Swerving my way up and around a bend in the rutted track, a smattering of adobe houses interspersed with small plots of 15-foot corn stalks opened just below. The community of Las Doncellas lies in a bowl in the highlands of Guatemala where every inch of the steep inclines running up the hills are planted with corn.
Several of the men from the community greet me and we make our way into the closest house. A haze of smoke from a wood stove in one extreme of the room fills the air, and the sweet aroma from the pot of coffee gently brewing draws me into the cozy, dimly lit home of José and Amparo Ordóñez.
One of the great pleasures of my job as a program coordinator with Presbyterian World Service and Development is to get away from the formats and reports that measure the results and impacts of the work, and spend some fleeting moments listening to the life stories of those who participate in the projects.
José, Amparo, and their four children lead transient lives. In fact, the whole community of Las Doncellas lives continually with motion, crop cycles, and the global economy.
Only a portion of the year is spent in what the Ordóñez family considers home. Just enough time to plant and harvest their maize and beans. With two potential crops each year, this supplies a part of their annual food needs. However, it leaves a “hungry season” of several months, which in recent years has become longer and longer due to failing rains.
To get through this season, José and Amparo sell their labour to large landowners that are harvesting their crops. Wherever that might be in the country is where they and most of the rest of the residents of this quiet village go.
Guatemala’s economy is highly dependent upon the monoculture planting of cash crops for export to the global market. Bananas, coffee, sugar, and cotton are the traditional crops that dominate the planting and harvesting season on the massive farms run throughout the Guatemalan countryside. Jobs are scarce throughout the year, but harvest time causes mass internal migrations for short-term injections of cash.
The face of these boom and bust industries has changed significantly in the past decades. Coffee’s price plummeted, while sugar and cotton have mechanized to the point where minimal jobs are available for the surfeit of labour. There is a new kid in town, African palm oil, which is pushing the agricultural frontier of the country into clearing of the northern jungles.
José and Amparo continue to travel to the coast each year, with the whole family in tow, for the sugar harvests, but say they will soon have to head north for work. Only upon my return to Canada did I realize the linkage of my lifestyle to their migration patterns. North America’s limiting of trans-fats in our diets and Europe’s push for biodiesel is the true wave that causes ripples throughout Guatemala.
