Abstract
In twenty years of research on the agriculture and forestry of the Yucatec Maya of southeast Mexico, I have seen many ideas come in from the great outside world. Some succeed, many fail. In spite of the anthropologists’ litany of “community participation” and “cultural sensitivity,” the predictor is usually supply and demand: where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions. Government or international help is, however, needed to help develop markets and to provide expert knowledge of how to mobilize for them and connect to them. When this has done, some important successes have followed. Implications for realistic policies go beyond the obvious.
Development schemes aimed at traditional small-scale rural communities rarely succeed. Most accounts can be arranged along a line from those that blame it on stupidity or blind tradition to those that blame it on conspiracy. Whatever the cause, the accounts usually agree on one thing: The small traditional communities are passive victims. Sometimes, both these attribution myths are combined into one romantic claim: the suffering poor are only trying to maintain their sacred traditions. Sometimes it goes with considerable blaming-the-victim.
Of course, in many, many cases the communities are indeed brutalized, often by outright violence that can include mass murder and genocide (as in Cambodia in the 1970s and Guatemala in the 1980s). However, I fear that many writers have a vested interest in turning their subjects into pure victims—so beaten down and oppressed by the government or the donors that they cannot perform.
Fortunately, there are some situations in which outcomes are better in spite of everything. For the last 20-odd years I have been visiting and studying the town of Chunhuhub, a Yucatec Maya community in central Quintana Roo, Mexico. This town has managed to remain quite prosperous as rural Mexico goes. One would never confuse it with Beverly Hills, but few go hungry and all have decent if usually home-made housing.
In those 20 years, Chunhuhub has become more prosperous, but the process has been erratic. Development plans have come and gone in the area. Chunhuhub usually rejects them, and when it does try them they generally fail. But, meanwhile, Chunhuhub, or its residents, have done quite a few things on their own initiative. These also have erratic histories, but some of them succeed. I apologize at the outset for lack of statistics. I have not collected many, and the government collects no valid ones. I have to go with my own observations and some aggregated household data.
Failed projects
The grim litany of projects that never got off the ground is fairly long, but not worth considering in detail. One idea popular in the 1980s was package loans for agriculture, involving loans that required the farmers to use pesticides and fertilizers according to what was supposed to be best practice. There was a strangely close correspondence between the agrochemicals deemed “best practice” and the firms that supplied funds to relevant government employees. The Maya were in no position to risk capital, did not trust the government (for the obvious reason among others), and found that the pesticides and fertilizers were counterproductive in their situation. The packages disappeared by 1990 (when I began serious work in the area).
Many other plans surfaced at local farmers’ fairs in larger towns. These had some direct or indirect influence on Chunhuhub but had no real presence there. Schemes to popularize local handicrafts were sensible, but Chunhuhub Maya do not make many. Honey production, both from European honeybees and from native stingless bees (Melipona becheii), was a much better idea, since Chunhuhub produced huge amounts of honey, but Africanized bees and parasitic mites (Varroa and other spp.) invaded and ruined the industry.
An example of true developer cluelessness was rabbit growing (cunicultura). This has often been tried in Mexico and elsewhere. Thomas Dichter in Despite Good Intentions (2003) tells stories from West Africa, where the poor rabbits immediately died of tropical diseases. They survive in Mayaland—there are native cottontails—but are less successful than the chickens, pigs, goats, ducks and turkeys that already make a Maya homegarden a meat factory. Moreover, the Maya could not bear to kill and eat anything so cute! The bunnies became children’s pets.
Projects for commercial production of tomatoes, chiles, and similar vegetables got off the ground with initial success, but succumbed to the twin problems of pest buildup and distance from markets. Chunhuhub is a very remote community, and there are many much closer to the urban markets that absorb commercial vegetables. The population of Chunhuhub is around 6,000, but almost everyone grows their own vegetables, so there is little internal market. Extremely successful vegetable gardening is practiced by several families in town, but there is no market for their surplus. The pest problem was due directly and specifically to pesticides. These wiped out natural predators of whiteflies, which carry viral diseases. The whiteflies multiplied beyond all measure, ruining large-scale vegetable production in most of the Yucatan Peninsula. Chunhuhub had many fewer problems with this, because it was isolated from contagion and above all because Chunhuhubians do not use much pesticide, but there were enough pests to keep production suboptimal.
In other communities, such as Yaxcaba and neighboring towns in Yucatan state, attempts were made to develop velvetbean as a cover crop (Juan Jimenez-Osornio, personal communication) and, when that failed, to use chopped-up vegetation as mulch (John Tuxill, personal communication). The Maya found little value in these techniques, which add dubiously useful but quite onerous steps to an already labor-intensive agricultural system. The green manure crops had worked very well in other areas of Latin America. The Maya were lukewarm, partly because of project fatigue, partly because their homegardens were already fertile and bean-filled, while their fields weren’t really worth the added effort and expense.
On the other hand, I observed that they developed vegetable raising in those villages without much outside input. Once again, the Maya are good at finding out what activities are actually worth the time and labor invested, while outside development agents rarely consider such tradeoffs.
Medicinal herbs could be produced on a large scale, and they commmand a ready sale; many are illegally exported to the United States for the migrant south Mexicans working there. Several attempts to raise medicinal herbs in Quintana Roo have failed, however, partly because of hurricanes, partly because it is still cheap to collect wild herbs, but mainly for the usual reason—no one thought to develop marketing channels.
The government is fond of bringing in a great new plan just before an election, handing out money to carry out the project, then dropping it once the election is over. Naturally, a few iterations of this game lead to the situation reported by Ueli Hostetler (1996): the villagers invest the donated money in beer and have a big party. At least they get that much out of it. Otherwise, the money is invested in (say) pigpens, then lost when the government abruptly cancels the project, half done. A half-finished pigpen is no use; a party at least gets the community together.
At best, the government may stay long enough to get the plan up and running, but the people abandon it as soon as the funding stops. This happens when the plan is just fine as long as some funding is coming in, but otherwise isn’t profitable enough to be worth doing.
All this has caused many people, from American inner cities to African savanna villages, to suffer from “project fatigue.”
Successes
By far the major planned success was the introduction of mechanized agriculture around 1980. Most of the Yucatan Peninsula is limestone with very shallow soil, unsuitable for agriculture, but along the rim of the central hill country are valleys with deep, rich alluvial soils washed off the hills. Only about 5% of Chunhuhub’s land is like that, but that 5% is concentrated in one broad level plain very near town. With mechanical pumps to bring up underground water and a tractor to pull a plow, this land is incredibly fertile. For the first dozen years of the project, however, the pumps or the tractor were generally broken, with spare parts almost impossible to find. By the mid-1990s the situation was more reliable, and by 2000 the mecanizada was in full operation most of the time, producing vast amounts of maize, watermelons, tomatoes, citrus, mangoes, and other crops.
A major success, but not because of its plan, was the “citrus corridor” idea created in the late 1980s. (This was a period of considerable activity since Mexico’s dominant political party, the PRI, felt seriously challenged for the first time in its history; it did indeed lose the presidency shortly thereafter. The PRI was desperately trying to buy votes by extensive projects. This worked well in Quintana Roo; the projects sometimes succeeded and the PRI stayed in power.) A strip 1 ha wide was cleared along some of the highways in southern Yucatan and neighboring Quintana Roo, and the government funded local people to plant citrus there. Water was developed where necessary. Communities received funding. The idea was to plant oranges and use the fruit to make juice concentrate. A huge plant was set up at Akil, Yucatan, to make the concentrate. As so often, the government had given no thought at all to marketing. The juice concentrate cost twice as much to produce as that from Brazil. Thus the project was hopeless. However, on their own initiative, the Maya soon learned that there was a huge market for fresh oranges and orange juice in Cancun, Merida, and other nearby towns. They developed this market by themselves. Some towns already had fresh fruit marketing networks; others, like Chunhuhub, had to start from scratch, but did so immediately and successfully. The people of Chunhuhub found they could also use these channels to sell watermelons, avocadoes, mangoes, bananas, and so on, produced from homegardens and increasingly from the mecanizada, and this is now the town’s major income source.
Finally, by far the most successful government plan in Quintana Roo in the last 30 years was the Plan Forestal. I have reported on this at length elsewhere (Anderson 2003, 2005; Primack et al 1998) and in any case Chunhuhub did not participate in it, so I will merely mention here that from the point of view of Chunhuhub it was not a success. In other towns, the plan worked stunningly well, mostly because there was a pool of highly trained biologists and administrators. It extended to game conservation and ecotourism, on a limited and experimental scale, with enough success to make further efforts highly desirable. One community, Nohbec, has even satisfied the exceedingly strict German standards for sustainable forest management, and thus can export mahogany and other woods to Germany at a premium price. There are side benefits: even communities that are not part of the plan see how successful conservation and sustainable management are, and now try to act accordingly. However, the Plan Forestal ran into troubled waters as it aged; early commitment and enthusiasm began to be subverted by local dissention and political problems (Faust et al. 2004; Haenn 2005). Many communities participated in it and developed forestry and related industries with great success, but the Chunhuhub citizens agreed overwhelmingly not to participate. Instead, they went their own way. At first they drastically overcut precious woods—mahogany, Spanish cedar, etc.—and faced an economic crash. This taught them better planning, and as more precious-wood trees reached commercial size, Chunhuhub managed its forests in a more sustainable way. Attempts to grow plantations of cedro did not work well; tip borers made the trees grow crooked, and anyway cedro grows so well by itself that plantation growing is hardly necessary.
In the meantime, the ejido system of communal landholding and collective management has largely ended. Changes in Mexican law in 1993 allowed privatization of ejido land. The Maya of Quintana Roo resisted this for a long time, but privatization finally came to Chunhuhub from 2005 onward. The effects of this are still not certain. One thing that is clear is that many ejido families had largely given up farming to follow the computer or other technological dreams, and the families still farming wanted more chance to be flexible and independent in their land management. This can only increase the rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor in the community. The future will be interesting.
Indigenous successes
While government plans were having mixed success, the Maya were busily doing their own developing. This was most conspicuous in the case of fruit marketing noted above, but there have been many other changes.
Particularly interesting was the evolution of the CEBETA school. CEBETA is a string of technical schools roughly equivalent to American community colleges. The Mexican government generously provided one to Chunhuhub, again in the late 1980s. Assuming that a successful farm town like Chunhuhub would want agriculture, it provided only that. However, the Maya were more aware of world futures than the developers were, and wanted computer training. They insisted with dogged and indomitable persistence, and computer training went in. The school and its programs survived a major scandal in 1996. As so often, Chunhuhubians took matters into their own hands, forcing out incompetent leadership. Later a hurricane that destroyed the computers; they were replaced, again at local insistence.
This was part of a wider mission of education. The Maya of Chunhuhub are self-consciously modernizing and education-demanding. This sets them apart from many of the smaller communities in the area, which are far less education-conscious. Chunhuhub is still reflecting its (re)settlement in the late 1940s by a particularly dynamic, intelligent, and upwardly mobile group of young men, largely of the Xool, Tun, and Pat families; these families are now well represented not only in local business ownership but in skilled work and professional circles all over Quintana Roo. I was sure of getting good service when I took my Nissan car in for maintenance in Chetumal, because the head of the repair shop was a Xool from Chunhuhub. Chunhuhub has become a major producer of teachers and similar educated workers, who have fanned out all over south Mexico.
Otherwise, the innovations in Chunhuhub have focused on new products. Most interesting was noni, a Polynesian medicinal plant (Morinda citrifolia). It is used in Hawaii for almost everything, but the Maya know it especially as a diabetes reliever. It appears to work; at least the Maya swear by it, but they always use it with Cecropia leaves and other local traditional remedies, so cannot really factor out which plant is really responsible for the truly striking relief they often enjoy. In any case, noni was completely unknown in southeast Mexico till about 2004, since which it has exploded, and is now found in countless gardens and sold widely in towns.
Other new crops, such as South American passion fruit, have entered the area and expanded since I began to work there.
Another newcomer is sheep. The Yucatec Maya did not traditionally keep sheep, which they call “cotton animals” (h-taman), in spite of Colonial Spanish introduction. As of 1991, Chunhuhub had a few sheep, in the care of a shepherd who—like many village shepherds the world over—was a gentle, simple soul whose world hardly extended beyond his flock. From the late 1990s, however, mutton was saleable. There was both tourist demand in and around Cancun and demand by mutton-loving Central and North Mexicans who had moved to the area. So more and more Maya have added tough, heat-resistant tropical sheep to their dooryard gardens.
Sheep do not automatically succeed in the region. Another, more remote town, Presidente Juarez, tried repeatedly to develop sheep-farming, but the sheep were eaten by jaguars.
Cattle have also increased locally, though this is limited by Chunhuhub’s unsuitability for cattle production. Good quality grass will not grow on the thin limestone soils and dense tropical clays that cover most of it. Cattle flourish exceedingly several miles to the south, on natural savannahs.
Meanwhile, a slow but steady increase in local prosperity results from sale of fruit, ornamental plants, thatch, nonprecious woods, medicinal herbs, and many forest products. Chunhuhubians are also extremely good at finding part-time jobs—from cake decorating to acting as clowns at parties. I recorded about 60 such informal part-time occupations in 1996. Obviously, the Chunhuhubians could do much more, and very often fail to succeed in their endeavors, but they have a good track record overall, especially compared to externally imposed schemes.
The Problems
Thus, while the government brings in new plans that are rarely successful, the people of Chunhuhub find their own ways to succeed. Among other things, they seem always able to come up with just enough capital, thanks to the extended family. Everyone has a relative with a good job somewhere. Capital was a serious limit on agricultural improvement when I started working in Chunhuhub 20 years ago, but from the early 1990s it was not a serious problem except during the recession of 1993-94. Individual families, however, run short of cash, especially after the frequent hurricanes and droughts. Microlending could be improved in the area. The Mexican government’s intricate and enormous bureaucracy puts countless hurdles in the way of start-up businesses, and this is an enormous disincentive to enterprise, especially marketing.
The government’s plans usually founder on one rock: Marketing. It simply does not occur to anyone in south Mexico’s development universe that a product needs a market, and that the market has to be lucrative enough to pay the costs of production and transportation with a little over for profit. This is a common failing of government schemes and NGO plans everywhere in the world. The Maya, by contrast, are amazingly good at finding the tiniest niche market that will actually pay well. In other parts of Latin America, where Maya and other local communities produce products of global importance, international NGO’s that focus on marketing have really helped local communities. This is true in regard to coffee, cacao, Guatemalan Maya weavings, and other products (for coffee see esp. Jaffee 2007). Too often in the Yucatan world, questions of profitability are seldom raised.
Similar stories of Maya vs. outside development abound (see Faust et al. 2004). They can be matched from around the world (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003). Since WWII, billions of dollars have been spent on development. Some $60 billion are now spent every year (Dichter 2003:104). There is now widespread admission that the money has not solved the problem (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003; cf. studies in Faust et al. 2004).
Thomas Dichter (2003) points out that part of the problem lies in the way development assistance is done. Complex and often byzantine bureaucracies invoke complex and expensive procedures, often badly targeted. Mistakes amplify through the system. There are the usual problems of bureaucracy—lack of accountability, top-down control by out-of-touch administrators, and the like. Dichter sees the rise of a huge “development industry” as the root of the problem. Certainly, the data in the present paper support his conclusions.
One wonders. There are too many signs that the agencies know all too well what they are doing to the world economy, and continue to do it anyway (cf. Ascher 1999). The world does virtually nothing about the huge trade barriers invoked by the rich nations against the poor ones (Stiglitz 2003). Above all, farm subsidies are enormous in the First World—the United States gives every American farmer an average of $57,000 a year in direct payouts, and at least as much again in indirect support. European subsidy levels are similar. Yet the international agencies do everything possible to eliminate subsidies in the Third World. One also recalls the point above about agricultural “packages” and giant international firms. Many development plans are not at all well-meaning foolishness, but are very clever and very evil. They are intended to exploit the poor and keep them down, rather than to help them (Ascher 1999; Hancock 1991).
It seems a bit too neat that the cumulative effects of World Bank, IMF, and WTO policies are to keep the Third World addicted to commodity exporting and minimum-wage, low-value-added industry (Humphreys et al. 2007; Stiglitz 2003—with some reading between the lines based on my own interviews with World Bank personnel). The First World has gone on to the information economy, hi-tech, and efficiency—all founded on a formidable education-and-research establishment. The agencies do everything they can to discourage this, by forcing Third World countries to defund education, research, extension, and indeed all public services. At the same time, they invest heavily in developing the most primitive and backward sectors of the economy: mining, plantation agriculture, oil extraction. Whatever the intentions, the effect is to keep these countries as fiefs of the rich nations.
Globalization has, of course, made all these trends and problems more dramatic and more intractable. However, it has also greatly increased the options of ordinary people. The Maya of Chunhuhub are an active, enterprising group with a large, rich land base, and are well positioned to take advantage of opportunities. They have shown a striking ability to do this. However, they have no way of accessing world markets for many of their products. Their precious woods and ordinary standard-grade woods, in particular, have to be sent to the city mills for uncertain and often low-quality milling. Quintana Roo’s wood industry has made attempts in the past to introduce high-quality curing, sawmilling, and production of high-end wood products, but all the fledgling firms have failed. This has much to do with international marketing structures, including high standards in the developed countries. However, precious woods are exported from one or two Plan Forestal communities to Germany under their sustainable tropical hardwoods program. This will no doubt increase.
Basically, the point is that globalization and global development increase the options and opportunities of the global poor in the “global south,” but, unfortunately, globalization increases even more the options and opportunities of the First World and its giant multinational firms to exploit the Third World and keep its people prostrate.
If we actually want to see the rural people of the “global south” improve their lot, the way to do it is to encourage local initiative and to help with small-scale loans and with global marketing. Local people are fully competent to do their own developing, but they cannot do it without some start-up capital and a lot of help accessing global markets.
Another bad idea that persists—this time unstated and unadmitted—is the old belief that wealth can come only from taking someone else’s money. This idea keeps resurfacing because it is common sense. The way we normally make money is to get it from someone. Usually, this is through legitimate business: I sell you a fish and get some cash. Sometimes, robbery, theft, conquest, or deception are the means. Either way, cash is transferred from person A to person B, and that is how person B gets rich.
However, in the modern world, wealth is often created anew, rather than merely redistributed. Turning raw materials into goods is only one way to do this. More efficient production, more value added, more streamlined management, more knowledge, more rapid and smooth transfer of information, more streamlined ways of doing business (“lower transaction costs”), and more environment-friendly production techniques all make something out of nothing—or, at least, reduce costs, and therefore improve cost-benefit ratios. The extent to which this is doable depends on the level of relevant education of the workforce. (Note that word relevant.)
Fortunately, Mexico is more aware than many Third World countries of the need to improve people’s lives through overall wealth creation. Education is universal and quite good. An educated workforce is obviously more able to do hi-tech jobs, make new inventions, and go into high-value-added enterprises. Also, rising wages force companies to modernize and become more efficient, to keep other costs down in the face of rising labor costs (Hayami and Ruttan 1985.)
Money for more education has to come from somewhere; it is part of the nation’s labor cost. A skilled workforce costs a lot. But, as Mexico is aware, an unskilled workforce is even more expensive when opportunity costs are figured into the equation. The problem is that opportunity costs are too dicey for the conservative economists to contemplate.
Resource extraction is another case in point. Mineral resources taken from Country A are lost to that country forever. In today’s world of low commodity prices, they do not even bring in much money. Resource extraction looks good only when one considers the world economy as a zero-sum game. The rich get it (cheaply), the poor lose it; wealth is redistributed, not created. To be sure, metals and some other goods are more efficiently and wisely used in a developed industrial system than in a nascent one, so there is good economic sense in taking copper from Papua-New Guinea and bringing it to Europe and America. But the same can hardly be said for coffee, or sugar, or cattle, whose processing is still a fairly primitive matter even in rich nations. The money spent developing cattle export would be better spent developing decent schools, or even meat-packing plants, in the exporting country.
This sort of zero-sum thinking underlies what George Foster called “the limited good hypothesis” (Foster 1965). Foster found that people who see the world in zero-sum terms come to assume that even things like affection and justice are limited goods. People living in closed economies with widespread low-key competition, or people who have to strive for power (always a limited good), are prone to think this way. So, it appears, are international bankers and development workers.
What is forgotten is that, given a chance, the poor rural villages of the world could produce more scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and (yes) developers than all the First World put together. The result would be wealth creation on an undreamed-of scale.
Wider Issues
The more naïve environmentalists will, at this point, object that this would trash the planet. If everyone consumed like Americans…!
The truth is that a world of opportunity and fair dealing would be a more efficient world. If commodity prices were at all fair, the rich would no longer have access to virtually infinite amounts of virtually free oil, minerals, sugar, and so on. The huge SUV would no longer be competitive with the small economical car. In fact, the car would not be competitive with public transport; people would not find it necessary to have their own cars. If the metals columbium and tantalum were not extracted for pennies from a Congo torn by civil war over the ore—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people—the American economy would not find it so cheap and easy to provide huge, overadequate computers on such a lavish scale; people like me, who use the computer merely as a glorified typewriter, would have much smaller, more efficient, longer-lived machines. If Third World countries had decent wages and decent social support systems, the rural people, newly empowered and given a stake in their economy, would no longer be forced to cut down every bush for firewood or to pull up every tuft of grass for fodder. They would be able to husband resources, control and manage them, use them sustainably.
The problem is that almost nobody thinks this is an achievable goal. Limited-good thinking is perhaps the major reason for such hopelessness. Today’s widespread cynicism typically takes the form of a belief that people are instinctively wired to destroy nature or to think in zero-sum terms (e.g. Ridley 1996). This flies in the face of common experience; it is only in genuinely limited situations (most often, struggles for power in hierarchic systems) that people develop limited-good thinking. Yet this is enough to make constant trouble for this imperfect world.
In fact, an evaluation of over 11,000 World Bank development projects showed that those with conservation goals were as successful at producing economic development as those that ignored conservation and simply went for the money (Kareiva et al. 2008).
It almost seems as if the world economy is not capitalist but feudalist. We are back to the world of the robber barons in their castles on the Rhine. Most of the world’s population is forced, by police or military violence and genocidal repression, to work for pennies. They work in bare-subsistence farms, they live by their wits in urban slums, or they work in extractive or low-value-added industries that provide cheap commodities for the more affluent. The affluent, having no economic incentive to conserve, use these commodities in a wasteful manner. The resulting damage to the world’s ecosystem worsens yet more the plight of the poor. Far from being capitalist, “neoliberal,” or some sort of new product of the mystical force of “globalization,” this economy is a throwback to an earlier age.
The cure is to focus first on providing the bare necessities of life: water, fuel, food, and health care. In the desperately overpopulated contemporary world, this last has to include the full panoply of contraceptive techniques, made freely available everywhere. Then we can begin to think about the long term: education, efficient use of resources, development of whole new industrial systems. This will require spending money not on quick fixes but on huge systems that have slow and uncertain payoffs—not only education systems, but ecological reserves, sustainable development, research and extension, and the like. Be suspicious of anything that pays off in the short term. If it is a good idea, private entrepreneurs will rush to do it without help. Otherwise, it isn’t worth doing.
There are lots of other ideas that really work. Even just controlling crime, or providing a road to market, can work wonders in certain places.
One need not—pace the anthropological establishment—totally revolutionize our views of the world or our political economy, though some revolution would surely be useful. Anthropologists have done thousands of studies showing how foolish outside developers are, and how smart the locals are at surviving in spite of them (one that sums up a vast literature in one complex story is Tanya Li’s The Will to Improve, 2007; see also, again, Dichter 2003). The anthropologists usually draw the perverse conclusion that what we need is for anthropologists to take over and end neoliberalism, or globalization, or some other meaningless mutisyllable nonsense. No. What we need is to give local people the simpler and more practical of the things they actually want, and then get the hell out of the way.
The one common denominator that all successful plans have, and that none of the failed schemes has, is that they actually give opportunities to ordinary people. It is among the ordinary people of the world that we can and must seek and find salvation.
References
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