Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
crops. However, they did not necessarily produce homogeneous agrarian
landscapes at local levels. Forexample, some export crops, notablycoffee,
have historically been intercropped with shade trees (in parts of Central
America,Colombia,andVenezuela)and/orfoodcropsforlocalconsump-
tion (in parts of Brazil and Colombia). Intercropping came about in part
becauseoftheopportunitiesandconstraintsposedbycoffeeplants.Afor-
est ''understory'' species, many coffee varieties thrive in heavy shade—a
sharp contrast to sugarcane, most bananas, and deciduous fruits. Small-
scale growers and contract laborers often planted species of trees and/or
bananas and plantains that simultaneously created a favorable environ-
ment for coffee while producing food and firewood. Intercropping also
offered advantages to coffee planters and investors who could compen-
sate workers with land for cultivation, rather than wages, during periods
when coffee prices fell and also during the years between planting and
first harvest, when coffee farms did not generate revenues.
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Intercrop-
ping was much less common on sugar, banana, and deciduous fruit farms,
but soils judged to be less than ideal for these cash crops were often dedi-
catedtootheruses,includingpasture,foodcrops,andfirewoodcollection.
In addition, squatters quickly moved onto lands abandoned by export
banana growers in Costa Rica and Honduras during the first half of the
twentieth century; one suspects that similar dynamics existed elsewhere,
including the coffee regions outside of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
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A commodity chain therefore might be more accurately envisioned as a
''commodity web'' in order to account for the existence of ''horizontal''
agroecological and social linkages.
Comparingtheenvironmentalcontextsinwhichcommodityproduc-
tion occurs brings new actors to the foreground and provides novel ways
to appreciate the complexities of older ones. The different shapes, sizes,
andlifecyclesofcropplantsgaverisetodifferentcultivationpracticesand
work rhythms: cane cutting meant swinging a machete for an entire day;
harvesting bananas involved shouldering 50-100 pound bunches of fruit;
citrus was plucked by harvesters perched on ladders; picking tiny coffee
berries required fast yet light fingers. The common element in all of these
labor processes is, of course, the human worker; during the past century,
mechanization had only minimal impacts on harvesting operations for
the crops in question. This has required farmers to mobilize labor forces
on a seasonal basis. For example, in early-twentieth-century Californian
orchards, harvesting operations could require ten times the amount of
laborneededduringtherestoftheseason.Twentieth-centurycoffeefarms
had similar spikes in labor demand during harvests. In Caribbean cane-
