By Javier Suazo on September 1, 2020
“Thanks to the efforts of the Bolivian people, we have eliminated colonialism and oppression, and now we can guarantee that the land is for those who work it.” Evo Morales Aymara
The policies of agricultural structural adjustment eliminate the programs of agrarian reform, based on the massive turn-over of land to campesinos and campesinas without land or with only precarious land possession. It also included technical assistance, agricultural supplies, and cooperative credit, offered by an organized support program. There were several reasons offered to justify this anti-agrarian reform intervention. The first is the lack of resources to continue financing or subsidizing this type of program, which, according to those called “neoliberal bastards”, doubtless turned out to be expensive for the public treasury, added to the financial crisis of the 1980s and the increase in the debt, which created pressure for public resources produced by the state to be used to satisfy external creditors, principally.
The International Financial Institutions, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary fund (IMF) maintained that the economic and political policies of Latin American economic integration had introduced a bias in favor of goods such as staple grains and vegetables produced for the internal and regional market by units of campesinos and groups and cooperatives organized to aid agricultural reform; they claimed this had a negative impact on the competitiveness of those countries, reflected in few available exports, low productivity and high costs for the government. This argument is, fundamentally, that these goods are produced more efficiently, and with higher productivity in physical and labor terms, in developed countries, but while failing to recognize the substantial subsidy that the government offers those producers so that they can sell their products and compete.
The agrarian reforms were aided by both internal and external circumstances, such as, for example, the fear of communism that they proclaimed had been installed in Cuba and threatened to spread throughout Latin America, as well as the strikes and protests of the campesinos against the banana-growing corporations and their takeovers of land. In addition, it is worth mentioning the coming to power of military governments calling themselves reformists and for national unity, at least in their public speeches and in the first years of their rule.
The substantial external debt and economic dependence of Latin American countries created a tendency for these governments to adopt programs of orthodox structural adjustment of agriculture, based on neoliberal-style policies favoring free markets, reduction of government, privatization of goods and services, and the validity of an individualistic productive model; all these were contrary to the collective and social participation model that sustained the agrarian reform programs. The underlying thesis is that collective ownership does not give or guarantee property rights so that the occupants of the land do not feel committed to the collective enterprise, and the imposed strategies of development, which went from occupation of the land (campesino settlements) all the way to obtaining property title as the price of the land is payed to the government from the earnings generated by the sale of products, both for the internal and the export market.
In the majority of Latin American countries with programs of agricultural structural adjustment, those governments considered progressive continued intensifying these sorts of policies, such as the development of agribusiness, extractivism (the large-scale removal or exploitation of natural resources for export) and energy projects, but they also made progress in carrying out programs of turning land over to campesinos. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales, in the twelve years between 2006 and 2018, distributed 3,168,465 hectares (7,829,448 acres) throughout the country; between the years 1995 and 2005, only 36,834 hectares (91,019 acres) were distributed. Hugo Chavez declared war on unproductive estates, allowing the expropriation of land in the hands of large landowners who were not carrying out their social function and where doubts about legal property rights existed.
Campesinos and campesinas without land were benefitted by compensatory and temporary programs, one of which, perhaps the most visible, is the so-called market-assisted agrarian reform, which seeks to give land to families utilizing market mechanisms such as the purchase of land from large land-owners or businesses.
For example, we can point out the experience carried out in Brazil and Honduras, with pilot plans and market-guided agrarian reform programs. Nevertheless, Lula (President Ignacio Lula de Silva) complemented the execution of this agrarian reform policy with the production and massive delivery of food products. In Honduras it accompanied the recovery of land in the northern part of Honduras with the organization Campesino Movement of Aguán during the government of Carlos Flores, with Aníbal Delgado Fiallos at the head of the National Agrarian Institute.
Today it is necessary to review agricultural structural adjustment in Latin America, as well as the policies, means, and supplementary mechanisms for its sustainability over time, as well as extractivism and Free Trade Agreements. This review should be part of the creation of a historical memory, now being lost, concerning processes of agrarian reform. It is equally important to do a critical analysis of the results and negative impacts of those policies carried out, in terms of food production, exports, general employment, property rights, productivity, use of seed native to the region, protection or destruction of water sources and forest, food insecurity, migration, poverty, extreme poverty and reconcentration of rural property in the hands of a few.
We would like to hope that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN would head up this critical analysis of the development of Latin American agriculture, but the evidence shows that the theme of concentration of property in few hands and agrarian reform as a principal program of government to substitute for unproductive exclusionary large agricultural landholdings is not a priority on the FAO’s agenda. If it were, they would note the production of food by campesino economies who refuse to die and who continue to feed the population on the basis of and who carry out their activities on small units of less than 5 hectares of land. We could say the same of the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) where the agrarian theme no longer forms part of their agenda for research and publication. What is more, one could count on the fingers of one hand the current employees of CEPAL who have proven competence in these areas.
The organization Via Campesina has adequate technical ability and international credibility to carry out an investigation of this type, and so campesino and social organizations and organizations of indigenous peoples within these territories should put forward a demand to each government and request for multi-sector coordination, beginning with the United Nations Development Program (PNUD).
This is very important in the current situation, where the Shock Doctrine attempts to strengthen the above-mentioned policies of agrarian adjustment, promoting and incentivizing the reconcentration of rural property into large parcels with very few benefits for campesinos and indigenous peoples. The argument is that it is necessary to produce food, that businessmen and large ranchers are those who are most capable of doing this, since they are supposedly more efficient than campesinos and campesinas. One must leave them alone and guarantee their property rights, regardless of size and productivity, and facilitate their acquisition of more, through facilitating their buying land now in possession of the national or regional government and that of the groups and cooperatives of the agrarian reform that remain, those that, according to the governments, are kept idle by “bums.”
The correct course is to do just the opposite. To allocate the uncultivated or unused lands to food production, organizing forms of cooperative agricultural production sustained by family labor and mutual cooperation. Also, to levy a progressive tax on uncultivated lands, with those resources to be dedicated to the production of food, fruits and vegetables by the “wretched of the earth” of Latin American agriculture. We have to reconstruct the agricultural institutional environment/ from the ground up and with the fullest participation of those involved, where the most important requirement is the protection of indigenous peoples’ rights over the natural resources and the functioning of supportive mechanisms of delivery of financial resources, seeds, and other supplies to the campesinos and campesinas.
Source: Latina Americana en Movimiento, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau