It’s supported by PADELAN, or the Project to Assist Local Development and Agroforestry in Nippes, a collaboration between Oxfam Quebec and the Ministry of Agriculture that uses money from the Canadian International Development Agency to fund projects identified as priorities by local development committees.
And in Anse-a-Veau, this store was one of those priorities--desperately needed.
Several doors down, Mayor Telisme Dutelien sits behind his desk in a small office in the town hall. On a mid-May morning, the room is dim and sweltering. No lights shine and no fan churns: the community’s generator, which provided electricity, stopped working the month before, explains Dutelien. It’s just one of the problems that has plagued Anse-a-Veau in recent years, ever since its population began to drop in the 1980s, dragging the community’s commercial vitality with it.
The decline of Anse-a-Veau is symptomatic of what has happened across Haiti as Port-au-Prince, the capital and hub of opportunity, sucked people from the countryside for jobs, for schools, for a better life—or the promise of one. But in January, disaster struck there: an earthquake leveled great swaths of the city, killing 230,000 people and shaking the nation to its core. That calamity brought into sharp focus the drawbacks of centering so much of a country’s lifeblood in one sprawling place.
Now, the call for decentralization, long a national goal, is again sounding loud and clear. As international donors promise enormous financial resources to help Haiti rebuild, what are the steps it needs to take to answer that call? Some ideas can be found in the initiatives Oxfam had launched before the quake—programs based on the needs of communities, as voiced by the people who live in them.
They are small, but steady steps and the store in Anse-a-veau is one of them. Open since December 2009, it operates six days a week, its shelves of canned milk and crackers, matches and razor blades plugging the household needs local growers can’t fill themselves.
Nearby, in Paillant, Guerline Rubin stands at the entry to her house, carrying a stack of cardboard crates loaded with eggs. They are from the chickens clucking in a henhouse in the corner of the yard—another of PADELAN’s community projects designed to help local families find ways to boost their incomes.
The chickens belong to Rubin’s father, a participant in the egg-production project which has targeted 20 households in the area. Each of them received 60 chickens, whose value the farmers will slowly pay back—at the rate of 500 gourdes a month, or $12.40—to the local development council that provided the birds. They lay about an egg a day.
For Rubin, that means trips to the market at least twice a week to sell her family’s cache. She ports the fragile eggs via tap-tap, a small colorful bus that lurches over the dirt roads between villages. Each egg fetches about five gourdes, netting Rubin’s family about 2 gourdes, or about 5 cents.
Added up, that bit of income becomes a precious resource for farmers trying to put food on their tables, pay for medical care, and have a little cash left over to invest in a hardier variety of seeds that can promise a decent harvest—and give families a reason to stay in the countryside.
A few hills over, Marie Camel Rubin bends over her field of beans, corn, and manioc. Behind her, in the distance, a low building rises from the sea of green—it’s a new mill built with the help of PADELAN to grind corn and sorghum. Open six days a week, the mill saves local farmers the time-consuming trip via bus to another community to have their grain ground.
Rubin is one of the local farmers happy to have their own mill nearby. And while it saves her time, she still struggles to make ends meet. Weeding along with her through the rows is her son, Noel Jolins. He’s 8—and he would be in school if his mother could afford the fees. But he had to quit when she couldn’t scrape together the money to send him.
That’s one of the reasons Laventure Benad is so eager to see a small irrigation system completed in the hills of Colora in central Haiti. The father of seven children, he can afford to send only four of them to school now. But with irrigation—and the opportunity it will provide for three harvests a year instead of just one—Benad hopes he will have not only more food for his family, but enough income to pay for additional schooling.
“We’d like to go forward,” he says as a pair of young men behind him hammer at a heap of rocks, cracking them into gravel to help build the irrigation system. Channeled into a pipe, water from the mountain stream flowing by them will find its way into more than 60 acres of fields below where it will help 150 farmers.
With the help of Proyecto Binacional Artibonito, an Oxfam Quebec-supported project known as PROBINA, the irrigation could eventually bring them a measure of financial independence, say farmers. They expect that within three years they will be doing well enough to b able to buy their own seeds and fertilizer.
For Markens Louidort, a 26-year-old student in Liancourt in the Artibonite Valley, education holds the key to a better future, he says. He has enrolled in a computer-training program offered by APPEL, or Association des Parents and des Professeurs d’Ecole de Liancourt, an Oxfam partner that provides post-secondary vocational training.
“The world is going on with technology and it’s important for someone to learn computers,” says Louidort. In a country with unemployment as high as 70 percent, Louidort is hoping this new, hard-won skill will help him land a job.
Three days a week, for four hours each day, he settles in behind a computer in the stifling APPEL classroom. A series of batteries from Oxfam, recharged with the help of a generator at a nearby radio station, provide the electricity for the computers. Every seat is taken. This is the most popular class APPEL offers and some students share computers. A mood of deep concentration hangs over them.
At the head of the classroom, teacher Dieunel Prince talks the students through the next step of a program that will allow them to format certificates. Later, he explains privately that one of the biggest challenges he faces in working with these students is the fact that so many of them never had the opportunity to learn how to type—a handicap for those hoping to dive quickly into this new field.
That gap in learning is an indication of the struggles Haiti has had with providing a solid education for its citizens—about a quarter of the districts have no schools and 38 percent of Haitians over the age of 15 are illiterate. Education is one of the fundamental services rural regions will need to offer if decentralization is ever to become a reality for Haiti.
Michelle Lisette Casimir, mayor of Saint Michel in Artibonite, knows that well. Many of the families in the area sent their children to Port-au-Prince for advanced schooling, and some of them died in the quake. What Casimir longs for Saint Michel to have is a professional school of its own.
“We can’t talk about the future without being concerned about the youth—they way they are living,” says Casimir, adding that education is her top development wish. “With education...we will keep them.”
]]>The poor conditions for farmworkers in this country exist, in part, because of the fundamental lack of enforcement of basic labor standards. Employers that do not feel threatened by labor law enforcement often take the risk of paying less than the minimum wage to save money. Businesses that wish to comply with the law but compete against such labor law violators feel pressure to violate the law as well or to pay the bare minimum. This spiraling down of labor standards must be thwarted.
]]>“Come into the sun, everyone. Stand in the sun with me,” Velazquez said, swooping his arms together the direction of the field in front of him.
Grudgingly, some of the hundreds of marchers who had gathered in Winston-Salem in support of farmworkers, eased out of the shadows into the field.
“This is what farmworkers are dealing with right now, right here in North Carolina,” said Velazquez, President and Founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) referring to the heat, which at 88 degrees was 16 degrees above average for the day. “(The) workers are stooped over in the fields making the life of leisure for the people in (RJ Reynolds’) executive offices. It’s not only an injustice, it’s a moral disgrace.”
The endlessly energetic Velazquez, and hundreds of farmworker and FLOC supporters, were in Winston-Salem for RJ Reynolds’ annual shareholders’ meeting to introduce a shareholders’ resolution that would require the company to adopt a strict human rights policy. In addition to the resolution, FLOC is seeking a formal meeting with RJ Reynolds CEO Susan Ivey to discuss ways to improve the working conditions in tobacco fields.
Despite having little chance of being adopted, the shareholders’ resolution is an opportunity to bring the issue of farmworker justice directly to RJ Reynolds officials. This year, Oxfam America Campaign and Advocacy Advisor Irit Tamir asked Ivey and others to support a stronger human rights policy. Oxfam and its allies believe that the weak human rights policy adopted by RJ Reynolds’ in February does little to ensure that the workers who pick the company’s tobacco – merely encouraging the company’s contractors to improve tobacco picker conditions, not demanding it.
And those conditions are brutal. Tobacco workers face some of the toughest conditions in the industry, including racism, long hours of stooped labor, exposure to dangerous chemicals and annual incomes of less than $8,000. Though RJ Reynolds claims an ‘independent’ survey of tobacco workers by a company it hired reveals that tobacco pickers are satisfied with their working conditions, it’s doubtful the workers at the May 7 rally would agree.
In its effort to rectify these conditions, FLOC has repeatedly sought a meeting with Ivey, only to have those overtures ignored. FLOC is also making its case publicly at shareholder meetings and through the media.
RJ Reynolds adopted its existing human rights policy partly in response to that work. While simultaneously distancing itself from the workers who pick its tobacco, claiming that because they work for a Reynolds contractor, they aren’t Reynolds employees. While technically true, FLOC and Oxfam believe that Reynolds has the responsibility and the power to demand higher standards from its contractors, and only purchase tobacco from contractors that ensure safe and healthy working conditions for its workers.
Though the shareholders’ resolution was defeated, the FLOC campaign against RJ Reynolds still maintains its goal of meeting with Ivey, and the ultimate adoption of a human rights policy that truly enforces human rights.
What you can do:
Planted long ago by a French worker from a nearby farm, jatropha was unknown to Maluleque. He’s since become one of the most experienced local cultivators of this unusual plant, now prized for its seeds used to produce biodiesel fuel. In 2006, when an international company approached Maluleque about managing the nursery for its 27,000-acre jatropha plantation in his town, he leapt at the chance.
“I was so happy,” he says, sitting beneath the jatropha bush. “I wanted to get a car and build a nicer house and educate my children at a higher level.” The company, called ESV Group, piped water into the village. It hired doctors and teachers to work there.
Right now Mozambique is devoting millions of dollars and more than 200,000 acres of land to growing biofuel crops for ethanol and biodiesel. The country is encouraging foreign investors to use its land in exchange for jobs and fuel to reduce its dependence on oil imports.
The diversion of agriculture from food production to biofuel crops represents a significant contribution to increasing food prices. Between 2005 and 2008, global food prices spiraled up more than 80 percent according to research by Oxfam and others. This has been a significant burden for poor people who often spend more than half their income on food. The food price increases pushed more than 100 million additional people into poverty globally. Some studies show that increased production of biofuel is responsible for 16 percent of that food price increase.
Small-scale farmers increase their vulnerability when they commit to biofuel projects. Things were looking good in Inhassune that first year, but then ESV started to have financing problems. When it abandoned the venture, local government officials ordered all the workers to stay on the job. Not all have, but for those like Maluleque who have continued to work, 14 long months have passed without pay.
Maluleque says he’s kept farming his own land but has been unable to afford to plant all of it. He planted on several acres, and cut back to one daily meal. In November 2009, Maluleque reported that he had practically exhausted his resources and was considering going to South Africa to look for work.
About four hours south of Inhassune, farmers in Nzeve face a different problem. This village of 137 people—located in the rolling, coastal hills near the resort town of Bilene—was told by the government that farmers each had to release about 80 percent of their land (usually about six acres) for a 49,000-acre jatropha project led by a foreign company. Locals were told that working on the plantation would offset any loss of food production. The government said that since the soil in the area was sandy, it was better for growing jatropha than corn anyway. It seemed reasonable until the company ran into cash flow problems and laid off workers.
Violeta Sithole, 47, lives in Nzeve and worked in the jatropha nursery until she lost her job. “They were going to give us a school and electricity … but we are not seeing any of it,” she says. “Now that I am no longer working, we need more money and we are not growing enough in our field. All we eat is cassava.”
Reports from communities about pressures on farmers have prompted Oxfam to begin studying the effect of biofuel production on farmers in southern Africa. Preliminary findings show that small-scale farmers are the ones caught in the middle of these global trends. They welcome jobs because it’s hard to earn cash in poor communities, so people in Inhassune and Nzeve want local plantations to succeed. But, the government and companies gambling on jatropha, also put local farmers at risk when they demand land and make no plans in case the scheme fails.
Fans of the jatropha plant rave about its potential: they say it can grow almost anywhere and needs little water. And—although jatropha is a weed and poisonous, known as “bellyache bush”—in 2009, Air New Zealand flew a jet powered in part by the plant’s oil.
Sound too good to be true? It may be. Dutch researchers say jatropha needs good soil and more water than corn or sugar cane for optimal growth. Repurposing land without local input can be disastrous because communities risk losing areas valuable for hunting or grazing livestock. Poor countries must move forward carefully and ensure that local communities are made aware of potential costs and benefits and have a voice in decision making.
Editor’s note: ESV announced in late November 2009 that it had sold its jatropha venture in Mozambique to an Italian partnership for $4 million—contingent on payment of all back wages and taxes by ESV.
]]>The Canadian organization Rights and Democracy has developed an assessment tool that communities can use to answer these questions for themselves. The system is called the “Getting it Right” Human Rights Impact Assessment tool, and is designed so that local organizations and citizens can, with minimal training, carry out their own study of how their basic rights -- such as free speech, water, safe working conditions, shelter, and education -- are affected by the actions of governments and companies establishing mines, agricultural operations, factories, or oil and gas pipelines.
“A lot of companies will do an impact assessment on their operations, using an outside consultant, but these don’t always do much for the stakeholders in the community, or promote accountability,” says Chris Jochnick, director of Oxfam America’s private sector program. “Helping community members conduct their own human rights assessment strengthens their capacity to examine their situation, frame their issues, and engage with a company or government,” he says. “We think this will produce a more robust and balanced assessment than one done by outsiders.”
The Rights and Democracy assessment tool helps people document how their rights are supposed to be protected under national law, and the actual effects of an investment project on these rights. It helps community leaders create a team, plan out the work and specific rights to assess, carry out surveys and community consultations, validate findings, write reports, and meet with companies and governments to urge action to address the problems uncovered in the assessment.
Rights and Democracy commissioned five assessments to test the system starting in 2005. One of them looked at the effects of a metal refinery on women’s rights in La Oroya, Peru, concentrating on the rights to water, health, adequate housing, and working conditions. It was done by the Centro de Promoción y Estudios de la Mujer Andina. The organization concluded that lack of enforcement of environmental rules by the state was one of the main contributors to the poor public health situation in the city. The report also cites lack of commitment by the Doe Run Peru SRL company to improve the environmental performance of the plant.
“By looking at the health problems in La Oroya through a woman’s eyes, this assessment helped uncover a pattern of children’s and reproductive health issues that was clearly connected to lead poisoning,” says Gabrielle Watson, Oxfam America’s planning and learning specialist who helped develop the assessment tool with Rights and Development.
Oxfam America is helping two organizations carry out a Human Rights Impact Assessment. One is related to a proposed natural gas operation in Bolivia where the Centro de Estudios Aplicados a los Derechos Economicos, Sociales y Culturales (CEADESC) will carry out the study with local Guaraní indigenous communities that were denied their right to be consulted about the gas exploration activities in their territory. The other case concerns tobacco pickers in the United States, and will be carried out by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). FLOC will look at efforts by migrant and undocumented farmworkers to improve working conditions on tobacco farms.
Watson says the human rights assessments will help people take control of the type of development carried out in their name. “Local people are the experts about human rights impacts of private investment projects in their communities. This tool puts them in the driver’s seat in the search for safer, more equitable outcomes that are good for everyone.”
]]>According to Peru's Civil Defense Institute, the rains have hit 18 of the country’s 24 regions, causing suffering to more than 190,000 people and damaging more than 28,000 homes. Particularly hard hit are communities located along the major Andean rivers in Cusco and Puno in the south.
With a $100,000 grant, Oxfam is supporting its local partner, PREDES, to help 529 families living in temporary shelters in the provinces of Anta, Calca, and Urubamba.
"At the moment, we're improving the temporary shelters to ensure they have clean water and basic sanitation, and so avoid major health problems", said Oxfam’s Elizabeth Cano, who is coordinating the humanitarian response for the organization.
Work includes the installation of separate toilets for men, women, and children as well as the distribution of hygiene kits equipped with basics such as toothpaste and soap. Oxfam and PREDES are also working with civil defense committees to help communities and local authorities improve coordination to be better prepared for future natural events.
"The only thing we haven't lost is our health and our lives,” said Eufemia Araníbar, a member of the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood committee in the district of Izcuchaca. "We haven't lost our children or our husbands. Everything else we can rebuild, because we have our health", she tells us firmly.
In Cusco, on Saturday, Jan. 23, people were already looking with concern at the clouds in the sky and the swollen rivers. Persistent rain had caused the rivers to rise, particularly at their confluence points. In a matter of hours, the Vilcanota, Jatumayo and Huatanay rivers and Huacarpay Lake had overflowed.
"Since Saturday 23, we've been in a state of alert, protecting ourselves, putting sandbags along the edge of the river. But it overflowed upstream, where we didn't expect it, and the houses have collapsed,” said Urbana Huamán, a 43-year-old single mother from Anta Province, as she showed a team from Oxfam the curved shape of a nearby river and lamented the miscalculation.
While in some areas residents stayed on the alert, elsewhere they had observed a reduction in the turbulence of the river and, instead of going out to keep watch and put up barriers, they went to bed, assuming they were safe.
"During the night, the water came and caught us unaware,” said 34-year-old Eufemia Araníbar. “Some people were awake, digging ditches, but some of us were asleep. Suddenly we were woken up by shouting and whistling. When I stood up, I felt water on the floor. My shoes were already wet.”
The first thing she did was to get her children out.
"We couldn't save anything, just a few clothes,” added Araníbar. “The water took everything. It took my pigs, my guinea pigs, my chickens..." And with them she lost she lost her savings.
Since that January night, the rain has not stopped. In March, the Quesermayo, Antarhualla and Kitamayo rivers in Calca Province broke their banks. There have also been landslides and more homes have been destroyed.
]]>Now, it’s all gone—their home and their livelihoods--destroyed in floods triggered by heavy rain in the mountains of southern Peru. Across the country, the rains have affected more than 190,000 people. Eighteen of Peru’s 24 regions have been hit, including Cusco, which has experienced unprecedented amounts of rainfall.
"Suddenly we found ourselves with no house, no business,” said Salinas, as she showed an Oxfam team the plot of land on the river bank where her house used to stand and where now there is only debris.
"I didn't want to leave. I had to be carried out,” Salinas said, describing how the river water rose hip-deep in her house. She wanted to save her goods and her husband's work tools. Three days after she was evacuated, the house collapsed. Now the couple is living in the temporary shelter in a stadium, thinking about how to start over again.
María Gutiérrez, 50, from the district of Izcuchaca in Anta Province told a similar story.
"I used to be a storekeeper,” she said, using the past tense because the disaster has left her with no capital. She would buy corn, wheat, and beans, and store them in her house to sell. But all of that was washed away by the river.
"Even if I had the money, I couldn't set up my business again because I used by house for storage and now I wouldn't know where to store the goods", Gutiérrez added.
While shopkeepers wonder how they will recover their losses, a larger worry for the region may be the harvest. According to Peru's Civil Defense Institute, 21,730 hectares of crops, or more than 53,000 acres, have been destroyed and more than 130,000 acres have seen a partial loss of crops, mostly in the Cusco and Puno regions.
"Nearly 100 percent of the crops have been lost,” said Juvenal Durán, mayor of the district of Yucay in the Sacred Valley. "The farmers have lost their crops: the corn and cabbage are rotting. Agricultural insurance only covers 400 soles ($141), and there are people who rent their land, so what are they going to do when the crops fail? Yucay is dependent on agriculture. What are we going to eat? Where are we going to live? How are we going to be able to send our children to school?"
The communities in the upland regions have also been affected.
"In my community the crops are riddled with pests, late blight. What's more, as we farm on slopes, the soil is being washed away,” said Alejandro Huamán from Andahuaylillas. He’s worrying because farming is how his family makes a living.
The local authorities are aware that the focus must be on how to safeguard the next harvest.
"We've got a plan to ensure the next harvest: seeds, fertilizer, training, river defenses. In addition, we need to rebuild the bridges to improve trade and the irrigation channels,” said Gilberto Gil, a councilor in Urubamba.
At the same time, officials know that they need to think about how to help local communities adapt to unpredictable weather.
"This is going to be permanent due to climate change. We must prepare for rains and droughts. We have to address the immediate problems but also plan for the long term,” said Gil.
"One of our biggest concerns is that these disasters will increase poverty", said Elizabeth Cano, Oxfam’s humanitarian aid coordinator in Peru. "One of the main sectors that has been affected is the small-scale farming sector. Unlike the tourism sector, many small-scale farmers live in poverty, so it takes them longer to recover. We are appealing to the central government to increase support measures for this sector."
]]>Despite its importance to two-thirds of the world’s population (and 80 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa), agricultural development has experienced a systematic decline in funding over the past 40 years. However, the current state of global crisis has breathed new life into arguments to support agricultural development.
“Feeding the world with scarce resources in an environment increasingly affected by climate change is one of our most important global challenges. It must be addressed in a way that meets a second challenge – helping millions lift themselves out of poverty in the process of agricultural development,” said Kimberly Pfeifer, Head of Research at Oxfam America.
Today’s panel discussion focused on the findings of the recently released book, Biotechnology and Agricultural Development: Transgenic Cotton, Rural Institutions and Resource-Poor Farmers, edited by Robert Tripp, one of the panelists. The research, commissioned by Oxfam America, assesses the socioeconomic impacts of genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton – or transgenic cotton – by examining its use by smallholder farmers in four developing countries with years of experiences with GM technology: India, South Africa, China, and Colombia.
“Concerns from climate change to food and energy prices only serve to intensify the debate about the future of genetically modified crops, as well as the role of agricultural technology in poverty reduction. This book examines the experience of GM cotton in developing countries and draws lessons about the relevance of agricultural biotechnology for resource-poor farmers,” said Tripp.
The research shows that institutional investments in agriculture are more important and relevant for poor farmers than investment in biotechnology and challenges the claim that biotechnology can be the solution to agricultural development by examining the precarious institutional basis on which these hopes rest in most countries.
“Resource-poor farmers must make decisions about what to plant in order to make a sustainable livelihood to feed their families, send their children to school, afford healthcare, and maintain their access to land. Adequate access to information is key to these decision-making processes,” said Pfeifer.
Oxfam has worked with West African cotton farmers to highlight the injustices in the international trading system and to shift the balance of power in the cotton value chain toward cotton producers.
“We could not ignore the pressure that existed to establish biosafety regulations to pave the way for the commercial adoption of transgenic cotton. Providing advice in this area seemed a daunting task given the very limited availability of rigorous assessments of the impacts of adopting this new technology,” said Pfeifer.
The case studies provide accounts of resource-poor farmers’ experiences with transgenic cotton along with the national governments’ efforts to facilitate its adoption, examining what resource-poor farmers need in order to take advantage of and benefit from the adoption of this technology.
The studies revealed a need to devote more attention to the development of local institutions that support public and private capacity for technology generation, technology delivery through markets, extension, and regulations, and farmer capacity to demand services, participate in markets, and understand the technology they are using.
“An innovation such as a transgenic crop is not simply a technical solution, it is an intervention with social, economic, and political consequences. We risk the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers if we neglect the critical foundation of sound local institutions that put farmers at the center of such technological choices,” said Pfeifer.
Today’s panel discussion featured: Robert Tripp Ph.D., Lead Researcher and Editor of the book; Richard Oswald, President, Missouri Farmers Union; Larry Beach, Ph.D., Senior Biotechnology Advisor, USAID; Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute; Mario Alejandro Rodriguez A., General Manager, C.I. Algodones de Colombia; Kimberly Pfeifer, Ph.D., Head of Research, Oxfam America.
For more information about the book, please visit: www.routledgeeconomics.com/books/Biotechnology-and-Agricultural-Development-isbn9780415543842.
]]>But even Mejia was unable to put a favorable spin on his situation at harvest time in late 2009: after he’d planted his corn and beans in his field high above the languid Chixoy River, now flowing at a very low level, his crops had failed, owing to lack of rain. Most years he can grow 22 quintales (about 2,200 pounds) of corn. This year, Mejia says he got about a tenth of that.
“We could see the corn cobs, but when we opened them up, many were totally empty,” Mejia says, standing in his field. “We got almost nothing this year.”
Mejia did everything he could short of making it rain, including fertilizing his field twice at great expense. But now that the 42-year-old farmer has harvested nearly everything, the field is overgrown with bright yellow weeds. Some call them flor de muerto (flower of death).
Mejia says at this point he is done trying to grow food and must wait for the next planting season in June 2010.
“We hope there will be rain,” he says. “Otherwise, we may die.”
Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition among children under five in Latin America: nearly 50 percent, according to the World Food Program. For indigenous children the malnutrition rate is even higher: close to 70 percent. On a recent visit to Mejia’s area, Francisco Enriquez, a sustainable livelihood specialist for Oxfam in Guatemala, found that most of the families had lost between 80 and 100 percent of their crops.
The hills above the Chixoy River are gray and dry at harvest time, with dark rocks visible through thin soils on the exposed slopes. It’s a tough place to farm, and Mejia’s family is just one of about 350,000 families the government of Guatemala said are at risk when it declared a food emergency in September 2009. Most vulnerable are those in central Guatemela’s “dry corridor,” where Mejia lives in the department of Baja Verapaz. His village, Xinacati II, is just one of the hundreds of communities—many composed of indigenous people—that are struggling to grow enough food to survive.
This food shortage is occurring in a country of luxurious green that exports millions in sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and coffee. Despite this abundance, poor Guatemalans, who are mostly indigenous Maya people, regularly face chronic food shortages. There is plenty of food in stores, but poor people can’t afford it.
Since the Spanish colonization of Central America, indigenous Maya people have been systematically moved off the most productive farmlands to arid areas and steep hillsides. In Mejia’s case, his community and several others were originally in the Chixoy River valley but were involuntarily relocated in the 1980s to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Most of the flattest, best land is used to grow export crops like coffee and sugar cane and, more recently, biofuel crops.
“The country is producing less and less corn and beans each year,” says Enriquez. He says the government “is not pushing for spending that will specifically benefit small farmers. … They need to invest in producing food; otherwise, when there is a drought or a flood, it becomes a dramatic crisis.”
The lack of rain in Baja Verapaz could be the type of dramatic crisis Enriquez fears.
Most of the families with significant crop losses last fall have few options. In order to earn money to buy the food they need to survive, many men from communities like Xinacati II will migrate to distant coffee and sugar cane plantations, where they will work for a few months, returning occasionally to bring money to their families.
If things are really tough, entire families may relocate temporarily. Mejia says he can pick more coffee beans with the help of his wife and five kids than he could alone.
“We would like people to have more options than just migration,” says Gonzalez. Oxfam is working with the Association of Community Health Services, known by its Spanish initials ASECSA (where Gonzalez works), as well as the Training Institute for Sustainable Development, to help farmers survive the winter. They will provide seeds and tools to help families grow vegetables to improve their nutrition and they will help families with feed and veterinary care for small livestock like chickens, pigs, and ducks. Oxfam is also helping fund ASECSA’s network of health promoters to provide nutritional counseling for families with young children to reduce child malnutrition and death.
This project will also support a range of community improvements: paying local people to work on irrigation systems and other infrastructure to help farmers when they plant next spring; producing organic fertilizer and insecticide to save money and protect the soil; and teaching farmers about native seeds to reduce costs and increase production of corn, beans, and peanuts.
“These things will help people after our project is over,” says Enriquez, who has worked with the UN and Oxfam in Guatemala for 10 years. “They will be better positioned to survive another drought.” The agriculture assistance and community service activities will help nearly a thousand families. Oxfam has committed $266,000 to the project.
“We tried asking others for the money for this but did not get a positive response,” Gonzalez says in the ASECSA office in Rabinal, two hours by walking and driving from Xinacati II. “So it is perfect that Oxfam is working with us. We are concentrating on the worst-hit area, and if it works, we will replicate it in others.”
Some of the factors contributing to the poor harvests in Guatemala in 2009:
For decades, economists have debated whether or not more should be invested in agricultural research and development in marginal areas. The paper begins by summarizing this debate, concluding that it is narrow and off-center of Oxfam’s campaign. Rates of return to investments in agricultural research are good enough in marginal areas, although they may be higher in other sectors such as infrastructure, and they are lower than in more favored areas.
The economic reason for investing in agricultural research and development for marginal areas is that doing so reduces poverty, contributes to sustaining the environment, and benefits not only these farmers but the rest of the world—in a number of ways. There are also moral arguments, well-known to Oxfam.
]]>