From: Mercy Corps
Guatemalan communities emerging from conflict benefit from Mercy Corps’ programs that improve land management, crop diversification and marketing.
For the mostly poor, indigenous families of Guatemala's central highlands, access to productive farmland is a first step out of poverty. Using that land to break into lucrative agricultural markets is a critical leap forward.
For decades, questions of land ownership has been at the root of Guatemala's widespread violence, displacement and bitter poverty.
In the country's fertile central highlands, Mercy Corps is trying to find answers — first by peacefully resolving land conflicts between landlords and tenant farmers, then by helping newly landed families grow high-value crops on their soil.
Despite a growing economy and the Mercedes and Jaguars cruising the streets of the capital, millions of Guatemalans still live in homes made of mud and walk hours to tend farms for little pay. The country is overwhelmingly destitute; three out of five rural families live in poverty.
One reason is that the country's fertile land — the most important means of production in an agricultural economy — is concentrated in the hands of a few. It's been reported that roughly 2 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the country's productive farmland.
Inequity over land has led to conflict. When worldwide prices for coffee plummeted in 2000, widespread layoffs forced workers from their homes and sparked violent confrontations between tenant farmers and landlords.
The highest number of these confrontations occurred in Alta Verapaz. That's where Mercy Corps has been working since 2003 to peacefully resolve conflicts over land through negotiated consensus, and then to help newly landed farmers make a profit from their lands.
Tags: Guatemala, Conflict & War, Donate, Economic Development, Latin America, Peaceful Change, One Lifetime
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