of the Environment was passed in Honduras creating a formalized system of protected areas under the control of COHDEFOR. As of 2002, 107 protected areas had been established in Honduras covering approximately 24% of the national territory (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The creation of the system of protected areas occurred concurrently with the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law, which sought to expand private property and increased land taxes. However, the resultant legal and institutional changes regarding land tenure and taxes within and outside protected areas created confusion among small farmers with increasingly negative attitudes toward the institution of protected areas (Richards 1996; Brady 2003). An example of the antagonism between the state and peasants is the issue of COHDEFOR’s complete legal jurisdiction over forested lands. The cutting down of trees formally requires a long bureaucratic process, and reports claim COHDEFOR often gives forestry concessions on private land to 3rd parties without consultation of the land owner
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(Jones 1990). Hence, there is a disincentive to allow forests to exist and land-users keep land cleared to thwart COHDEFOR control: “COHDEFOR leads a constant battle against forest fires, many of which are thought to be set by disgruntled farmers in protest. This is not an entirely symbolic gesture; once forests have been eliminated, COHDEFOR loses interest in the land, and farmers may take control.” (Jones 1990, 129) Thus, COHDEFOR’s lack of legal jurisdiction over cleared land has created a loophole for residents living within protected areas. As long as previously cleared land remains free of trees, the residents are allowed to remain. If forest regenerates on their lands, it reverts to COHDEFOR control (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). Essentially this is the legal underpinning for the provision in the 1987 Cloud Forest Law allowing residents to remain within protected areas as long as there is no further forest clearance. Due to a lack of state funding stemming from fiscal restraints of neoliberal reforms, protected areas in Honduras resembled ‘paper parks’ with little management or enforcement (Brandon et al. 1998). In response a 1993 Executive Agreement called for the ceding of the management of public protected areas to NGOs, community groups, and private interests under the supervision of COHDEFOR (Beltrán and Esser 1999). As a result, the management of protected areas has become dependent on funding from aid agencies, multilateral banks, and NGOs with a concurrent rise in international groups working in Honduras on protected area issues. A brief list includes the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), Conservation International (CI), the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), along with national development agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Peace Corps, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the
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Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI), the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), among many others (Richards 1996; Herlihy 1997). The plethora of national and international environment and development groups involved in protected areas in Honduras illustrates the degree to which the state has relegated the management of public lands to outside interests. Structural adjustment programs imposed due to heavy state indebtedness has forced the retrenchment of the state from many areas of the public sphere. In doing so, global environmental interests are able to dictate the priorities of environmental conservation, which often stands in contrast to the local context. For example, one of the main management objectives for national parks, as stated by the IUCN, is “to eliminate and thereafter prevent exploitation or occupation” (Davey 1998, 52). Such a definition contradicts the 1987 Honduran Cloud Forest Law based on the unique history of agrarian relations, which established national parks in Honduras and allowed for continued human habitation within the parks. So when global interests take over the management of Honduran national parks the question arises: which of the conflicting models do they abide by? In this instance, the study of Celaque National Park serves as an excellent addition to the debate.
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III. Study Site – The Physical and Cultural Landscape of Celaque National Park
FIGURE 1: Location of Celaque National Park, Honduras
Celaque National Park
(Data Source: ESRI 2000)
A. The Natural Landscape Celaque National Park, located in the western highlands of Honduras near the border with Guatemala and El Salvador, was created out of the Cloud Forest Law of 1987 with a core area of 159 km² between 1800 m and 2849 m in elevation and a surrounding buffer zone of 107 km² ranging in elevation from 1000 to 1800 m above sea level (AFECOHDEFOR et al. 2002). Including the highest elevation in Honduras, the rugged topography of the park has 94% of its area in excess of 30 degree slope and 66% with slopes over 60 degrees (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The rugged topography and steep slopes have served as an effective barrier to widespread human degradation to the forests and soils of the mountains. Geologically the mountains of Celaque National Park are an extinct remnant of the Central American Volcanic Axis. While the majority of Honduras has an "Old
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Antillia" geological base, characterized by relatively infertile soils, the volcanic origin of the mountains contributed to the creation of fertile soils relatively unique to the country. The majority of the soils within the park are classified in the Milile soil series that have deeply weathered clay loams with moderate acidity and excellent fertility. At lower elevations within Celaque National Park and in the surrounding areas soils are classified in the Ojojona soil series which are acidic, shallow, poorly drained, and with a relatively lower fertility than Milile soils (Portillo 1997; AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The region within which Celaque National Park is located has a humid subtropical climate with a pronounced winter dry season between November and April. In the lower reaches of the park the humid subtropical climate has annual temperature averages around 21 degrees Celsius and precipitation of 1800 mm per year. However, the leeward southern side of the Celaque Mountains experiences a rainshadow effect and increased solar exposure, resulting in lower precipitation and higher temperatures which can reach 35 degrees Celsius. As elevations increase temperatures decline and precipitation increases until the climate changes to a highland wet climate. Accounting for 60% of the park the highland wet climate has annual precipitation totals exceeding 2600 mm and temperatures averaging 10 degrees Celsius at the highest point of Cerro de las Minas (Portillo 1997; AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002; Wilson and McCranie 2004). The vegetative composition of Celaque National Park is dependent on the soil and climatic characteristics. The lower elevations, with their acidic Ojojona soils and humid subtropical climate, are dominated by pine forest intermittently mixed with oak. At higher elevations, with fertile Milile soils and a highland wet climate, a mixed broad-leaf and pine forest is present. Above 2200 meters in elevation lies the largest lower montane
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moist forest in Honduras. More commonly referred to as cloud forest, it is characterized by broadleaf trees reaching 25 to 30 meters in height, epiphytic mosses, orchids, and bromeliads (Wilson and McCranie 2004). In addition, the cloud forest contains high profile fauna species such as quetzals, toucans, spider monkeys, pumas, and at least 45 species of reptiles and amphibians (Mejia 1993; Wilson and McCranie 2004). The consistent and high precipitation totals within the upper reaches of the mountains form the headwaters for dozens of rivers that provide the water supply for over 100 surrounding communities. The importance of water is evident in the indigenous Lenca term for the mountains, celaque, meaning ‘box of water’ (AFE-COHDEFOR et. al 2002). Besides the provision of ecological services such as water supply, the unique assemblage of flora and fauna in the cloud forest constitutes high biological diversity. Cloud forests are considered to be among the most threatened ecological systems in the world, making their preservation a high priority (Mejia 1993; WCMC 1998). As part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, Celaque National Park’s importance for environmental conservation also becomes tied to regional environmental conservation programs (GEF 1999; AFE-COHEDEFOR et. al 2002; GTZ 2002).
B. Cultural Landscape While Celaque National Park contains an important assemblage of biological diversity and provides ecological services, it is also a cultural landscape with a history of human habitation. Within Celaque National Park there are an estimated 15 Lenca villages with a total population of 3,150 people living between 1800 and 2200 meters in elevation accessible only by foot and pack animal along narrow and steep trails (AFE-
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COHEDEFOR et. al 2002). Surrounding the park, in what is termed the buffer zone, are an additional 18 communities with a total population of 5,670 inhabitants living between 1000 and 1800 meters in elevation, with the majority of the communities seasonally accessible by four-wheel drive vehicle. Outside the buffer zone, in an area referred to as the ‘zone of influence’, reside 30,495 inhabitants in 68 communities (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The cultural landscape of the Celaque Mountains is inherently related to the physical landscape. In contrast to the vast majority of Honduras which has been geologically endowed with poor soils, the western highlands have relatively fertile soils which have facilitated higher population densities of the indigenous Lenca from preColombian times until the present. While the largest indigenous group in Honduras, their language had become extinct by 1900 which precipitated a decline in traditional Lenca culture. Today only a relict of the pre-Hispanic Lenca culture survives in place names and syncretic mixes of Catholic and Lenca belief systems (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). Part of the lost history of the Lenca is the length of time they have inhabited the Celaque Mountains. It is reported they resided in the mountains in 1536 during the Lenca resistance to the Spanish (Newson 1982). But the settlement history of the current population of the Celaque Mountains is not clearly tied to ancestral habitation. Robert West (1958), who performed ethno-geographic research on the Lenca peasants in the western highlands of Honduras during the 1950s, claimed, “[f]rom this extensive area [western Honduras and the eastern third of El Salvador] the modern Lenca and other Indian groups have been reduced to isolated highland enclaves, surrounded by encroaching whites and mixed-bloods, or ladinos” (West 1958, 68). West’s statement is
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supported by more recent research by Stonich (1993) in southern Honduras where the distribution of Lenca peasant settlements are clustered in highland regions surrounded by lower elevation ladino settlements. In the Celaque Mountains a similar pattern has evolved with Lenca peasant settlements existing in the higher reaches of the mountains with ladinos and commercial coffee fincas encroaching upon the lower elevations (Cherrett 2001). The settlement patterns exhibit a cumulative historical process. In relation to Marx’s (1867) observation of the cyclical demise of the peasantry in England, the historical process creating highland settlement of Lenca peasants surrounded by ladinos has not been a singularly linear process of Lenca retreating from the advance of ladino encroachment. Instead it has been an historical ebb and flow whereby Lenca peasants, during boom periods for exportable commodities such as gold and silver, were coerced to relocate to reducciones as sources of labor (Finney 1978; Newson 1982; Stonich 1993). During bust periods of the cycle they returned to successively higher settlements due to the encroachment of ladinos, creating a cumulative retreat over time into the present settlement patterns and distributions. Support comes from Stonich’s (1993) study in southern Honduras where the settlement history of the highland villages was difficult to ascertain. The history was undocumented and local knowledge of establishment of a few households stemmed only from the early 1900s, corresponding with the ending of a silver boom around 1900 (Finney 1978; Acker 1988). Jansen (1998), in a separate study of a Lenca community in the western highlands, noted the inhabitants had no memory of settlement in the area prior to 1900. However, historical evidence and forest analysis indicates a series of
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settlement and cleared forests for agriculture alternating with abandonment and forest regrowth as far back as the Spanish Conquest. In Jansen’s study, the ‘virgin’ forests being cleared for agriculture were in fact secondary forests. During fieldwork for this dissertation, settlement history questions similarly revealed knowledge of the existence of the communities in the Celaque Mountains dating to the early 1900s, with no admitted knowledge of any previous habitation. It is interesting to note that the missing settlement history corresponds with the reported loss of the Lenca language around 1900 (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). Hence, while it is reported Lenca inhabitation of the Celaque Mountains stretches back at least to 1536 (Newson 1982), continuous inhabitation can only be consistently claimed for the past century. Within this time frame, the Lenca peasants have traditionally resided in dispersed homesteads loosely organized into settlements, or aldeas. The dispersed homesteads consist of one-room homes made of wattle-daub walls and pitched roofs of thatch in lower elevations and fired wood shingles in higher elevations where large trees are available (West 1958). The homesteads are surrounded by the household’s fields, which in turn separate homesteads from each other. The resulting aldeas are not centrally organized settlements, but a dispersed association of homesteads whose patterns follow the contours of mountain valleys. The traditional Lenca peasant social structure is tied to kinship where preference to locate near family is paramount, "...the result of his pattern of residence is that household economics trend to merge not only around productive but reproductive activities as well; generally around such relations as labor pooling, non-monetized labor
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exchange, petty commodity production and peddling, lending money, and the sharing of food and other expenses" (Stonich 1993, 100). The separate aldeas are connected through extended kinship and trade relations (Brady 2003). The Lenca peasant households rely primarily on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods, using a traditional swidden fallow system (Jansen 1998; Brady 2003). Vegetation is cut and left in place, burned with a low intensity fire, and planted in crops. After 3 to 6 years crops are abandoned and the land is turned over to pasture for cattle and/or fallow land where grasses, bushes, and trees are established. The fallow system allows for the cycling of nutrients and maintenance of soil fertility, as well as control of weeds, pests, and plant diseases. Prior to the creation of Celaque National Park and the influence of COHDEFOR, the land was often fallowed for longer periods with secondary forest establishing itself. However, with COHDEFOR’s jurisdiction over forested land there is a disincentive to allow trees to grow back, and the land is kept clear except for grasses and bushes. Lenca households grow a particular assortment of crops and produce different handicrafts in accordance with the physical environment, including climatic conditions and soil types at different altitudes. The traditional milpa is practiced at all elevations. However, differing climatic and soil conditions due to elevation allow for the cultivation of additional crop types. At lower elevations, dominated by Ojojona soils and with a drier and warmer climate, greater amounts of corn can be produced through double cropping (harvesting two crops of corn per year). At higher elevations, with the fertile Milile soils and higher precipitation and cooler temperatures, crops such as cabbage,
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potatoes, and carrots can be cultivated. The pattern reflects the altitudinal life zones present in the high relief of Central America. The different crops are exchanged at Lenca market centers optimally located at an intermediary location between the high and low elevation Lenca aldeas. Brady (2003) reports the Lenca preference for these markets over larger nearby ladino market centers, which are largely avoided by the Lenca. In the Celaque Mountains this can be observed in the Lenca Sunday market in the municipality of Belen Gualcho on the western side of Celaque National Park, where residents of aldeas in the Celaque Mountains exchange produce and crafts with those from lower elevations and purchase basic household goods. Income generating activities are used to supplement subsistence agricultural production. Examples include the sale and trade of unique and excess crop production at markets, craft production for market such as ceramic pottery and roofing tiles, and seasonal labor on coffee fincas (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The major coffee producing area for the Celaque Mountains is centered on the municipality of Corquín, located on the western side of the mountains. The harvest season generally stretches from October to February, with January as the time of greatest activity. Generally the Lenca peasants take short trips to pick coffee during harvest to earn supplemental income, although work is available in the processing of picked coffee and tending to coffee trees before and after harvest. The peasant system of the Lenca in the Celaque Mountains of western Honduras relies on the functioning of their peasant ecology centered on the relationship between the social relations of production of the peasantry with their ecological relations of production with the environment. While the initial creation of Celaque National Park in
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1987 did little to alter their peasant ecology, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 served as a catalyst for a reworking of the peasant ecology tied to the global national park model; relocation.
C. Disembodying the Cultural Landscape Due to the fiscal constraints of the Honduran state, funding and management of protected areas has shifted to foreign sources (Beltrán and Esser 1999). The German development agency GTZ has become highly involved in the management of protected areas throughout Honduras. In 1997 the €1.43 million Support to Cerro Celaque National Park Project was initiated to create a park management plan and set up institutions for the management of the park (GTZ 2002). The main institution created was the non-governmental organization Proyecto Celaque, which completed a park management plan and created a national park guard service consisting of 10 local guardarecursos, or resource guards (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). Within the project’s Plan General de Manejo: Parque Nacional Montaña de Celaque, the stated goal is to disallow the establishment of settlements within the nuclear zone of the park (above 1800 meters) and to promote the voluntary process of relocation of communities from within the nuclear zone (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002, 53-54). Hurricane Mitch, which struck Central America in 1998, caused extensive flooding and destruction throughout Honduras, and left many of the Lenca peasant households within Celaque National Park without housing or food. Several Lenca residents were sent by the aldeas within the park to the municipality of San Manuel de Colohete, within whose political borders the aldeas are located, to solicit immediate assistance in the form of food and medicine and in the long term for the rebuilding of
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Figure 2: Relief Map of Celaque National Park with Settlements and Roads
Gracias
La Chimis Corquín
Rio Negro El Cedro
Belen Gualcho
Poza Verde
Otolaca
Los Horcones La Campa San Manuel de Colohete
(Aguilar 2003, 17)
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their communities. The alcalde, or mayor, of the municipality originally entertained the possibility of assistance in the rebuilding of their original aldeas. However, in subsequent meetings between the municipality, government ministries, and Proyecto Celaque it was decided that assistance to the aldeas within the park would encourage continued habitation. Since habitation conflicted with the newly stated goals of the park management plan (AFE-COHEDEFOR et al. 2002) the offer of in situ assistance was repealed (Oviedo 1999, 2-3). Instead, the municipality of San Manuel de Colohete, the local Catholic Church, Proyecto Celaque, and the United States based NGO Amigos de las Américas offered assistance only to households that relocated outside of Celaque National Park’s boundary. Due to the complete destruction of their aldeas, all of the households of Poza Verde and El Cedro, along with several households from the less damaged aldeas of La Chimis and Rio Negro, relocated to one of two settlements; Otolaca and Los Horcones. Other Lenca households within Celaque National Park chose to rebuild their aldeas in the original location without outside assistance. The differential damage can be attributed to the geographical location of the aldeas with Poza Verde and El Cedro located on the southern side of the main mountain ridge while the other aldeas are located on the northern side, which was better protected from the intense precipitation of Hurricane Mitch. Otolaca, located on a road accessible site just outside of the southeastern boundary of the park, was built on land donated by the municipality of San Manuel de Colohete with houses and a primary school constructed by Amigos de las Américas. The settlement is divided into two separate, but connecting, housing developments with one
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inhabited by 28 households from El Cedro and the other by 17 households from Poza Verde. Land for farming was donated by the Catholic Church in the neighboring municipality of Gracias, a 3 hour walk from the housing settlement. Los Horcones, located on a non-road accessible site outside of the southwestern boundary of the park, is home to 16 relocated households from Poza Verde, Rio Negro, and La Chimis. Prior to Hurricane Mitch, a single Lenca household had purchased a parcel of land in the area. After Hurricane Mitch the household convinced 15 other households to relocate together to this site instead of participating in the relocation settlement in Otolaca. While promised assistance in land acquisition and house construction for relocating, the residents of Los Horcones received only a small supply of roofing timbers and tiles delivered to a road-accessible village 2 hours away by foot. The logistical difficulty in reaching Los Horcones was given as the reason for the meager housing assistance offered by Proyecto Celaque (Oviedo 1999), although no explanation has been provided for the lack of assistance in acquiring land. As a result, the households that relocated to Los Horcones purchased their own land and built their own housing. In effect, Los Horcones represents a bottom-up community-led resettlement project due to the lack of outside assistance, despite the fact that the initial impetus for relocation came from institutional policies and promises. This stands in contrast to the top-down formal resettlement project in Otolaca where outside interests had much greater influence.
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D. Conclusion The devastating effects of Hurricane Mitch in October of 1998 caused at least 5,600 deaths and left 285,000 people homeless in Honduras alone (Lehmann 2001). In light of such widespread destruction any form of assistance is beneficial to the victims of a natural hazard such as Hurricane Mitch. The relocation of residents to provide assistance has also been argued as logistically prudent due to the difficult accessibility of the highland aldeas within Celaque National Park (Oviedo 1999) 3 . However, the help provided was not purely altruistic. The requirement of relocation is an important caveat and reflects an underlying motive; to promote the “voluntary” relocation of residents from within Celaque National Park (AFECOHDEFOR et al. 2002, 53). For the affected residents with dead family members, destroyed homes, no food or medicine, and a rise in gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments (Oviedo 1999) there was little choice but to accept the conditional assistance in order to receive short-term relief, with a resultant long-term relocation. Hence, while the proximate cause of relocation was a natural disaster, the ultimate cause was a global national park model based on the exclusion of human occupation. The 1987 Cloud Forest Law, which allowed for habitation within park boundaries for existing populations, ran counter to this model. But the destitution of these existing populations following Hurricane Mitch provided an “oportunidad” to alleviate this discrepancy (Oviedo 1999, 1). The GTZ funding for the Proyecto Celaque ended in 2003 (GTZ 2004), and the NGO no longer exists. Coincidentally, a new GTZ funded program has been initiated, 3
An evangelical missionary group organized a mule-train with food, medicine, clothing, and zinc roofing materials to be brought to the aldea of La Chimis after Hurricane Mitch, proving assistance can reach these remote areas.
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the Protection and Economic Use of Natural Resources project, which will disburse €3,850,000 over the time period 2003-2007 with the goal of promoting sustainable development for the area surrounding Celaque National Park (GTZ 2004). Meanwhile, the national park guard service, the guardarecursos, disbanded when it became apparent that their salaries had not been paid in months. Little institutional presence exists for managing the park and local tensions have risen over the collection of park entrance fees from visitors. In the end, the relocated residents of Otolaca and Los Horcones have been left to adjust to the changes of relocation by themselves.
IV. Research Objective Agrarian social relations in Honduras exhibit a pattern of coerced labor from the highland subsistence peasantry during times of export expansion and, conversely, reemergence of the peasantry during the bust cycles of export production. While the earlier examples for the mining industry relied mostly on labor needs, the recent ascendancy of coffee production and other exportable agricultural products relies both on labor and land, which for coffee includes the traditional peasant highlands. In addition, the forms of coercion have changed as forced labor has been replaced by "the impersonal workings of the economic system", manifest in the promotion of the private land ideology in which land is redistributed to the most economically 'efficient' user (Brockett 1991, 87). In this way, both land and labor are freed to work for capitalist export production. While much of the recent research on the fate of the peasantry focuses on changes brought about by agrarian land reform and tenure as capitalist export agriculture spreads (Bryceson 2000a; Jansen 2000; Kay 2000), the diffusion of the global environmental
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movement with its protected area ideal is also displacing peasants in what has been termed a "new regime of imperial exploitation camouflaged as environmentalism” (Katz 1998, 50). Here it is argued that the diffusion of protected areas from the global North to the global South is another manifestation of globalization which supersedes local interests through the application of unequal power relations. However, local actors are not passive bystanders to the dictates of top-down structural elements such as the global protected area model. Local actors adopt, adapt, and react from the bottom-up to these top-down forces, and peasant ecology serves as an appropriate theoretical framework to address such feedbacks. Peasant ecology meshes the social relations of production from peasant studies with the ecological concerns of political ecology through ecological relations of production to explain ecopolitical conflicts between peasants and other interests, and the resulting environmental ramifications (Shrestha and Conway 1996).
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Chapter 5 Research Questions and Methodology I. Introduction From a political ecology framework the structure of global environmental conservation as applied in the national park model is critiqued for its’ policy of protecting nature from human activity by fencing it off and excluding human occupation. The diffusion of the national park model from the global North to the global South is facilitated by unequal power relations exercised through the political economy of neoliberal reforms, which transfers power from the state to global interests. Yet as structural elements dictate the top-down penetration of global environmental protection interests into localities such as the western highlands of Honduras, local actors are able to mitigate the effects through the use of bottom-up agency. The peasant ecology framework addresses the ability of local actors to adopt, adapt, and react to the changing structures mandated upon them. It is from this context the overall research objective is posed; to determine how the imposition of a global national park model on the locality of the Celaque Mountains impacted the ecological and social relations of production for the Lenca peasants relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras. In this chapter the research questions are specified, methodology explained, and analysis techniques defined. In Chapter 6 the results of the data analysis are presented to answer the research questions. Finally, Chapter 7 will elaborate upon the quantitative results through qualitative assessments informed by the interviews and discuss the results within the theoretical context of peasant ecology.
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II. Research Questions A comparative analysis will be used to address three research questions; (1) How has relocation affected access to land, (2) How has access to land affected land use intensity, and (3) How has land use intensity affected income earning activities? Through the quantification of these measures and qualitatively addressing the results within the peasant ecology framework, the dissertation will investigate whether the survival strategies of the peasants has led to environmental degradation and the demise of the Lenca peasantry through social differentiation. The household, the chosen unit of analysis in this dissertation, is defined as related people co-residing within a single dwelling. While this definition may not be applicable in other settings (Netting et al. 1984), traditional Lenca households have consisted of co-resident familial dwellings productively and physically separated from other households. The dispersed pattern of dwellings within the highland aldeas facilitated the separation of such defined households (West 1958; Brady 2003). After relocation the decision making based on co-residence has continued and remains the definition used in this dissertation.
A. How Has Relocation Affected Access to Land? Access to land is important in determining the level to which Lenca peasant households can provide for their own subsistence and produce a surplus for sale on the market. A decrease in the amount of available land can result in the condition of land scarcity, where households do not have access to enough land to meet their subsistence needs. The imposition of the exclusionary principle of the global national park model in
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Celaque National Park in Honduras has led to the relocation of Lenca households and this first research question will address whether or not the peasant ecological relations of production have been altered through the creation of land scarcity. Three measures will be used to determine the changes in access to land due to relocation. The first quantitative data measure to determine how relocation has affected access to land is the amount of land owned by the household. Renting of land is another way households can increase access to this means of subsistence (Sadoulet et al. 2001), but as no households reported the renting of land it is not relevant to this study. According to a study by Boyer in 1982, an average peasant household in the mountains of southern Honduras required 7.2 hectares of land to fully supply their subsistence using a three-year fallow cycle (from Brocket 1998, 80). However, the total amount of land is not the only factor involved in access to land. Having a large area of land with poor soils in an unfavorable climate, and made up of several parcels in disparate locations, may be worse than having a small area of land consisting of one parcel with excellent soils and a favorable climate. Hence, additional measures are needed to address the question of how relocation has affected access to land. The second quantitative data measure to analyze access to land is the number of separate land parcels owned by households. Traditionally, households in Lenca aldeas own a single parcel of land surrounding their dwellings. However, many peasant households throughout Central America take advantage of multiple climatic and soil zones through the use of several parcels in differing geographical locations, allowing for the cultivation of a variety of interspecific and intraspecific crops while minimizing the risk of complete crop failure. The use of many parcels can be advantageous, but it can
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also represent the scarcity of available land in a given area forcing households to search a more geographically expansive area to acquire enough land to provide their subsistence, increasing time and effort costs in agricultural production. The final data measure to investigate access to land is the qualitative perception of soil quality by households. The respondents were asked whether soils were more fertile in their relocated fields when compared to the soils they previously farmed in their original communities, with the choice of responses being much better, better, the same, worse, or much worse. While perception of soil quality is not a physical measurement of soil characteristics, it does reflect how the soils in a given location suit the needs of household crop production tied to local agricultural knowledge, technology, and methods (Jansen 1998).
B. How Has Access to Land Affected Land Use Intensity? A change in access to land can influence the intensity of land use. Intensified land use consists of an increase in the relative amount of available land under cultivation, an increase in the use of agricultural inputs, and achieving the same, or higher, production on less land. Increased intensity of land use due to a change in the access to land is indicative of land scarcity, meaning households do not have enough land to meet their needs. Five measures will be used to determine if land use intensity has been altered due to changes in access to land. The first measure to determine changes in land use intensity is the percentage of land owned under cultivation. Traditionally Lenca peasants employed a fallow system, allowing land to ‘rest’ and supporting pasture for animals. If the percentage of land
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owned under cultivation increases after relocation it may disrupt this fallow system and necessitate further intensification of land use. The second measure is the change in the number of animals owned. Cows, horses, and mules need pasture or fallow land. If this is not available, the number of animals supported by households may decline. A decline in the number of animals, particularly cows, is important as they provide dairy and meat products, fertilizer, and “hooved bank accounts” to mitigate times of economic pressures (Brady 2003, 66). The number of animals owned is then a measure of land use intensity related to access to land, the traditional fallow system, and a decrease in farm activities to support households. The third measure is agrodiversity, defined here as the number of different crop varieties grown. The basic staples for Lenca peasant households are corn and beans. However, depending on geographical location, a variety of other crops are also grown to complement the basic staples and to provide a source of income from sales. If agrodiversity decreases due to changes in the access to land it can represent the condition of land scarcity in that households must rely on a smaller bundle of crop varieties. Specialization in fewer crop varieties increases risk to the peasant households, as the chance of the loss of a single crop increases with fewer crop varieties available to offset the losses. The fourth measure is the percentage of households using purchased fertilizer. A change in the amount and quality of land combined with the shortening of the fallow system may necessitate increased use of purchased fertilizers to maintain soil fertility. For example, the use of low intensity fire in the fallow system to cycle nutrients into the soil may have to be replaced with the use of purchased fertilizers. Increased use of
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purchased fertilizer is indicative of increased intensification of land use as extensive soil fertility maintenance decreases. Finally, the fifth measure of land use intensity is the percentage of households using purchased biocides, consisting of herbicides and pesticides. A decrease in the amount of land, and a resultant decline in the fallow system, may restrict the use of fire to cleanse the soil of pests and weeds. In its place the use of purchased biocides may be adopted to accomplish the same function. Further, a decrease in agrodiversity creating greater reliance on fewer crops increases the risk of pest damage (Netting 1993). In response the use of purchased biocides is increased to ensure greater chance of survival of fewer crop varieties. Taken together, the five measures will determine if the change in access to land has resulted in intensified land use, which would reflect the creation of conditions of land scarcity for the relocated households.
C. How Has Land Use Intensity Affected Income Earning Activities? Another element of the Lenca peasant ecology is the use of income earning activities to supplement their subsistence lifestyle, including the sale of surplus agricultural production, craft production for market, and wage labor. Changes in access to land, with resultant changes in the intensity of land use and agricultural production, can increase the costs of production necessitating greater dependence on income earning activities. Five measures will be employed to determine how changes in access to land and land use intensity have affected income earning activities. The first measure is the change in the number of income earning activities per year engaged in by members of the household. While an increase in the number of
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income earning activities may indicate an increase in dependence on income, it also may indicate greater opportunities for income activities. Therefore the number of income earning activities is not sufficient by itself to determine how income earning activities have changed. The second measure used is the percentage of households selling animals. With animal husbandry comes a source of income, and changes in this source of income are dependent on other factors such as access to land and the number of animals owned. In relation, the third measure is the percentage of households selling crops. Traditionally Lenca peasants in the Celaque Mountains periodically travel down-slope to the Sunday Lenca market at Belen Gualcho to sell and exchange surplus agricultural produce from the mountains with those from the lowlands. Relocation may alter this by changing the varieties and amounts of crops produced and providing access to additional markets. The fourth measure of income earning activities is the number of family members working on coffee fincas. Lenca peasants work seasonally during the harvest on coffee fincas, and this measure will address changes in the use of family labor to provide income. The fifth measure is related to the fourth and consists of the number of weeks working on coffee fincas per year. Changes in the amount of time devoted to working on coffee fincas during the harvest will affect the amount of income generated and alter the time allocated to other activities. These five measures will be used to determine the change in income earning activities building upon the previous two research questions.
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II. Methodology A. Data Acquisition During a Tinker Foundation funded preliminary field research trip in June and July of 2002 the author, accompanied by staff members of Proyecto Celaque, was able to visit the two relocated communities of Los Horcones and Otolaca. During these visits the author was introduced to community members and preliminary interviews took place. Further, a 1998 data set of social and economic attributes of the relocated households prior to relocation was obtained from the non-governmental organization Proyecto Celaque (Oviedo 1999). Afterwards a structured interview questionnaire was developed to collect quantitative data for analysis (Appendix II). The research project was cleared by the Indiana University Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects in April of 2004 (Appendix III). The main phase of field research was carried out in Honduras between May and August of 2004 with the support of two local guides. Florentino Mejia, a former guardarecurso and local resident, served as a travel guide and arranged transportation by mule to Otolaca, Los Horcones, and aldeas within Celaque National Park. Walter Muerja, a bilingual guide, assisted in all of the interviews and survey data collection. During a brief visit to the settlements in May of 2004 with the two guides, the author was re-introduced to community leaders during which the purpose of the study was explained. Upon receiving approval from the community leaders, the author performed a community walk with introductions to other community members and a mapping of the settlement patterns with housing counts. Subsequent visits were then scheduled for the survey and interview phases of the research.
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The extended data gathering visit to Los Horcones occurred in the first two weeks of June 2004. For Otolaca the extended trip followed during the final two weeks of June and the first two weeks of July 2004. For Los Horcones all 16 of the relocated households were surveyed and interviewed while in Otolaca 33 of the 45 relocated households were surveyed and interviewed. All 17 of the households relocated to Otolaca who were originally from Poza Verde were surveyed and interviewed. Of the 28 relocated households in Otolaca originally from El Cedro, 16 were interviewed and surveyed, with no refusals. 14 of these were chosen by selecting every other house from the community map and 2 were included as they were recognized as leading households in the community and requested not to be excluded from the sample. In all 49 of the 61 relocated households were surveyed. Interviews and surveys were conducted by the author and guide David Ortega in the home of the respondents. The meetings lasted from thirty minutes to three hours in length with the male or female head of the household and other members of the household present. After an introduction, the head of the household was read and given an Informed Consent Statement outlining the study’s purpose, the voluntary nature of their participation, and steps taken to ensure confidentiality (Appendix III). Once consent was granted, the head of the household was asked questions from the structured questionnaire to collect comparable quantified data on of social and economic factors and how they changed from before relocation to present (Appendix II). After the questionnaire was completed, open ended questions were asked about the experience of Hurricane Mitch, the process of relocation, and what they viewed as their major problems and prospects.
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During the last week of July the author traveled with the two guides to the populated highland aldeas of La Chimis and Rio Negro, as well as the abandoned sites of Poza Verde and El Cedro. Attempts to conduct surveys and interviews were met with widespread refusal. Of the 30 households approached, only 10 consented, with reluctance and refusal to answer many of the questions regarding land ownership and agricultural activities. Reasons given included fear of use of the information by authorities who would relocate the households or collect land taxes. The high refusal rate, incomplete information, and questionable accuracy of information prompted the decision to exclude this data from the dissertation.
B. Data Analysis The information gathered from the questionnaire surveys allows for a time series analysis of the effect relocation has had on households in terms of access to land, land use intensity, and income earning activities (Cernea 1991; Hough 1991; Scudder 1991; Machlis and Soukup 1997). Statistical normality cannot be assumed since the dataset is relatively small with an overall number of households of 49 and, when divided for crosscomparison, 16 for Los Horcones and 33 for Otolaca. Further, tests of normality indicated non-normal distributions, particularly the post-relocation data where limited options of the relocation process created skewness and clustering of values. Hence, nonparametric statistical tests were chosen. While the dataset is relatively small, confidence in the responses is high. Overall, 49 of the 61 relocated households were surveyed. In Otolaca, 33 of the 45 relocated households were included. For Los Horcones all 16 of the relocated households were
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surveyed, which technically represents a census of the population as defined by relocated households in Los Horcones. In order to maintain consistency and clarity in cross-group comparisons the subset of Los Horcones will be treated as a sample with statistical testing performed to determine the statistical strength and confidence in the observed changes. Data analysis began with descriptive statistical measures to find means, modes, medians, and variance with histograms graphically expressing distribution. Comparison of dependent variables to determine significant changes before and after relocation was performed with a Wilcoxen signed rank test, a nonparametric statistical technique which applies when normality in the distribution of data is not met. Correlations between variables are computed with a Spearman’s rho test, which ranks values and tests for the proportion of variability accounted for. Initially the relocated households are treated as one population, with statistical testing performed to determine the significance of changes in the variables over time. Then the relocated households are divided into two subgroups based on the geographical location of the relocated settlements which represent different relocation processes, resulting in a subgroup of households relocated to Otolaca and subgroup of households relocated to Los Horcones. Statistical comparison of the changes within the two subgroups is undertaken with the same measures used for the entire relocated population.
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Chapter 6 Quantitative Analysis I. How Has Relocation Affected Access to Land? A. Land Ownership Prior to the 1998 relocation, the surveyed households owned a mean of 4.16 ha in the highland settlements, with a median value of 2.80 ha. The discrepancy between the mean and median values is due to a significant positive skew created by one household that owned 17.50 ha. After the 1998 relocation, the amount of land owned by the relocated households decreased to a mean of 1.24 ha, with a median value of 1.40 ha (see Table 2). In this case, the median value is slightly higher than the mean due to the clustering of households reporting less than 1.00 ha. The statistically significant difference between pre-relocation land ownership and post-relocation land ownership supports a conclusion that relocation has coincided with a decline in land ownership. Additionally, the distribution of land ownership became more equitable. Prior to relocation, the amount of land owned varied from a minimum of 0.70 ha to a maximum of 17.50 ha. Afterwards, the range was smaller with a minimum of 0.35 ha and a maximum of only 4.20 ha, with 87.8% of households reporting owning 1.75 ha of land or less. The clustered distribution of households with 1.75 ha or less exhibits the process whereby relocation has constrained land ownership (see Figure 3). The decrease in amount of land owned, and the more clustered distribution of land ownership, occurred for both the households of Otolaca and Los Horcones. In Otolaca the 33 surveyed households reported a statistically significant drop in land ownership from 3.64 ha to 1.12 ha with the range changing from a minimum of 0.70 ha and a
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maximum of 10.50 ha before relocation to a minimum of 0.35 ha and a maximum of 2.10 ha after relocation. In Los Horcones the 16 surveyed households reported a similar decrease in the amount of land owned from an average of 5.25 ha to 1.48 ha with the range contracting from a minimum of 0.70 ha and a maximum of 17.50 ha to a minimum of 0.35 ha and a maximum of 4.20 ha. The analysis of the data supports the conclusion that there was a significant loss of land ownership for the households, whether combined as a single sample of all relocated households or separated into the sub-groups of Otolaca and Los Horcones. Further, the distribution of land holding sizes became clustered around fewer and lower values than previously experienced. TABLE 2: Change in Mean Amount of Hectares of Land Owned
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 3.64 1.12 2.52 -4.793 0.000
Los Horcones Households 5.25 1.48 3.77 -2.928 0.003
All Households 4.16 1.24 2.92 -5.503 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
B. Number of Land Parcels The mean number of land parcels owned by households prior to relocation was 1.02, with only a single household reporting a second parcel. For all surveyed households one parcel of land surrounded their dwellings prior to relocation, which is consistent with past settlement patterns reported for Lenca aldeas (West 1958). After relocation the average number of parcels climbed to 1.63 with 59.2% of households reporting 2 parcels and 2%, or one household, reporting 3 parcels.
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The results for both Otolaca and Los Horcones follow the pattern of increased land parcelization. In Otolaca 39.4% of the households reported 1 land parcel while 60.6% of the households reported 2 land parcels. For Los Horcones the number of household parcels increased similarly from an average of 1.06 parcels before relocation to 1.69 parcels after relocation, with 37.5% of the households reported having 1 parcel, 56.3% households had 2 parcels, and 6.3%, or one household, with 3 parcels. In Otolaca farm land was donated by the Catholic Church in Gracias and consisted of a large parcel of land subdivided equally into a 0.70 ha plot per household. However, 20 households (60.6%) in Otolaca were able to cooperatively purchase an additional parcel of land which was subdivided among them. In Los Horcones promises of assistance to acquire land by the NGO Proyecto Celaque were not kept and households individually purchased land parcels. The data on parcels supports a conclusion that there was a significant increase in the number of land parcels. The change in number of land parcels was similar for both relocated communities as well. The increase in parcels not only creates an additional hardship in terms of time required to reach separate land areas, but also represents a need to search more widely for available land in a more highly settled region. TABLE 3: Change in Mean Number of Separate Land Parcels Owned
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 1.00 1.61 0.61 -4.472 0.000
Los Horcones Households 1.06 1.69 0.63 -2.887 0.004
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
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Total Households 1.02 1.63 0.61 -5.503 0.000
C. Soil Quality Perception Households were asked their perceptions on the difference in soil quality between lands in the highland settlements and those in the relocated settlements on a graduated scale. Results were: 0% claimed the soils were much better, 2% reported soils were better, 8.2% reported the soils were the same, 65.3% stated the soils were worse, and 24.5% reported the soils were much worse. In Otalaca 15.2% reported soils were much worse, 69.7% reported the soils were worse, 12.1% reported the soils were the same, 3.0% reported the soils were better, and 0% reported soils being much better. In Los Horcones 43.8% reported soils much worse and 56.3% reported the soils were worse. The results support a conclusion that the perception of soil quality is worse in the relocated farm lands. While perceptual, the results do reflect the needs of the households in terms of crop choices and the necessity of further soil inputs to maintain soil fertility and crop yields. The results are also supported by soil classifications in the differing areas. The highlands of the Celaque Mountains, near the cloud-forest, are dominated by weathered red clay loam soils of the Milile series whereas the pine-covered lowlands are dominated by shallow acidic soils with a relatively infertile rhyolite base material of the Ojojona series (West 1958; Portillo 1997; AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). As discussed in the following research questions, the change in soil characteristics has repercussions for crop choice and soil inputs. TABLE 4: Perception of Change in Soil Quality
Total Otolaca Los Horcones
Much Worse 24.5% 15.2% 43.8%
Worse
The Same
Better
65.3% 69.7% 56.3%
8.2% 12.1% 0.0%
2.0% 3.0% 0.0%
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Much Better 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
FIGURE 3: Land Ownership Histograms (bin sizes in 0.7 ha increments) Pre-Relocation Land Owned- All
Post-Relocation Land Owned - All
22
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Households
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Post-Relocation Land Owned in Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Land Owned for Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Land Owned in Los Horcones
Post-Relocation Land Owned in Los Horcones
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108
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D. Summation The results of the analysis support the conclusion that relocation has decreased access to land. Not only did the absolute amount of land owned shrink, but increased number of parcels created a further hardship in terms of additional time and energy required for travel. The perceived quality of land also declined, which is supported by the change in soil types. While a decrease in access to land has been established, the question of whether or not this has created land scarcity must be tied to the following research questions on the effects of decreased land access on land use intensity and income-earning activities.
II. How Has Access to Land Affected Land Use Intensity? With access to land curtailed, the question as to whether or not this represents land scarcity is addressed by analyzing the changes in land use intensity. The measures used to answer this question are percentage of land owned under cultivation, the number of animals owned (cows, horses, and mules), agrodiversity (the number of crop varieties grown), and the percentage of households using purchased fertilizer and biocides. Again, addressing this question will consist of a comparison of these measures before relocation and after relocation for the overall population of relocated households followed by a subgroup comparison of the households relocated to Otolaca and Los Horcones.
A. Percent of Land Owned Under Cultivation The percentage of land owned under cultivation increased significantly from a mean of 61.1% (and a median of 66.7%) before relocation to 88.3% (and a median of
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100%) after relocation. In addition to the increase in the relative amount of land under cultivation, the absolute amount of land under cultivation fell from an average of 2.12 ha prior to relocation to 1.10 ha of land under cultivation in the relocated settlements. The changes in percentage of land under cultivation do vary between Otolaca and Los Horcones, although the overall trends are similar. The average percentage of land under cultivation in Otolaca prior to relocation was 64.4%, which rose to 92.9% after relocation. In absolute terms, the average area of land under cultivation fell from 2.05 ha of land prior to relocation to 1.19 ha of land after relocation, a 42.0% reduction. In Los Horcones, the average percentage of land under cultivation rose from 54.4% to 78.8%. The reduction in the average amount of land cultivated from 2.30 ha to 0.96 ha represents a 58.3% loss, a more drastic decline than in Otolaca. The decrease in land ownership curtailed the area available for growing crops to such a degree that the households cultivated a greater percentage of their land. Further, the absolute amount of land under cultivation fell sharply. The perceived decrease in soil quality amplifies these pressures. Hence, the results support the conclusion that the decrease in land ownership after relocation has created conditions of land scarcity. TABLE 5: Change in Percent of Land Cultivated
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation
Otolaca Households 64.4% 92.9%
Los Horcones Households 54.4% 78.5%
Total Households 66.7% 88.3%
B. Number of Animals Owned The average number of animals, consisting of cows, horses, and mules, dropped from 2.53 prior to relocation to 0.35 animals after relocation for all relocated households.
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Further, the range of animal ownership fell from a pre-relocation maximum of 12 and minimum of 0 to a post-relocation maximum of 3 and minimum of 0. While 49.0% of households prior to relocation reporting owning at least 1 animal, the post-relocation percentage fell to 19.4% of households, all of which had previously owned animals. The change in animal ownership between the two settlements exhibits the same trend. The average number of animals owned for the households in Otolaca decreased from 2.58 to 0.36. For Los Horcones the average number of animals owned fell from 2.44 to 0.31. In terms of animal owning households, 48.5% of households in Otolaca and 50.0% of households in Los Horcones owned at least one animal prior to relocation. After relocation the percentage fell to 24.2% for Otolaca and 12.5% for Los Horcones. TABLE 6: Change in Mean Number of Animals Owned
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 2.58 0.36 2.22 -3.563 0.000
Los Horcones Households 2.44 0.31 2.13 -2.499 0.012
All Households 2.53 0.35 2.18 -4.344 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
C. Agrodiversity The average number of crop varieties grown by households prior to relocation was 6.45, with a median of 6.00 and a range of 3 to 11. After relocation this number dropped to 4.04, with a median of 4.00 and a range of 2 to 8. For Otolaca the mean number of crop varieties decreased from 6.58 crops varieties prior to relocation to 4.33 after relocation. Further, the minimum and maximum changed from a pre-relocation range of 3 and 11 to a post-relocation range of 2 and 7. In Los Horcones the average
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dropped from 6.19 to 3.44. The distribution also changed from a pre-relocation minimum of 3 and maximum of 11 to a post-relocation minimum of 2 and maximum of 8. The decrease in land area and amount of land under cultivation occurred at the same time as the decrease in the number of crop varieties grown. In addition, the change in climatic conditions and soil characteristics also played a part in the changes reported, as will be elaborated in the following chapter. Together with the decrease in animal husbandry the focus on a smaller range of crop varieties indicates a greater emphasis on staple crops and the intensification, as well as specialization, of land use. TABLE 7: Change in Mean Number of Crop Varieties Grown
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 6.58 4.33 2.24 -4.645 0.000
Los Horcones Households 6.19 3.44 2.75 -3.260 0.001
All Households 6.45 4.04 2.41 -5.594 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
D. Purchased Fertilizer Use The percent of all relocated households that used purchased fertilizer increased from 61.2% prior to relocation to 98.0% after relocation. When the households that had used purchased fertilizer prior to relocation were asked on a graduated scale to compare their the amount of purchased fertilizers used after relocation to the amount used before relocation, 37.5% reported more and 62.5% reported much more. The results indicate both an increase in households using purchased fertilizer and an increase in the amounts of purchased fertilizer used. Comparing the two relocated communities uncovers a difference in the use of purchased fertilizer. Prior to relocation, 78.8% of the Otolaca
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households used purchased fertilizers, in comparison to only 25% of the households in Los Horcones. After relocation the results were essentially the same with all households reporting the use of purchased fertilizer with one exception in Los Horcones. The increase in purchased fertilizer use, both in terms of the number of households using and the amounts used, coincided with the absolute loss of land owned, the increased percentage of land under cultivation and shortening of the fallow system, decreased soil quality, and the decrease in number of crop varieties grown. TABLE 8: Change in Percent of Households Using Purchased Fertilizer
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation
Otolaca Households 78.8% 100.0%
Los Horcones Households 25.0% 93.8%
All Households 61.2% 98.0%
E. Biocide Use The use of biocides, entailing herbicides and pesticides, was nonexistent prior to relocation in the highland aldeas. In the relocated settlements the use of biocides was reported by 36.7% of the households. Both relocated communities reported essentially the same pattern with the 36.4% of the households in Otolaca and 37.5% of the households in Los Horcones reporting biocide usage. The use of biocides not only increased, but represents the adoption of a new agricultural strategy by the relocated households. TABLE 9: Change in Percent of Households Using Biocides
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation
Otolaca Households 0.0% 36.4%
Los Horcones Households 0.0% 37.5%
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All Households 0.0% 36.7%
F. Summation The decrease in access to land in combination with the increase in the intensity of land use represents the onset of land scarcity. In this case there has been an increase in the percentage of land under cultivation and an absolute decrease in amount of land under cultivation. As a result, there has been a shortening of the fallow cycle which leaves little land for animal husbandry. Agrodiversity has declined as well, as households focus more on basic staples and adjust to new soil and climate conditions. Combined with the increase in fertilizer and biocide usage, the results reflect that curtailed access to land has led to intensification of land use, illustrating conditions of land scarcity among the relocated households.
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FIGURE 4: Percent of Land Cultivated Histograms Pre-Relocation Percentage of Land Cultivated
Post-Relocation Percentage of Land Cultivated 36
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Post-Relocation Percentage of Land Cultivated for Otolaca
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Percent Cultivated
Pre-Relocation Percentage of Land Cultivated for Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Percentage of Land Cultivated for Los Horcones 28
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FIGURE 5: Animal Ownership Histograms Pre-Relocation Animal Ownership Post-Relocation Animal Ownership
40 40 36 36 32
Households
Households
32 28 24 20 16
28 24 20 16
12 12 8 8 4
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Post-Relocation Animal Ownership for Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Animal Ownership for Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Animal Ownership for Los Horcones
Post-Relocation Animal Ownership for Los Horcones
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III. How Has Land Use Intensity Affected Income Earning Activities The third research question builds upon the first two, and asks how the creation of land scarcity and intensification of land use has changed income earning activities. The measures employed to answer this question are the number of income earning activities per household, the percentage of households selling animals, the percentage of households selling crops, the number of household members working on coffee fincas, and the number of weeks per year the household members spend working on coffee fincas. The analysis will consist of a comparison of these measures before relocation and after relocation for the overall population of relocated households followed by a subgroup comparison of the households relocated to Otolaca and Los Horcones.
A. Number of Income Earning Activities The mean number of income earning activities for members of a household prior to relocation was 2.25. 22.4% reported 1 income earning activity, 49.0% with 2, 16.3% with 3, 6.1% with 4, and 6.1% with 5. The average number of income earning activities for households after relocation decreased to 1.43. 69.4%, reported only 1 income earning activity, 20.4% reported 2, 8.2% reported 3, and 2.0% reported 4. Comparing the two relocated communities uncovers differences. The average number of income earning activities for the households in Otolaca decreased from 2.58 prior to relocation to 1.64 after relocation. For Los Horcones, the number of income earning activities decreased from a pre-relocation average of 1.56 to 1.00 post-relocation, with all households reporting work on coffee fincas as the sole income earning activity.
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While the statistically significant declines in income earning activities may initially imply less of a reliance on income earning activities, it does not measure the change in the types of income earning activities or the amount of time and effort devoted to each. The following measures address such changes. TABLE 10: Change in Mean Number of Income Earning Activities
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 2.58 1.64 0.94 -4.039 0.000
Los Horcones Households 1.56 1.00 0.56 -2.714 0.007
All Households 2.25 1.43 0.82 -4.829 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
B. Market Activity for Selling Animals The percentage of animal owning households that sold animals at market decreased from 50% in the pre-relocated communities to 0% post-relocation, indicating a complete collapse of this income earning activity. In Otolaca 56.3% of the animal owning households sold animals prior to relocation while the percentage of 37.5% for the households relocated to Los Horcones. In relation to the decrease in animal owning households, this source of income has completely disappeared. TABLE 11: Change in Percent of Households Selling Animals at Market
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation
Otolaca Households* 56.3% 0.0%
Los Horcones Households* 37.5% 0.0%
* Represents only animal owning households
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All Households* 50.0% 0.0%
C. Market Activity for Selling Crops The percent of households that sold crops at market decreased from 71.4% prior to relocation to 2% after relocation. While post relocation households involved in the sale of crops dropped to 1 for Otolaca and 0 for the household in Los Horcones, the prerelocation responses of selling crops at market differ considerably. In Otolaca 90.9% of the households reported selling crops at market prior to relocation, in comparison to only 31.5% of the households in Los Horcones. The decline in market activity for selling crops represents a loss of wage income and coincided with the creation of land scarcity. With less land to grow crops, and the decrease in the number of crop varieties grown, the production is consumed completely by the household with no surplus to sell at market. TABLE 12: Change in Percent of Households Selling Produce at Market
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation
Otolaca Households 90.9% 3.0%
Los Horcones Households 31.5% 0.0%
All Households 71.4% 2.0%
D. Number of Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas Prior to relocation the mean number of household members working on coffee fincas, which consisted primarily of picking coffee during harvest, was 1.88 with a median of 1.00. After relocation, the average number of household members traveling to work on the coffee fincas rose to 4.71, with a median value of 4.00. The changes for Otolaca and Los Horcones are strikingly similar, with the average number of household members working in coffee rising from an identical pre-relocation value of 1.88 for both settlements to 4.64 in Otolaca and 4.88 in Los Horcones.
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Employment in coffee production was transformed from an activity of a single, or a few, members of the household to the dominant form of wage earning activity including an increased number of household members. A telling statistic is 44.9% of households reported the entire household seasonally traveling to the coffee fincas to work. The results support the argument that land scarcity and land use intensification have increased the necessity of earning income, particularly through wage labor. TABLE 13: Change in Mean Number of Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 1.88 4.64 2.76 -4.045 0.000
Los Horcones Households 1.88 4.88 3.00 -2.814 0.005
All Households 1.88 4.71 2.83 -4.879 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
E. Number of Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas In addition to the number of household members engaged in coffee finca work, the amount of time engaged in the work increased substantially. The average time period household members spent working on the coffee fincas increased from a pre-relocation average of 2.33 weeks per year, with a median of 2 weeks, to an average of 7.12 weeks per year post-relocation, with a median of 8 weeks. Again, both settlements reported the same trend, although the households of Los Horcones increased their time engaged in coffee work to a greater degree than those in Otolaca. The average number of weeks picking coffee for the households of Otolaca rose from 2.30 to 6.76, while in Los Horcones the average rose from 2.38 weeks to 7.88 weeks. The increase in the number
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of weeks engaged in work on coffee fincas, in conjunction with the increase in the number of household members involved and the loss of market activities, represent a greater emphasis on wage labor to provide income. The results further support the conclusion that land scarcity and land use intensification have coincided with an increasing reliance on wage earnings. TABLE 14: Change in Mean Number of Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas
Pre-Relocation Post-Relocation Difference Z Score Significance Level*
Otolaca Households 2.30 6.76 4.46 -4.963 0.000
Los Horcones Households 2.38 7.88 5.50 -3.180 0.001
All Households 2.33 7.12 4.79 -5.837 0.000
* Two-tailed Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test
F. Summation The conditions of land scarcity and the increased costs of land use intensification occurred as the households increasingly relied on wage labor activities for income to provide subsistence. Prior market activities related to the sale of crops and animals have virtually ceased. In order to earn income, the households have increased their reliance on wage labor to provide income. Finally, all forms of craft production previously engaged in have ceased as wage labor has become the dominant livelihood strategy to compensate for land scarcity.
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FIGURE 6: Household Members Working on Coffee Fincas Histograms Post-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee
Pre-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee 36
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Households
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Post-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee for Otolaca
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Pre-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee for Otolaca
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Post-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee for Los Horcones
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Pre-Relocation Annual Number of Household Members Working in Coffee for Los Horcones
Households
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Household Members
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Household Members
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FIGURE 7: Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas Histograms Pre-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee
Post-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee 30
27
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Households
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Post-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee for Otolaca
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Households
Households
Pre-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee for Otolaca
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Post-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee for Los Horcones
Pre-Relocation Annual Weeks Working in Coffee for Los Horcones 7
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Households
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IV. Conclusion This results chapter was based on quantitative data gathered from structured interviews employing an identical set of questions. The data were analyzed at the aggregate scales of total relocated households and the two relocated settlement subgroups. The results demonstrated the impact that relocation from the highlands of Celaque National Park to the lowlands outside of the park’s boundaries has had on the livelihoods of the affected households, particularly in the alterations to the ecological relations of production centered on access to adequate quantity and quality of land. Relocation decreased the households’ access to land to such a degree that the intensity of land use was increased. Together, lost land and intensified land use represent the creation of land scarcity. Further, households increased their participation in wage labor activities in order to meet their subsistence needs. In effect, and elaborated upon in Chapter 7, the disruption of the ecological relations of production required alterations in livelihood strategies.
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Chapter 7 Empirical Generalizations and Theoretical Implications I. Introduction The previous chapter presented the results of the quantitative analysis to determine the changes relocation has had on access to land, land use intensity, and income earning activities. In this chapter qualitative data gathered from non-structured interviews, informal discussions, community observations, and secondary data sources are included to expand understanding and explanation. Further, the empirical results will be situated within the theoretical framework of a Central American peasant ecology addressing how the changes in the ecological relations of production brought on by relocation has altered the social relations of production for the Lenca peasantry. This will result in a more comprehensive understanding of how relocation has affected livelihoods and uncover adaptations by actors to create opportunities for themselves.
II. Empirical Generalizations A. Contrasting Experiences in to Access to Land Quantitative analysis showed that relocation led to a decrease in the ownership of land, increased number of land parcels, and a perceived decrease in soil quality. However, the contrasting experience of relocation for the two relocated settlements has resulted in different outcomes in terms of land access. To capture the differences this section will be divided into three parts; the resettlement experience for Otolaca, the experience for Los Horcones, and a conclusion addressing the parallels and divergences the alternate resettlement processes have created.
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1. Otolaca and Structurally Imposed Resettlement Otolaca, situated on a road-accessible site on the eastern edge of the park’s boundary, is comprised of 45 households originally from the highland aldeas of El Cedro and Poza Verde. The aldeas, located an approximate full day walk from Otolaca, were completely destroyed and abandoned after Hurricane Mitch. Prior to relocation, the households in Otolaca each had owned 1 land parcel surrounding their dwellings with an average size of 3.64 ha, indicating they were land poor in relation to the pre-relocation average of 5.25 ha for those relocated to Los Horcones. After the destruction of El Cedro and Poza Verde, the residents were offered assistance conditioned upon relocation outside of the boundaries of Celaque National Park. Assistance consisted of identical housing built by the NGO Amigos de las Americás on land donated by the municipality of San Manuel de Colohete. Farm land, located a three hour walk northeast of Otolaca near the city of Gracias, was donated by the Catholic Church of Gracias and consisted of a land parcel subdivided equally into a 0.70 ha plot for each of the households, defined by co-residence prior to relocation. From the original land grant provided for the households several changes in land ownership occurred. Of the 33 households surveyed, 6 had only 0.35 ha. These 6 households all had co-residing elder sons with families prior to relocation from Poza Verde. During relocation the sons were given their own house, but the 0.70 ha plot was divided into 0.35 ha each for the 3 parent households and the 3 son households. 7 of households continued to farm the original 0.70 ha provided for them. Meanwhile, 20 of the households, representing 60.6% of all households in Otolaca, cooperatively purchased an additional parcel of land from the municipality of
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San Manuel de Colohete located a 1 hour walk to the south of Otolaca and subdivided it according to the contribution of each household. 17 of the 20 surveyed households doubled their land holdings to 1.40 ha while 3 households tripled their land holdings to 2.10 ha. Of the 20 households able to obtain additional land, 16 were originally from the aldea of El Cedro and 4 were from Poza Verde. Additionally, all of the 13 households that had either 0.35 ha or 0.70 ha were originally from the aldea of Poza Verde. This indicates a difference within the relocated community of Otolaca based primarily on original aldea ties. The community division can be seen in the settlement pattern of Otolaca where the households from Poza Verde are physically separated 100 meters apart from the El Cedro households. In addition to the differences in land acquisition, the resettlement created an increase in time required to travel to the disparate land parcels. Since the distance to land parcels in the highland aldeas was essentially 0 hours due to the adjacent location of lands to dwellings, the relocated land parcels located a 1 hour and 3 hour walk from their dwellings created an additional hardship for the households. Otolaca is located in an area where the majority of surrounding lands are owned by ladino farmers, necessitating a wider search for available land. The households of Otolaca also reported a perceived decrease in soil quality in the relocated farm lands. However, while 84.9% of the households reported the soils were worse or much worse, 12.1% claimed the soils were of the same quality and 3.0%, or 1 household, claimed the soils were better. The households reporting the soils were better or the same qualified the responses by including climatic factors. Since the lower elevation areas have less rainfall and higher temperatures, corn can be produced in
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greater abundance. An example given was the ability to harvest two crops of corn per year on the relocated lands as opposed to only one crop per year in the highlands. However, the crops required greater amounts of inputs such as fertilizer in order to achieve the higher production.
2. Los Horcones and Self-Determined Resettlement Located on the southwestern border of Celaque National Park an approximate 45 minute to 2 hour walk from their previous lands, Los Horcones consists of a mix of households from the highland aldeas of Poza Verde, Rio Negro, and La Chimis. The damage of Hurricane Mitch was less destructive for some of the relatively land-rich households relocated to Los Horcones. While only 3 households in Los Horcones came from the completely destroyed and abandoned aldea of Poza Verde, the other 13 households came from Rio Negro and La Chimis, two aldeas that received less damage and where the majority of the households remained to rebuild on their own. Hence, the absolute destitution of post-Hurricane Mitch for the households relocated to Otolaca was not felt as deeply for the households relocated to Los Horcones. Prior to Hurricane Mitch one household had purchased a parcel of land a 45 minute walk away from the aldea of Poza Verde in Los Horcones. Since clearance of new lands within Celaque National Park was illegal, the single household had decided to purchase the land parcel just outside of the park’s boundary to expand the varieties of crops grown and to utilize sons of working age. After Hurricane Mitch, and with the promise of assistance in purchasing land and building houses by the NGO Proyecto
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Celaque, the ‘pioneer’ household convinced additional households to relocate to Los Horcones in lieu of participating in the resettlement project in Otolaca. However, the assistance provided to the households which relocated to Los Horcones did not meet expectations as assistance in land purchases was not received and housing assistance consisted of a single load of roofing timbers and tiles delivered to a village two hours away on a path passable only by foot or mule. The households’ dissatisfaction in the amount of assistance provided was corroborated by discussions with employees of Proyecto Celaque and a report by the NGO claiming the logistics of bringing materials to Los Horcones as impractical (Oviedo 1999). In lieu of outside assistance the households in Los Horcones individually purchased land parcels and built houses using the sales of their animals, increased wage labor on coffee fincas, and personal loans within the relocated community to finance the purchases. Hence, Los Horcones represents a self-determined resettlement effort which received little assistance by governmental and non-governmental organizations. The result has been differentiation in land ownership in Los Horcones as opposed to the more egalitarian pattern in Otolaca. The households of Los Horcones lost an average of 3.77 ha, as compared to only 2.52 ha for the households of Otolaca. However, prior to relocation the households of Los Horcones were relatively land rich in comparison with the households relocated to Otolaca. After relocation the average land owning in Los Horcones was again higher, with 1.48 ha to Otolaca’s 1.12 ha, but the range of land holdings was also greater, from a minimum of 0.35 ha to a maximum of 4.20 ha. In Otolaca the initial land grant and subsequent land purchase by a select group created a more even distribution of land holdings. In Los Horcones, where households
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had to independently acquire land, the result was a greater differentiation in the size of land holdings. The perception of soil quality in Los Horcones exhibits the same trend of decreased quality as found in Otolaca. However, whereas a few households in Otolaca reported soil quality as being the same or better, none did so in Los Horcones where 56.3% reported the soils were worse and 43.8% reported soils were much worse. The overwhelming perception of decreased soil quality is reflected in the landscape and is a result of its geographic location. Los Horcones is located in the rainshadow of the Celaque Mountains on steep, south facing slopes with increased solar exposure. The result of the warmer and drier climatic conditions in this location has resulted in a rocky semi-arid region of degraded oak-scrub savannah woodland that has largely been cleared for hillside agriculture. While results indicate the access to land for the households of Los Horcones was constrained to a greater degree than those in Otolaca, interviews and informal discussions in Los Horcones uncovered an advantage for the independent resettlement process in closer proximity to their former lands. Located a 45 minute walk from the highland aldea of Poza Verde, a 1.5 hour walk to Rio Negro, and a two hour walk to La Chimis, three of the households in Los Horcones reported continuous cultivation of their previous land holdings within Celaque National Park. While park regulations outlaw clearance of new lands, all lands previously and continuously cleared can be cultivated. If allowed to reforest, effective control of the lands return to the Honduran forestry agency COHDEFOR. The three households cultivating previously held lands utilized large family size to keep the land cleared and planted, maintaining land-use claims. These
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households have adapted to the relocation process and used the regulations of national forest policy to expand their land holdings in differing ecological zones. These three households shared basic demographic characteristics. While the average age of the head of household for Los Horcones was 45.1 years, the age of the head of households for these three were 62, 60, and 55. They also had larger households than the average of 7.7, with 12, 10, and 9 members. Further, these large households reported 4 adults, higher than the average of 2.9. In comparison, three other households reported a desire to work their previous land holdings but were unable to do so, and in turn their previous lands had begun to reforest and had reverted to state control. These 3 households had a younger age for the head of household (31, 32, and 32), smaller family size (5, 6, and 7), and only 2 adults per household. The post-relocation access to land within Celaque National Park was not included in the data due to respondent reluctance to divulge details. However, the interviews indicate an advantageous adaptation whereby households were able to obtain additional lands in new ecological zones and expand both production and agrodiversity based on availability of family labor. During informal discussions it was reported that several residents of Los Horcones had broken the agreement with Proyecto Celaque and had returned to farm and live in the highland aldeas within Celaque National Park. When directly asked, all but 1 of the households stated the desire to do the same. The respondents believed breaking the agreement with Proyecto Celaque not to return was justified since Proyecto Celaque had been delinquent in promised assistance in the relocation process.
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3. Parallels and Divergence in Resettlement Experiences The relocation of households to Otolaca and Los Horcones exhibits broad parallels based on the overall relocation process. However, the alternate resettlement experiences also resulted in divergent outcomes for access to land, with important consequences for the peasant ecology of the relocated Lenca households. The main determinants of these divergences are the structurally planned resettlement of Otolaca versus the self-guided resettlement of Los Horcones and their geographical situations. The relocated households of Otolaca, due to their desperate situation after Hurricane Mitch, were coerced into accepting resettlement planned by outside interests; namely international NGOs, the Catholic Church, and government agencies. As a result there was little community decision making in the process of site selection for farming land or housing. Without community participation, outside interests determined the location of the settlement geographically separated from their previous aldeas. Through communal action a select group of households was able to purchase additional lands. In Los Horcones the resettlement process was self-guided whereby households determined the site and pattern of their settlement, and as a result chose a location in geographical proximity to their previous aldeas. While access to land was constrained in a similar fashion to Otolaca, the situation of the settlement allowed a group of households to access their previously held lands within Celaque National Park due to the laws governing forested lands in Honduras. Hence, in both Otolaca and Los Horcones the households were able to work within the rules of the formal land market and national land policies to acquire land in an effort to ease land scarcity.
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However, the difference between the planned resettlement of Otolaca and the selfguided resettlement for Los Horcones exhibits an interesting contrast. In Otolaca the housing pattern as determined by outside interests resulted in identical housing in a grid oriented pattern, with housing in close proximity. In Los Horcones where promised outside assistance proved to be lacking, the households built their own dwellings in a dispersed pattern, more akin to the pattern observed in their previous aldeas. When asked whether their house in the relocated settlement was better than their house in the highland aldeas, 72.7% of households in Otolaca responded with worse or much worse while 68.8% of households in Los Horcones reported their housing to be better or much better. The greater satisfaction in housing in Los Horcones can be explained by their self-determination. While dismayed with the lack of outside assistance, it allowed for the households to build their dwellings tailored to their own needs and resulted in greater pride and satisfaction as opposed to the identical gridoriented block housing imposed upon the households of Otolaca. TABLE 15: Perception of Change in Housing Quality
Otolaca Los Horcones
Much Worse 24.2% 0%
Worse
The Same
Better
48.5% 12.5%
3.0% 18.8%
24.2% 50.0%
Much Better 0.0% 18.8%
Relocation detrimentally affected all households, but they have not been merely passive responders to these changes. Instead, they have found spaces in which to mitigate the negative effects to some degree in terms of land access. In Otolaca a select group of households have found ways to acquire more land through communal action in
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the face of structural limitations. In Los Horcones several households have accessed previous lands due to the geographical proximity that self-determination has allowed.
B. Land Use Intensity The loss of access to land resulted in an intensification of land use as measured by percent and absolute amount of land under cultivation, a decrease in animal husbandry and agrodiversity, and an increase in the use of fertilizers and biocides. The increase in the percentage of land under cultivation, coupled with an absolute decline in land under cultivation, is significant in that traditional land fallow systems have been disrupted. A decrease in the ownership of land with a perceived decrease in soil quality has coincided with greater percentage of land cultivated, supporting the conclusion that the creation of land scarcity has led to increased land use intensity as fallow systems have been reduced or eliminated. Prior to relocation, the households in Otolaca had less absolute amounts of land than those relocated to Los Horcones, on average 3.64 ha compared to 5.25 ha. Less land created the need to cultivate a higher percentage of land, 64.4% in comparison to the 54.4% cultivated for the households that were relocated to Los Horcones. After relocation the households in Otolaca were again relatively land poor and cultivated a higher percentage of their newly acquired lands, 92.9% in comparison to 78.5% for Los Horcones. However, in absolute terms, the households of Otolaca cultivated a slightly larger amount of land on average than the households in Los Horcones. Reports of cultivation of previously owned lands in the highland aldeas by households in Los
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Horcones, while not present in the data, may indicate the sharing of labor and time to cultivate both areas and leaving less land cultivated in the relocated settlement. The decrease in land ownership also negatively affected animal husbandry. Traditionally the Lenca peasantry relies on cattle as a source of meat and dairy products, a source of fertilizer for their fields, and as a “hooved bank account” (Brady 2003, 66). The households that owned animals in the highland settlements prior to relocation reported the lack of land to support animal husbandry in the relocated settlements as the main reason for the decrease in animal ownership. Further, the sale of animals was used as a source of income to purchase additional land parcels after relocation. Besides a reflection of land scarcity, these results exhibit a breakdown in the fallow system, a decrease in diversity of farm activities, and the drawing down of their ‘hooved bank account’ in order to expand land holdings. Agrodiversity, measured here by the number of different crop varieties grown, declined in response to the decrease in land ownership and new ecological conditions. Prior to relocation, 18 different varieties of crops were reportedly grown by at least one household. Of those, 10 varieties of crops were abandoned after relocation and 2, peaches and avocados, declined from 24 and 35 households to 1 and 2 households after relocation. Most of these abandoned crops such as wheat, linseed, cabbage, chan, radishes, cabbage, and potatoes, are more suited to the cooler temperatures and higher precipitation of the highlands as opposed to the drier and warmer climate of the lowlands. Further, the shallow acidic soils of the lowlands are not as fertile as the higher elevation clay loams (West 1958; Portillo 1997; AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002).
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The soil and climatic characteristics of the lowlands does create better conditions for the cultivation of other crop varieties. Plantain, cassava, zucchini, pineapple, and mango are crops grown in the relocated settlements that had not been cultivated previously. In addition, more households are growing coffee trees and pataste, especially in Otolaca. Relocation resulted in not only a decline in agrodiversity, but a shift in agrodiversity in line with new soil and climate conditions. However, the traditional milpa crops of corn and beans, along with sugarcane, remained the major staple crops. TABLE 16: Number of Households Growing Crop Varieties Otolaca
Los Horcones
Total
PrePostPrePostPrePostRelocation Relocation Relocation Relocation Relocation Relocation
Corn Beans Peaches Sugarcane Wheat Linseed Cabbage Chan Avocado Radish Potato Carrot Orange Pataste Lemon Squash Mustard Coffee Mango Pineapple Zucchini Cassava Plantain
33 33 24 20 23 20 17 18 8 7 7 3 3 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
33 33 1 20 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 18 0 0 0 7 0 0 1 4 24
16 16 11 12 8 9 5 2 9 3 1 2 0 2 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
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16 16 1 10 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 4 1
49 49 35 32 31 29 22 20 17 10 8 5 3 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
49 49 2 30 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3 20 0 0 0 7 1 1 1 8 25
In response to the change in soil conditions, purchased fertilizer use increased substantially from 61.2% of households to 98% after relocation. However, fertilizer use increased more substantially for the households of Los Horcones. Prior to relocation only 25.0% of the households of Los Horcones used purchased fertilizer, compared to 78.8% of those relocated to Otolaca. On average, the pre-relocation households of Los Horcones had greater land ownership and a lower percentage of land under cultivation, indicating a longer fallow period to maintain soil fertility. Additionally they reported less market sales of crops which suggest less need for increasing production to create a surplus beyond subsistence levels. Further, the residents of Los Horcones reported a decline in soil quality in the relocated settlement to a higher degree than those in Otolaca, which may be reflected in the greater increase in purchased fertilizer use. Biocide usage also increased substantially from 0% to 36.7%, with almost identical results for both Otolaca and Los Horcones. When the households were asked to explain the use of biocides, it was reported the previous year’s corn crop had been decimated by an insect invasion. The pest had not been present in the highland aldeas and with no prior experience they adopted the use of biocides. Additionally, with the adoption of double cropping the chances of pest damage are increased. The loss of land, coupled with the new ecological conditions, has led to a decrease in agrodiversity and reliance on fewer crop varieties which increases the risk of pest invasions. In response, the adoption of biocides is necessitated to minimize the loss of staple crops. An important change to the ecological relations of production created by land scarcity has been the disruption of the traditional swidden fallow. The system relies on the cutting and low-intensity burning of fallow cover to cycle vegetative nutrients back
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into the soil and clear the land of weeds, pests, and crop diseases. In the relocated communities the loss of fallow periods obviates the use of fire. Further, the use of fire to clear land is reported to be discouraged by authorities in the western highlands of Honduras (Jansen 1998). As a result purchased chemical fertilizers and biocides are introduced to replace the role of fire which increases production costs and can lead to the pollution of land and water resources (Murray 1994). While the two settlements differed in their access to land, the impacts of curtailed land access on land use intensity were similar. The key to the disruption of the peasant ecology is loss of land and the resultant loss of the fallow system. Hence, adoption of capital intensive techniques, fewer crop choices, and loss of animals has left the relocated residents with increased land use intensity, increased agricultural risk, and the adoption of production techniques reliant on purchased chemical fertilizers and biocides with the potential of ecological damage.
C. Income Earning Activities Income earning activities had previously been a part of the livelihoods of the peasant households, but land scarcity and land use intensification necessitated by relocation have increased reliance on wage labor activities to provide subsistence in lieu of the sale of surplus agricultural produce and crafts. Prior to relocation, 71.4% of households sold surplus crops, particularly cabbage, at the traditional Lenca market town of Belen Gualcho. In addition, 50% of animal owning households had marketed their animals. After relocation only 1 household had sold crops at a market and the sale of animals ceased entirely. The decline in market activity in the sale of agricultural
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products represents not only a decrease in production, with the bulk of production used solely for household needs, but also the geographical separation of the producers from their markets. The traditional Lenca Sunday market in Belen Gualcho, located on the western slopes of the Celaque Mountains, is the central location where Lenca from the lowlands and highlands meet to sell, purchase, and exchange goods. For example, highland Lenca would sell specialty produce like cabbage and purchase extra stores of corn, which is grown in greater abundance in the lowlands. Relocation severed this connection for the households of Otolaca who now reside on the opposite side of the Celaque Mountains. The nearest market center for the households of Otolaca is the ladino town of Gracias. However, the households have not been able to access this market center to sell agricultural surplus, particularly since they have no surplus to sell. The households of Los Horcones can still reach Belen Gualcho relatively easily, but traditionally were less likely to sell crops and currently report having no surplus to sell on the market as production is completely consumed by the households. While there was a decrease in the number of income earning activities, the change in the types of income earning activities represents an important shift in livelihood strategies. Prior to relocation, household members engaged in the sale of agricultural produce, wage labor on coffee fincas, production and sale of roofing tiles, and the manufacture and sale of ceramic pottery. After relocation most of the household members abandoned the sale of agricultural produce, roofing tiles, and ceramic pottery in favor of wage labor on neighboring ladino farms and a substantial increase in wage labor on coffee fincas. The abandonment of roofing tiles and pottery is due to the geographic
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separation from the red clays located in El Cedro, from which the products are made. Hence, the income earning strategies for the relocated household has shifted from the production and sale of crops and crafts to dependence on wage labor for income. TABLE 17: Number of Households Engaged in Income Earning Activities
Coffee Fincas Sale of Crops Sale of Animals Pottery Production Roofing Tiles Pulperia * Ladino Farms
Otolaca Prior Post 33 33 30 1 9 0 7 0 5 0 0 1 0 13
Los Horcones Prior Post 16 16 5 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Total Prior Post 49 49 35 1 12 0 7 0 5 0 0 1 0 13
* A Pulperia is a basic goods store supplying the local community. Not only did relocation shift income earning activities toward wage labor, it altered the age and gender division of income activities. Prior to relocation, adult males in El Cedro produced roofing tiles while adult females were predominately responsible for ceramic pottery production. Adult males in all of the aldeas worked seasonally on the coffee fincas, which consisted primarily of picking coffee beans during harvest. For example, 73.5% of the households reported only one male household member working on the coffee fincas annually prior to relocation. In a complete reversal, and valid for both Los Horcones and Otolaca, postrelocation households reporting only one member working on coffee fincas fell to 26.5% and the time spent increased significantly. The coffee fincas are located on the western side of Celaque National Park in the municipality of Corquín, which is a 6 to 8 hour walk from the highland aldeas. Travel from Otolaca to Corquín necessitates either a two day walk or full day’s bus ride, and from Los Horcones a full day walk. With the increased
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time and effort to reach the coffee fincas, working trips of shorter duration have been replaced with forays of longer duration. The reasons given for the increase in time and number of household members working on the coffee fincas were the need for income to purchase supplemental food, pay for increased agricultural production costs, save money to purchase more land, and pay the increased taxes levied on their newly acquired lands. With the need for more income and the increased distance between home and coffee finca it has become necessary to increase the time and number of household members seasonally relocating to the coffee fincas for work. The work also changed from merely picking coffee to other activities such as coffee processing and tree maintenance that includes male and female adults and children able to work. The time devoted to working on coffee fincas increased to a greater degree in Los Horcones where households averaged 7.88 weeks per year, as opposed to 6.76 weeks in Otolaca. Explanations include the closer proximity of Los Horcones to the coffee producing areas in Corquín and the need for additional income to purchase land and build houses, both of which had been provided for the households in Otolaca. Further, 13 of the households in Otolaca participated in a new income earning activity, working on the neighboring ladino farms. Throughout the year male adults and children now perform wage labor in the fields for the ladino farmers and female adults and children process the corn (husking, washing, grinding) during the harvest. While households in Los Horcones devoted their labor to working in coffee, those in Otolaca expanded their wage earning activities and hence devoted slightly less time to working in coffee.
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Another factor that can explain the increase in wage labor on coffee fincas is the political economy of the global coffee trade. With the ending of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, producing countries flooded the market with coffee causing supply to skyrocket and prices to fall, in some cases below the cost of production (O’Brien and Kinnaird 2003; Talbot 2004). Prices for coffee paid to growers in Honduras fell from $0.82 per pound in 1989 to $0.38 per pound in 1993. Prices did spike in 1997 due to the lingering effects of a Brazilian frost decreasing supply and speculative trading, with Honduran growers receiving $1.17 per pound. Since the 1997 price spike, however, prices dropped precipitously to $0.34 in 2001, a level not seen since the early 1970s. As a result, wages paid to laborers also fell. During the harvest season of 2003/2004 the interviewed households reported being paid 10 lempiras for every bucket of coffee beans picked. In a good day a coffee picker can harvest 5 buckets for a total of 50 lempiras per day, which in U.S. dollars amounts to approximately $2.50. However, households claimed they earned 15 lempiras for every bucket of coffee beans picked prior to relocation during the 1997/1998 harvest season, which corresponds with the spike in coffee prices. Hence, households would need to work 33% more in 2004 in order to earn the same amount of income they earned in 1998. While the decrease in wages per unit of work can explain a part of the increase in time and household members working in coffee, land scarcity and land use intensification remain the primary determinants of the increase as reported by the respondents.
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FIGURE 8: Honduran Coffee Exports, 1986-2004
3,500,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0
Series1
19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04
Number of 60 kg Bags
Honduran Coffee Exports
Year
(Data Source: ICO 2005)
FIGURE 9: Prices Paid to Honduran Coffee Growers, 1986-2004
1.40 1.20 1.00 0.80 0.60 0.40 0.20 0.00
Series1
19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04
U.S.$ per lb.
Prices Paid to Honduran Coffee Growers
Year
(Data Source: ICO 2005) 143
D. National Parks, Semi-Proletarianization, and the Coffee Industry The addition of qualitative data to the quantitative results allows for elaboration of empirical results and a more in-depth understanding of the impacts of relocation and the adaptations adopted by the Lenca peasant households. The loss of access to land and the corresponding increased intensity of land use have resulted in an increase in the dependence on income earning activities. In the process, the relocated Lenca peasants have become more engaged in the larger capitalist economic system through intensified agricultural production, the workings of formal land markets, and an increase in dependence on wage labor on capitalist farms. In effect, they have become increasingly semi-proletarianized through the creation of land scarcity. The semi-proletarianization of the peasantry has long been observed in Central America where disarticulated economies have necessitated the creation of a cheap labor force to serve the interests of the “repressive agro-export development model” (Brockett 1991, 37). Here the increased semi-proletarian nature of the relocated Lenca peasants is reflected in the heightened dependence on wage labor for the export oriented coffee industry. In addition to greater dependence, the increased impoverishment of the Lenca workers has resulted in the acceptance of lower piece-meal wages at precisely the time when international coffee prices reached record lows. Coincidentally, an increasingly dependent and cheap labor force during times of low coffee prices serves the capital interests of coffee producers. In Central America the semi-proletarianization of the peasantry has traditionally occurred through repressive state policies and the workings of the capitalist economic system based on partial primitive accumulation. In this case a new strategy for partial
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primitive accumulation has been utilized; the imposition of a global national park model based on exclusionary principles. The global national park model aims to protect nature from degradation produced by humans, which has often corresponded with the spread of destructive capitalist production methods. Recent research into land use and land cover change in and around Celaque National Park have targeted expanded coffee production for the export market as the major conservation threat to the park (Cherrett 2001; Southworth et al. 2002a, 2002b; Aguilar 2003; Bass 2006). In effect the relocation of the Lenca peasants from Celaque National Park has resulted in the creation of labor conditions that contribute to the expansion of the environmentally damaging capitalist production methods of coffee production threatening the park itself. The situation is reminiscent of Faber’s (1992; 1993) argument whereby disarticulated capitalist development dependent on export products benefits from an increasingly semi-proletarian workforce which environmental degradation creates. Yet Faber’s model can be viewed as fatalistic by focusing solely on the environmental destruction created by peasants as they are further semi-proletarianzed. Through adopting a peasant ecology framework the ability of peasants to work within imposed constraints reveals peasants to be not merely victims of change or agents of environmental degradation. Instead, they find unique ways to mitigate the negative social and ecological repercussions of their marginalization. It is to this concept the chapter now turns, based on a Central American peasant ecology.
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III. Theoretical Implications: Renegotiating the Peasant Ecology Peasant ecology focuses on the nexus between peasants’ social relations of production and ecological relations of production (Shrestha and Conway 1996). For Central America the peasant ecology relies on access to enough land of suitable quality to maintain the rotating swidden fallow system. As the results for the three research questions demonstrate, the loss of access to land has disrupted the ecological relations of production with important repercussions for the social relations of production and potential for environmental degradation. The disruption of the ecological relations of production through a decline in the amount and quality of land has shortened, and in many cases ended, the rotating swidden fallow system and eliminated the use of fire to maintain soil fertility and control pests and weeds. With a resulting decrease in animal husbandry, agrodiversity, and production along with an increase in the relative amount of land under cultivation the affected households have had to adopt intensified land use with inputs of chemical biocides and purchased fertilizers. Use of these inputs in conjunction with increased soil erosion in the degraded and constantly cleared fields can contribute to ground and water pollution and may require increased intensification over time to maintain agricultural production. To compound the problem, the change in geographical pattern and location of settlement further increases the risks of environmental degradation. Prior to relocation the households resided in dispersed homesteads near the upper reaches of the mountains and using the extensive fallow system of agricultural production. After relocation the households became clustered in areas closer to more populated areas and engaged in intensified agricultural production with increased risk of land and water pollution from
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chemical fertilizers and biocides. For the majority of the households in Los Horcones their new lands are located within the same watershed as they previously inhabited, only located further down the mountains. The environmental impact of the households has been concentrated downstream with greater risk of water pollution, which the creation of the park was originally meant to protect against (AFE-COHDEFER et al. 2002). Due to the disruption of the ecological relations of production, the social relations of production for the affected households have been altered as well. Prior to relocation the households relied on a variety of supplemental income earning activities. The relocation of the households has geographically uprooted them from ecological conditions necessary for their craft production (soils), markets for their products (Belen Gualcho), and eliminated the sale of agricultural products through decreased production. In place of this basket of income earning activities households have become dependent on wage labor, representing what Carmen Deere terms “superexploitation” of familial labor in face of increased impoverishment (in Faber 1993, 74). The disruption of the ecological relations of production has increased the semi-proletarian nature of the households, creating an even greater number of cheap laborers for both neighboring ladino farmers and the agro-export coffee industry. The surplus labor value produced by the increased wage labor of the households has been appropriated external to the peasantry. Within the relocated peasant communities there is no hiring or selling of wage labor, only superexploitation of familial labor. Hence, in a classic Marxist interpretation, social differentiation is not occurring within the peasantry through appropriated surplus labor value.
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Yet within the communities some households did acquire more land than others. In a Spearman’s rho correlation test the amount of land owned in the relocated communities is positively correlated with the number of land parcels, which indicates the expansion of land ownership occurs by acquiring separate land parcels. Since the households were relocated to populated areas, land availability is constrained and must be acquired through the privatized land market (Carter and Salgado 2001). In order to purchase additional parcels of land households must earn additional income. While there was no significant correlation between the amount of land owned and the number of income earning activities, there was a significant correlation between the amount of land owned and the number of household members working on coffee fincas along with the number of weeks spent working on them. Hence, the increased superexploitation of familial labor working in the agro-export coffee industry is not just a result of the creation of a cheap semi-proletarian workforce due to land scarcity, it is an accumulation strategy used by these households to acquire more land. Only two other variables are significantly correlated with the amount of land owned; a negative correlation with the percentage of land owned under cultivation and a positive correlation with the number of crop varieties grown. The households that were able to purchase additional parcels of land through increased work on the coffee fincas cultivate a smaller percentage of their land, allowing a portion to remain in fallow. Further, they have a higher agrodiversity in their fields in terms of number of crop varieties grown. What this suggests is a move toward a less intensive form of agricultural production in an attempt to renegotiate the peasant ecology and recreate the rotating swidden fallow system.
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The lower percentage of land under cultivation could be a result of the greater number of family members working on coffee fincas for longer periods of time, leaving less labor to fully cultivate their land. However, the greater number of crop varieties being grown and greater amount of absolute land under cultivation by the households with more land suggests otherwise. While the need for income is greater in the relocated communities due to a reported lack of agricultural production and increased costs, many claimed the main reason was to purchase land. Respondents stated they would decrease their wage labor work when they had acquired additional land. TABLE 18: Spearman’s rho with the Amount of Land Owned Correlation Coefficient 0.650 0.404 0.393 -0.544 0.415
Number of Separate Land Parcels Members Working on Coffee Fincas Weeks Working on Coffee Fincas % of Land Under Cultivation Number of Crop Varieties
Two-Tailed Significance Level 0.000 0.004 0.005 0.000 0.003
The households that appear to be the most semi-proletarianized by the increases in wage labor on the coffee fincas are doing so in order to lessen their semi-proletarian status through the acquisition of additional farm lands. The regulations of Celaque National Park represent structural forces that have led to household relocation and impoverished situations. However, the structure has left niches through which households can resist their own degradation. Whether through superexploitation of familial labor in order to acquire more land in Otolaca, or as in Los Horcones where geographical proximity and exploitation of loopholes in the structural forest policies allowed access different ecological zones, these are ecopolitical battles through which the peasantry attempts to renegotiate the peasant ecology in order to resurrect their traditional 149
lifestyle. The peasants are not simple bystanders to these structural forces, they are actively adapting through exploiting the spaces left available to them in the process. Faber (1992; 1993) believed the loss of land that intensifies the semi-proletarian nature of peasant households would also increase environmental degradation of farmable land. In turn, peasants would be forced to rely even more on cheap labor opportunities for survival. This tie is essential to the downward spiral of social and environmental degradation upon which Faber’s thesis is based. However, in this case the peasants were not just attempting to maintain survival; they were actively working to renegotiate the ecological relations of production through exploiting their external social relations of production in order to recreate their previous peasant ecology. While at this point it is too early to determine if they will be successful, it does expose another motive for peasant strategies to persist in the face of externally imposed pressures.
IV. Conclusion In this chapter the empirical results of the quantitative analysis were elaborated upon with the addition of qualitative data and placed within the theoretical framework of peasant ecology. Relocation due to the implementation of exclusionary national park policies has seized upon the opportunity provided by Hurricane Mitch to disrupt the ecological relations of production through loss of land and the traditional swidden fallow system upon which the Lenca peasant livelihood relied. In response the swidden fallow system has been replaced with increased use of purchased fertilizers and biocides to perform the same functions. Further, relocation has concentrated environmental impacts downstream in closer proximity to populated areas dependent on the water supply.
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In conjunction, the disrupted ecological relations of production have altered the social relations of production through increased costs associated with intensified agricultural production. The increased costs have necessitated a rise in participation in wage-earning activities. Of particular importance is the intensification of the semiproletarian status of the households who now serve as an increasingly cheap source of labor for the export-oriented coffee industry. While these changes have affected the external social relations of production, internally there is no appropriation of surplus labor value and hence no social differentiation from a classical peasant studies perspective. The peasant group is surviving, albeit as an increasingly impoverished and marginalized peasantry due to the imposition of the exclusionary principles of a global national park model. However, the affected peasants are not just passive bystanders to the process of impoverishment. Evidence of adaptive strategies to mitigate the negative effects and attempt to renegotiate the peasant ecology are uncovered through qualitative elaboration of the quantitative results. In Otolaca a group of households has been able to purchase additional lands through superexploitation of familial labor on the coffee fincas. In Los Horcones a group of households was able to exploit a loophole in national forest policies to expand their land holdings and take advantage of different ecological niches. In effect they are actively finding ways to regain more land in order to recreate the swidden fallow system, the basis of the Lenca peasant ecology. But just as new versions of ecology discount stable state equilibria in nature in favor of dynamic fluctuations, the attempts to renegotiate the peasant ecology may only be temporary or even fail. In this case a select group of households in both communities
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are engaged in the attempt to acquire more land, whereas others have been unable to do so. If the pattern continues and ends with the extraction of surplus labor value by some from the others then social stratification begins and this particular peasant group will cease to exist in classical political economy terms. At present this is not occurring. The differentiation that exists is between the relative semi-proletarian status of the households. Those who acquire more land will work less for wages while those who do not will continue to labor more intensively for external interests. By elaborating upon the quantitative analysis through the addition of qualitative data and the peasant ecology framework this discussion has gone beyond merely chronicling the structural impoverishment of a peasant population relocated from Celaque National Park. In addition, it uncovered how Lenca households have been able to mitigate the negative impacts of relocation to exploit niches left open to them by structural forces. In doing so it adds an empirical study to the impacts protected areas have on local populations and contributes to theory through building a peasant ecology which includes the ability of people to respond to structural changes. “Their loss is both psychological and material. The continuation of a land-based lifestyle is a strong value for farming families, not only in peasant communities in later-developing countries but also among commercial family farmers in other countries such as the United States. When pushed off of the land, the farming family has lost a lifestyle that is usually intensely preferred, from which a meaningful and stable identity and worldview were derived, and that connected it to earlier generations. The loss is also material, of course. Land provides security: even the smallest holding has room for a home, for some subsistence crops, and perhaps for growing firewood. As the size of that holding shrinks, its ability to produce subsistence diminishes as well. The great majority of [Central America’s] rural people no longer have enough land to sustain a family.” (Brockett 1991, 76)
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Chapter 8 Conclusion – Parks and Peasants I. Introduction The exponential growth of protected areas during the past fifty years is without precedent. The conservation goals of protected areas are indeed important in an increasingly globalized world with rising populations and resource needs. At the same time, and particularly in the global South, the impacts of the growth in protected areas on local populations has risen substantially including the loss of resource access, regulated land-use, altered land tenure regimes, introduction to commercial agricultural systems, and even physical relocation (Katz 1998; Neumann 1998; Bates and Rudel 2000; Smethurst 2000). Relocation is of special import in this dissertation and recent estimates place these new environmental refugees in the tens of millions globally (Geisler and de Sousa 2001; Brockington et al. 2006). The growth of protected areas and their resultant impacts have been critiqued from a political ecology perspective as a global process resulting in local poverty and underdevelopment in areas surrounding protected areas (Neumann 1998). In effect, the cordoning off of rich natural areas in the global South is viewed as extending control over these landscapes to global interests at the expense of local residents. Be it consumptive landscapes for tourism profits or biological reserves for large corporations, the benefits accrue to the global North while the costs are borne by local residents (Katz 1998). While political ecology provides a structural argument for the impacts of protected areas on local peoples, there is a lack of theoretical rigor (Bernstein and Byres 2001) and empirical study on processes at the local level (Hough 1991; Wells and
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Brandon 1992; 1993; Nelson et al. 1997; Wilkie et al. 2006; Brockington et al. 2006), particularly in Latin America (IUCN 1992). Further, empirical studies are criticized for failing to link the impoverishment of local populations to the role of the parks, noting that rural populations in such areas are marginalized regardless of whether protected areas are present or not (Wilkie et al. 2006). Hence, the study of the impacts relocation from Celaque National Park, Honduras, has had on the Lenca peasantry answers the call for empirical research into the direct role of protected areas in altering the livelihoods of local populations in Latin America and contributes to the theoretical understanding of the socio-ecological relationships between protected areas and local populations.
II. Empirical Summary The relocation of Lenca peasant households from Celaque National Park, Honduras, was the result of a confluence of a natural hazard and a structural process imposing a global exclusionary national park objective on local populations. Neoliberal structural adjustment reforms, tied to the political economy of the debt crisis, resulted in the transfer of funding and management of Celaque National Park from the Honduran state to foreign interests (Beltrán and Esser 1999). Consequently the management objective of allowing residents to remain within the park’s boundaries was replaced with the goal of relocating the residents (AFE-COHDEFOR et al. 2002). The 1998 natural disaster of Hurricane Mitch provided the opportunity to realize the goal with 61 Lenca households relocated to two settlements outside of the park (Oviedo 1999). Stemming from the contextual situation, the research objective was to determine the changes in the social and ecological relations of production for affected indigenous
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Lenca peasant communities relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras. To ascertain the changes, two summers of fieldwork in Honduras were utilized in collecting secondary data and administering formal questionnaire surveys and open-ended household interviews to provide quantitative and qualitative data for a comparative analysis of relocated settlements before and after displacement. Specifically, three quantifiable research questions were posed; (1) how has relocation affected access to land; (2) how has access to land affected land use intensity; and (3) how has access to land and altered land use intensity affected income earning activities? The three questions address ecological relations of production, revolving around land, and social relations of production, based on wage labor, to determine the alterations of the Lenca peasant ecology in response to expulsion from Celaque National Park. In regards to access to land, quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated an absolute decrease in land owned, an increase in land parcels, and a decrease in soil quality as measured by household perception. As a result of the decrease in access to quality land the traditional fallow system has been substituted with intensified land use. The relative increase in the percentage of, and absolute decrease in the amount of, land under cultivation has meant the loss of animal husbandry and a decrease in agrodiversity as households focus on a smaller number of basic crop staples. In absence of the ecological services provided by the fallow system in maintaining soil fertility and controlling pests and weeds, households increased the use of purchased fertilizers and adopted biocide usage to compensate. The combination of decreased access to land and the intensification of land-use support the conclusion that relocation has resulted in land scarcity for the affected households.
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In turn, the costs attributable to the intensification of production increased reliance on income-earning activities to meet household subsistence needs. Land scarcity has left households without adequate amounts of quality land to produce a surplus of crops or to support animal husbandry, as reflected in the abandonment of market activity in animal and crop sales. Further, all forms of craft production have ceased as the households have been physically separated from the natural soil resources required to produce roofing tiles and pottery while, at the same time, being geographically separated from the traditional markets for these crafts. In the place of a diversity of income earning activities, wage labor has risen as the sole source of income for the relocated households. Relocation has placed the households in greater proximity to ladino farms where the households have begun to engage in wage labor. However, the most significant change has been the superexploitation of familial labor for wage earnings on the coffee fincas which has become their dominant income earning activity. The result of relocation, which was a consequence of the implementation of a global national park model predicated on exclusionary principles, has been the creation of land scarcity, the intensification of land use, and an increased dependence on wage labor to provide income to meet subsistence needs. The disruption of the ecological relations of production, revolving around access to land and the traditional fallow system, has altered the social relations of production as the households have become increasingly semi-proletarianized. The empirical study provides direct evidence of the negative effects park policies can have on local populations, an assertion previously questioned by critics (Wilkie et al. 2006).
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III. Theoretical Contributions Beyond recording the negative impacts of relocation stemming from the implementation of exclusionary national park policies, this dissertation contributes to the theoretical fields of peasant studies and political ecology through the specification of a Central American peasant ecology. Peasant studies addresses the fate of peasant groups through political economy whereby primitive accumulation from capitalist expansion results in semi-proletarianization and, eventually, full proletarianization (Marx 1867; Lenin 1899; de Janvry 1981; Ellis 1988; Faber 1993; Zmolek 2001). A key debate in the field is the survival of the peasantry in face of growing pressures in an increasingly globalized world (Shanin 1990; Anderson 1994; Bryceson 2000a; Kay 2000). However, peasant studies literature focuses primarily on the social repercussions for peasant groups and neglects ecological factors (Bernstein and Byres 2001). Political ecology shares the critical political economy perspective of peasant studies as it pertains to these social transformations, but includes the ecological transformations as well. In so doing the ecological and social repercussions resulting from the development and diffusion of capitalism are tied together. Yet the ecological aspects of political ecology have been criticized as lacking the specific theoretical rigor of peasant political economy (Bernstein and Byres 2001). In this dissertation the adoption of, and contributions to, peasant ecology address these concerns by linking the social relations of production and the ecological relations of production. Peasant ecology is based upon Yapa’s (1980) ‘ecopolitical economy’ which studies different modes of production and their reliance upon ecological systems. Shrestha and Conway (1996), in coining the term peasant ecology, created an ecopolitical
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economy for peasants in Nepal by specifying the nexus between their social relations of production and their ecological relations of production. The subsistence focus of peasant systems creates a symbiotic relationship where the lack of capitalist forms of accumulation and exploitation maintain ecological and social relations over time. However, alterations in either the social or ecological relations of production have repercussions for the other and can lead to environmental degradation and social impoverishment. The social relations of production for peasants are defined by a lack of social stratification through internal surplus labor value extraction. Instead, reliance on family labor negates individual capital accumulation gained from the surplus labor of hired wage laborers. The ecological relations of production for peasant groups entail their use of natural resources to meet their subsistence needs and maintain their social relations of production over time. Property relations are essential to the maintenance of social and ecological relations of production for peasant groups, particularly in terms of the process of primitive accumulation. When the peasants are separated from their lands, upon which they rely for subsistence, social differentiation occurs as they are transformed into the wage earning proletariat and environmental degradation may ensue through the expansion of capitalist modes of production. For the Central American peasantry the ecological relations of production are based on access to adequate amounts of land to practice the rotating swidden fallow system. The maintenance of the system is threatened when access to land is curtailed and the fallow system is altered. In lieu of the ecological services formerly provided by the fallow system, the peasants must intensify land use which can result in environmental
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degradation as they attempt to maintain subsistence on a declining land base. The disrupted ecological relations of production created by the loss of land and the fallow system alter the social relations of production as well. Intensified agricultural production necessitates increased income to pay for the additional inputs. In turn, the peasants became more dependent on wage labor, increasing the semi-proletarian nature of the peasantry. However, the change in the social relations of production does not represent social differentiation, which leads to the end of the peasant group. Instead, the appropriation of surplus labor value upon which social stratification rests is extracted by employers external to the peasantry. The peasantry survives due to the absence of internal social differentiation, despite their increasing socio-ecological impoverishment. However, the peasants are not merely caught in a downward spiral of social and environmental degradation created by structural forces. Instead, they can attempt to renegotiate the peasant ecology and mitigate any negative social and ecological ramifications. One peasant group used superexploitation of familial labor on the coffee fincas in order to raise income to purchase additional lands, upon which they are attempting to resurrect the traditional swidden fallow system. An additional group of peasants has taken advantage of relocation and national forest policies in order to expand their land holdings in different ecological zones. In effect, the struggles by these households are attempts renegotiate the peasant ecology in the face of externally imposed pressures on their livelihoods. This dissertation contributes to theory through the melding of political ecology with peasant studies in the form of peasant ecology. Political ecology provided the analytical tools to address structural processes whereby the exclusionary polices of the
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global national park model have been imposed upon local populations. Peasant studies provided the theoretical understanding of peasant political economy. Peasant ecology brings these together through focusing on the relationship between the ecological relations of production and the social relations of production, allowing local actors to adapt to structural changes.
IV. Relevance to the Parks and People Debate The global spread of protected areas has correspondingly increased the impacts, both positive and negative, they have on local populations. However, within the conservation community there has been a resurgence toward the strict enforcement of protected areas and exclusion of resident populations (Kramer et al. 1997; Brandon 1998; Terborgh 1999). Claiming global conservation interests trump those of local populations, Kramer et al. in Last Stand: Protected Areas and the Defense of Tropical Biodiversity go so far as to propose: “Governments of civilized nations have the duty to ask their citizens to accept restraints on their freedom of action when it serves the common good… In the case of tropical forest parks, governments can claim forest lands as national property because they serve national and international interests…the role of the military is to protect the nation’s interest, usually against outsiders but in case of emergency also against rebellious insiders. Moreover, the military is often the only power with authority and is the best-organized and equipped institution in the country. Use of the military, however, may cause resentment among local residents and reduce local conservation support, so it should be considered only as a means of last resort.” (Kramer et al. 1997, 224) Just such a case has occurred in Tanzania where a paramilitary unit has been formed within the national park service, "…the militarization of conservation has overlapped with state repression of minority ethnic groups and liberation movements"
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(Neumann 1998, 6). In Central America, with its’ long history of military oppression of rural populations (Brockett 1992), the use of the military to patrol national parks could have the same effect. In such cases the ecopolitical conflicts of Shrestha and Conway (1996) are realized as parks are “held in place by violence: both the violence of the state that guarantees private interests, and the violence of those who contest such interests” (Mitchell 2001, 273-274). Adherents of strict exclusionary protected areas question claims about the negative impacts protected areas have “…because to date little empirical evidence exists to substantiate the contention that parks are bad for local people” (Wilkie et al. 2006, 247). While this dissertation focuses on only one case study, it does provide empirical evidence of negative social and ecological impacts exclusionary policies have had on relocated Lenca peasant households. With estimates of people relocated from protected areas reaching into the tens of millions globally (Geisler and de Sousa 2001; Brockington et al. 2006), the importance of the results are not inconsequential. The premise for the exclusionary model is the assumption that local people are the main threat to the conservation goals of protected areas. However, here even this assumption is challenged. Research has shown that within the higher reaches of Celaque National Park, near the Lenca aldeas, mature forest over 20 years old increased from 35.4% in 1987 to 46.6% in 1992 and 57.3% in 1998 (Aguilar 2003, 11). Hence, the original park policy allowing the Lenca to remain within the park without further forest clearance actually resulted in an increase in mature forests between the year of the park’s inception, 1987, and the year of relocation, 1998. The evidence does not support the assumption that Lenca people were degrading the forest and, in fact, suggests otherwise.
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The original park policy influenced the Lenca peasants to abandon forested areas of land used by the households in the long-term fallow rotation, resulting in re-growth and maturation. The highland Lenca aldeas within Celaque National Park, with their swidden fallow system and dispersed pattern, were conducive to forest regeneration due to the pattern of agriculture, shrublands, and forests in various stages of succession which allowed for the dispersal of flora and fauna; “Landscape pattern and disturbance history should be considered when assessing the potential of a deforested or degraded area to naturally regenerate” (Aguilar 2003, 13). Here is it argued that park policies regarding relocation should consider actual evidence of human caused degradation before being implemented based on assumption. Celaque National Park is suffering human induced degradation and recent research has pointed to encroaching coffee fincas at lower elevations near, and within, the park’s boundaries as the major threat (Southworth et al. 2002a; 2002b). The transition of forest to coffee fincas has been reported as the major landcover change in nearby mountainous areas of western Honduras as well (Cherrett 2001; Bass 2006). Hence, the global national park model based on the assumption of local people needing to be excluded actually contributed to the real threat, coffee, by intensifying their semiproletarian position and increasing the pool of ever cheaper labor to facilitate the expansion of coffee production into the park itself. The empirical contribution of the case of Celaque National Park to the parks and people debate is the demonstration of the negative social and ecological impacts the exclusionary policies can have on local populations. The global national park model is not necessarily appropriate everywhere and should only be implemented if evidence
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supports it. The application of this model based on assumptions not confirmed by empirical verification can create negative impacts on local populations and foster antagonism toward the park itself, as the actions and attitudes of the residents of Los Horcones attest. It is within this context that the exclusionary policies of the national park model, imposed by global conservation interests on localities throughout the global South, display the characteristics of “ecological imperialism” (Pletsch 1993, 3). “If peacekeeping has been widely accepted as an international function, why not nature keeping? If local park guards are too weak or too subject to corruption and political influence to carry out their duties effectively, internationally sponsored guards could be called in to help.” (Terbogh 1999, 201)
V. Further Research This dissertation answers the call for more empirical study of how protected areas impact local populations (Hough 1991; Wells and Brandon 1992; 1993; Nelson et al. 1997; Brockington et al. 2006; Wilkie et al. 2006), particularly in Latin America (IUCN 1992). However, it is only one case study on a national park in Honduras. There still exists the need for additional empirical work within different locales and contexts in order to identify the direct positive and negative impacts protected areas have. In addition the dissertation addressed the criticism by Wilkie et al. (2006) of post facto assessments by including two time periods; prior to relocation in 1998 and after relocation in 2004. While the data recorded for 1998 was based on recollection, confidence in the data is supported by a secondary data set collected at the time of relocation by the NGO Proyecto Celaque (Oviedo 1999). Yet it only includes two points in time and households were hopeful that as they grew accustomed to the new environs they would eventually be able to improve their situations. Follow up research is needed
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to see if the trends observed continue, particularly in the efforts by households to renegotiate the peasant ecology. Finally, more comprehensive research needs to be undertaken to understand the workings of the coffee industry and its relationship with semi-proletarian peasant laborers. Excellent work has been done on the political economy of the coffee industry (Roseberry et al. 1995; Talbot 2004). But more is needed to understand how the political economy affects the role of the laborers and resultant impacts on the environment.
VI. Concluding Thoughts The main objective of this dissertation was to determine how the imposition of a global national park model on the locality of the Celaque Mountains impacted the ecological and social relations of production for the Lenca peasants relocated from Celaque National Park, Honduras. It was shown that the relocation of Lenca households upset their peasant ecology leading to social and ecological impoverishment. Yet members of this marginalized group were able to mitigate the negative repercussions by working to restore the relationship between their social and ecological relations of production through superexploitation of familial labor and geographical situation. The critical treatment of protected areas such as national parks stems from the negative repercussions they create on local populations and failures at achieving conservation goals. Yet in an increasingly globalized world with unparalleled consumption of natural resources the conservation of nature is indeed necessary. But as the parks and people debate exhibits there are dilemmas and conflicts over how to
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accomplish this goal. The polarization between entrenched pro-people and proenvironment positions stymies attempts to workable alternatives. The conservation versus development dialectic is predicated upon the separation of humans and nature. In the case of national parks the global exclusionary model is based upon this separation, ideologically and practically. However, most natural areas protected as parks have been changed appreciably by humans and the denial of this fact "illustrate[s] man’s short memory where his own effects on landscape are concerned” (Nelson and Byrne 1966, 226). The very idea of preserving nature from human impact through the creation of protected landscapes is inherently paradoxical and reflects the philosophical dilemma created by the perception of humans as separate from nature. The path to resolve this dilemma is through a re-conceptualization of the human/nature dichotomy. Peasant ecology can be instrumental in addressing the dialectic through the unity of the social and ecological relations of production. The restoration of humans and nature is a goal of Yapa’s (1980) ecopolitical economy and, while peasant ecology specifies the ecopolitical economy for peasant societies, it can be applied to analyze a variety of human/nature relationships (Yapa 1979). The inherent unity of humans and nature must be accepted if there are to be new concepts toward the conservation of human-nature systems. In Celaque National Park this relationship was not acknowledged and the presence of Lenca peasants within the parks boundaries was assumed to create environmental degradation. Yet the focus on the Lenca ignored the main threat to the park, encroaching coffee fincas. Could it not be possible to promote the cultural
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landscape of the Lenca as a buffer against the expansion of capitalist export agricultural production, the true threat to the conservation goals of the park? In such a way you can have conservation through cultural survival (Furze et al. 1996, Stevens 1997a) in attempting to redress the dialectic. Such a view holds that national parks are not natural islands, but are inherently tied to their surroundings ecologically, politically, socially, economically, and culturally. At the very least it is reprehensible if, in the rush to fence off large areas of natural resources, we fail to take into consideration the often economically disadvantaged and vulnerable local residents who are directly impacted by such practices. At worst it can lead to social and environmental degradation. Conservation efforts cannot be separated from social and ecological relationships; their fates are tied together. “I love the mountains, but I hate the park” - Lenca peasant relocated from Celaque National Park
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-------. 1996. "Ecology as Cornerstone and Chimera in Human Geography." In Concepts in Human Geography, ed. C. Earl, K. Mathewson, and M.S. Kenzer, 161-188. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. -------. 2000. "The Reworking of Conservation Geographies: Nonequilibrium Landscapes and Nature-Society Hybrids." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2): 356-369. Zmolek, Mike. 2001. “Further Thoughts on Agrarian Capitalism: A Reply to Albritton.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 29 (1): 129-154. Zoomers, Annelies. 2000. “Land in Latin America: New Context, New Claims, New Concepts”, in A. Zoomers and G van der Haar (eds.) Current Land Policy in Latin America: Regulating Land Tenure Under Neo-Liberalism, pages 59-72. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers. Zoomers, Annelies and Gemma van der Haar. 2000. “Introduction: Regulating Land Tenure under Neo-liberalism.” In Current Land Policy in Latin America: Regulating Land Tenure under Neo-liberalism, ed. A. Zoomers and G. van her Haar, 17-26. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers.
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APPENDIX I: IUCN Protected Area Categories (Davey 1998, 50-55) Category 1a Strict Nature Reserve: protected area managed mainly for science Area of land/or sea possessing some outstanding or representative ecosystems, geological or physiological features and/or species, available primarily for scientific research and/or environmental monitoring. Category 1b Wilderness Area: protected area managed mainly for wilderness protection Large are of unmodified or slightly modified land, and/or sea, retaining its natural character and influence, without permanent or significant habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural condition. Category II National Park: protected area managed mainly for ecosystem protection and recreation. Natural area of land and/or sea, designated to (a) protect the ecological integrity of one or more ecosystems for present and future generations, (b) exclude exploitation or occupation inimical to the purposes of designation of the area and (c) provide a foundation for spiritual, scientific, educational, recreational and visitor opportunities, all of which must be environmentally and culturally compatible. Category III Natural Monument: protected area managed mainly for conservation of specific natural features Area containing one, or more, specific natural or natural/cultural feature which is of outstanding or unique value because of its inherent rarity, representative or aesthetic qualities or cultural significance. Category IV Habitat/Species Management Area: protected are managed mainly for conservation through management intervention. Are of land and/or sea subject to active intervention for management purposes so as to ensure the maintenance of habitats and/or to meet the requirements of specific species. Category V Protected Landscape/Seascape: protected area managed mainly for landscape/seascape conservation and recreation. Area of land, with coast and sea as appropriate, where the interaction of people and nature over time has produced an area with high biological diversity. Safeguarding the integrity of this traditional interaction is vital to the protection, maintenance and evolution of such an area. Category VI Managed Resource Protected Area: protected area managed mainly for the sustainable use of natural ecosystems Area containing predominately unmodified natural systems, managed to ensure long-term protection and maintenance of biological diversity, while providing at the same time a sustainable flow of natural products and services to meet community needs.
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APPENDIX II: Questionnaire A. Información Básica de Hogar (Basic Household Information) 1. ¿Cual es su communidad de procedencia? (What is your original community?) 2. ¿Cuántos años tiene usted? (How old are you?) 3. ¿Cuántos personas viven en su casa? ¿Niños y adultos? (How many people live in your house? Children and adults?) 4. ¿Cuántos años estuvieron en la escuela cada uno? (How many years have each gone to school?) 5. ¿Hay miembros de su hogar que no viven aquí? (Are there members of your household that do not live here?) 6. ¿Donde viven? (Where do they live?) 7. ¿Qué ocupación tienen allá? (What occupation do they have?) 8. ¿Cuántos años hicieron en la escuela? (How many years of school have they had?) 9. ¿Cuántos años tiene? (How old are they?) 10. ¿Recibe dinero de estas personas? (Do you receive money from them?) 11. ¿Espera que regrese en el futuro? (Do you expect their return in the future?) 12. ¿Hace usted otro trabajo que no sea agricultura? ¿Que tipos? (Do you have other work that is not on your farm? What types?) 13. ¿Cuántas semanas por año realiza usted este trabajo? (How many weeks per year do you perform this work?) 14. ¿Hizo otro trabajo en su comunidad de procedencia? ¿Que tipos? (Did you have other work in your previous community? What types?)
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15. ¿Cuántas semanas por año realizó usted este trabajo? (How many weeks per year did you perform this work? 16. ¿Hacen otras personas en su casa otro trabajo? ¿Que tipos? (Do other people in your household have other work? What types?) 17. ¿Cuántas semanas por año realizan ellos este trabajo? (How many weeks per year did they perform this work?) 18. ¿Hicieron otras personas en su casa otro trabajo en su comunidad procedenica? ¿Que tipos? (Did other people in your household have other work that was not on you farm in your previous communty? What types?) 19. ¿Cuántas semanas por año realizaron ellos este trabajo? (How many weeks per year did they perform this work?) 20. ¿Es su casa aquí mejor que su casa anterior? (Is your house here better than your house before?) Mucho Mejor (Much Better)
Mejor (Better)
Iguales (Same)
Peor (Worse)
Mucho Peor (Much Worse)
B. Datos de la Tierra (Land Data) 1. ¿Cuántas manzanas de tierra posee? (How many manzanas of land do you own?) 2. ¿En varios lotes o solamente uno? (In various parcels or only one?) 3. ¿Cuántas manzanas de tierre tuvo en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many manzanas of land did you own in your previous community?) 4. ¿En varios lotes o solamente uno? (In various parcels or only one?) 5. ¿Cuántos minutos camiando hace de su casa a su terreno? (How many minutes does it take you to walk from your house to your land?) 6. ¿Cuántos minutos caminó de su casa a su terreno en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many minutes did it take you to walk from your house to your land in your previous community?)
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7. ¿Su propiedad es privada, ejidal, comunal, nacional, o alquilada? (Is your property private, ejidal, communal, nacional, or rented?) 8. ¿Su propiedad fue privada, ejidal, comunal, nacional, o alquilada en su comunidad de procedencia? (Was your property private, ejidal, communal, national, or rented in your previous community?) 9. ¿Cuántas manzanas tiene cultivadas? (How many manzanas do you have in cultivatation?) 10. ¿Cuántas manzanas tuvo cultivadas en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many manzanas were in cultivation in your previous community?) 11. ¿Cuántas manzanas tiene en pastos? (How many manzanas do you have in pasture?) 12. ¿Cuántas manzanas tuvo en pastos en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many manzanas did you have in pasture in your previous community?) 13. ¿Cuántas manzanas tiene en bosque? (How many manzanas do you have in forest?) 14. ¿Cuántas manzanas tuvo en bosque en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many manzanas did you have in forest in your previous community?) 15. ¿Cuántas manzanas tiene sin usar? (How many manzanas do you have not in use?) 16. ¿Cuántas manzanas tuvo sin usar en su comunidad de procedencia? (How many manzanas did you have not in use in your previous community?) 17. ¿Que tipos de cosechas tiene? (What types of crops do you have?) 18. ¿Que tipos de cosechas tuvo en su comunidad de procedencia? (What types of crops did you have in your previous community?) 19. ¿Vende cosechas? (Do you sell your crops at market?) 20. ¿Vendió cosechas en su comunidad de procedencia? (Did you sell your crops at market in your previous community?) 21. ¿Usted paga impuesto para su tierra? ¿Cuántos? (Do you pay taxes on your land? How much?)
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22. ¿Usted pagó impueste para su tierra en su comunidad de procedencia? ¿Cuántos? (Did you pay taxes on your land in your previous community? How much?) 23. ¿Son mejores los suelos aquí que allá? (Are the soils better in the relocated community than in your previous community?) Mucho Mejor (Much Better)
Mejor (Better)
Iguales (Same)
Peor (Worse)
Mucho Peor (Much Worse)
C. Equipo Agrícola (Agricultural Inputs) 1. ¿Que tipos de equipo de agrícola usa? (What types of agricultural equipment do you use?) 2. ¿Que tipos de equipo de agrícola usó en su comunidad de procedencia? (What types of agricultural equipment did you use in your previous community?) 3. ¿Usa fertilizantes? (Do you use fertilizer?) 4. ¿Usó fertilizantes en su comunidad de procedencia? (Did you use fertilizer in your previous community?) 5. ¿Usa mas fertilizantes ahora que antes? (Do you use more fertilizer now than before?) Mucho Mas (Much More)
Mas (More)
Iguales (Same)
Menos (Less)
Mucho Menos (Much Less)
6. ¿Usa pesticidas? (Do you use pesticides?) 7. ¿Usó pesticidas en su comunidad de procedencia? (Did you use pesticides in your previous community?) 8. ¿Usa mas pesticidas ahora que antes? (Do you use more pesticides now than before?) Mucho Mas (Much More)
Mas (More)
Iguales (Same)
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Menos (Less)
Mucho Menos (Much Less)
9. ¿Tiene un préstamo agrícola? (Do you have an agricultural loan?) 10. ¿Tuvo un préstamo agrícola en su comunidad de procedencia? (Did you have an agricultural loan in your previous community?) D. Animales (Animals) 1. ¿Que tipos de animales tiene? (What types of animals do you have?) 2. ¿Cuántos animales tiene para cada uno? (How many animals do you have of each type?) 3. ¿Que tipos de animales tuvo en su comunidad de procedencia? (What types of animals did you have in your previous community?) 4. ¿Cuántos animales tuvo para cada uno? (How many animals did you have of each type in your previous community?) 5. ¿Vende animales? ¿Que tipos? ¿Donde? (Do you sell your animals? What types? Where?) 6. ¿Vendió animales en su comunidad de procedencia? ¿Que tipos? ¿Donde? (Did you sell animals in your previous community? What types? Where?) E. Pregunatas Generales (General Questions) 1. ¿Usted tiene relaciones con la gente el las comunidadas dentro el Parque Nacional de Celaque? (Do you have relationshipos with the people in the communities inside of Celaque National Park?) 2. ¿Trabajan ustedes juntos a veces? (Do you work together sometimes?) 3. ¿Por que usted moviá del comunidad de procedencia? (Why did you move from your previous community?) 4. ¿Decearia usted volver a vivir en su communidad vivió antes? ¿Por que? (Do you desire to return to live in the community you lived in before? Why?) 5. ¿Cuáles son sus problemas mayores? (What are you major problems?)
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APPENDIX III: Human Impacts Study Information Sheet Study # 04- 9065 UNIVERSIDAD DE INDIANA - BLOOMINGTON HOJA DE INFORMACIÓN DEL ESTUDIO EL IMPACTO DE LA RELOCALIZACIÓN EN SUSTENTOS Y UTILIZACIÓN DEL TIERRA: PARQUE NACIONAL DE CELAQUE, HONDURAS Usted ha sido invitado a participar en un estudio que intenta saber sobre su vida y como esta ha cambiado debido a la creación del Parque Nacional de Celaque. El propósito de este estudio es considerar cómo diversas comunidades se están adaptando a las reglas del parque y a la reubicación de sus comunidades fuera del parque. INFORMACIÓN A usted se entrevistara acerca de su hogar, cultivos, y opiniones. Las respuestas serán anotadas en papel, pero sus nombres no serán anotados es decir que este estudio es anónimo. El numero de participantes será de aproximadamente 90 personas incluyendo cada miembro de su comunidad y las otras dos comunidades. Toda la información recolectada en cada comunidad será combinada, de forma tal que no se que nadie puedan saber su información. El tiempo estimado para contestar las preguntas de la entrevista será aproximadamente una hora. VENTAJAS El propósito de la entrevista es saber cómo su comunidad ha cambiado debido a la creación del Parque Nacional de Celaque, y comparar como los cambios han afectado otras comunidades. Los resultados del estudio ayudarán al investigador a terminan su educación y también serán importantes para agencias gubernamentales y no gubernamentales a entender los problemas que las comunidades están enfrentando debido al Parque Nacional de Celaque y a encontrar soluciones positivas a estos problemas. Mucha gente alrededor del mundo está experimentando problemas similares a los suyos, y sus experiencias también ayudarán a encontrar soluciones para ellos. CONFIDENCIALIDAD Usted no será identificado por su nombre o información ya que el estudio es anónimo. Toda la información será combinada con la información provista por otros miembros de su comunidad. De esta manera nadie sabrá de donde provino la información de forma tal que no se podrá atribuir a ningún individuo. Las notas de su entrevista serán almacenadas de forma segura y estarán en posesión del investigador, estas no serán compartidas con ninguna otra persona. CONTACTO Si usted tiene preguntas respecto a este estudio, o sobre los procedimientos del estudio sientase en la libertad de contactar al investigador Benjamin Timms, (después de agosto de 2004). Dirección postal: Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 USA. Usted también puede llamarle a USA via (812) 855-7956, o contactarlo por correo electrónico:
[email protected].
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Si usted siente que no sido tratado según las descripciones de esta forma, o que algunos de sus derechos como participante en la investigación no se han honrado durante el curso de este proyecto, usted puede entrar en contacto con la Universidad. Dirección Postal: Indiana University-Bloomington Human Subjects Committee, Carmichael Center L03, 530 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47408 USA. Usted también puede llamar 812/855-3067, o por correo electrónico al
[email protected]. PARTICIPACIÓN Su participación en este estudio es voluntaria, usted puede rechazar participar en el mismo sin ninguna penalidad. Si usted decide participar, usted tiene la oportunidad de retirarse del estudio en cualquier momento de la entrevista o del estudio sin ninguna penalidad. Fecha de la Hoja de Informacion: 04/20/2004
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Study # 04- 9065 INDIANA UNIVERSITY - BLOOMINGTON STUDY INFORMATION SHEET THE IMPACT OF RELOCATION ON LIVELIHOODS AND LAND USE: CELAQUE NATIONAL PARK, HONDURAS You are invited to participate in a research study that seeks to know how your lives have changed due to the creation of Celaque National Park. The purpose of this study is to see how different communities are adapting to the rules of the park and the relocation of their communities outside of the park. INFORMATION You will be asked questions about your household, farming, and opinions. The answers will be written down on paper, but your names will not be written down. Approximately 90 peole will be asked to participate, including everyone in your community and two other communities. All information that you give will be combined with the information that other members of your community provide, so that no one will be able to know your information. The questions and answers will take about one hour to complete. BENEFITS The purpose of the interview is to know how your community has changed due to the creation of Celaque National Park, and how it compares to the changes in other communities that have been affected. The results of the study will help the researcher complete his education and will also be important to helping agencies understand the problems you are facing due to Celaque National Park and finding positive solutions to these problems. Many people around the world are facing the same problems you are, and your experiences will help find solutions for them as well. CONFIDENTIALITY You will never be identified by name and your information will not be used by itself. All information will be combined with the information given by other members of your community. In this way no one will know any information that could be attributed to yourself. The notes from your interview will be stored securely and in the possession of the researcher and will not be shared with any one else. CONTACT If you have questions at any time about the study or the procedures, you may contact the researcher (after August, 2004), Benjamin Timms, at the Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. You can also call me at (812) 855-7956, or by email at
[email protected].
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If you feel you have not been treated according to the descriptions in this form, or your rights as a participant in research have not been honored during the course of this project, you may contact the office for the Indiana University Bloomington Human Subjects Committee, Carmichael Center L03, 530 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47408 USA, 812/855-3067, or by e-mail at
[email protected]. PARTICIPATION Your participation in this study is voluntary, you may refuse to participate without penalty. If you decide to participate, you may withdraw from the study at anytime without penalty. Information Sheet date: 04/20/2004 PROCEDURE: When introduced to the respondent, the respondent will be given a copy of this Study Information Sheet to read before the interview will proceed.
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Benjamin F. Timms Curriculum Vitae Department of Geography Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 Born:
February 2nd, 1975 in Bend, Oregon USA
Education:
M.A. Geography, Indiana University, 1999 B.A. Cum Laude Geography, University of New Mexico, 1997
