Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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Subsequent foreign investment opened more land for cash crops and cattle.
International aid and loans from development banks promoted large
projects focused on export markets. Between 1956 and 1980, large-scale
monoculture projects received four-fifths of all agricultural credit. Land
devoted to cotton and grazing grew more than twentyfold. Land planted in
sugar quadrupled. Coffee plantations grew by more than half. Forced from
the most fertile land, Guatemalan peasants were pushed up hillsides and
into the jungle. Four decades after the 1954 coup, fewer than two out of
every hundred landowners controlled two-thirds of Guatemalan farmland.
As the size of agricultural plantations increased, the average farm size fell to
under a hectare, less than needed to support a family.
This was the story of Ireland all over again, with a Latin American
twist—Guatemala is a steep country in the rain-drenched tropics. But like
Irish meat, Guatemalan coffee is sold elsewhere. And like its coffee,
Guatemala’s soil is also leaving as adoption of European agricultural methods
to tropical hillslopes ensures a legacy of major erosion. The combination
of cash crop monoculture and intensive subsistence farming on inherently
marginal lands increased soil erosion in Guatemala dramatically,
sometimes enough to be obvious to even the casual observer.
In the last week of October 1998, Hurricane Mitch dumped a year’s
worth of rain onto Central America. Landslides and floods killed more
than ten thousand people, left three million displaced or homeless, and
caused more than $5 billion in damage to the region’s agricultural economy.
Despite all the rain, the disaster was not entirely natural.
Mitch was not the first storm to dump that much rain on Central America,
but it was the first to fall on the region’s steep slopes after the rainforest
had been converted into open fields. As the population tripled after the
Second World War, unbroken forest surrounding a few cleared fields was
replaced by continuously farmed fields. Now, most of the four-fifths of the
rural population farm tiny plots on sloping terrain practicing a small-scale
version of conventional agriculture. While accelerated erosion from farming
Central America’s steep slopes has long been recognized as a problem,
Hurricane Mitch ended any uncertainty as to its importance.
After the storm, a few relatively undamaged farms stood out like islands
in a sea of devastation. When reconnaissance surveys suggested that farms
practicing alternative agriculture better survived the hurricane than did
conventional farms, a coalition of forty nongovernmental agencies started
an intensive study of more than eighteen hundred farms in Guatemala,
Honduras, and Nicaragua. Pairing otherwise comparable farms that prac-
let them eat colonies