Progress, Hunger and Envy : Commercial Agriculture, Marketing and Social Transformation in the Venezuelan Andes

Throughout the world, peasant societies are becoming integrated into markets through participation in commercial agriculture. In many cases marketing middlemen - who link the rural and urban economic spheres - come to play dominant roles in these societies, yet their activities are seldom examined. Over the past thirty years agricultural life in Bailadores, a high valley of the Venezuelan Andes, has become increasingly characterized by the production of vegetables destined for the major wholesale markets of the country. The new orientation towards cash crop production has changed the nature of fanning and brought exchange relationships into a prominent place in the rural society. Marketing intermediaries with their roots among small producers have developed key roles in the definition of new practices in both production and exchange. How do traders build their enterprises, and how are their activities perceived by the community? This study argues that market participation both generates the need for and supplies new cultural forms which have to do with practical and social skills and the deployment of resources. These changes challenge the values of the community and generate controversy. Hunger (hambre) and envy (envidia) are terms in which people carry on the public discourse about the market economy and its effect on individuals and the society as a who le, in search of a consensus as to what the new moral framework for economic life should be.