Guatemala diary: food and agriculture - in pictures
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Mark Tran continues his photo diary of Guatemala, visiting Raxnam village, near Cobán city in the central department of Alta Verapaz. The landscape is lush and green, but many residents face problems with roya, the coffee plant disease that also affects cardamon, another cash crop. Others practise food sovereignty, growing traditional produce such as maize, onions, amaranth, radishes and coriander without resorting to chemicals. They feed their family and sell the surplus
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Raxnam village lies near Cobán city in the department of Alta Verapaz, central Guatemala. The area is a lush emerald landscape of hills covered in coffee and cardamom bushes. Coffee is one of Guatemala's biggest exports.
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Raxnam's residents, from the Q'eqchi' indigenous group, live scattered in the hills. The one flat area in the village has a muddy football field where boys and girls take turns to play
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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All is not well in the fields of Raxnam where the cardamom and coffee plants are under attack. Coffee rust disease – roya in Spanish – has disfigured the glossy green leaves
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Rolando Rax, from Raxnam, inspects an infected cardamom pod. He and his family are having second thoughts about their decision to grow cardamom and coffee as cash crops
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Rax's family cooks a special meal of chicken soup with a root vegetable that looks like an apple but tastes like yam. No meal is complete without warm corn tortillas
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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The view from Rax's home. The whole area is a beauty spot
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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A common sight in Raxnam – tiring work
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Maria Sales stands in an African palm plantation, which she says is polluting the groundwater in the area. Swaths of land have been given over to African plam in northern Guatemala. Land grabs here for the oil rush often involve dispossession of peasant farmers
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Maria Saturnina Ojom is a practitioner of food sovereignty, growing traditional crops without using chemicals. Her family grows maize, onions, amaranth (a leafy vegetable), radishes and coriander mainly to feed themselves and to sell any surplus
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
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Unlike food security – defined as ensuring people have enough to eat – food sovereignty focuses on power and control of land, water and seeds. Under this approach, a farmer typically uses a third of her seeds to produce food for the family, a third to sell and trade, and saves the remainder for the next season
Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian
