LATIN AMERICA GUATEMALA'S DEADLY HARVEST
By Florence Gardner Florence Gardner was a staff member of the recently closed Environmental Project on Central America and is now a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Those interviewed for this article requested that their names not be used for fear of reprisal. GUATEMALA CITY--"When I was a kid," says a man far up the Usumacinta River in Guatemala's Peten rainforest, "the hunting and fishing were very good. It was simple to keep food on your table; there were wild pigs, birds, but now everything is gone." The forest is being cleared, says the man, by "people [who] can't stay where they are and need to come to the Peten to survive.... In the highlands, the large landowners have grabbed all the land, and the campesinos [peasants] have no land, no salaries and no way to speak out for the changes they want." Guatemala provides a stark lesson on the environmental impacts of poverty, and of a "development" process which has alienated people from the resources which sustain them. An estimated 65 percent of Guatemala's original forests have been destroyed; ecologists estimate that Guatemala's forest cover could disappear in 25 to 40 years. Huge farms and plantations producing for export employ pesticide-intensive techniques which poison field workers and contaminate drinking water. Peasants who once grew crops for domestic consumption are displaced by large producers. "The people are like strangers in the land which has belonged to them for thousands of years, and they are considered second- class citizens in the nation which their heroic ancestors forged," a conference of Guatemalan Bishops concluded in a 1988 statement. Sowing the seeds of destruction Guatemala's current development model grew out of a CIA-backed military coup in 1954. The CIA engineered this coup to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, a U.S. corporation owning 550,000 acres of Guatemala's national territory, from a land reform process which threatened to redistribute 210,000 acres of idle United Fruit land. At the time, the United Fruit Company was the largest landowner and foreign company in Guatemala, controlling 40,000 jobs, holding $60 million in investments and owning 887 miles of railroad track in Guatemala. The coup overthrew the "ten years of spring" led by two moderate presidents who reformed some of Guatemala's basic social inequalities. Under Presidents Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala had experienced its first chance at real democracy: the government gave 100,000 landless families plots of unused land, instituted the country's first social security system, legalized unions, allowing one-third of the workers to become formally organized and dramatically expanded public education and literacy. The series of military dictatorships which followed reversed these reforms. Today, Guatemala has the most unequal land tenure in all of Latin America, with less than 2 percent of the landowners controlling 65 percent of the farmland. At the other end of the scale, approximately 27 percent of the total population is landless and forced to work as part-time wage laborers. As more land has become concentrated in fewer hands in the last 30 years, the average size of small farms has declined from 1.71 to 0.79 hectares. Despite its abundant water resources and some of Latin America's most fertile land, Guatemala has the third lowest "physical quality of life" index in Latin America, after Haiti and Bolivia. All of its social indicators, from health to literacy, put Guatemala firmly at the bottom, compared even to its impoverished Central American neighbors. Over 86 percent of the population lives in poverty, up from 63 percent in 1981. Where poverty and malnutrition leave off, the brutality of three decades of war waged against the Guatemalan people by their own government begins. In the last three decades, 100,000 Guatemalans have been killed and 40,000 disappeared by the army and paramilitary death squads. The intense violence of the late 1970s and early 1980s completely destroyed more than 400 Indian villages. An estimated one million people were forced to abandon their homes, including 200,000 who fled to neighboring countries, especially Mexico and the United States. There are currently 46,000 Guatemalan refugees living in camps in southern Mexico. Hundreds of thousands more are internally displaced--having fled to the slums of Guatemala City or to the forests to escape repression. Harvest of destruction The end of Guatemala's 10 years of spring also marked the beginning of a tremendous growth in the country's agro-export sector as the U.S. government moved quickly to ensure a path of development favorable to U.S. business. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), private banks and U.S.-led multilateral development banks, such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, provided cheap loans to transform Guatemala's "backward" economy into an efficient agro-export machine, producing one or two main crops for the international market. Between 1956 and 1980, large-scale agro-export production received 80 percent of all agricultural credit, as land devoted to cotton increased by 2,140 percent, to sugar by 406 percent and to coffee by 56 percent. The next export boom came with cattle a few years later. From 1960 to 1978, grazing land increased by 2,125 percent. This unprecedented period of expansion transformed the lives and land of Guatemalans more than any time since the Spanish conquest. Though extremely profitable for a few, this agricultural boom is responsible for a tremendous loss in forests since the 1950s, increasing hunger in the countryside and the widespread pesticide contamination of people and the environment. Along with cotton came "miracle-working" pesticides from the United States. By the 1970s, a Guatemala had earned the dubious distinction of registering the world's highest levels of DDT in mothers' milk and human flesh--185 times higher than limits set by the World Health Organization. An estimated 80 kilograms of insecticide per hectare are applied to cotton each year in Guatemala, one of highest levels in the world. This intense pesticide use has strengthened pest resistance and caused the explosion of new pest populations, thus requiring more frequent applications of pesticides. Applications have risen from 8 to 40 times per year in the last two decades. These pesticides, flowing with the rains into rivers and down the Pacific plains into the ocean, contaminate fisheries and drinking-water supplies with toxic runoff. Guatemalan peasants and U.S. consumers are also directly exposed to the chemicals whether harvesting or consuming contaminated exports. During the 1980s, there was an average of over 1,000 reported pesticide poisonings per year in Guatemala, according the New York-based National Central American Health Network. The cattle boom of the 1960s brought even greater destruction to the Guatemalan landscape and to traditional forms of agriculture. Heavily funded by AID and multilateral development banks, beef production accelerated deforestation and further impoverished much of the population. The beef industry, exporting almost exclusively to the United States, continues to destroy vast expanses of rainforest in the Peten, where 20 percent of Guatemala's 2.5 million head of cattle now graze. In other areas, peasants are thrown off even the most marginal lands because cattle can be raised where other exports cannot. Additional deforestation results, as people dispossessed from their land move further up the hillsides or migrate to the Peten. Unemployment has also risen, because cattle ranching requires few workers and displaces other, more labor-intensive agriculture. The increased marginalization and impoverishment of the rural majority resulting from the expansion of cattle ranching has led to the bitter irony that beef consumption in Guatemala is less than half of what it was 10 years ago, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Beef has undermined the livelihood of Guatemalans more than any other agro-export. Most campesinos who organized themselves in the late 1960s and 1970s to reclaim their diminishing access to land and resources understand this fact. Conflict in the countryside escalated as peasants began to respond to the outright expropriation of their lands by cattle ranchers and their armed escorts. In 1978, more than 100 Kekchf people were massacred in the town of Panzos when they marched peacefully to the Government's Ministry of Agrarian Transformation to appeal for help in settling a conflict with large cattle ranchers. This massacre was considered a turning point that resulted in an upsurge of grassroots resistance in the country, as entire communities of indigenous people joined the popular movement or the armed opposition against the government. Other cash crops play significant roles in the agro-export scheme. A few landowners, using substantial inputs of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, grow coffee, sugar, tobacco, bananas and cardamom on expansive plantations. Bandegua, a subsidiary of Del Monte (itself a subsidiary of the massive conglomerate R.J. Reynolds), holds a total monopoly on banana production, controlling production from 7,600 hectares in the eastern Izabal Department. Despite the destruction wrought by the export business, many environmentalists blame individual campesinos for most of the environmental problems in Guatemala today. Soil erosion has increased in the highlands in recent years, as displaced campesinos are forced to produce on smaller, less fertile lands. Campesinos are abandoning traditional agricultural practices, including fallow periods, green manures and crop rotation in favor of more intensive, less ecologically sound methods. But one campesino activist explains, "After being [expelled] from our land and forced to plant on the very tops of the hills, the fault for this is not ours." He adds that logging companies which cut "indiscriminately" are responsible for much of the deforestation. International creditors such as the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank are also accelerating the process of environmental destruction. In an attempt to squeeze more money out of the country's failing economy, they demand the Guatemalan government undertake austerity measures. These so-called "structural adjustments" force countries like Guatemala to cut what are viewed as "non-essential" health, social and environmental programs [see "Brutal Banking," April 1990, Multinational Monitor]. Structural adjustment programs also mandate intensified export production, exacerbating the problems caused by the agro-export economy. New crops, old story In the last decade, the traditional agro-export model has begun to break down. The world prices of coffee, cotton, beef and sugar--mainstays of Central America's economy--have dropped dramatically, while the costs of agricultural inputs have steadily increased. The foreign loans which initially fuelled the agro-export system are barely covering the interest on previous loans and are forcing an overly intensive use of the land. The toll that the last two decades of large-scale export production have taken on the environment is beginning to catch up with profits. With up to two-thirds of all agricultural soil in Central America severely degraded and a growing problem of increased pests and diseases resulting from indiscriminate pesticide use, the agro-export system is facing diminishing returns. At the same time, the growing landlessness, poverty and repression that have been by-products of this system have led to social unrest now on the verge of explosion. The Guatemalan government and the lead engineer of Guatemala's modern export system, AID, hope to take some fuel out of the flames of revolution by improving the situation of the small farmer- without undertaking land reform that would challenge those in power. "Non-traditional" crop production offers a new way to help Guatemala earn foreign exchange and to temporarily fend off the desperate need for land reform by providing a lucrative, if risky, way for farmers to make a living on their shrinking plots. Because many farmers no longer have enough land to grow corn to feed their families, AID is encouraging them to grow snow peas, broccoli, cauliflower, melon, strawberries and flowers for export to the United States and Europe. But this profit comes at a high price. Campesinos who once grew their food without chemicals now need tremendous amounts of fertilizers and highly toxic pesticides to grow their new crops. The new crop's year-round system of cultivation does not allow the land to rest or the insects and diseases to die off. Some tropical agronomists believe that it may be impossible to sustainably grow broccoli and other non-traditional crops in the tropics because the winter or dry seasons are not substantial enough to break the pest cycle, so that insects and diseases remain in the soil continuously. The new pesticide use in the highlands has vast ecological consequences. Large-scale bird and bee kills and numerous human- health impacts have been widely reported as the backpack pesticide sprayer joins the machete as the campesino's other essential tool. Protective safety equipment is virtually non- existent. In a recent study, more than half the farmers reported knowing one or more people who had collapsed, been taken to the hospital or died from pesticide poisoning. Already non-traditional export crop production is showing signs of strain. At the Cuatro Pinos cooperative, an AID showcase of the success of non-traditional crop production, farmers reported that they have had to double and triple their use of agro- chemicals, especially fungicides, in the last three years. North American agronomists and researchers in the area indicate that snow pea harvests are dropping due to increased disease and soil depletion. Just a few years ago farmers harvested 250 pounds of snow peas per cuerda (a 40 x 40 meter square) two to three times a week; now they only get 10 pounds per cuerda and cannot harvest as often. Some farmers are no longer able to cover their production costs, a problem likely to worsen as the rest of Central America jumps on the non-traditional crop bandwagon, bringing prices down on the world market. In addition to pesticides, the new wave of nontraditional crops requires small-scale irrigation systems to facilitate growing year-round. Agronomists and campesinos report that since drilling and pumping for irrigation began, the water table in some highland areas has dropped and people are losing access to drinking water. AID loans for these new systems are adding to the debt burden of small farmers, who are compelled to use such technologies in order to stay competitive. Irrigation systems, intensive labor and the use of chemicals entail a much greater capital outlay for small farmers. A crop of snow peas costs about $12,373 per hectare to produce, compared with $2,024 for corn, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Land prices in the last three to five years have risen by 500 percent in some areas as a result of capital- intensive, non-traditional farming. When crops are rejected at the border or, as happened in 1989, the harvest is lost due to frost or heavy rains, farmers are left with no crop to sell, no crop to eat and large bills to pay. The trend toward non-traditional crops is also contributing to a decrease in the ecological diversity of Guatemalan farms, as farmers abandon traditional integrated farming practices where many varieties of plants are grown together. Now, small farmers all over Guatemala are growing only a handful of crops to sell for export to the United States and Europe. Under current economic and political conditions, many poor farmers are forced to choose between growing non-traditional crops and growing inadequate amounts of corn on the same piece of land or earning starvation wages on the plantations. Farmers will not have lasting options for survival until they themselves have the power to determine the direction of their own development and the use of local resources. A choice to grow snow peas or starve is no choice at all. Addressing the roots Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans who have joined the popular movement for social change are reaching the conclusion that if the root causes of the crisis in Guatemala are not addressed, they will see an unending cycle of poverty, war and dispossession. "We need democracy before we can have political stability and before we have environmental protection--so that people are not only worried about starving or being killed. And we need a government that is freely elected and responds to the needs of the people," says a prominent Guatemalan environmentalist. However, the call for democracy and respect for human rights goes beyond elections and fewer killings. Many groups in Guatemala are realizing that the right to a clean and safe environment and the right for all Guatemalans to decide how to manage their country's resources are also fundamental issues of human rights and democracy. "We need to decide what model of development we want to follow and how we want to use our land and resources," another environmentalist explains. Any conception of real democracy for Guatemala must include not just political justice, but economic justice as well. This places the focus on the handful of people and corporations who own nearly all the land and resources of Guatemala. "Redistributing the land is the only real solution. We cannot dedicate ourselves to palliatives, like how to improve technology so the campesino can produce a little more on terrible soil. This is not a solution," states a Guatemalan agronomist. Analyses of Guatemala's "environmental problem" must be broadened to include the country's underlying social problems. Until now, mainstream environmental organizations and development agencies have shaped the terms of debate about the problems confronting many Third World people. The voices of the people who have lived from the land for generations, and whose struggle for survival also includes the survival of the land have not been heard. A Kekchi explains: "Ecological destruction in Guatemala is a destruction at the same time of the indigenous universe and of the Indians themselves. Ethnocide is being carried out in Guatemala against the indigenous people, not just by killing us by the thousands, but also by the destruction of our way of life. Today in Guatemala we are facing the greatest threat to our people since the [Spanish] Conquest. And because of all this, we believe that we have something to contribute to these environmentalists who are raising the problems of ecological destruction." The report on which this story is based, "Guatemala: A Political Ecology," is available for $1 from: Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway #28, San Francisco, CA 94133.