Social and Cultural Capital: Empowerment for Sustainable Development in the MOUNTAINS OF ESCAZU, COST by Phillip J. Montoya - HTML preview

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                13                           7,000                                     6                                              1,167     

                14               164,500(*)                                        8                                  20,562(*)         

                15                           10,500                                   6                                              1,750     

                16                           3,500                                     5                                                700      

                17                           21,750                                   8                                              2,719     

                18                           35,000                                   5                                                700      

                19                           1,750                                     4                                                437      

                20                           GARDEN                                              4                                              -----        

                21                           1,900                                     2                                                950      

                22                           ------(**)                 3                                              -----        

                23                           10,500                                   3                                              3,500     

                24                           14,000                                   4                                              3,500     

                25                           13,500                                   7                                              1,929     

                26                           15,750                                   6                                              2,625     

                27                           17,000                                   5                                              3,400     

                28                           3,500                                     5                                                700      

                29                           6,800                                     10                                             680      

                30                           21,000                                   6                                              3,500     

                31                           45,000                                   11                                           4,090     

                32                           35,000                                   1                                  35,000              

                33                           GARDEN                                              6                                              -----        

                34                           ------(**)                 4                                              -----        

                35                           ------(**)                 5                                              -----        

                36                           3,500                                     5                                                700      

                37                           1,750                                     9                                                194      

                38                           2,000                                     11                                             181      

                39                           18,000                                   3                                              6,000     

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 TOTAL     446,552 M2                                      214                                         -----        

 AVERAGE                           11,750 M2                                            5.5                                          2,167     

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 (*) Not included in average or total (area in Prot. Zone)            

 (**) Numeric data was not obtained                                                                             

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                Already, among the farming families interviewed, one third of these cultivated land that was not their own, farming instead, land that was rented or lent to them.  Otherwise, they did not have access to any land at all (see Table No. 4).  Thus among the farming families in San Antonio, one fourth of the land under agricultural production was land they did not own (see Table No. 5).

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    TABLE NO. 4                                                                  

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                                                                LAND TENURE REGIME                                                               

                OF 58 AGRICULTURAL FAMILIES IN SAN ANTONIO, 1997                             

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 LAND TENURE REGIME                                               NO. OF FAMILIES                             %           

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 OWN LAND                                                                        33                                                           56.9       

 OWN LAND AND RENT LAND                                     6                                                             10.3       

 WITHOUT LAND, ONLY RENT                                    11                                                           19.0       

 WITHOUT LAND, ONLY BORROW                            5                                                             8.6        

 NO ACCESS TO LAND                                                    3                                                             5.2        

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 TOTAL                                                                                 58                                                           100%    

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                                                                    TABLE NO. 5                                                                  

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                                TENURE AND AREAS OF AGRICULTURAL LAND                                               

                  OF 58 FARMING FAMILIES IN SAN ANTONIO, 1997                         

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 LAND TENURE REGIME                                                               AREA (HAS.)       %                           

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 OWN LAND                                                                                        44.66                      73.5                       

 RENTED LAND                                                                 12.90                      21.2                       

 BORROWED LAND                                                                          3.18                       5.2                        

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 TOTAL                                                                                 60.74                      100%                    

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                The parceling of land for inheritance equally among sons and daughters has been a common practice among farming families in San Antonio.  This has resulted in a situation of minifundios, or extremely small pieces of land for each family.  Although in the past this tendency was countered by purchasing other pieces of land in the same district, allowing the subsequent generations to continue cultivating sufficient amounts of land, by the 1990s this option was practically impossible.  In the decade of the nineties the prices of land climbed vertiginously, becoming inaccessible to farming families.  The tendency of an irreversible parcelization of land until the lots could only fit a home on them threatened the persistence of farmers in San Antonio de Escazú.  Those small farmers who still retained a piece of arable land counted their blessings.

                "Thanks be to God, I have half an hectare," Nino said to me the first time I met him.  "Because we farmers are being pushed out from here.  Don't you see that all this land is becoming residential.  But it is the people's own fault.  They don't want to fight for their rights.  A bunch of Gringos are coming here and they hoodwink us, we who are humble folk, paying any amount of dollars for the land.  And I have seen many people selling needlessly.  The most foolish thing is to sell the land.  The land is something that doesn't have a price.  They are cornering us and soon they will do away with us all.  The thing is that this has become residential.  Then come the road taxes, sewers, garbage collection, and the property taxes go up and many of us cannot pay.  So, with paved roads, electricity, and water, the Gringos come and buy this up.  What we have to do here is to hold on to the land as far as we can, and sell only as a last resort. (Field notes, May 23, 1992).

                The demographic tendencies, the rising property taxes and land prices, the inability of campesinos of San Antonio to compete with "First Worlders" to buy the land in their own home town, were just some of the macro tendencies an NGO, or community organization like CODECE could not tackle, but that the community itself had to contend with.  In addition to these, there were other more overarching macro-tendencies, even less susceptible to change by local organizations.  These included global processes, such as an increased liberalization and interconnectedness of the global economy, the transnationalization of capital and production, including agricultural production, the decreased sovereignty of Third World States, the decreased interest of the State in national support systems for farmers and workers.  The list goes on.

                These may be, however, the very factors which most impinge on the sustainability of local communities such as the community of small farmers around the Mountains of Escazú.  If CODECE could not be expected to transform these macro tendencies, the small farmers of San Antonio had to confront these issues, developing their own means to sustain their lifeworld, coming up with their own measures of sustainable development.

 

 

Campesino Measures of Sustainability

 

                It is interesting to note that the majority of the land sold in San Antonio to outsiders in the last ten years were coffee farms.  Many farmers explained that with raised property taxes, with the high cost of coffee pickers during harvest time, and with the lowered coffee prices, "coffee no longer pays for itself".  Thus, many small farmers changed from the extensive cultivation of coffee, to a very intensive cultivation of vegetables.  If at one time coffee represented the main crop of San Antonio, in the 1990s vegetable growing prevailed, with one third of the farming families dedicated exclusively to their cultivation, as compared to only less than seven percent of the farming families dedicated exclusively to coffee (see Table No. 6).

 

 

                                                                    TABLE NO. 6                                                                  

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                   LAND USE REGIME OF AGRICULTURAL LANDS IN 1977                             

                BY 58 AGRICULTURAL FAMILIES IN SAN ANTONIO, ESCAZU     

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 LAND USE                                                          NO.                         %                            AREA                    %           

 REGIME                                                              FAMILIES                                            HAS.                                     

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 ONLY VEGETABLES                                       19                           32.8                        19.7                        22.8       

 ONLY COFFEE                                                  4                             6.9                         5.6                         6.5        

 COMBINATIONS AND OTHERS  35                           60.3                        61.2                        70.7       

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 TOTAL                                                                 58                           100                         86.5                        100        

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                Contrary to coffee, which required many workers during a brief ha