Traveling on the Pan-American Highway in highland Guatemala in June 2008, I marveled at the ingenuity of Maya farmers who maximized their use of marginalized plots of land on steep hillsides. A US embassy official in our party, meanwhile, pointed out broccoli and blackberry harvests destined for export, an enterprise promoted by the embassy, the US Agency for International Development, and Peace Corps volunteers. He was convinced that such boutique monoculture would free Indigenous farmers from poverty and Guatemala from underdevelopment. To little avail, I tried to explain the sustainability, high yields, and other crucial contributions of milpa polyculture—small-scale maize, bean, and squash cultivation—that the broccoli and blackberry farms were increasingly displacing. If I had had Tiny Engines of Abundance back then, I could have simply handed it to him.Across four continents, five countries, and hundreds of years, small-scale agriculture has been remarkably productive, as historian Jim Handy demonstrates in Tiny Engines of Abundance. He also charts how persecuted such small-scale agriculturists have been. That paradox sits at the heart of Handy's concise and compelling book. Although Handy has long been one of the leading historians of Guatemala, in this comparative study he also analyzes small-scale farmers and agricultural development in England, Jamaica, Kerala (India), and Nigeria. What makes this book so exciting is that his thesis is as relevant for policymakers, development officers, and politicians as it is for historians and other scholars.As he details intensively efficient polycropping in each country, he makes the case that small-scale farmers generally have understood their particular (sometimes changing) land, climate, and weather patterns well enough to fine-tune their agricultural enterprises with symbiotic crops. Left to their own devices, they almost invariably produced enough for their families and often harvested surplus goods to sell in local, regional, and national markets.The tragic irony is that the biggest obstacle to small-scale farmers’ success has been national and foreign interlopers who portrayed peasants as backwards and their enterprises as failures to underscore the need for the Green Revolution and other allegedly innovative approaches to agriculture, particularly for large-scale production. Handy traces this tendency back to Thomas Malthus's (1766–1834) warnings about overpopulation. Malthus assumed growing populations would outstrip agricultural production, but Handy's study reveals that “increased population levels most often led to more intensive and effective use of land through the application of more labour on each acre” (83). This and similar observations in the book speak to its title: small-scale agriculture and its agriculturists were “tiny engines of abundance” (5). What makes efforts to discredit and even undermine small-scale agriculture so insidious is that the very organizations and individuals sowing doubt and discord also had evidence that disproved their own convictions. A 1973 US Agency for International Development study concluded that Guatemalan highland peasants’ techniques and knowledge contributed to yields that were twenty times those produced on large-scale enterprises in the United States and Guatemala (68).Along the way to establishing small-scale agriculturists’ ingenuity and brilliance, Handy disproves long-held myths such as biologist Garrett Hardin's 1968 “Tragedy of Commons” essay, which argued that people with access to common property over-exploited those resources, thereby fomenting human and environmental disaster. Instead of conducting research to prove his assertion, Hardin “imagined Africa” (81) to manufacture that tragedy. Handy explains that no evidence suggests that the “complex mechanisms that existed in thousands of commons around the world” (81) resulted in such alleged environmental degradation and overpopulation. Although Handy raises race as a factor in some of his case studies—in 1861 the Economist insisted: “the dark races must in some way or other be induced to obey white men willingly” (83)—an explicit argument about the role of racism in disparaging portrayals of peasants and, in turn, the ways that erroneous theories like Malthus's and Hardin's contributed to denigrating social constructions of small-scale farmers of color would have been welcomed.As much as Handy convincingly argues for the efficacy and potential of small-scale agriculture, he is not blind to its limits. In his chapter on Kerala, he notes that declining yields and rising costs of agrochemicals and other Green Revolution technologies compelled many small-scale agriculturists to migrate to earn cash to supplement their livelihoods. In turn, that loss of labor on their farms undermined the ability to maintain abundant and complex house gardens, which necessitated a shift to simpler types of cultivation that required less labor for higher yields. “The result is a vicious cycle of declining complexity, yield and environmental health of house gardens and permaculture plots that heightens the need for labour to find outlet elsewhere,” Handy notes (116).The long historical tail of colonial destruction of peasant agriculture and the Green Revolution's dependence on agrochemicals, characterized by decreasing effectiveness and increasing costs, continue to undermine the ability of small-scale agriculturists to thrive. That is as true in Kerala and Nigeria as it is in Guatemala, if Kaqchikel Maya oral histories are any indication. Such conundrums and challenges notwithstanding, Handy concludes: “Getting out of the way [of peasants] would do more to build sustainable futures and decent lives than a hundred dams or a thousand agricultural modernization projects” (122–23). We can only hope that policymakers, agricultural development officers, and politicians in North America and Western Europe heed that advice.
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David J. Carey (2024) studied this question.