Commercial Agriculture and Environmental Degradation
The environmental destruction accompanying the spread of commercial agriculture along the margins of the global economy is now well documented by geographers and anthropologists. Areas previously marked by sustainable subsistence cultivation soon exhibit such symptoms as rapid soil erosion, deforestation, and pesticide
contamination (Nietschmann 1979; Blaikie 1985; Grossman 1984; Grant 1987). Damage most commonly results when impoverished growers are forced to retreat to ever more marginal lands (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In Buguias, however, it is primarily the most prosperous farmers—those wealthy enough to hire bulldozers to flatten hilltops and to construct private roads—who precipitate erosion and deforest the slopes. Wealthy growers expanding into the fertile eastern cloud forests also destroy watershed vital for the entire valley, and increasingly outcompete the growers in the older, exhausted districts. But all villagers, rich and poor alike, degrade their lands, especially by unleashing biocides and fertilizers into the streams of the region.
This devastation does not stem from cultivators' ignorance or mismanagement. Benguet vegetable culture is in many respects intricately fitted to the local landscape, with each crop cultivated in the precise microhabitat to which it is best adapted. Moreover, most gardeners are aware of the dangers of chemical contamination and denuded slopes. But the commercial system in which they are imbricated leaves them few alternatives. With a long-term decline in profits and a notoriously capricious vegetable market, growers must feverishly intensify production in a desperate attempt to avoid losing ground during poor seasons (what Bernstein [1977] calls the "simple reproduction squeeze"). And the prospect of unpredictable price jumps propels them in the same direction; the lure of a jackpot harvest brings an even higher pitch of activity during the perilous typhoon season, a time marked by accelerated erosion and periodic market windfalls.
The environmental and social pressures of market-oriented agriculture in the global periphery can be extraordinarily destructive; in the worst cases, as Watts has shown for Nigeria, the "horrors and moodiness of the market" (1983:xxiii) can bring famine and mass starvation. But the vegetable districts of northern Luzon have as yet seen only the early warnings of an ecological and economic debacle. The vegetable farmers today remain the envy of both subsistence growers in the mountains and impoverished peasants in the lowlands. Nor has the market's individualizing force brought cultural dissolution as it so often does. In fact, far from destroying local culture, commercial development has greatly enhanced its
central feature, the redistributive prestige feast. But the very continuation of communal feasting has actually become an accomplice to the environmental breakdown.