Volume 64, No. 1, Spring 2005
Fair Trade and Eastern Caribbean Banana Farmers: Rhetoric and Reality in the Anti-Globalization Movement
Mark Moberg
With the impending removal of tariff quotas that formerly guaranteed access to the UK market, the Eastern Caribbean banana industry faces the prospect of direct price competition with cheaper Latin American bananas. Some farming communities in the region have embraced Fair Trade as an alternative marketing strategy. Certified Fair Trade farmers receive higher prices than do conventional growers, as well as a social premium for local development. In exchange, they must conform to extensive social and environmental criteria. This article compares the rhetorical claims of the Fair Trade movement with the experiences of Fair Trade farmers on St. Lucia. By examining the price differential between conventional and Fair Trade fruit and appropriateness of certifying criteria, I offer a preliminary assessment of Fair Trade as a form of anti-globalization politics.
Key words: globalization, bananas, Fair Trade, Eastern Caribbean
Risk Takers, Risk Makers: Small Farmers and Non-Traditional Agro-Exports in Kenya and Costa Rica
Susan E. Mannon
This article examines the effects of small farmers’ competitive strategies on production relations in the non-traditional agro-export sector of the developing world. It uses a comparative case study approach involving cases with different commodity, institutional, and socio-historical features: one involving snow pea production in Kenya, the other involving chayote production in Costa Rica. Despite the contrasting characteristics of each case, small farmers in both areas responded to production and marketing risks by utilizing alternative markets. These strategies, however, decreased their ability to guarantee supply and quality to agro-export firms, which compelled such firms to develop alternative production arrangements that side-stepped small farmers. The findings reveal the limitations of non-traditional agro-export production as a rural development strategy. They also call into question the value of certain strategies as risk-reduction mechanisms for small farmers.
Key words: Non-Traditional Agricultural Exports, Contract Farming, Rural Development
Some Rationales for Sharecropping: Empirical Evidence from Mexico
Jean-Philippe Colin
These past decades, agrarian contracts such as sharecropping have re-emerged as a major focus of interest. Economists typically conceptualize these contracts as an agency relationship (in the economic sense) between large and labor-constrained landlords and landless tenants. From a methodological perspective, while acknowledging the theoretical insights of economists, this article, based on comparative case studies carried out in Mexico, suggests that understanding contractual practices depends on a comprehensive and theoretically-grounded ethnographic approach. Explaining contractual practices, actors’ decision criteria are investigated rather than postulated or econometrically inferred. A detailed comparative case-study approach highlights the local diversity in contractual practices and contractual configurations. From a theoretical perspective, the paper suggests drawing upon different theoretical insights, as a single theoretical model cannot exhaust empirical diversity. The share contract emerges as a ‘polyfunctional’ institutional arrangement, with a large palette of possible raison d’être.
Key words: sharecropping, agrarian contract, land tenancy, Mexico
Organophosphate Pesticide Exposure in Farmworker Family Members in Western North Carolina and Virginia: Case Comparisons
Thomas A. Arcury, Sara A. Quandt, Pamela Rao, Alicia M. Doran,
Beverly M. Snively, Dana B. Barr, Jane A. Hoppin, and Stephen W. Davis
Farmworkers and their family members are exposed to pesticides in their homes as well as at work. Using a sample of nine farmworker households in western North Carolina and Virginia, this analysis describes the organophosphate (OP) pesticide urinary metabolite levels of adults and children in these households, and compares these farmworker household OP metabolite levels to the national reference data. Data from survey and in-depth interviews are analyzed to find dwelling, household, and work characteristics related to OP metabolite levels. All participants had measurable OP metabolites. Every household had a high level of OP metabolites when compared to national reference data. There were common factors among the households that could cause the high household OP exposure, including farm employment and living adjacent to agricultural fields. Factors associated with household variability in OP exposure included having a non-nuclear family structure, and, therefore, having more adult males who were employed doing farm work, living in rental housing, not owning a vacuum cleaner, residing in a dwelling that is difficult to clean, and the season (spring versus summer) in which urine samples were collected. These results indicate that regulatory changes that improve low income housing, improve industrial hygiene standards, and provide farmworkers information about their pesticide exposure are needed to protect farmworkers and their families.
Key words: migrant and seasonal farmworkers, farmworker families, pesticides, organophosphate pesticide metabolites
Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11: Comparing Perspectives on a Complex Process
Avram Bornstein
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, there was a significant redeployment of law enforcement in the United States, especially in New York City, which included: greater public displays of weapons; increased suspicion, surveillance, registration, detention and deportation of Arab and Muslim immigrants; the prevention of bias crimes against those same people; training for first response to future disasters; and greater investigation cooperation between municipal and federal agencies. This article explores aspects of these changes through the securitycivil liberties debate, but goes beyond this dichotomy to include less explicit aspects of antiterrorist policing like dealing with trauma and popular myths of the hero. The process is described from three perspectives, each situated in a different paradigm of social analysis and practice: the rationalEnlightenment paradigm, the power paradigm, and the psychocultural paradigm. Some behaviors can be accurately described from a one of these points of view, but no single perspective exhaustively explains all behaviors, especially complex changes in large institutional settings. This article explores simultaneous dimensions of a multilevel process allowing for a causal pluralism, rather than mere relativism.
Key words: policing, terrorism, bureaucracy, New York City
Negotiating Locality: Decentralization and Communal Forest Management in the Guatemalan Highlands
Hannah Wittman and Charles Geisler
Decentralization is a political process, concerned with the distribution of power, resources, and administrative capacities across national territories. This research analyzes nominal decentralization of the forest sector in Guatemala, where recent legislation situates administrative power and territorial control of communal forests at the municipal level. We explore the local implications of this legislation, especially for communal forest management, in the context of historical power asymmetries between competing localities and the state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and historical analysis of public policy in several municipalities in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, we suggest that decentralization policies at times diffuse centralization and actually increase state power at the local level, putting at risk and even weakening successful village-level forest governance structures and local livelihoods.
Key words: decentralization, deconcentration, power, common lands, community forest management, natural resources, Guatemala
From Nature Tourism to Ecotourism? The Case of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania
Susan Charnley
This paper examines what is needed to transform nature tourism to protected areas into ecotourism, having genuine social benefits and serving as a tool for sustainable community development. It draws on the case of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania’s most visited protected area, and a multiple land use zone inhabited by the pastoral Maasai peoples. I argue that for ecotourism to promote sustainable development in communities that are its supposed beneficiaries, three fundamental conditions must be met. First, opportunities to capture the economic benefits of tourism must be structured in a way that is culturally appropriate, and therefore accessible to the target population. Second, for communities to benefit from ecotourism, they need secure land tenure over the area in which it takes place, as well as the ability to make land use decisions for that area. Third, tourism benefits to local communities must be more than economic; they must promote deeper social and political justice goals that, if left unaddressed, restrict peoples’ ability to enjoy the economic benefits of tourism. Without these elements, the conservation outcomes of ecotourism are likely to be less favorable.
Key words: ecotourism, sustainable development, Maasai, Ngorongoro
"Nadie es Profeta en su Tierra": Community, Civil Society, and Intervening Institutions in Rural Chile
Gene Barrett, Mauricio I. Caniggia Ditzel, Ariel Muñoz Jelvez, and Lorna Read
In this article we examine community level civil society in Chiloé, Chile. We look at the interface between community and the wider systemic environment in the community development process. Issues such as the paradox of community solidarity, culture of dependence, obstacles to grass-roots participation, and leadership are examined in the community context. These issues are set in relief against a systemic environment comprised of traditional municipal politics and modernist ‘intervening’ agencies of the state. We refer to the case of one organization, ProRural, to examine the successes and failures of an interventionist strategy in Chiloé. Our central argument is that structural powerlessness, and dependent relations on the state, are reproduced through traditional cultural patterns in small community settings. These obstacles can be overcome through the development of leadership capacity and small project successes which in time stimulate new cultural patterns. The role of intervening organizations in this process is vital. But such organizations have to adopt a long-term, capacity-building strategy based on flexible and responsive relationships with their constituencies.
Key words: civil society, community development, intervening institutions, Chile
From an Ethnographic Team to a Feminist Learning Community: A Reflective Tale
Linda Spatig, Kathy Seelinger, Amy Dillon, Laurel Parrott, and Kate Conrad
Drawing on data generated over a five-year period, this narrative chronicles the evolution of a four-woman ethnographic team created to conduct qualitative evaluation research for a Head Start to Public School Transition Demonstration Project in West Virginia. The team transformed itself from a loosely connected hierarchy of individuals to a close-knit group united personally and professionally, and finally to a more egalitarian community of learners. The first step of the transformation grew out of compatible diversity within the group as well as a felt need to band together against outside forces. The final step to what might be called a feminist learning community was facilitated by a leader committed to open, honest, and purposeful attention to feelings and the personal as key ingredients in developing authentic relationships, conducting meaningful research, and advocating for social justice.
Key words: ethnographic team, learning community, feminist organization
