Guatemala diary: food and agriculture - in pictures

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

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

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

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

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

The view from Rax's home. The whole area is a beauty spot Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian

A common sight in Raxnam – tiring work Photograph: Mark Tran/Guardian

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

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

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