Citrus Culture In British Honduras

Author : Mark Moberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Citrus, Strategy, and Class written by Mark Moberg and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citrus, Strategy, and Class examines two decades of significant socioeconomic change in rural Belize. Mark Moberg draws on his extensive field research in two villages of Stann Creek district, supplementing and contrasting his findings with earlier ethnographic data from the same locales. The result is an unusual portrait of village societies in transition that documents the shifting basis of household economies from subsistence agriculture to citrus farming for export markets. With direct yet sophisticated prose, Moberg illustrates how the rural poor manipulate economic strategies and powerful outsiders as they become involved in production for the world market. In Silk Grass, where residents first planted citrus trees in the 1960s, the effects of world commodity markets were dramatically evident two decades later: increasing demand and escalating prices have enriched citrus farmers, but pronounced stratification now crosscuts the once nearly egalitarian village. Residents of Hopkins, seeking to emulate the outward success of their neighbors, organized a cooperative to circumvent their income limitations and gain access to development grants. Now, given the cooperative's political basis and the stratifying effects of citrus production, social classes are rapidly supplanting factional divisions. Moberg employs early ethnographic accounts, household surveys from 1971 and 1986, and detailed life histories to analyze these socioeconomic changes from a longitudinal perspective rare in community studies of rural development. He situates economic strategies within the constraints and incentives of world markets, national food and marketing policies, and local-level politics. Examining theefforts of the rural poor to actively pursue their interests, Moberg documents their often successful efforts to define the local consequences of world markets. In contrast to other studies, Citrus, Strategy, and Class demonstrates that the outcome of development is defined as much by the agency of rural residents as it is by the state, powerful political actors, and an embracing world market. Moberg's conclusions will be relevant to anthropologists, economists, political scientists concerned with local-level politics and factionalism, and development theorists and practitioners.