En Tiempos de Pandemia
Guatemalan Campesinos Revalue Bartering as a Traditional Practice
A woman harvests radishes in the Guatemalan highlands. Growing diverse subsistence crops can contribute to food security in rural farming communities. January 2020.
The global spread of Covid-19 in early 2020 led to travel and market restrictions that impacted food systems across Latin America (FAO & ECLAC; Tittonell et al.). Guatemala’s nation-wide curfew and myriad restrictions on movement created a distinct economic shock, shaping this pandemic era, or ‘tiempos de pandemia.’ In a study on rural campesino economic solidarity and resilience to economic shock, I documented the strategies and collective actions taken by eight Guatemalan grassroots farmer organizations in 2020 and early 2021. Campesino communities’ existing and emergent social networks helped sustain crop production and food access, considering the relative failure of the neoliberal state to support campesino livelihoods. In 2020, bartering re-emerged as a strategy for exchange in rural Guatemala, that works both within and outside of neoliberalized capitalist markets.
I partnered with UW-Madison Horticulture Professor Dr. Claudia I. Calderón and Geographer Dr. Nathan Einbinder to develop transdisciplinary survey and ethnographic methods that consider agroecological and spatial differentiation, community development constraints, and diverse historical contexts of rural field sites. With the collaboration of eight community partners, I gathered crop production data, documented changing local markets, and recorded reflections from agroecological farmers and leaders in six of Guatemala’s departments: Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Baja Verapaz, Petén, Chiquimula and Izabal. Field methods included online surveys with organizational leaders, interviews with farmers and leaders through Zoom and Whatsapp, and follow-up interviews with leaders to triangulate research findings.
This focus on grassroots action, within the paradigm of agroecology as resistance (Caballeros; Sigüenza Ramírez), attempts to “capture desire instead of damage” in research with marginalized communities (Tuck 416). Based in people-environment geography, this transdisciplinary study weaves together approaches from agroecology, Latin American studies and critical agrarianism. The analysis required the integration of scientific/lay, qualitative/quantitative, and Western/non-Western knowledge to form collective insights (de la Vega-Leinert & Schönenberg).
Many Guatemalan rural smallholders earn their livelihoods from both subsistence crop production and a matrix of income from commercial crops, off-farm employment, and remittances. During the pandemic, the farmers I interviewed were largely cut off from the municipal markets in small cities or towns, on which they usually rely for both selling and buying food and other products. In practice, this meant that farmers with an excess of crops like beans, fruit, onions, squash or medicinal herbs, for example, suddenly had no market outlet. “Our harvest is ready, but there is no market that we can take it to,” said a farmer in Tacaná, San Marcos. “The rains came, but the problem was an economic one. We’ve had huge losses, not only in the small vegetable crops, but also in fava bean sales. There just wasn’t a municipal market.” Loss of market access can severely affect food security in communities with multiple existing vulnerabilities and high poverty rates.
While some community and farmer organizations offered aid, many campesinos turned to other strategies, one of which was bartering. Producers who bartered agricultural products described the practice in two ways. The first was a survival strategy when cash flow was low, food prices were high, and certain crops were produced in abundance. “Sometimes we sold, but more often we bartered produce for animals, like ducks, chickens and fish,” says a man farming in Izabal. “That was how we confronted the pandemic.” With municipal markets put on hold, social relations became as or more important than cash in some places. In Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, one woman recounts that she stopped selling altogether because people could not make it to her town’s plaza. “It really affected my income and finances. But families would come over and give me beans. I gave them yuca and sweet potato in return.” Another female farmer, from Tejutla, San Marcos, noted that “for a while, money lost its value.” She ran out of cash during the pandemic, but “would exchange beans for corn or fruits, apples for peaches, [and] potatoes in exchange for corn,” with her neighbors and friends in the immediate community.
Notably, these practices did not base exchanges on the relative market value of crops in the local quetzal currency. Instead, the amount bartered depended on mutual and community needs. People gifted or bartered what they could spare, what they had available or what the receiver needed to sustain survival. Akin to the logic of the gift, or el don, these pandemic-era practices were based in reciprocity (Barona), skirting capitalist logic that dictates the exchange of goods on a market regulated by supply and demand. Bartering is instead rooted in Indigenous ontologies and worldviews of solidarity economies (Fondo Indígena 96), or the merging of democratic solidarity with economic activities, in which the overarching economic logic centers creating relationships of exchange that suit common goods rather than profit (Laville 35; Santiago 1).
The second approach to bartering was as a revalued ancestral tradition being brought back into practice as a component of agroecology. Indeed, there is evidence of Lacandón and K’ekchi’ Maya communities bartering cacao, annatto and vanilla for metal tools, salt, quetzal feathers, cotton and copal in complex 16th and 17th century trade relationships (Barrera & Fernández 30-31). Indigo, the world-renowned blue textile dye made from the Guatemala-native Indigofera suffruticosa, was used as early as 1900 BC and is known to have been bartered for textiles and foodstuffs between Guatemalan and El Salvadorian communities into the 18th century (Reiche, 2016).
Because of their foci on diversified production and economic solidarity, some agroecology organizations are well situated to implement bartering systems. “The practice of bartering is from our ancestors, and it has been practiced for many years,” says a leader of Asociación de Comités de Productores Agrícolas, an agroecology organization in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz. He sees bartering as an integral ancestral and agroecological practice, which the organization can promote on a community level. “[During the pandemic] it resurged in the community culture, and it should not be lost.” Red Kuchub’al, a network of agroecology groups in western Guatemala, had a bartering program in place before the pandemic in which lowland and highland communities within the network traded the food produced in their respective microclimates (Calderón et al. 1144). While the transportation restrictions largely prevented Red Kuchub’al from bartering across the organization during the lockdowns, the pandemic reinforced the organization’s plans to expand this regional exchange of goods between highland and sub-tropical zones to help more households access diversified diets.
While this return to bartering in rural Guatemala emerged in the context of government-sanctioned curfews and temporary lockdowns, it is a salient example of the possibilities for non-monetary exchange in alternative economic spaces. After decades of unchecked capitalist growth and corporate takeover of everyday life and civil society, “cracks had begun to appear in the edifice of global capitalism” by the early 2000s (Leyshon & Lee 3). Bartering is no longer relegated to Rostowian modernization theories (Rostow) of capitalist economic growth stemming from a primitive society based on subsistence farming and barter, which develops linearly into industrial take-off and economic maturity. Indeed, money and barter have co-existed historically, and “money does not negate barter” (Chapman 55). Bartering features prominently within solidarity economies, from urban barter clubs to formal and informal rural and rural-urban bartering networks within global food sovereignty movements (Miller 25-6).
Close analyses of bartering highlights the social relations and relations of power that shape economic geographies. Across Latin America, bartering is used as a social, economic and agroecological technology food system change. In Oaxaca, Mexico, contemporary urban and rural bartering systems promote the exchange of goods, as well as services and knowledge, contributing to the building of alternative economies (Rocha Pardo et al. 66-7). Further south, the Indigenous Kokonuco peoples of El Cauca, Colombia, have embedded bartering in collective social memory, and are passing the associated indigenous values to youth in the face of globalizing economic factors (Jairo 146). Lastly, barter markets in Peru are characterized as new indigenous economies that challenge sustainable development’s ‘infinite growth’ discourse (Argumedo & Pimbert 343).
The extent to which bartering persists post-pandemic among Guatemalan campesinos remains an open question. Since restrictions were largely lifted in 2021, farmers in this study are welcoming the return of municipal markets. The temporary un-tethering of food products from market exchange, however, de-commodified the products needed to sustain survival and highlights the significance of alternatives to mainstream economies. For one woman farming in Chiquimula, the practice reveals an underlying ethos of care: “Bartering was a way to help others. We are neighbors and we have to help each other. It was a beautiful thing.”
About the Author
Anika M. Rice (she/her) is pursuing a PhD in Geography at UW Madison, studying migration, land, gender and agroecology in Central America. Her 2020-2021 masters work focused on economic solidarity and agroecological farmer organizing in rural Guatemala. In 2016 she completed a project titled “Migration, Women and Coffee Production: Changing roles on Guatemalan and Nicaraguan farms” as a National Geographic Early Career Grantee. She received her BA in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2014 and subsequently worked as a feminist outdoor educator and farm curriculum writer in the Bay Area.
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