Anatomy of the Disappeared, Part 2

by Devon G. Peña

The Myth of Inefficiency

Few contemporary social scientists and historians use the ethnocentric language of Steinel, but many continue to view Hispana/o agriculture in a less than favorable light.  In a recent study of the San Luis Valley appearing in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, Kenneth Weber argues that the pace of economic and technological change is rapidly leading traditional Hispana/o family farms down the road to extinction.  These farms are casualties of "modernization" which drives "inefficiencies" out of the market.  The unfortunate but inevitable result of this process is a displaced, unproductive, and welfare-dependent population of unemployed rural landholders.

Responding to earlier research by F. Lee Brown and Helen Ingram (Water and Poverty in the Southwest), Weber emphasizes "truck farming" in his policy analysis of Hispana/o agriculture.  From this point of view, Hispana/o rural landholders lack a sufficient land base to support even modest economies of scale.  Traditional Hispana/o agriculture will therefore play an insignificant and greatly reduced role in future regional development, especially when compared to the rapid growth of mining, timber, tourism, real estate, and service industries. 

According to this view, Hispana/o farming communities must accept the inevitability of capitalist development.  This view uncritically endorses the triumph of a predatory rural industrialization governed by the rules of a modern scientifically-managed market economy.  But this obviously involves a conflict between extractive and regenerative philosophies of land use.  Weber fails to acknowledge that the conflict between competing land-use values has not been legally or politically resolved. In his quest to tell the story of mechanical efficiency he ignores the complex political and cultural history of Hispana/o agriculture.  Generations of local ethnoscientific knowledge and land rights struggles are made to disappear.

The myth of "inefficiency" fails to recognize the ecologically-integrated character of Hispana/o agriculture.  In its traditional form, Hispana/o agropastoralism involves the integration of row crop farming with livestock raising.  This pattern of land use involves a symbiotic relationship between farming and ranching in a cultural landscape characterized by multiple life zones. 

For example, every ranch traditionally has land on mesa tops, upland prairies, and river bottoms.  This cultural geography provides access to different types of terrains and makes for an "innately" high level of biodiversity.  But the biological diversity of these farming and ranching landscapes is not of interest to Weber who seems to be searching for evidence of more "efficient" monocultures.  That such monocultures might be completely alien to and inappropriate in the biogeographical context of the Upper Río Grande is a problem which eludes this perspective.

The concepts of efficiency and productivity are themselves problematic.  Much of the sustainable agriculture debate has focused on redefining these concepts.  Again, the issue involves the opposition between mechanical and biological perspectives.  Shiva makes the following relevant commentary in a study of the conflict between scientific and social (or locally self-managed) forestry in northern India:

The displacement of local forest knowledge by 'scientific' forestry was simultaneously a displacement of the forest diversity and its substitution by uniform monocultures.  Since the biological productivity of the forest is ecologically based on its diversity, the destruction of local knowledge, and with it of plant diversity, leads to a degradation of the forest and an undermining of its sustainability.  The increase in productivity from the commercial point of view destroys productivity from the perspective of local communities.  The uniformity of the managed forest is meant to generate 'sustained yields.'  However, uniformity destroys the conditions of renewability of forest eco-systems, and is ecologically non-sustainable.

Commercial and biological productivity are often at odds.  What is good for business may not be so good for the land or the local communities. 

Productivity should not be reduced to measurements of economic output derived from rigid formulas that deify mechanical efficiencies.  This approach, in practice, homogenizes the land organism because economies of scale are not compatible with polycultures and their innate biodiversity. 

Agroecologists have long recognized that productivity must be measured in terms of the land's capacity to renew its biological diversity (its resilience) and thus to support long-range sustainability of mixed communities of humans and non-humans.  It may very well be that Hispana/o agroecosystems , if measured by their biodiversity, habitat integrity, renewable energy, and long-term place-based economic sustainability, are much more "efficient", "productive", and "resilient" compared to agroindustrial monocultures. 

NOTE: This excerpt is from the original and unedited version of a chapter first written in 1994. The only changes in this entry include additions to place this in the context of the blog series. A revised, fully referenced, and more detailed version of this chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (Arizona, 2011).