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  • From: christopher nesbitt <christopher.nesbitt@mmrfbz.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in (Meso)America Part II
  • Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 12:24:46 -0600

Hi Steve,

The issue of subprime loans and predatory lending practices, cloaked in the flag of enabling everyone to be a land owner, is a whole other topic. So is long term debt. Neither of them apply to this situation, which is the only situation I have been discussing here. I don't have time to address that, and it is peripheral to what I have tried to say, but would like to say that privatized profit and socialized risk for corporations are symptoms of a very seriously unhealthy economic system, but have absolutely zero to do with what I am talking about, the benefit of property rights to the health of land and people in Maya communities in Belize.

You seem to have read a lot into what I have said, assigning values to things I have said, and assuming I am saying things which I did not say. I am not advocating a landlord class, in China or anywhere, though looking at the millions of Chinese who starved to death and resorted to cannibalism during the Great Leap Forward, perhaps what you are mentioning would be an improvement over statist agricultural models. Also, the reply about the ancient Maya was not to you, it was to a comment regarding stewardship of the commons posted by Scott. I suggest you reread it so that you can see it was not addressed to anything you said. Judging from your questions, you have not read or understood what I wrote. To reiterate, I am not advocating anything as a universal cure, just pointing out examples where land ownership in Maya communities has been beneficial. The critical parts that answer your latest questions, which would have been answered already if you had bothered to read what I wrote a bit more carefully, are in ALL CAPS.

So far I have only been speaking of this watershed and district, and the benefits it has had in indigenous communities who have been able to gain title to land that was already theirs. This is land they have been using, and now is land they own. As I have said, this very clear benefit to their living standards is not a universal cure to the worlds ills, few things are universal, replicable everywhere, but it has had many benefits in the communities here.

The advantage of private property for my neighbors is that now they are wiling to make long term investments in their land with agroforestry, which takes a long term plan, and there are legal structures that protect their land from being take by the government, taken by developers, taken by someone else. This was done with out incurring a debt, and now people have the land they have been working for the last 50-100 years (the Kekchi migrated into this valley in waves, with the first being around 1905).

After three years looking at various pieces of land, in 1988, I bought a severely damaged piece of land that no one wanted. I have sweated and bled on it for 20 years, put more into this land than I can write about, and now..... I have something that is worth wanting. 20 years on site and it is my home. When I bought this land it had been on the market for years. Local people could have bought it, it was cheap, and this community was loaded with ganja money in the 1980s, picture 5 gallon buckets crammed full of USD100 bills, there were many hundreds of thousands of dollars floating around here in the go-go 1980s, but the land was too far away (still is), and too damaged for anyone to want it, except for young people like I was who wanted to live somewhere remote, and who did not realize how damaged much of the land was. Most people avoided this village because it had a reputation as being the Wild West. The only reason I wanted this land was because I did not realize how damaged the land was, or how much a road would make life easier. If I had known then what I know now, I would have bought a different piece of land. With two exceptions, one gringo couple who bought an adjacent piece of land 2 years ago, which had been empty for many years, and a local family that lives across the river on land that has been in their family for 100 years, but only moved there in 1997, our nearest neighbors are at least a mile away. Judging from what you have written, I should feel conflicted for stewarding this abandoned and damaged land and planting out thousands of trees, planting vetiver to control erosion, rehabilitating pasture that had severely compacted and degraded soils and creating a very complex food forest. No offense, but I don't.

If, Christopher, you can show me situations where private property doesn't lead to division into the propertied class and the rent paying class, doesn't lead to longterm debt, where in order to service their debts people aren't forced into accepting whatever job is available, doesn't cause people to be leading precarious lives tied to the whims of big banks, where the agents that legitimate private property are ones that one would like to see in future abundant sustainable communities, then I would be happy to change my assertion that private property is a universal longterm ill.

I think I have already, Steve. I am going to repeat this once more, to try to clarify what I am saying, so please read this very carefully, okay? The local people have ALREADY been given title to the land they have been working. It's fairly simple, they had been using it for generations, they had many problems related to their lack of ownership, they wanted secure land tenure in the form of property so that they could make improvements to their land and own those improvements. In response to the will of the people, government facilitated that, and not one of them is unhappy with being given their land. It belonged to them, already, but their "ownership" was not well protected. THEY NOW OWN THEIR LAND. IT IS LEGALLY THEIR PROPERTY, and there are all the frameworks to protect their land that any other ethnic group in Belize has. THERE IS NO DEBT. This merely formalized what was theirs already. Your main points of contention are moot here. This is not replicable everywhere, obviously, but it works here.

In Belize, getting land is a right for every Belizean, wether Mopan Maya, Garifuna, Kekchi Maya, Yucatec Maya, Creole, Mennonite, ethnic Chinese, Lebanese, Nigerian, Mestizo, East Indian, even naturalized foreigners like myself can apply for a piece of land, so this land, that they were already using, was given to them using the same legal structure every other Belizean has. It now belongs to them. All they have had to pay for is a portion of the cost of surveying the land. No debt. No loans. With that land, they have been able to plant long term crops, like cacao, as some community members who already had property were doing in the 1920s and in the 1950s, which has enabled them to access international (fairtrade/organic) markets, which help to lift then out of poverty, send their children to school, buy iPods and computers washing machines and televisions, whatever they want to buy and can afford, the same choices you can make,

I think that the lack of secure, viable mechanisms of land tenure, including land ownership (wether individually, through land trusts, communities) is a practically guaranteed way to sow dissension and lock people in the developing world in perpetual poverty. At least that has been the case here. If you can show me otherwise, which is unlikely, since you do not live here, I will be happy to modify my assertion that anyone who asserts with sweeping blanket statements that property is a universal long term ill is myopic, idealistic, unrealistic, delusional and misinformed. ;-) Very few things are universal, and here, land ownership has been very beneficial, both for the environment and for the people working the land.

Because of poorly defined land ownership, this community, and others like it, have been filled with contention, envy, bitterness, sabotage, and arson over people planting long term crops, like cacao and coffee, or milpa plantations of large size into "communally owned land". These crops, cacao and coffee, provide economic benefits to the families engaged in growing them, provide ecological services like flood mitigation to the community, fuel wood for cooking, habitat for animals they traditionally hunt, and financially by allowing access to schools, healthcare, etc. They do this while providing ecological services that are valuable on a global scale that are increasingly important , in the form of carbon sequestration, habitat creation, soil and soil moisture retention, etc, etc, etc. The change of land tenure to private ownership has resulted in better practice, and has been close good for the biotic health of that land. Previously, communally managed land has been managed poorly here (and again, I am not saying it couldn't be managed well elsewhere).

Perhaps in years to come, this titling of land will lead into all the things you speak of, the unhappiness, polarization, rent paying, but there are no indications in the communities that have had private land for generations that it will. In villages like San Antonio, many of the land owners who planted cacao 25-40 years ago have built up their land, have shops, and citrus farmers use oranges to earn income in addition to their other farming, and are more prosperous than their neighbors who decided that the short term gains of planting rice beans and corn were more worth their efforts than the cacao and timber their prosperous neighbors planted (on land they owned). There are virtually no rent payers in Toledo west, except teachers, Peace Corps types, and health care workers posted in the back villages, and government pays that, and the people renting the houses are pleased with the extra income.

I will branch out a bit. Here is another example, outside Belize: I can't remember the mans name, but there is a Peruvian economist that wrote an interesting article about a squatter invasion of land outside Lima. I read this a very long time ago in Harpers(?) or Utne Reader(?) or maybe that bastion of free market conservatism, Whole Earth Review, but it stuck with me as an excellent example of what is wrong with land use/ownership patterns in Latin America (and I am sure you and I can find plenty of common ground there). The incident he described involved thousands of land less peasants who occupied empty land, overnight, mapping out streets, putting up simple houses, four walls, a roof, making their neighborhoods. They had tried legal means, but were stymied by the process, 200 papers from 60 government agencies, which took an average of 300 days of work to have processed (or something like this) and they decided to just grab this empty land.

The government chased some of them away, but many stayed, and many who had been chased out, returned. This land was divided by a river. X amount of years later (20-25? I don't remember), one side had nice permanent houses, with gardens, ornamentals, trees, small community managed parks, gardens, streets, street lights, while on the other, the people still lived in cardboard and zinc houses, still had lack of access to running water, still had lack of access to legal electricity.

These two communities were established during the same squatter invasion. They were still involved in the same socioeconomic bracket, working in Lima in the same factories, or as domestics, or as day labourers, and yet they lived in two communities where one was beautiful, and had been improved, had trees planted, had well managed community spaces, parks for children, churches, and the other was marked by temporary housing, squalor and lack of sanitation. By all indications, they should be the same, the settlements on both sides of the river were established during the same event, the people living there were working the same jobs, so, what was the difference with these communities? Well, the better developed community had worked together as "informal" owners and were better organized to prove ownership, which the Peruvian government agreed to recognize. With ownership, or secure land tenure, they were willing to invest their income, their energy and their time into the land, since the land was legally theirs and it was protected by the Police, the courts, etc, all systems you see as tools of the oppressor (it would seem).

The other side of that river at the time the article was published was still (10-12 years ago) considered a squatter camp, and the inhabitants faced eviction by the government, or seizure by powerful land speculators. Under such a system of land tenure, nobody is willing to invest their money into improving what is essentially not theirs, subject to the whim of some ink shitting paper pusher behind a desk somewhere who may decide to have them removed, and remove them with a pen. Such decisions may be made in offices by "urban planners", and in smoke filed board rooms reeking of greed and avarice, and their land, which they have lived in for many years, may be taken, parceled out and distributed through an "urban renewal" campaign, or just given to developers. Those people are permanently at risk of eviction or seizure, or losing their land to other squatters, even if they were settled 50 years earlier. After 50 years, they can still be removed. They have not built any equity, they have not secured any land, built any assets, improved their standard of living. In this case, lack of property has created a permanent underclass, which may well be the aim of the ruling class in Peru.

The side that managed to wrest legal tenure to that land now has access to services, water, sewage, electricity, and is able to sell their land, which they have invested their time, money and labour into, to return to the rural communities they left, in desperation (economic desperation, fear of Shining Path, etc). They had built up equity which they were free to sell, free to pass on to their children, free to use as collateral for loans. I am hard pressed to see what could possibly be wrong with enabling landless peasants to have land ownership.

So, should those landless peasants who squatted land not be given access to titles for their land because it might lead to divisions someday in the future? If you think so, can you explain why? How about all my neighbors, many of whom did not have security in their land tenure before they were given titles to their land, should they all be deprived of the ownership of land they have farmed and want to own? If you think so, can you explain why? This is not a rhetorical question, in the absence of a working model, one that is applicable to most people (and eco-villages may be the future, but take a more highly evolved person, in my experience, one willing to deal with a lot of people issues, and one that is not infinitely scaleable), ay least on a local scale, I am not seeing a viable alternative model, and you aren't offering one, either, other than making sweeping broad generalizations about "universal long term" ills.

Again, the will of the people in Maya communities in southern Belize is to own their land. That is what THEY want. Do you think that you know better than all of these thousands of people in what is best for them? What alternative do you suggest? Should they be forced to give up their land?

It's easy to throw rocks, Steve, vaguely identifying a problem, and, admittedly, there are problems with land ownership, but I am not sure these problems are worse than the problems that are a byproduct of insecure land tenure, at least here. You half identify what you feel are problems, and say that there are solutions, but provide none. What, exactly, is the solution you are offering? How do you think land should be used? Is there a vision here, with tools to make it happen, or are you just..... making noise? Can you provide any working examples of this land use pattern you envision, if such a vision exists? What, exactly, is your point? Your point, if you have one, remains elusive.

I will sign off by saying that property rights occupy an extremely small amount of my time, hahaha, entirely too much, recently! I mostly think about agroecology, food security and biological diversity in agriculture, renewable energy and poverty alleviation, all of which are much more interesting topics, and offer real chances of making changes in peoples lives, although my world view is not universal in scope, and merely applies to the lowland humid tropics. Breadnuts don't grow everywhere, just like the issues I identified here related to land tenure are not "universal". I would prefer to focus on things that are likely to result in positive change. I am

Best wishes,

Christopher


On Nov 8, 2008, at 4:32 AM, Steve Read wrote:

Hello, christopher nesbitt,

Thanks for your reply and the subsequent analysis of old Mayan culture, I wasn't aware that people considered them highly spiritual and elevated, If I gave the impression that I thought they held property in common then I didn't mean to, personally I have no illusions about past civilisations in general.

However we could perhaps look at the situation now; as you pointed out people are using private property around you as a means to ensure stability and security of tenure. You have done likewise, although having at first the idea to open up your private paradise to a more communal situation. Looking around you see the local people doing the same thing and perhaps see in this a justification of your tenure status? I don't know about the other PmC teachers you brought in but I imagine that a private property apologist like Toby would also help to justify your tenure status.

I would perhaps suggest that someone such as you who has wider contacts than many of the local neighbours of yours, and I imagine much experience of nations where private property held by individuals is the norm, might be more questioning as to the efficiency of this as a long term solution.

An even cursory glance at the USA toady reveals many of the problems associated with private property as a medium to longterm solution, particularly at this time of mortage arrears, repossession and negative equity.

Then we can look at the structures which are needed to legitimise private individual property, these form the basis of the nations states in which many people live and are again perhaps not the most optimal longterm solution to human socio-economic needs.

We can look also at how anyone, let alone the less well off can access private property, few have the means to get their own place without recourse to incurring a big and longterm debt. Their lives are now locked into a debt/repayment cycle which will lock them into a certain pattern of living which will enable them to repay that debt, a job, any job very usually, few can afford to be unemployed even for a short term. How do you envisage the local people around you getting their private property? Perhaps you have a solution to logterm private debt whereby people end up paying far more for their property than the original cost that is if they end up at the end rather than experiencing a global economic downturn etc etc.

In China the landlord class is apparently being reinstated, people going to the city will be able to sell their land to a landlord who can then rent it out, this is apparently seen by the Chinese authorities as the solution to their "inefficient" agriculture which hasn't seen harvest increase in the manner deemed appropriate, so you are in good company.

If, Christopher, you can show me situations where private property doesn't lead to division into the propertied class and the rent paying class, doesn't lead to longterm debt, where in order to service their debts people aren't forced into accepting whatever job is available, doesn't cause people to be leading precarious lives tied to the whims of big banks, where the agents that legitimate private property are ones that one would like to see in future abundant sustainable communities, then I would be happy to change my assertion that private property is a universal longterm ill.

That people use it as a solution to their current unstable situation does not, imo, mean that it is the optimal solution, a viable longterm solution or one that will be effective at longterm earth and people care.

The space I left before to be filled in with names/details of projects that had found a communal ownership strategy I left in the perhaps forlorn hope that others knew more than I (something I usually find). I ahd hoped that there would be more voices raised against this obscene dividing of this Earth onto little private holes where people retreat with some idea of security at the same time denying to themselves that any security comes from the Police/ Courts and Governments, insitutions they often don't trust, disagree with and would like to change.

As an aside many Brits believe they own their own home, ignoring the fact they live in a Monarchy, Britain belongs to their Queen, that she doesn't chose to wield her power is another matter.

SteveR

======= At 2008-10-31, 04:29:54 you wrote: =======

Hi Steve,

I didn't assume anything about you. I know nothing about you. I just
find that the idea that property is an inherent wrong is uninformed,
but seems to be popular amongst people in the developed world who have
access to property. I am pretty sure the only part I mentioned about
you is that many people here do not have the things you subsequently
agreed that you have, and that perhaps yo had not considered that they
would like to, and that commonly held land and the problems associated
with it were barriers to their accessing those things they wanted. All
I discussed was my experiences regarding what I see as problems
related to commonly owned property and benefits of private land
ownership for both the people who own it and for the land itself, but
looking at it on a very local scale. This is not a universal view,
applicable to all situations, but it is something I have observed
during my life of protracted observation of the place where I live. I
am not advocating anything. I am pointing out that the desire to own a
piece of land is near universal in the rural agrarian Maya communities
I have worked in.

As an aside, Kekchi and Mopan people are still on the periphery of the
currency based economy, especially the back villages, and still engage
in currency free trade, firewood for corn, corn for a pig, a days
labour for a days labour. There are many cultural traits that they
have retained that are under threat. One is that a very high
percentage of the children do not want to be farmers like their parents.

As far as the Maya holding all things in common, that is plain wrong.
That never happened. That is mere Caucasian mythology about indigenous
people that just never happened.

Its important to not fall into the trap of mistaking indiginous
peoples for ones who have some sort of cultural purity and are in
some way unaffected by the marketing and straight forward socio-
economic pressures driving this 'modern' world, the Macdonaldisation
of the planet continues apace.
No worries about me romanticizing Maya people. They are just people.

I would be interested to see you fill in that gap where communally
owned property has allowed people to access TVs etc. With the
exception of Cuba, which has not allowed access to TVs (but has very
good health care and education), I am not thinking of any, but, again,
my experience is limited. I agree that things like Ecovillages are a
way forward, but even those are a form of ownership, albeit more
cooperative and egalitarian.

While I would say that, in my opinion, commonly owned land has not
worked well here, I had a consultancy in Venezuela in 2006, looking at
cacao, which was very interesting. I had previously been to Venezuela
to look at coffee, but cacao is my thing. One part of my time there
was in a place called Cata, one valley over from the famous El Chuao.
The community an abandoned cacao grove the community took over. The
cacao grove was 400 acres or so, managed by the community, divided
into sections, owned by the community, but individual families had
access to and responsibilities for set plots, delineated, clearly. All
of it was centrally fermented and marketed through the cooperative at
Ocumare. There were a few other communities that provided cacao to the
coop, too. It was a wonderful example of community managed
agriculture, well organized, only a few unhappy people (all
cooperatives have their unhappy members), and I was struck by how
market savvy they were. World market prices for cacao was swinging
between USD1200-1600 a tonne. Fairtrade/organic was USD1950 a tonne,
and they were getting USD4500 a tonne. That is a place where a form of
collective ownership worked, but with clearly delineated boundaries
and responsibilities. Any earnings were directly tied to their
management practices. That is a nuanced private land ownership/
commonly held land model that I really admired.

As far as scholarships, we host courses, attracting great teachers
from all over the world, like Toby. One course we have done the last
three years is a permaculture design course. We are able to provide or
find funding to allow local students to take the course free of cost.
This is subsidized by students who are paying, and by the teachers,
like Toby, who are willing to facilitate training for free (hat off to
Toby Hemenway, Penny Livingston, Larry Santoyo, Albert Bates and
Andrew Goodheart Brown, who have done that in tha past, and to Albert,
Goodheart, Andrew Leslie Phillips and Maria Ros who are doing that
this year). 23 Belizeans have taken a PDC here, including extension
officers from Ministry of Agriculture, extension officers from NGOs as
well as Peace Corps volunteers, and hundreds of farmers have been
given training in agroforestry.

Anyway, I am not on an opposite side to you, I just see that universal
platitudes about the evils of ownership are not wholistic in scope.

Best wishes,

Christopher

On Oct 30, 2008, at 3:51 PM, Steve Read wrote:

Hello, christopher nesbitt,

Thank you for the examples which are all very interesting, although
i'm not sure why you imagine that my experience is exclusively
'developed world' it most certainly isn't I have lived and worked
in a number of different countries, cultures and environements,
'nuff said

You are discussing driven societies/people, the socio-environmental
pressures that have driven cultures that by tradition held all in
common to reject that way and adopt private property as a way of
dealing with the developmental pressures most cultures are
undergoing go unmmentioned in your list of successful projects, as
do the millenia many of these cultures have lived and thrived with
their old communal way.

" would like all the things that I suspect you enjoy or have access
to, Steve, a computer, an education for their children, a TV, a
car" I'm sure they would and I'm not going to apologise for
currently being in a culture where 2nd hand computers/cars trickle
down to me, on the contrary I am lucky to have lived in such
cultures and seen/see at first hand the pitiful state to which so
many people are reduced. When people start bandying comparisons
between rich and poor countries I often suggest they dig out some of
the social and health statistics, despite all these 'golden years'
of capitalism, private ownership and development these so called
developed countries carry hidden in their dark underbelly millions
of dispossesed, come and live in a cardboard box under a bridge in
the winter in London, to be woken at 5am to be doused with
disinfectant, Cold, the Cold. The shifting cultivators around you
don't have these 'luxuries' simply because the areas they live in
have star
ted down this Oh So Wonderful developmental path later than here, so
what? Bruno in Brazil who did a PDC with me pointed out that many
people were 'dispossesed' becaus ethe Govet had a lwa that stated
that any labourer who worked for 'you' for more than 90 days (I
think) became eligible for pensions and stuff so your wonderful
private property owners simply kick them off at the end of that
period and get new ones, no chance to develop a veg patch or
anything.



the gap above can be filled in with examples from developing
countries where communally held land etc has enabled then to
improve their standards of living, have a TV etc.

Its important to not fall into the trap of mistaking indiginous
peoples for ones who have some sort of cultural purity and are in
some way unaffected by the marketing and straight forward socio-
economic pressures driving this 'modern' world, the Macdonaldisation
of the planet continues apace.

There would be too nuances of private ownership, where a land is
owned by an extended family and lived and worked by them through
generations, this resembles in many ways a tribal communal tenure,
the legal status giving the extended family security of tenure
similar to when tribal lands are decreed as being "owned" by such or
such tribe. Before current modern pressures undermined tribal areas
they too had security of tenure, although they may often have had to
fight to keep it. If we do as I keep suggesting and buy the land to
put it into a safe common holding, educate people to use it wisely
then where is the difficulty?


What do you mean 'scholarships'? I am glad Toby has had the
opportunity to see and experience these areas, I'm sure it has
enriched the quality he brings to his designs.

SteveR
======= At 2008-10-30, 19:00:47 you wrote: =======

Hi Steve and Toby,

I am going to make some observations of land tenure from the limited
perspective of living in proximity to indigenous communities, but am
not emotionally attached, am not attacking anybody. This is an
alternative view of the problems and benefits of land tenure in Maya
communities in southern Belize:

I have lived in a piece of land in southern Belize for the last 20
tears. When I bought it, I bought it cheap because it lacked road
access (still lacks road access), had no grid (still has no grid
electricity), and the land was severely damaged abandoned pasture
land
and old citrus groves. I have used my labour, my thoughts, my
energies, income earned off the farm as well as income from the farm,
to rehabilitate the soil, make this land a beautiful farm, and to
make
a very well established food forest, with many hundreds of species.

When I bought this land, I wanted to open it up to be a community. I
invited local people, and international people, and.... no one was
really interested. They all wanted to pursue their own thing, so I
pursued my own thing, too. I now have an Eden, which I intend to pass
on to my children, which I share through courses. Toby has taught
here, twice, and knows that we provide scholarships for participants
who can not afford to take the courses we offer (made possible by
teachers like Toby who are willing to facilitate scholarships).

If this land had been community owned, it would have all been burned
down and planted to corn years ago.

Moving on to the matter that you may not have considered: most people
in the developing world want private property, at least the people I
know. For the last 20 years, I have lived in San Pedro Columbia,
Toledo, Belize. My neighbors are mostly Kekchi Maya people who did
have community land tenure, and, as the book "the Tragedy of the
Commons" points out, community land was not always well managed. I am
not saying that it couldn't be, but my experience here has shown me
that, here at least, it is not. Fallow crop rotational cycles
appropriate for the types of soil we have here, 12-15 years, were not
observed when that land was everybody's and nobody's. The incentive
was, at the time, to chop it, burn it and plant it out to corn before
someone else did, resulting in shortened fallow cycles of 7 years, 5
years, 3 years, with the predictable decline in production and an
increased environmental cost of erosion, siltation, and fire damage
(we lost 50 acres of habitat to a caretaker for a privately owned
piece of land "managed" by absentee land owners this last year,
though
the core areas of the farm were largely unaffected). Any one who
fallowed a piece of land for more than 7 years could expect to find
someone else clearing it for their milpa when they went out to their
farm.

Toby has been to two of the farms in San Pedro Columbia with well
developed agroforestry. One is Saul Garcias land, farmed for 40
years,
worthy of a book of its own, amazing levels of biodiversity both
between species and within species, and the other is Ignacio Ash's
farm, a very wel developed farm that is a cacao dominant polyculture
that has been in one family for 3 generations. He has also been to
Burton Caliz's farm, which is another farm that is amazing. These
farms are exceptional, and a common feature is that they are "owned",
that the person who established them expected to have something to
pass on to their children.

In 20 years time I have watched all the rainforest within a two hour
walk of the village chopped and burned up for corn. Lack of
delineated
properties resulted in a land use pattern that is full of contention
and conflict, where the land was not stewarded for the long term
benefit of the community or for the land itself, and has kept this
community mired in stagnation, economically marginalized by a lack of
access to traditional avenues of credit (and this is not a debate
about wether or not that is a good thing) and with a social
prohibition on making long term investments in the land, like
planting
cacao, enforced by sabotage, community censure, arson and violence.
Any attempt to plant long term crops like cacao or coffee, or timber
trees in association with cacao or coffee was seen as a resource
grab.
Cattle pastures were not managed to avoid soil damage, because it was
not "theirs", and the way to show intention to use that land was
through not fallowing it.

Commonly owned land here resulted in greed, fear and division, too,
worse, in my opinion, than where property was delineated.

The few cacao farms in this watershed of any size are held by
families
that managed to get their land titled back in the 1920s or 1950s,
like
Ignacios, whose grandfather planted out most of the cacao he has.
Saul
"stronged" his land and would probably have chopped anybody who tried
to steal it from him into several chunks a few years ago. He owned
that then and now by respect for his abilities and age, respectively.

Now, the land that provides the ecological services displaced by
shifting cultivation tends to be privately owned land. I allow people
to collect firewood from my land, for example, since their is no
firewood close to the village anymore, except on privately owned
land.

Another community near hear is San Antonio village, a Mopan Maya
community that was established in 1840. San Antonio is very well
developed (if you like agroforestry, there is a section in the middle
of the village that is staggeringly productive, combining several
back
yards to make a small carbon sink and block of habitat for birds that
is also very productive in food and cacao). The largest cacao farms
in
Toledo are all owned by farmers in this village. Average acreage of
cacao farms in Maya communities is a bit over an acre. In this
community, the median acreahe is 4 acres, with several farms as large
as 12 acres. Some of the farms are being managed by the children or
even grandchildren of the initial farmer. San Antonio village is like
a garden, one of the prettiest villages in Toledo, and well
developed.

San Antonio is a prosperous village. People invest their energies
into
their land because it belongs to them.

Looking at San Antonio Village, and San Pedro Columbia we see one
community with property rights that has engaged in very sophisticated
agroforestry, land that is passed securely from generation to
generation, who can access credit to expand their farms, buy TVs,
build new houses, have shops, that is able to send children to
school,
and another, that has also developed, but not as quickly, that is
still dependent (though less so) on shifting cultivation, that lacks
access to credit and has been marginalized at the boundary of the
currency based economy. Both of these communities are engaged in
agriculture. Both of these communities have access to the same
markets. Both of these communities are over 100 years old. One of
these communities is a nicer place to live (hahaha, and I don't live
there)!

San Antonio observes better agricultural practices on commonly owned
land, too, with 60 feet from any waterway kept forested, and the
school and church well taken care of, a pride in ther community that
is an extension of their pride in their farms.

There are some differences in the communities apart from property
rights. San Antionio is Mopan Maya, a lowland Maya in the Yucatecan
language group, and the Kekchi are a Quichean people, highland in
origin, who arrived in Belize after 300 years of perpetual
displacement. The Mopan came from San Luis Rey, Peten, with the
intention to settle that valley, a single movement to establish a
settlment, from a place very similar to San Antonio, same plants,
soils, weather patterns. The Kekchi in Columbia arrived as the front
end of a wave of the displaced of the displaced of the displaced, and
have a legacy of living for a few generations in one place and then
migrating, either by choice or external factors. They are from the
highlands, cooler, with a pronounced wet season and dry season, and
different plants. But, apart from that, right now, they both have
access to the same markets, the same level of service (clinics,
schools, extension services, hospitals). The biggest difference has
been their relationship with the land they farm.

There are people here who speak against private property for the
Maya,
saying the communal land system is their culture (debatable, but
certainly the model since the Conquest). Most of these proponents own
their own land, if Maya, or are Caucasian, who own property back
where
they come from. Most Maya people would like property they can pass to
their children, or use to access credit, and can increase the value
of
by their labour, etc.

I am not debating the merits of access to credit, or economic
integration with the balance of the country and the global economy,
but it is worth noting that %99.9 of the farmers I know would like to
own their land, would like access to more money, would like all the
things that I suspect you enjoy or have access to, Steve, a computer,
an education for their children, a TV, a car, and they don't have
those things because with poor land tenure, making shifting
cultivation provide the bulk of their income (financial and caloric),
they are always two steps from a bad crop failure and loss.

San Pedro Columbia surveyed most of the land five years back and gave
the land to people. I wish I could say that was done transparently
and
was painlessly, but it was not. It was done in the months before a
general election with the intention of gaining votes. I am sad to say
it worked, and that party swept into power for a second term (though
they lost the next election when they had no assets to give away).
Having aid that, most people got the land they were farming, and are
happy with this. They have also started planting out more tree crops,
and the overall health of that land is better as people have
incentive
to manage it well, by planting long term crops, and to avoid burning
into their neighbors lands.

There is also a movement in Belize for land owners to set aside a
percentage of their land to be maintained as habitat and for the
ecological services wild areas provide, which is a whole other
subject. Their are talks about incentives for this, etc.

In closing I would say that the 30 prettiest farms I have seen (I
worked as the head of extension for a cacao cooperative here, and
have
visited well over 400 farms in Belize, and dozens of farms in Costa
Rica, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Venezuela) have all been farms
where the owner had very secure land tenure, either property or long
term leased land, and an ability to transfer ownership to their
children. I am not saying that communal land doesn't work, or that
private property is a panacea that will solve all of the problems
facing farmers here (or anywhere), but that land here is better
maintained when the stakeholders have something to pass on to their
own children via secure property rights.

Just my .02.

I have to run, go plant some more trees.

In development,

Christopher







On Oct 30, 2008, at 1:26 AM, Steve Read wrote:

Hello, Toby Hemenway,

Interesting approach to extrapolte from one PDC and its mug praxis
to principles and strategies of land tenure; It reminds me too of
the platitudinous arguments that Thatcher & Co. put forward to
justify selling off the council owned housing, frankly I rarely saw
a run down council house except on estates that had been designanted
as 'problem' estates by the local council and were then therefore
following some strange logic of their own refilled with more
'problem' families. And then of course council blocks that fell into
disrepair and misuse becaus ethey were simply so badly designed.

Your argument also belies the fact that for prbably millenia humane
societies have enabled land tenure strategies that allowed
sustainable, durable use of commonly held assets. Th
e fatuous book 'Tragedy of the commons' has been massively
instrumental in creating a mythology around this subject. Your
argument also imo seems to betray a certian myopia, looking out the
window do I see a world where privately owned resources are not
destructively exploited, a world where privately property is tended
and nurtured for subsequent generations? Or do I see a world where
the traditional class layers have gone to be replaced by one big
squandering propertied class in the rich countries and those that
are becoming fatter? For myself I only have to go to the municipal
dump to see where private property ends up, even when still in good
condition.

I imagine that you personally however are tending well your private
patch of Earth, your private Eden.

And of course there's Renting property out, what a great way to
increase my income, living off the sweat and labour of others,
keeping the world split into have's and have nots and of course
expecting the people who are renting the property to look after it
as if it were their own, well how is it they can do that in rented
accomodation and yet wouldn't be able to do it in commonly held
accomodation?

I would however agree with you Toby that there is some education to
be done, its not difficult, one simply transports the emotional
content that one has for 'mine' to 'ours'. I frankly fail to see
that if we can't do this and that as designers we are not promoting
this how we are to move along towards sustainable interconnected
communities.

Buy the land and free it into a safe common legal entity, then help
people develop the capacity to nurture it, and in this I am speaking
too and perhaps in particular of the urban areas. This definately
seems to be the philosophy developing here in France.


Steve R





======= At 2008-10-30, 04:45:47 you wrote: =======

A story I may have told before: On opening day of a PDC, the venue
was
kind enough to put out mugs, each with a participant's name on it.
They
asked that each person be responsible for rinsing and putting away
their
own mug. The system worked beautifully; the classroom stayed free
of
scattered mugs; each was back in the rack at the end of the day.
Then,
come our mid-class day off, the mugs were put through an industrial
sterilizer and the labels were removed. They went back to the
classroom
unlabeled. Within a few days, mugs were everywhere--under chairs,
on
shelves, left outside, many full of molding tea leaves, and another
couple of dozen mugs had been commandeered from elsewhere since no
one
could find a clean mug and it was easier to grab another from the
stash.
Soon almost every mug the place had was in our classroom, dirty and
haphazardly stuck anywhere.

I was pretty surprised, since the participants seemed like decent
folks.
The lesson I took home was twofold: private ownership is one way to
encourage responsibility toward resources, and, a culture that is
used
to private ownership is liable to behave irresponsibly toward
resources
held in common.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



Nancy Frank wrote:
Steve -

I think it will be awhile before we get as far as we've come and
return to common land.

Nancy


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Best regards.
Steve Read
steveread@free.fr
2008-10-30


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_____________________________
Christopher Nesbitt

Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
BELIZE,
Central America

www.mmrfbz.org



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Best regards.
Steve Read
steveread@free.fr
2008-10-30


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_____________________________
Christopher Nesbitt

Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
BELIZE,
Central America

www.mmrfbz.org



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Best regards.
Steve Read
steveread@free.fr
2008-11-08


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_____________________________
Christopher Nesbitt

Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
BELIZE,
Central America

www.mmrfbz.org







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