The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Owners and Fences 87
a little corn and manioc, and many medicinal plants are also obtained
from the plot, on which poultry and pigs are maintained as
well. Commercial as it is, this type of agriculture preserves most of
the preexisting ecosystem in its vast diversity of cultigens, and the
soil is constantly nourished by a compost of the fallen leaves, which
equals that found in tropical rain forests. The flowering shade trees
are said to be essential for the health of the perennial crops, and in
blocking the sun they inhibit the weed growth that proliferates in
open-field tropical farming and causes much extra work. The abundance
of tree life breaks the winds and absorbs the heavy rains;
moreover, the trees hold moisture and slowly release it in the dry
seasons.
The plantains yield their fruit eight to ten months after planting,
regardless of the time of the year, and through their suckers they
continue producing for five or more years. Cocoa and coffee are harvested
every two weeks. Both have a six-month cycle, and the cycles
are complementary: when coffee wanes, cocoa waxes, and vice versa.
Hence, a steady trickle of income and labor input is maintained
during the whole year. There is very little capital maintenance, if
any.
Women own and manage one-third of the peasant farms, and no
sharply defined division of field labor by age or sex exists, as it does
in the agribusinesses. Areas tend to be divided into kindreds centered
on a rich male peasant with ten or more hectares of land. He
calls on his neighboring siblings, cousins, concubines, and their
children to assist in the work that his own household cannot handle,
pays them on a daily rate, and is always susceptible to their claims
for loans and gifts. On his death the large farm is usually divided
among these persons, and the quasi class pyramid collapses, to be
slowly reformed by the emergence of another hierarchical kindred.
Reciprocal ties based on family mold labor relationships. Redistribution
of wealth along kinship molds class structure. The national
market affects labor and the distribution of wealth within the peasant
sphere, but it is not constitutive of that sphere's inner structure
and function. Commercial as it is, this peasant mode of livelihood is
not a microcosm of the market economy. It is not rationalized in the
capitalist sense whereby the rule and weight of commodity formation
permeates the metabolism of social life in the productive process
and colonizes life outside the workplace, as well.
Since 1971 when many peasants and landless laborers were organizing
invasions of plantations to take over lands by force, this traditional
style of peasant farming became subject to a "green revolution"
wrought by the Colombian government and the United States