Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

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  The political ecology of peasant sugarcane farming in northern Belize

  Higgins, John Erwin, 1954- (The University of Arizona., 1998)

  The Belizean export sugar industry is dominated by small family farmers who produce the nation's most important cash crop in terms of area under cultivation, employment, and export earnings. These peasant farmers control both cane cultivation and the harvest transport system and receive the lion' s share of the proceeds from the sale of Belizean sugar. The origins of this anomalous industry can be traced to the regions' long history of peasant resistance to exploitation. Sugarcane was brought to Belize by refugees of the Mayan Caste Wars in the mid-nineteenth century who began producing sugar for the local market using swidden technology. Sugar production was briefly taken over by British plantations; however, the peasants were never fully proletarianized despite attempts to turn them into a plantation labor force. The peasantry's historical resistance to proletarianization is the result of several factors. Colonial officials and capitalists found it difficult to control either the movements or the labor of these independent cultivators. Low rural population density, peasants' refusal to give up subsistence farming, sugarcane's compatibility with swidden farming practices, and the peasantry's politicization all contributed to the dominance of small-farmer cane production during this century. During the 1950s plantation production was resurrected in order to meet the colony's recently acquired Commonwealth Sugar Agreement export quota. Colonial planners assumed that plantations were more efficient and competitive than peasant farmers. Nevertheless, in 1972 the state sponsored plantations were forced to shut down due to competition from independent small cane farmers. Peasant sugarcane farming has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of crises spawned by chronic fluctuations in the price and demand for cane sugar. Most farmers depend heavily on family labor to minimize their production costs. Because they have minimal capital inputs to production, they can sustain negative profits from cane and still survive by deploying family labor into other income and/or subsistence producing activities. The viability of peasant farming families that allows them to compete successfully with large-scale capitalist sugarcane farmers contradicts the Marxian notion of the inevitability of polarization into capitalist farmers and proletarian workers.
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  Study of an ancient Maya Bajo landscape in northwestern Belize

  Kunen, Julie Lynn, 1968- (The University of Arizona., 2001)

  This dissertation investigates the organization of ancient Maya settlements with respect to the use and management of critical agricultural resources. I find that inhabitants of my study area divided the landscape into discrete zones, each with a distinct use pattern. Residences were located in upland areas, where open spaces among the houses were used for gardens. Farming was practiced on terraced slopes in a second zone, where clusters of agricultural installations were designed to sustain cultivation. Finally, a nearby seasonal wetland served as a reservoir of important raw materials. The pattern of land use I document suggests a variation of the infield-outfield model of agriculture. According to this model, farming households invest decreasing amounts of labor in cultivation as the distance from house to agricultural field increases. Some scholars suggest, however, that during the Classic Period (A.D. 600-900) population in the Maya lowlands was so dense as to create continuous rural settlements, with little space separating the sustaining area of one center from that of its neighbors. In consequence, reliance on various forms of intensive cultivation increased, the infields of one polity overlapping those of the neighboring polity. No vacant terrain remained for extensively cultivated outfields, and long-fallow cultivation dropped out of the subsistence repertoire. My research supports this conclusion, with the important exception that certain lands, such as seasonal wetlands, were not conducive to the demands of intensive agriculture, and thus continued to be used as reservoirs of other essential resources. I not only documented the partition of the landscape into discrete zones of use, but also investigated the relationship between access to resources and the social and spatial organization of three ancient Maya communities. My study suggests that the founders of communities gain access to the greatest number of production options. My research links aspects of residential variability, most notably length of occupation, size and complexity of house compounds, and extent of architectural elaboration, to access to productive resources by demonstrating that the residences of community founders---those with evidence for the longest occupation---are also the largest, most complex, and most elaborate in each community.
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  THE EFFECT OF FATHER ABSENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENTIATION AMONG MALE BLACK CARIB STUDENTS IN BELIZE

  Mertz, Ronald Elmer, 1941- (The University of Arizona., 1976)