As I wrote when I began, a primary goal in Guatemala is to understand the Fair Trade model here—particularly how groups have formed and have been able to work together successfully. I have certainly seen groups performing at a level hardly imaginable for most of the groups I interacted with across Uganda and functioning more cohesively than most programs I have read about in Africa. So, why?
One school of social capital research argues that social capital is a fixed asset—that a particular group is endowed with a certain level of collaborative ability, and this should be regarded as a static allocation. From my initial research proposal I have attacked this notion as seriously incomplete and even destructive in development planning—imagine development agencies refusing to work in any village that scored poorly on some social capital index. If I had to select the most important lesson from my Guatemalan research, it would be the importance of contextualizing social relationships with local, regional, national, and even global histories and political relationships.
In my research and interviews, I noted influences in the current cooperatives and collectives from colonial structures and the global cold war, national land reforms and the guerrilla conflict, and local shared experiences of collective exploitation and forced migrations. Success is always relative, but I was incredibly impressed with the seemingly assumed notion among the groups I visited that they would work together, and further amazed by how much of the collective formation was initiated by the groups themselves. It was interesting to discuss this cooperation with the foreign staff of Entre Mundos, the NGO umbrella organization in the Xela area. One American who had worked and traveled in several Latin American countries was struck by what he called a lack of cooperation and collectivity in Guatemala. He teaches at a private school in the city and noted how his students were intensely individualistic and hated the idea of sharing. I asked about his experience with community inclusiveness in group formation in the area; from what I had read it seemed that many of the groups were an entire community participating together in a development plan or project. However, he replied that while this was sometimes the case, in the cooperatives and self-help groups he had observed, structures seemed more open and inclusive on paper than in reality. While projects were often organized at the community level, there were many times only a few active leaders coordinating the project. He noted that in other Latin American countries the collective spirit seemed far more tangible.
That said, the idea that a whole community would plan development projects locally and organically was new to me and almost completely unheard of in Uganda. The NGO’s director, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso agreed with me. The locally initiated projects she saw here were way beyond anything she had worked with in West Africa, with a seemingly much more sustainable orientation. As I noted earlier, the colonial history of working on fincas in forced communities may have much to do with the group orientation towards development. The finca workgroups shared not only common exploitation, but soccer teams and sometimes particular dress. The structure of land reforms required peasants desiring change to organize themselves and initiate their petitions, thus forming collectives and strong leadership well before groups had the opportunity to work completely independently.
While the degree of self-organization appeared quite high, it is important to recognize the very significant influence of the Catholic Church in Guatemala. Initially missionaries were forces of conservatism and supported foreign finca owners unconditionally. However, as many priests began to observe the exploitation, the Liberation Theology movement took root. Priests were responsible for the formation of a large number of cooperatives throughout the country. In Paradise on Ashes, Manz details the leading contributions of a Catholic priest in turning an entire village into a powerful social and economic cooperative force. SCIDECO also was initially organized with the assistance of the Church. The effort wasn’t confined to farming alone; I visited a weaving cooperative in Zunil, just a few kilometers from Xela, where local women had been organized by a German Catholic priest, who had even brought in a German woman to help teach the women what would sell in Europe. (This group was an interesting story in itself; the women had been very successful prior to the war when their products were exported to Europe, but when the priest had to return during the fighting, their market suddenly vanished. The women tried a number of alternatives, but lost money transporting their textiles for selling in Guatemala City and were cheated by an American who offered to sell the products in the US. Now they sell just at their store, but the market in a small town in semi-rural Guatemala cannot possibly compare to past sales. This story illustrates the importance of markets; no matter how strong social ties are, if there is nowhere to sell what you produce, you can’t succeed!)
Of course, groups and cooperatives can take multiple forms. La Florida’s model of all working collectively is one of the most difficult structures to coordinate and sustain, requiring complete trust and cooperation. I visited one cooperative, Santa Anita, that had started with the same structure. Santa Anita is unique in the sense that it is one of three cooperatives in the country composed of former guerrilla fighters. Members of the group met in a reintegration camp and decided for whatever reason that instead of returning to their home communities they would come together and try to start a cooperative—an idea supported and funded by the government as part of the Peace Accords, with assistance from a number of foreign donors. Initially, as the group received abundant external assistance, the cooperative functioned harmoniously. The affects of outside assistance are immediately apparent—a well-restored patron house for volunteers and visitors, full electrical processing equipment, and a government primary school and recreation area. Yet, when the outside group funding began to diminish, the success and cohesiveness of the group seemed to waver as well. Some members decided that allocations of labor were unfair, with field laborers working much harder than managers. They successfully lobbied for the division of the cooperative land into individual family plots. According to an American volunteer who had lived with the group for several months, the fissure had produced a great degree of tension, still simmering three years later. It was hard to know if and how production had actually been affected because Hurricane Stan had destroyed most of the plantation’s crops. However, the group did still trust each other sufficiently to sell cooperatively, hiring a member of the organization to lead the processing. Each family brings their coffee to the center, receives a receipt for their production, and then later is paid accordingly. Because the cooperative is working with a number of US Fair Trade roasters and distributors, they receive a substantial portion of their profits in advance, ensuring all have revenue to sustain themselves throughout the year. Further, many families use banana trees as the shade for their shade-grown coffee, further benefiting from the fruit sales on the local market. Each household can also choose to grow other supplementary crops on their land, and it sounded like at least some families saved out a small portion of their coffee production to sell to the coyotes, traders who come right to the farm gate, receiving far reduced prices but instant cash.
Perhaps the cooperative has lost some of its idyllic commune feeling, but it seems to have found a sustainable structure. The volunteer told us how some additional income-generating projects had fallen by the wayside as foreign assistance was reduced. However, he assured me that he was quite confidant that the farmers had a permanent market from their US buyers, with links that could not be easily broken. The nature of the Fair Trade and organic niche markets fostered close cooperation between buyer and seller, and several American representatives had visited the cooperative and had meaningful friendships with the growers. It is hard to know if and how this model could be scaled up. Though the partnerships are economically efficient by reducing middle men and fostering direct ties, the linkages are also difficult to arrange. Fair Trade depends on buyers willing to pay above the market price to purchase coffee where they know the workers were not exploited. It sounds great—but how many consumers are so interested?
While one could debate endlessly about the viability of Fair Trade, what is perhaps more interesting are the bonds and ties of the cooperatives at the local level. The group mentality and trust in collective financial arrangements is a prime example of the cognitive social capital I am studying—the cultural values in a given area that affect production. I am not sure the actual networks among farmers within a village or between villages are any different in Guatemala than elsewhere; I didn’t see evidence of more relationships between farmers (though the generally far better road and transportation infrastructure would facilitate such linkages). What I did see was a culture of trust and cooperation that ensured that existing links could be leveraged successfully.
Without specific economic data from farmer groups, I cannot definitively cite the impact of the relationships, but from what I saw, heard, and read, especially among Fair Trade producers, these groups have managed to find markets and buyers that trust the reliability of their production and have generally moved beyond subsistence farming to at least moderately successful commercialization. With my work with the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) in Uganda, one of the most difficult struggles all over the country was explaining the concept of farming as a business and trying to convey the idea that subsistence farming with small amounts of a wide variety of crops could never be profitable. In the cooperatives I visited and read about here, everyone seemed to know this. I don’t want to convey the impression that all rural peasants in the country are growing commercially; certainly the majority of campesinos are still growing primarily for their own consumption. However, in discussing subsistence versus commercial farming with La Florida residents, I never detected a reticence to buy food, and there certainly wasn’t a cultural taboo against purchasing food as I observed in parts of Uganda (where the need to buy food spoke to one’s insufficiency as a farmer). In fact, Doňa Maria noted that her new ability to purchase food with her work on the coffee cooperative was a sign of real success.
Finally, I should note that my visits were to cooperatives who had managed to obtain large amounts of land for their collective farming projects. While there are a slowly growing number of these arrangements throughout the country, it is still only a tiny minority of campesinos who have access to such large amounts of land. Observing these groups provided significant insight into the social capital and organization of such groups, but can certainly not be used for any sort of generalization about cooperative models in the country. That said, the Catholic Church and other organizations have been involved with the organization of campesinos on much smaller scales as well. I met with one representative of Red Kuchubal, a relatively new NGO working to organize domestic and international markets for the organic produce of twenty women’s campesino organizations with ten to twenty members each (I later found out that La Florida was one of these associations, but my impression was that the other groups were much more isolated, smaller operations). Interestingly, these groups had all already existed prior to the NGO assistance, seemingly entirely formed by the peasants themselves. However, without any training, the groups lacked the capacity to market their produce for fair prices or receive premiums for organic production. Red Kuchubal was working to offer the capacity building necessary to ensure that even the small associations could benefit from their social ties and collective work ability. If I were to conduct further research, I would plan to visit many of these smaller groups to understand the specific marketing challenges they faced with little capital investment and without the economies of scale the larger groups have achieved.
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