ABSTRACT

Flex crops and commodities complexes consolidate within former strongholds and set off to new territories to take down today’s social and ecological crises. Grounded in Guatemala from 2005 onwards, this chapter discusses the implications of the rise of the flex crops and commodities complexes in transitions to sustainability for jobs, labor regimes, and socioecological reproduction. Specifically, the operations of the flex (sugar)cane and (oil) palm complexes in Guatemala involve a predatory form of agrarian extractivism which is driving a process of ‘impairing destruction’. This works by means of a job-poor, culturally insensitive, toilsome and unpaid labor-based ‘productive’ model and the manufacturing of environmentally and socially toxic landscapes to fuel a purge of the countryside. The purge hits harder on the many working families (and especially on women) who are deemed redundant for the renewables-led corporate model of sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Many struggle against this outcast condition. But the life purging agro-extractivism of the cane and palm companies both increases and stagnates the reserve army of labor, while simultaneously pushing the relative surplus population to the limits of subsistence. These findings about ‘renewable but unlivable’ futures call into question business as usual climate stewardship and sustainable development initiatives.