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.
Highlights
Members of rural Central American families are regularly faced with the decision to leave their communities to search for work abroad [1,2]
We explore the nexus between land, food insecurity, and international migration in two locations in Guatemala and Nicaragua
Even though 49.3% of the country’s population is rural and depends on small-scale agriculture for food security, land in Guatemala is highly concentrated in the hands of a few elite families [31]
Summary
Members of rural Central American families are regularly faced with the decision to leave their communities to search for work abroad [1,2]. We explore the nexus between land, food insecurity, and international migration in two locations in Guatemala and Nicaragua In both countries, decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes favoring export agriculture and natural resource extraction have concentrated arable lands, directly displacing some small-scale farming families from lands [7,8,9,10,11,12], and setting. Slow displacement from the land, with shrinking land access, yields consequences including the truncated ability to engage in small-scale agriculture leading to hunger and migration. In this context, migration is at once evidence of displacement, as well as a strategy for families to prolong remaining on the land to produce food
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have