Political ecology, mountain agriculture, and knowledge in Honduras

The social and biophysical processes entailed in environmental deterioration are the subject of intense debate in Honduras, one of the poorest countries of Latin America. This book analyses the political ecology of precarious farming in mountainous areas. The author evaluates a rich array of social and agronomic data in order to assess existing theories that purport to explain environmental deterioration and agrarian change in Honduras. It explores the relationships between land tenure patterns, shifting agricultural practices, changing social relations of production, and producers' knowledge. Special attention is given to differential perceptions and responses of producers to environmental deterioration, and to the broader knowledge struggles of different actors about issues such as burning, the fallow crisis, biocide use, and deforestation. This detailed case study draws on political economy, human ecology, critical realism, and social constructionism and constitutes an original contribution to current debates on political ecology.The central argument of this book is that land degradation through present agricultural practices is not simply an effect of poverty, inconsiderate acting or a direct consequence of a modernisation process which is orchestrated and imposed upon the Honduran peasantry by external capitalist development. Instead, the social causation of environmental change in mountainous areas of Honduras should be understood in terms of a complex mixture of local patterns of access to resources, forms of state intervention, the heterogeneous paths of technological change and knowledge generation, divisions of labour, and the specific interactions of emerging commodity markets and the organization of production.Chapter two focuses on issues of land tenure and property rights. It compares local histories of land distribution in El Zapote with widely used models of the latifundio-minifundio complex and the colonial legacy of the large landholding. Subsequently, it explores how local rules and cultural notions, local government and state laws, and state interventions through land reform and land titling projects, mediate the relation between people and the land. Conclusions deal with the multiple land histories which explain the complexity of conflicts, and with the many factors shaping the meaning villagers attribute to the value of land.Chapter three explores technological changes in crop production and cattle husbandry and compares the findings in El Zapote with recent studies dealing with heterogeneity and diversity in agriculture, thus criticizing approaches which maintain a duality of traditional and modern agricultural technology. It stresses the recognition of the multiplicity of factors causing technological change.This exploration of technological change serves as a starting point for the discussion of how different environmental problems are perceived by different actors. Chapter four identifies different perspectives on the fallow crisis, the use of fire to clear fields, vegetation and climatic change, and the use of new agro-chemicals. It deals with the paradox that agronomy cannot encompass the many factors involved in environmental deterioration, but that an alternative strategy of validating producers' environmental perceptions cannot provide a coherent theory of the causes of environmental deterioration as well.In Chapters two, three, and four, it will be shown that environmental behaviour and perceptions about environmental change relate to access to, and distribution of, resources. Chapter five gives further consideration to the different aspects of the social relations of production in El Zapote, in order to understand the processes of social differentiation.Chapter six broadens the issue of social differentiation with a discussion of local agricultural knowledge. The argument is put forward that we need an understanding of both the practical character of knowledge, (that local knowledge generation responds to environment and social context), and its discursive character. Knowledge is not only embedded in narratives on the epistemological level, but also in concrete natural environments and social relations. An important conclusion is that current `local knowledge approaches' overestimate the potential of local knowledge for environmental conservation or restoration.The concluding chapter starts by commenting on various explanations of environmental deterioration in Honduran mountain agriculture. Using the case study of El Zapote it presents an alternative explanation with the main argument that a linear relation between the distribution of the means of production and labour relations on the one hand, and use of the environment on the other, cannot be justified, but that, nevertheless, an inquiry into changing patterns of social differentiation may provide insight into important mechanisms of human interaction with nature. The final section challenges theoretical (epistemological and ontological) confusions about social and biophysical causation of environmental deterioration in environmental social science.