The Slow Displacement of Smallholder Farming Families: Land, Hunger, and Labor Migration in Nicaragua and Guatemala

Abstract

Smallholders worldwide continue to experience processes of displacement from their lands under neoliberal political-economic governance. This displacement is often experienced as "slow", driven by decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes that favor input-intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction and export projects at the expense of traditional agrarian practices, markets, and producers. Smallholders struggle to remain viable in the face of these forces, yet they often experience hunger. To persist on the land, often on small parcels, families supplement and finance farm production with family members engaging in labor migration, a form of displacement. Outcomes, however, are uneven and reflect differences in migration processes as well as national and local political economic processes around land. To demonstrate "slow displacement", we assess the prolonged confluence of land access, hunger, and labor migration that undermine smallholder viability in two separate research sites in Nicaragua and Guatemala. We draw on evidence from in-depth interviews and focus groups carried out from 2013 to 2015, together with a survey of 317 households, to demonstrate how smallholders use international labor migration to address persistent hunger, with the two cases illuminating the centrality of underlying land distribution questions in labor migration from rural spaces of Central America. We argue that smallholder farming family migration has a dual nature: migration is at once evidence of displacement, as well as a strategy for families to prolong remaining on the land in order to produce food.

Agribusiness Facing Its Limits: The Re-Design of Neoliberalization Strategies in the Exporting Agriculture Sector in Chile

“…On the contrary, our analysis confirmed that the strategies of agrarian neoliberalism in Chile continue unabated, disregarding the various studies showing the negative impacts and the deepening of inequalities in the rural regions. In particular, the loss of peasant livelihoods is reinforced by this type of agribusiness strategy, leading to a process of proletarianization with rural workers and small farmers conspicuously migrating to the city (a mass movement of people that in other Latin American countries has been called "slow displacement", [79]).…”

Reversing Channels and Unsettling Binaries: Rethinking Migration and Agrarian Change under Expanded Border and Immigration Enforcement

“…While the 1996 Peace Accords formally ended the conflict, enduring structural challenges and inequalities ensured the continuation of out-migration flows [64]. New postconflict neoliberal reforms favored expanded agrarian extractivism and other mining and energy "megaprojects" to the detriment of smallholder production, land access, and labor opportunities [4,17,60,110]. Today, many smallholders live under a condition of "slow displacement," in which prolonged neoliberal political-economic governance "[provokes] a kind of displacement from the land that [unfolds] slowly over years" [17] (p. 2).…”

“…Furthermore, while scholars widely recognize that migration outcomes are heterogenous [28], analysis of differentiation has generally centered on comparative work between migrant and non-migrant households. Recent research by Carte et al [17] observes uneven socioeconomic outcomes among migrant cohorts, yet between groups engaged in distinct migration and political-economic processes from different migrant-sending countries.…”

Land Governance from a Mobilities Perspective

“…Signals of such long-term transformations run across all articles. The theme is perhaps most poignantly expressed in Carte et al's title "The slow displacement of smallholder farming families: land, hunger, and labor migration in Nicaragua and Guatemala" [30] (in this special issue). In both countries the formal end of civil wars brought a new era of neoliberal reforms of the rural economy to the advantage of intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction, often disadvantaging traditional agrarian practices and leading to waves of emigration in both countries.…”

“…An example may serve here to illustrate how intricate these long-term processes at the nexus of land use, income, and migration are. When cattle ranchers in Caballo Blanco, one of the study sites in Guatemala, started renting out their land for sugar cane production, less land was available to rent out or lend to community members for farming, especially at a rental price low enough for poor farmers, in turn leading to less agricultural production and hunger, which then triggered labor migration in order to be able to pay for the higher prices to rent land, which in turn increased the land rental prices even further leading non-migrant families (families who do not have a member who earns income elsewhere from labor migration) to become excluded from access to land; this in turn led more community members to migrate in order to send back at least the "money for some beans" [30] (p. 8). Migration is therefore both evidence of displacement but also a strategy for families to prolong their hold on the land as farmers.…”