Consultant on development, particularly agriculture, farmers' organisations, land governance
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2The burden of history: Land and a divided community in San José Sinaché, Guatemala
We meet Rosalía in a roadside café in a dusty town in the Quiché department, in Guatemala’s Western Highlands. She lowers her voice whenever people come in – you never know who might be listening. Land is sensitive stuff, especially in Quiché, a region that still bears, perhaps more than any other part of Guatemala, the scars of the civil war (1960-1996) – as we will see. In 2018 alone, 15 defenders of land rights in Guatemala have been killed with total impunity, several of them in Quiché.
Do we really want peasants?
The debate on agriculture and development is heated and, apparently, never ending. This is especially true of the role and position of peasant (or smallholder) agriculture, with people either vigorously defending the sector or saying that in time it will (and should) disappear. Prof. Olivier de Schutter is a clear exponent of the former line of thought, as is evident from his contribution ‘We want peasants’ on Land Portal (26 September, 2018).