I Am Destroying The Land!

The Political Ecology Of Poverty And Environmental Destruction In Honduras

Susan C Stonich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367011208
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429715747
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book is about interconnections-those among the historical, geographic, demographic, social, economic, and ecological aspects of development-as well as how Central Americans struggle with the interplay of increasing poverty and environmental degradation. Centering on the case of southern Honduras and expanding to include the Central American region, Susan Stonich's analysis employs an integrative approach that builds on a strong and varied methodological foundation to encompass both political economy and ecology. Stonich examines the systemic linkages among the dynamics of dominant development models and associated patterns of capitalist accumulation, regional demography, rural impoverishment, and environmental decline. By casting the discussion against the backdrop of southern Honduras, she presents a powerful historical record of how larger socio-political communities impact individuals and the natural environment and how, in turn, people respond. She charts the destiny of peasant groups within the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, recognizing that the fates of the peasantry and the natural environment are intimately linked. Stonich's study contributes to an improved understanding of the complex interrelationships between social processes and environmental degradation, offering a timely and pertinent comment on one of the most serious modern challenges

1Linking Development, Population, and the Environment: Perspectives and Methods

In June 1992, representatives from 178 nations convened on Rio de Janeiro for the historic United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as UNCED or the Earth Summit), while some 2,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) met at the unprecedented concurrent event, the Global Forum. The Rio summits marked the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment which convened in Stockholm to consider how human activities alter the global environment. In 1972, there was little recognition that economic development contributes to environmental decline and even less empirical research focused on the connections. Twenty years later, the environmental costs of unrestrained economic growth and the simultaneous need for increased economic opportunity persist throughout the world. Over the decades, however, a growing acceptance of the intimate connections between development processes and the state of the natural environment also arose. The conclusions and recommendations of international councils, such as the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (UNWCED 1987), and the environmental initiatives on the part of major funding institutions, which occurred during that time, point to the expanding recognition that complex interconnections exist among economic, social, demographic, as well as environmental processes, related to development.

In the aftermath of Rio 1992, however, many questions emerged about the value of the meetings and the limited nature of the agreements that were reached (Lowe 1992). For example, issues related to population growth, critical links between development and the environment, were touched on only superficially—despite engendering rancorous debate and the warning of Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Bruntland, in her opening address to UNCED that, "poverty, environment, and population can no longer be dealt with, or even thought of, as separate issues" (Holloway 1992). Representatives to UNCED from Third World countries declared that they would not discuss efforts to reduce population unless developed countries were willing to consider endeavors to decrease consumption. At the same time, participants at the Global Forum, perceived discussion aimed at controlling population as an infringement on women's rights and as a means of deflecting efforts away from eradicating the real causes of poverty and environmental destruction in the Third World (Holloway 1992).

While it is premature to consider the ultimate legacy of the Earth Summit and the Global Forum, their greatest feat may rest not in the insufficient commitments made by governments and organizations but in the way that the events shaped the future global agenda—by bringing out new international values of equity and environment and tying them to relations between rich and poor nations (Speth 1992). The bitter debates over population concerns may have some positive results as well, as environmental organizations increasingly include population issues into their endeavors, and foundations establish more programs aimed at integrating the population dimension into research agendas concerned with linking development and the environment (Hollowav 1002).

Despite the growing recognition among policy makers and the public that complex links exist among development, population, and the environment, current research and practice in each area largely remain separate and professionals in one domain are only starting to comprehend the issues and priorities of the others (Brandon and Brandon 1992:477). In addition, understanding the interrelated human and environmental problems currently being faced by the world, also demands the facility to shift among local, regional, and global levels. Since the 1970s, theoretical and methodological changes have occurred within anthropology which have strengthened anthropologists' abilities to address conceptual issues and methodological approaches that integrate development and the environment more fully both in terms of linking relevant domains of knowledge and levels of analysis. These advancements also have enhanced the participation of anthropologists in interdisciplinary research related to global environmental change.¹

In response to criticisms that community focused anthropological studies did not adequately consider the relationships between such communities and the larger political and economic systems of which they were a part, many anthropologists expanded their research focus to examine how relatively small groups are integrated into laiger regional, national, and international systems (Ortner 1984). By restoring human agency to a central place in social scientific investigation and by demonstrating that individuals and institutions in the Third World have a substantial impact on modifying international pressures, these efforts also helped correct the excesses of dependency and world system theory that were so in vogue during the 1960s and the 1970s (Ortner 1984). In the extreme, these paradigms proposed an all-powerful metropolitan capitalism as the explanation for underdevelopment in the periphery—in effect denying that local initiative and local response had any significant role in the making of history (Mintz 1977).

These shifts within anthropology have raised a number of theoretical concerns related to the general processes involved in sociocultural change and in the nature of integration of systems, as well as more specific methodological issues regarding appropriate levels and units of analysis. In their book, Micro and Macro Levels of Analysis in Anthropology, Pelto and DeWalt stress that social scientists have augmented their efforts to understand the relationship between relatively small scale and larger scale processes (i.e., between microand macro-level phenomena) and that this escalating concern has brought about the need to develop appropriate methodologies to guide research (1985: 187). Two important methodological responsibilities are clear delineation of conceptual models and of systems of postulated relationships among levels of analysis, and precise definitions of the relevant factors that are used as the specific linkages to articulate those levels (DeWalt and Pelto 1985:187). Also of significant concern are appropriate sampling strategies and procedures at each level. While such considerations may be unimportant to anthropologists working solely at the community level, they become crucial when the results of research conducted at the local level are applied to larger regions or processes, because of the serious questions regarding representativeness that they raise. Also problematic, is accomplishing these methodological tasks while not diminishing the strengths of the ethnographic and other techniques already employed by anthropologists. Participant observation and key informant interviewing must be used in combination with other techniques that establish multilevel linkages. Often, this leads to more interdisciplinary approaches in which data and analysis from other social or natural science disciplines are incorporated with anthropological work. This is especially the case in research that deals with issues of contemporary policy importance.

The theoretical and methodological changes which took place throughout anthropology, also occurred within ecological anthropology. While, earlier human ecological studies by anthropologists stressed the detailed analyses of relatively small populations in local areas (e.g., Netting 1968,1981; Rappaport 1967), recent efforts have emphasized the need to expand local level studies to the region, and even to the world, in a systemic and systematic manner (e.g., Bennett 1976,1985,1990: 351, Moran 1986,1990). This is especially the case, if anthropologists are to enlarge their participation in interdisciplinary research and policy which confront global environmental problems (Bennett 1990; Moran 1990; Rappaport 1990). Important ways in which ecologically oriented anthropologists have expanded their studies beyond the single community, include the use of remote sensing, image processing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which allow the integration of diverse kinds of spatially recorded data (demographic, social, economic, and ecological, as well as environmental).² Although these technologies have been used in other disciplines for the past two decades, the low level of formal training in spatial analytical methods and the steep learning curves of many GIS software packages, for most anthropologists, have suppressed their use within the discipline (Aldenderfer 1992:14). However, recent interest and opportunities for training, as well as the capability of anthropologists to verify data obtained from remote sensing devices through fieldwork (i.e., through ground-level observation or "ground-truthing"), have amplified the number of anthropologists utilizing such technologies. This surge of interest led several participants in a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara in early 1992 (The An- thropology of Human Behavior Through Geographic Information and Analysis: An International Conference) to speak of an imminent "GIS revolution" in anthropology (e.g., Conant 1992:15).

At the same time that the global awareness of the ties between development and the environment grew and consequential theoretical and methodological advancements took place within anthropology, a serious disagreement evolved concerning the ultimate destiny of Latin American peasants in the context of the spread of contemporary capitalism known as the campesinista/decampesinista debate. Although peasants always have been linked to larger economic systems, the expansion of capitalist agriculture throughout the Third World in recent decades has transformed the peasantry and made it reliant on wage work in labor markets tied to the world economy as never before (Smith et al. 1984). In Latin America this transformation has taken many forms, but the overwhelming trend has been towards changing subsistence farmers into wage laborers (de Janvry 1981). The overall effect has been that few rural households persist independent of wage labor, while the majority generate household income from a wide array of economic activities both on and off the farm: agricultural production, commodity production and vending, service jobs, and wage work (Warman 1981; Lehman 1982; Roseberry 1983; Collins 1988). The dependence on off-farm income is especially significant among smallholder farm families who derive the majority of household income from off-farm sources (Deere and Wasserstrom 1981). This unparalleled proletarianization raised important questions about the nature, the diversity, and the ultimate outcomes of the transformation: What forms does the process take? How stable are the emerging part-time farms, can they continue to exist and, if they do, can they do so without compelling neighbors to become rural wage earners? Such questions have provoked vigorous debate, a wide range of opposing arguments, and a number of contending positions that have theoretical significance and also affect agricultural development policy (Heynig 1982). At one extreme are the various proponents of the peasantization school (the campesinistas) who share the conviction that the peasant form of family production is congruous with the expansion of rural capitalism and, moreover, actually facilitates capitalist penetration (See Stavenhagen 1977; Warman 1981; Lehmann 1982). At the other limit are the supporters of the depeasantization or the proletarianization school (the decampesinistas) who argue that capitalist penetration into rural areas inevitably transforms peasants into landless wage workers and thus leads to social differentiation and to the emergence of a class of rural proletarians (Bartra 1974). Both these extreme positions have been criticized for being unable to capture the complexity of the process of proletarianization: the peasantization school for failing to recognize the degree to which the expansion of capitalist agriculture has been accompanied by growing social differentiation, by increasing proletarianization in the production process, and by expanding numbers of farm households who rely on semiproletarianization to survive; and the proletarianization school for being unable to explain why the emergence of a full-time proletariat appears so limited and why peasant production persists, is reproduced, and continues to be an important source of subsistence for large parts of the rural population (de Janvry and Vandeman 1987).

In their comparison of international patterns of proletarianization in agriculture, de Janvry and Vandeman observe that although there appears to be expanded proletarianization of labor in the agricultural labor process, a class of full-time rural proletarians emerges very slowly (1987). Impediments to full proletarianization range from a variety of social factors such as the flexibility of semiproletarianised farmers that allows them to participate in seasonal work and their worth to capitalist enterprises which are able to hire them cheaply because they maintain other sources of income (Maclachlan 1987), to ecological factors such as the protection of small farmers from expropriation because they occupy environments unsuitable for large-scale, heavily capitalized endeavors (Brush 1987). Following Stavenhagen (1978: 27-37), Heynig maintains that contending forces, some stimulating proletarianization and others enhancing peasantization, often act simultaneously, and suggests that embracing an uncompromising position at either extreme in the debate implies either an oversimplification of reality or a spurious dilemma (1982: 113-40).

More positively, Roseberry (1983, 1989) and others (e.g., Favre 1977; Holmes 1983; G. Smith 1989) have proposed the augmented study of the processes associated with proletarianization in order to understand the nature of agrarian transformations—placing special emphasis on the linkages among the various actors involved in the process. Of these various endeavors the reconceptualization of the peasantry as proposed by Deere and de Janvry (1979) is especially relevant. Rejecting efforts to define the peasantry as a distinct economic or sociocultural category, Deere and de Janvry undertook to develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of peasant households that considered their participation in diverse income generating activities. They argued that the analysis of contemporary peasants must be founded on the numerous relations of production in which peasant households participate (Deere and de Janvry 1979; Deere 1990). Given this conceptualization, the income generating strategies of peasant households—their survival strategies—encompass the links by which they struggle to reproduce themselves as units of production and reproduction and can be used to examine how such households persist in contexts of growing impoverishment.

Major Perspectives for Linking Development, Population, Poverty, and Environmental Destruction

The various points of view regarding the connections among development, population, poverty, and environmental decline in tropical areas of the Third World can be grouped into three general perspectives: Malthusian and neoMalthusian; neoclassical economic and/or technological; and dependency and ecological Marxist. The issues that are raised, the specific questions that are asked, the factors that are determined to be relevant to the explanation, the relative priorities of those factors, and the proposed solutions to human and environmental problems vary with each approach.

Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian Approaches

The most familiar perspective used to explain poverty and environmental destruction in the Third World is the Malthusian or neo-Malthusian, which views mounting demographic pressure on natural resources as the paramount factor (Ehrlich 1968; Eckholm 1976; Brown 1987; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1970,1990). Proponents of this perspective contend that the carrying capacity of the earth is finite and that resource destruction results when too many people intensify their efforts to extract food and other needs (e.g. Ehrlich 1968; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990). They point to increasing populations and declining resource productivity of agriculture in many regions of the Third World and argue that this stimulates increased migration and human settlement in tropical forest regions. The results include destruction of biodiversity and natural resources. For these individuals, reducing population growth is necessary in order to arrest environmental degradation.

In opposition to the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians are the "Cornucopians" for whom population growth presents little threat and may even stimulate economic development and bring about higher standards of living through improved technology and augmented productivity (Tierney 1990: 52). These individuals, led by the ideas of Julian Simon (1980,1981), believe that as a particular resource becomes scarce, human innovations will occur that will produce more of the resource or find an acceptable, and perhaps better, substitute (Simon and Kahn 1984). They draw on the ideas of Ester Boserup (1965) who argued that increasing population pressure gives rise to its own solution: as land becomes scarce, for example, people intensify their use of it.³ Hayami and Ruttan (1985) and Pingali, Bigot, and Binswanger (1987) have elaborated this model and argued that a change in one factor, such as land, will lead to conservation of that factor and increased use of the more abundant factors—in this case, labor (see also Lele and Stone 1989). According to them, although increasing population may lead to difficulties in the shortterm, in the long-term, a larger population will lead to innovation, technological progress, and greater productivity.

An additional criticism of the neo-Malthusians is that their arguments largely have taken place at a global or theoretical level without sufficient empirical evidence. A National Research Council study committee, for example, could find little empirical work on the linkage between population growth and environmental degradation (1986) but nevertheless concluded, "that slower population growth might assist less-developed countries in developing policies and institutions to protect the environment" (National Research Council 1992: 78). Likewise, a recent study by the United Nations Population Fund notes that although there has been considerable theoretical debate about the alleged connections among population growth, poverty, and environmental degradation, the relationships involved have not received adequate attention in the way of rigorous analysis and detailed, empirical documentation, nor have they been adequately addressed through policy initiatives (UNFPA 1991).

Studies, based on empirical research which moves beyond abstract theoretical discussions, have found several sets of linkages among population, poverty, and environmental destruction (UNFPA 1991). These analyses come from diverse perspectives (e.g., Durham 1979; Murdoch 1980; Ellen 1982; Lappe and Shurman 1988), but share the common view that environmental problems have their basis in the structure of rural poverty rather than in population increase per se. These studies look further than the risk of Third World populations ravaging resources to ask why such populations continue to grow at high rates. They identify an interacting array of economic, social, and cultural factors that maintain high levels of fertility—including the low status of women, high rates of infant and child mortality, the vital economic contributions of children, and the lack of old-age security. They contend that the decision to have children is a rational response to existing conditions and, therefore, that analysis should not center on gross correlations between population characteristics (such as growth or density) and poverty but rather on the historical and political-economic contexts that influence power and reproductive choice.

A particularly germane appraisal of the argument that overpopulation invariably explains resource s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Linking Development, Population, and the Environment: Perspectives and Methods
• 2 Southern Honduras: Environment and Demography
• 3 The Historical Legacy
• 4 Agricultural Development in Southern Honduras: The Human and Environmental Effects
• 5 Local Level Responses to Agrarian Transformation: The Municipality and the Community
• 6 Strategies for Survival: The Dynamics of Rural Impoverishment and Environmental Destruction
• 7 Conclusions: The Political Ecology of Development
• Appendix: Research Methodology
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author