Territorial dispossession: dynamics of capitalist ...

Third World Quarterly

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Territorial dispossession: dynamics of capitalist expansion in rural territories in South America Luis Felipe Rincón & Bernardo M. Fernandes To cite this article: Luis Felipe Rincón & Bernardo M. Fernandes (2018): Territorial dispossession: dynamics of capitalist expansion in rural territories in South America, Third World Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2018.1458297 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1458297

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Third World Quarterly, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1458297

Territorial dispossession: dynamics of capitalist expansion in rural territories in South America Luis Felipe Rincón and Bernardo M. Fernandes Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia Campus de Presidente Prudente – Geography, Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho, Sao Paulo, Brazil

ABSTRACT

The rural territories of the Agrarian South have been occupying a central role as epicentres for the recent dynamics of capitalist expansion. Over the last years this has led to an increase in the process of control and extraction of natural common goods by different mechanisms such as agribusiness, mining-energetic projects, megainfrastructure building, cultural dispossession and so on. Taking the territory as the central analytical approach that involves different dimensions and scales, we analyse the recent transformations in several rural sceneries from South America where various forms of dispossession of natural goods have been presented. With this perspective, we hope to contribute to the analysis and understanding of the agrarian transformations in the Agrarian South.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 19 July 2017 Accepted 25 March 2018 KEYWORDS

Extractive regimes territorial dispossession natural common goods South America

Introduction The worldwide economy in the last few decades has been based on an intense dynamic of extraction of natural goods, which has had negative repercussions on rural territories. This model has a major impact on those countries which show lower levels of economic development and well-being for their population1 – countries which have been historically dominated by relations imposed by both industrialised economies and international corporations, and which – from a critical perspective – have been defined as the ‘Global South’. The increase of international prices of commodities in the past few years has created a great pressure in terms of the access to and control over natural goods in rural territories. Thus, Latin American, like other regions of the Global South, is the epicentre of several mechanisms of capital territorialisation based on the dispossession of its commons. This has led to a deepening of the deindustrialisation process because the national economies have based their development in the extractive export matrix. Therefore, the decline in price of raw materials leads to a reduction in national incomes with the concomitant emergence of social tensions as consequence of economic deceleration growth; and additionally the impossibility of regaining the economic growth based on national industrialisation.

CONTACT Luis Felipe Rincón

[email protected]

© 2018 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

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L. F. RINCÓN AND B. M. FERNANDES

The extractivist regime started in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) with the neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s, when numerous economic, political and social reforms were introduced which led to favouring the privatisation of state assets, globalisation and the suppression of social policies.2 As Borras et al. write, this economic-political model ‘started to gain ground early in this region, liberalizing land markets in various ways, encouraged international capital movements and reduced trade barriers, in turn transforming the agricultural sector’,3 like other economic sectors. That has drawn a convergence of ‘multiple crises of food, energy, climate and finance, as well as the rising demands for commodities from newer hubs of global capital’.4 Thus, the rise of per-capita incomes in the middle-income countries (MICs) has been crucial for increasing the local and international demand for agro-commodities5 and raw materials.6 Also, as the home of up to five billion of the world’s seven billion people and 73% of the world’s poor people, and where about one-third of global gross domestic product (GDP) is concentrated,7 the MICs play a central role with their high demand for resources, as well in having an important reserves of land, minerals and natural goods. Additionally, this dynamic has been consolidating the extractive model which has transformed the driving force of the Global South economies. As Giarraca and Teubal write,8 the extractivist model has a direct relation with the appropriation of natural resources by transnational companies; however, it is common to relate it to the mineral sector. In fact, it goes beyond and corresponds to multiple strategies of dispossession: [The] definition of an economy based on extraction is not limited to activities normally falling into this category (mining and oil), but also includes other sectors such as agribusiness or the production of biofuels. … In addition, it includes the transport infrastructure projects (waterways, harbors, bi-oceanic corridors, and so on), energy projects (large hydro dams) and communication infrastructure projects.9 On the other hand, Harvey10 supports that, at the current levels of development of neoliberalism, the expansive process of accumulation of capital has been based in the control and extraction of commons. This determines, among other things, land privatisation, deterritorialisation of rural communities, the elimination of rights to natural goods, the transformation of the labour force, and the suppression of alternatives ways of production and use. In short, colonial, neocolonial and imperial appropriation processes of the assets and natural resources, or as Fernandes11 describes it, the ‘deterritorialisation’ of non-capitalist relations of production and ‘reterritorialisation’ of capitalist relations of production, mean a territorial dispossession. With the Accumulation by Dispossession (AbD), Harvey12 described the new strategy of developing ripe capitalism in different contexts where it is not central to create capitalist social relations so as to diversify the mechanisms of appropriation and dispossession to take up the super-concentrated capital of global economy. An analysis of the specific mechanisms that shows how dispossession in local territories has occurred13 will offer the best view of the developmental dynamics of international capital and its impact in the local communities. On the other hand, the territorial framework provides a powerful analytical tool for understanding the complex process of destruction of the social relationship but also the destruction of the territory that produces this relationship: the peasant and indigenous territories, for example. This article’s objective is to introduce the analytical perspective of territorial dispossession that we hope will contribute to an understanding of the dynamics and impacts of the recent expansion phase of capital in the rural territories of the Global South. We emphasise three

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scenarios of Latin America that have gone through singular processes of the configuration of social relations of production in the rural areas, and also specificities in the social, political and productive role that rural people have; and finally, that are the subject of particular mechanisms for appropriation and exploitation of the common goods. These nonetheless constitute them in scenarios of territorialisation of the current extractive regime. Thus, taking the case studies as reference, we intend to show how the perspective of territorial dispossession can be used to analyse the dynamics and impacts of the expansion of the current extractive regime. First, we draw an analytical contribution based on the territorial framework to understand and interpret the causes and impacts of capital territorialisation in LAC’s rural areas. Then, based on empirical information, we analyse the territorial implications as part of the extractive regimen’s expansion process on rural areas from Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. Finally, we discuss the continuities in and differences of territorial dispossession in the agrarian south.

Territorial dispossession: notes for a definition Extractivism has been occurring in LAC since 500 years ago, starting with the occupation and dispossession processed imposed by Europeans on indigenous territories. Svampa14 mentioned that in the last few decades LAC ‘has switched from the Washington Consensus with its focus on finance to the Commodities Consensus based on the large-scale export of primary products’, and defined the Commodities Consensus as ‘the beginning of a new economic and political order sustained by the boom in international prices for raw materials and consumer goods, which are sharply demanded from industrialized and emerging countries’. Acosta15 affirms that extractivism means a lot to those activities which remove large quantities of natural resources that are not processed (or processed only to a limited degree), especially for export. In addition, neo-extractivism includes the participation of the financial capital and speculative markets to promote the current model, and support by progressive central governments. Thus, the extractive model involves different kinds of territorialisation, such as the control of agribusiness in the Southern cone countries like Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. In the Andes countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, mining industry and largescale hydropower projects have a major impact. In Central America the tourism and plantation models are the most relevant. However, all have been characterised by generating strong impacts on rural areas. This situation has affected and transformed the livelihoods of the local population who have lost control of their land/territory, causing and aggravating socio-territorial conflicts as part of an encounter and confrontation between antagonist development models and paradigms16 Additionally, as Acosta17 says, the evolution of these primary export economies is characterised by the fact that their production is subordinated to and motivated by external demand. When all is said and done, neo-extractivism maintains and reproduces key elements of the extractivism that dates back to colonial times.

Thus, the multiple strategies of territorial dispossession lead us to extend the concept of land grabbing to describe the diversity and complexity of the current process. It is fundamental to clarify that land grabbing is essentially ‘control grabbing’, understood as the power to control land and associated resources such as water in order to derive benefits from such control. Also, the study of current land grabbing requires a consideration of the scale of such

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land grabs. This notion of scale, however, should not be limited to the scale of land acquisitions, often within the dominant view that defines large acquisitions as those that exceed the 1000-hectare benchmark. Finally, the distinctive feature of current land grabs is that they occur primarily because of and within the dynamics of capital accumulation strategies responding to the convergence of multiple crises: food, energy/fuel, climate change and financial crisis18 On the other hand, the current land control process has introduced new mechanisms of land control and new actors. However, practices and technologies of governance and control, subtle or violent, are still employed to acquire, secure, and exclude others from land in intense competitions over control19 In short, extractive and neo-extractive processes and land grabbing are an integral part of the current model of capitalist expansion of accumulation by dispossession. Levien20 claims the AbD ‘opens up fertile terrain for understanding the proliferation of contemporary land grabs … mining projects, privatized infrastructure development, tourism and real estate schemes, all of which fit awkwardly into classical theories of primitive accumulation and agrarian transition.” In this way, the territorial approach could contribute to understanding the different specific ways in which capitalism’s advance in the territory has impacted at different scales and different dimensions, treating the agrarian sector as a political and economic category, as well as the local population. From this perspective we attempt to show the complexity of the dispossession dynamics in the territories, because it has a strategic importance in the control of material resources, and the relations of production, among other things; territorial dispossession also involves the capture of immaterial approaches such as the official narrative, ideology, public policies and knowledge. In the last few decades the territorial approach has been gaining relevance in academic, political and social debates, with an emphasis on LAC countries. Thereby, national or international bodies have introduced the territory category in development projects or through public policies. In these cases, the territory is used as a space of governance. The narrative of corporations is presented through business projects and social responsibility, which means an instrumental interpretation. Socio-territorial movements and local communities have a compression of the territory as the basis for their existence, and the reason for their struggles and social resistance. At the academic level the territorial narrative is presented as an analytical category. Thus, the notion of the territory will depend on who makes use of that interpretation, what is its intentionality, what will be the use given the territory, and what is its capacity to impose that interpretation. These elements push us to draw a definition of the territory which we have been using to understand and interpret the social reality. As Fernandes21 argues, the lands acquired by corporations are not empty. They have been occupied by communities for hundreds or thousands of years. They are fractions of the national territory that are delivered to large corporations. Thus, a country’s area is the first territory. The areas granted by the government are the second territory. These are territories that are dispossessed. Often, scholars cannot differentiate these two dimensions. The territory has as its most important characteristics the notions of totality, multidimensionality, scale and sovereignty, approaches which are central in the moment of analysing the implications of the capitalist expansion in rural spaces. In many studies and research papers it is common to find a restrictive understanding of the territory in which it corresponds only to the space of governance. That perspective ignores the different territories that are into the space of governance, and this notion of territory has been used as an instrument of domination through neoliberal policies. Thus, territorial dispossession is a conceptual framework


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Table 1. Population, land use and main agro-commodity in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. Argentina*

Brazil*

Colombia**

Population (%) Urban Rural Rural employment

94.1 5.9 1

86.3 13.7 15

80 19.9 16

Total area (million ha)Land use (%) Agricultural area Crops Grass Gini concentration

278 53 27 72.9 0.83

851.6 32 28.88 71.1 0.85

114.2 37 19.8 80 0.80

Soybean 58.7

Sugarcane 737

Sugarcane* 38.1

Main agro-commodity Production (million tons)

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAOSTAT* (2016), National Administrative Department of Statistics, DANE-CNA** (2014).

for understanding how the capital expansion, in its territorialisation process, advances in a constant dynamic of dispossession not only over the material assets, like land, water, minerals, forests, and so on; this also include the immaterial dimension such as the narrative, ideology, culture, etc. Therefore, we recognise the properties that involve the territory category such as totality, multidimensionality, multi-scale and sovereignty22 which mean recognising the complexity and contradictory dynamic that in the economic, social, political and cultural dimensions are involved as part of the dispossession capital process, and the actions carried out by local communities in defence of their territories.

A view of the extractivist territorialisation process in South America. Argentina, Brazil and Colombia are three emblematic scenes of the territorial dispossession affecting rural territories. Argentina has consolidated an intensive large-scale model of production of commodities for export which has involved several agrarian changes; Brazil has been transforming its agrarian sector to incorporate the agribusiness model which has had to confront peasant resistance; and Colombia has adopted the extractive industry as the ‘driving force’ of the economy. Table 1 shows some specific facts, such as that the rural population is low in relation the urban one; a high index of land tenure; and the relative importance that the rural sector still has for each of these countries.

Argentina: agrarian transformations by expansion of the soybean industry Agricultural production has always been an important sector of the economic rise and development of the country. With several economic phases which have fluctuated between crisis and stability periods, the Pampa region has been characterised as concentrating agrarian production over a diversity of both productive matrix and agrarian structure, which had a strong tradition of production of crops (cereal and oleaginous) and cattle (meat) oriented to local and international markets, and a milk sector destined for local markets. This model was supported over a mode of production characterised as Agricultura Familiar or family farming, who had land at medium scales, used a combination of family employment and salaried work, and specialised techniques of production on a medium level consistent in

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mechanised and agrochemical inputs, and which has been displaced by the agro-extractive industry. With the introduction of neoliberal reforms since the 1990s, a phase has begun that led to pushing forward the agribusiness sector, especially in the government of Carlos Menem (1989–1995 and 1995–1999), who ‘removed import and export taxes on capital goods, reduced farm subsidies and trade protections, increased interest rates on agricultural loans, and privatized public services’.23 As a consequence of the economic crises in 2001–2002 as part of the neoliberal polices and the unsustainability of the convertibility system, important agrarian changes were produced, which mainly affected the family farming sector, who were faced with hyper-inflation growth and saw an increase in their production costs and debts, and in this way were brought gradually to economic and productive unviability.24 This scenario was utilised by international corporations and local investors to expand the production of agro-commodities, especially soybean in Argentina. Thus, the soybean crop has occupied a central role in the dynamic of flex crop expansion in South America, where Argentina is one of the most important producers at the international level. The country is an important global player in the soybean crops which supply the international market, especially the Asiatic one. In 2010 nearly 80% of their production was destined to foreign markets. In addition, in two decades Argentina’s soybean production grew from 11 million tons in 1993 to 58.7 millions tons in 2016; this represents an increase in their participation from 9.5% to 17.5% in worldwide production.25 To analyse the expansion dynamic of agribusiness in Argentina it is necessary to pay attention to how this process has been actuated in two ways. The first is the direct control over land and production (first territory), and the second is the control over both public policies and narratives (immaterial territory) that agribusiness has achieved. In the first way agribusiness has promoted the territorial dispossession process through land grabbing, which involves two main mechanisms: the direct acquisition of land to produce crops, with the participation of local and international companies and investors;26 and the pool de siembra systems which are a complex and intricate arrangement of indirect agreements for the production and rent of the land, which concentrated capital from private investors, financial sector, and other speculative sectors. These involve a flexible use of factors of production (land, labour and machinery) in each production cycle. The firms organise sowing polls and do not necessarily own the land that they operate but, rather, lease it on a short-term basis and outsource farm tasks through machinery contracts.27

Soybean production has led to an increase in the pressure for land acquisition, where the small and medium properties have reduced their relative participation in number and hectares by 25% and 20%, respectively, between 1998 and 2002, and a growth in the number and total area of properties from 500.1 hectares to 10,000 hectares or more. Nevertheless, the small units still account for 75% of the total farmers, 27% of the gross product, 18% of land and 64% of the rural employment28 This process has led to an increase in international investment and land grabbing dynamics, as shown by Murmis and Murmis: ‘Today, two firms control 90 percent of the Argentine soybean market and cover the entire range of the varieties grown in the country’.29 The model of production characterised by the expansion of oleaginous crops30 has brought an important change in relation to the kinds of crops which traditionally have been


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produced. Therefore, the cattle industry oriented to meat and milk derivatives has been displaced by large-scale crops expansion in a process called ‘agriculturisation’, which makes reference to the hegemony of the monoculture. The soybean crop area in the last few decades has grown by 18 million hectares, rising from 2,100,000 hectares in 1979–1980 to 20,680,000 hectares in 2015–2016.31 This process has represented alterations in relation to the kind of production in vast areas of the country, especially near the Pampa region, where agribusiness has been territorialised in a more radical way. This has led to a loss of the traditional system of production called ‘tambero’, represented by the family producer who oriented their products to local markets, and ‘additionally, the Pampas model has expanded to areas which were previously considered marginal for agricultural production, which were traditionally populated by small peasant farmers’.32 In addition, soybean agribusiness has created a strong idea such as that responsible for the development of the rural sector and the whole society through the control of public policies and the narratives. This notion was consolidated during both Kirchner governments, Nestor (2003–2007) and Cristina F. (2007–2015), when an agreement was established with agroindustry to incentivise the agro-export production with the purpose of obtaining the foreign currencies and taxes necessary to finance the implementation of compensatory policies oriented to favour the poor population. This led the corporations to have a central role in influencing the orientation of national policies (immaterial territory), such as the Strategic Agri-food and agribusiness plan (PEA in Spanish) (2010–2020) which has the aim of expanding agribusiness production area for export. It is not oriented to attend to local demand with sustainable development supported on the production of food and not commodities, environmental conservation and social justice for the rural people. In short, the consolidation of the agribusiness soy sector in Argentina, as Figure 1 shows, started in the late 1990s with the implementation of neoliberal policies, and the convertibility crisis which led to unviable conditions for sectors of small and medium family farming, and in this way it created the conditions for the expansion of the agribusiness model through business farmers and the pool de siembra complex, all in a context of high international prices of agro-commodities. Here, the agrarian sector has been confronted with a fast and radical process of consolidation of territorial dispossession in the sense that international speculative capital has taken control of natural goods such as land, water and biodiversity, to incorporate specific social relations of production, and imposed commodification in agriculture to feed the international dynamics of capital accumulation.

Brazil: large-scale production and peasant resistance The territorial dispossession in the current neo-extractive stage in Brazil has shown a complex and diverse way to control and exploit natural goods by both the local and international capital33 as in the case of the Belo Monte dam in Para34 the expansion of genetically modified (GM) soybean specially in the South Region35 and flex crops such as sugarcane36 in the South-east Region37 and so on38 Additionally, the agrarian question in Brazil has been determined by the confrontation between two models: agribusiness and the small-farming/peasant:39 ‘The capitalist development process in Brazilian agriculture is essentially unequal and contradictory, a process that simultaneously eliminates and creates parts of the peasantry’.40 Agribusiness’s territorial dispossession dynamic has developed a dual strategy; on one hand is the territorialising process through the illegal appropriation of land called terras griladas;41

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Figure 1. Expansion of the soybean industry in Argentina, 1969/1970 to 2014/2015. Source: Ministry of Agroindustry, SIIA (2016) (http://www.ucar.gob.ar/index.php/en/).

on the other hand, it has promoted land grabbing in both national and foreign areas. This has led to an increase in the socio-territorial conflicts persistent in rural territories.42 Additionally, the economic growth with which Brazil has experimented in recent years – especially in their agrarian sector – has led to an expansion of their influence in the formulation and orientation of agricultural policies in several countries of the region. Once again, with the Brazilian case, it shows the territorial dispossession process as the driving force by agribusiness production has led to changes in the traditional production system oriented to guarantee food for the population to agro-commodities for the international market. However, it has a peculiarity expressed in that the peasant movement has achieved confronting both the material and immaterial territory of agribusiness, but this dispute has developed in unequal conditions. Thus the peasant mobilisation has transformed their struggle; while in the 1990s the struggles had the focus of confronting the unproductive latifundium, recently the struggles have taken the form of resistance in the territory and against the ‘productive’ agribusiness at the local, national and international level. With a production which reached 768 million tons of sugarcane in 201343 and a planted area of more than 10 million hectares in 2015,44 Brazil occupied an important place in the worldwide ranking of sugar-cane production, leading it to reach a domestic production of 28 million m3 of ethanol and 35 million tons of sugar in only the period 2014–201545 to supply the domestic and international demand, carrying on to consolidate it as a flex crop. In this context, Sao Paulo state occupies a central role by participating in the national production, with 56.4% of the total planted area in 2013–2014, to contributing 48.5% of domestic production of ethanol and 61.6% of domestic production of sugar in 2014–2015.46 This has been promoted by the international climate change polices, oriented to find substitutes for


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Figure 2. Foreign investments in the agro-industry complex in Brazil. Data source: Database of Struggle for Land (DATALUTA, 2015). From top left to bottom right: (a) Brazil – number of agribusiness companies with foreign capital, by country; (b) Brazil – number of rural proprieties of agribusiness companies with foreign capital, by country; (c) Brazil – number of rural properties of agribusiness companies with foreign capital, by commodity; (d) Brazil – number of agribusiness companies with foreign capital, by state.

fossil energies to decrease the effects of global warming; and also the local government policies which have been increasing the use of biofuel.47 These flex crops48 have led to an increase in the control of the industry and the financial capital over the agriculture sector through the possibility to speculate not only with land, but also with the quantity and destination of the production. Therefore, agricultural production has become an instrument for financial speculation without a connection to the local demand to supply healthy and culturally appropriate foods. As Figure 2 shows, Brazil in general and the Sao Paulo state in particular are an important focus of interest for international capital through the direct acquisition of land and by the creation of industries, where the sugarcane sector is the most important industry which concentrates the international inversion, leading to the deterritorialisation of non-capitalist relations of production to push forward the configuration of new territories – both material and immaterial. The west region of Sao Paulo state has been characterised as an important epicentre of constant agrarian regional transformations.49 The region of Pontal do Paranapanema50 is a good example of the territorial transformation promoted by different capitalist interests and stages of development.51 The region is the epicentre of the highest level of agrarian conflictivity in Sao Paulo state with an intensive dynamic of struggles for land access and in defence of peasant territory.52 Between 1988 and 2013, 816 occupations occurred of large-scale farms and public lands, which had been appropriated unlawfully. More than 100,000 families participated in these actions. During the whole period they have been organised in several socio-territorial movements, 25 in total, where the MST53 is the most relevant in relation to the capacity to move people and to take several actions around the territory, and in its influence in all the municipalities that make up the region.54 However, the active dynamic of mobilisation and struggle for land did not have a big impact in changing the concentration of land tenure in the region, as shown in Table 2.

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Table 2. Land tenure in Pontal do Parapanema, SP. 1988 Land tenure (ha) Up 10 10 to 100 100 to 1000 1000 or more

Propr. 2485 7877 2086 325

% 19.5 61.7 16.3 2.5

2002

Area 14,182.4 252,127.3 627,583.4 701,387.3

% 0.9 15.8 39.3 44.0

Propr. 4521 10,586 2514 306

% 25.2 59.1 14.0 1.7

Area 23,879.2 34,8871.8 717,981.9 710,910.1

% 1.3 19.4 39.9 39.5

Source: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE (2016).

Table 3. Distribution of UPA by área, Colombia. Up to 5 ha 5 to 10 10 to 50 50 to 100 100 to 500 500 to 1000 1000 or more

UPA* (%) 70.9 10.3 13.5 2.8 2.1 0.2 0.2

Area (%) 2.4 2.0 9.8 6.8 13.9 5.0 60.1

*

Agricultural Productive Area (UPA in Spanish) is an administrative classification. Source: National Administrative Department of Statistics, DANE-CNA (2014). UPA.

In the last few decades, the region has shown a rapid increase in the production area of sugarcane, in a proportion greater than the state and national rate. Whereas the production area of sugarcane in the 32 townships which belong the region was 71,095 hectares in the period 2003–2004, it increased to 351,836 hectares in the period 2013–2014, which represents an increase of 394.9% in a decade. Meanwhile, the increase of the production area at the state and national level in the same period only reached a growth of 92.1% and 90.1%, respectively.55 This fast and dramatic dynamic of sugarcane expansion has led to a consolidation of the territorial dispossession of agribusiness through, on the one hand, material resources like land, water and biodiversity in a continuous process of extraction, and, on other hand, immaterial aspects through the consolidation of an ideology, narrative, knowledge and public policies which have led to promoting and understanding agribusiness as the unique alternative for the development of the sector, and where the environmental and social negative impacts are minimised. Thus, peasant movements should face both material and immaterial de-territorialisation, which are part of the current advance of the capitalist regime in the territories.

Colombia: extractive industries as the ‘driving force’ of the economy The agrarian question is part of the historical roots of the cycle of conflicts which has characterised the country.56 The inequality relation of land tenure has increased dramatically in the past few years. As Table 3 shows, a very small percentage of the estates (landlords) have control over 65.1% of the agricultural lands, in large-scale properties of 500 hectares or more. In addition, 70.9% of estates (small-farming/peasants) only have control over 2.4% of agricultural lands, in small farms of 5 hectares or less.57


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This great control over the land and territory, and the change in the orientation of the development model based on national industrialisation and agricultural development to agro-export and commodities, has consolidated the extractive model as the main way of development in the countryside. Thus, the current dynamic of territorial dispossession in Colombia, in addition to promoting the expansion of agriculture to a large scale, is materialised through a wide range of strategies of dispossession such as the mining industry, infrastructure and dam projects, business tourism and real estate developments, among others, which act in rural territories. For this analysis we referred to the processes in the rural areas of Caldas department,58 which is located in the west centre of the country in the central mountain range; towards the west the Andean and high-mountain landscape prevails.59 It has a predominantly peasant social base, and an economy sustained by coffee production.60 The department of Caldas suffered the 1990 crisis deeply, a product of the elimination of subsistence prices for grains;61 in addition to the policies of economic opening applied in the period affecting the lines of farming production. Thus, the region witnessed the incursion and expansion of different agents of the internal conflict, mainly militiamen promoted by landowners and businessmen interested in developing mineral and energy projects, putting pressure on the appropriation and control of the territory, ending in a deep social, productive and political crisis.62 Nowadays the region is an important epicentre where different dynamics of expansion of the current extractive model converge, and which we identify as investments for mineral exploitation on a large scale, building of medium and large dams, and tourist undertaking from cultural dispossession. The mining investment includes one of the most important epicentres: the Mining District of Marmato, which has an area of 348 km2 and has reserves of gold and silver, representing 6.7% of national production – and is in an expansion phase. This is an iconic region where the mining activity has been the principal support for small miners who have had a connection with the mine since the occupation of the Spanish people. With the increase in the international price of gold and silver, the mine has been gaining relevance for international companies such as the Gran Colombia Gold Corporation, which plans to develop a large-scale system for mineral extraction that has created several conflicts with the local miners who will be displaced. The local population has been affected by the relocation of the municipal town because their current location affects the corporate plans. This situation has created a continuous process of material dispossession of territory and the loss of the traditional social relationships which had roots within the peasant legacy and traditional strategies for mineral extraction.63 The construction of large-scale and micro-scale dams is another way that territorial dispossession has been materialised in the rural territories. First, in the east region of Caldas department, an important dam called Miel I was built. It has a height of 188 metres (the second highest dam in the world), and contains a reservoir of 1220 hectares. The region was the epicentre of an intensive violent period by paramilitary groups which sought to ensure the sale of lands by peasant people and offer security for the building of the project. On the other hand, for the building of this mega-project all the environmental authorisation was granted and the special conditions necessary for the success of the inversion were created, as was the declaration as a natural reserve of the Florencia jungle, a process that could take several years, but that is fundamental to guaranteeing the volume of water to supply the energetic system. This energetic complex will be completed with the construction of Miel II which, although of smaller dimensions, will be strategic to complete the energetic offer for

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the industry and the capital cities. The high-eastern region of Caldas is the new epicentre of natural dispossession by micro-scale dams, 10 in total. This has been presented as a new strategy to take control of the territory and their natural goods, now on a smaller scale but with the same implications in relation to the environmental effects which will have impacts on the small farming/peasant production systems. Finally, the declaration of several townships as part of Coffee Cultural Landscape64 by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is an additional strategy, like the tourist industry and the real estate developments, which are being used to strip rural people of their the local culture including architecture, artistic expressions, food, landscape, and other things; to place these functions under the interest of capital. In short, in the last few years the rural territories have transformed their agricultural and livestock orientation to become an area of interest to development extractive initiatives such as mineral exploration and dam projects. These new dynamics of capitalist expansion have government support and have been defined as the route for development in the country. This situation of convergence between, on one hand, the political and economic exclusion of the majority of rural people, and, on the other hand, the development model which has negative environmental impacts, concentrating profits for a small group of corporations and persons, which might be local or foreigners, are the central elements that configure the socio-territorial conflict and the current Colombian agrarian question.

Conclusion The rural territories of the ‘Agrarian South’ occupy a central role in international capital expansion projects. With enormous stocks of natural goods such as land, water, forests, biodiversity, conservation forests and so on, these territories have experienced an important transformation in the last few decades that has affected the local population and has led to the consolidation of the privatisation of natural goods. This process has been accompanied by a continuous dynamics of growth of socio-territorial65 and socio-environmental conflicts.66 However, the global dimension of the current capitalist phase, and its way of materialising in the territory, has a structural connection with the socio-economic and political trajectory in each of the territories in the Agrarian South. The rural territories of LAC are not an exception and in recent years they have been the scene of the dynamics of capital expansion through accumulation by dispossession.67 In our interpretation, the current phase of privatisation and dispossession of natural goods started in the 1990s with the implementation of neoliberal postulates in the economy, a process that was generalised in the countries of the region, and led to transforming the role of the state which had central participation in the orientation of economic policies in the phase of import substitution industrialisation (ISI). The state went on to have a subordinated relationship in the neoliberal regime. In the rural territories a process of privatisation of natural goods, a dismantling of agricultural policies oriented to small farm/peasant sectors and, at a deep level, a radical change in the notion of the role of rural areas in society have occurred. Rural territories are not more important by their character than areas for food production to supply urban populations, or as spaces of natural reserves and places where a substantial proportion of the population still lives – and may reduce the pressure on the big cities. Under the neoliberal regime, the rural territories and agricultural production have adopted a notion of resources in order to consolidate the capitalist relations of production


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by different strategies such as agro-commodity production, mining-energetic projects, mega-project building, cultural dispossession and so on. With the confluence of multiple crises in the early 2000s,68 the control of international and local capital over natural goods has been consolidated and has been increasing conflicts over their access and control. As we revealed in this paper, each of the countries shows a particular mechanism by which capital has taken control of natural common goods in rural territories. In spite of this differentiation, all the countries supported their economic development in terms of the extractive and neo-extractive model. Thus, the diverse political orientation of the governments (which has characterised the cases of study and which has fluctuated in the last few years between the centre-left and the right), or the kind of productive matrix and their destination we pay attention to (that is, from the agro-commodities production for the international or local market to mining and energetic projects), are not a restriction against applying the same economic model since a few years ago it was consolidated in the region, and this has led to the national governments being the only regulators of the current capitalist regime. In short, the nation state is subordinated under the interests of local and international capital. That has led to consolidating the dispossession regime of natural common goods as the main mechanism of capitalist expansion in rural territories. Argentina has presented the consolidation of the agro-industry and agro-food strategic plan to 2020 (that plans to increase the production of grains to 58%, to reach the goal of 157.5 million tons in 2020), supported by the agribusiness sector, while on the other hand, it has dismantled the institutional support of the family farming sector as the recent Macri administration has been reducing the financial resources and technical staff of the sub-secretary of family agriculture. Brazil has presented a variety of mechanisms of dispossession, which have been increasing in the last years. The interim president has announced the elimination of the ministry of Agrarian Development which is responsible for the family farming sector, which shows the orientation that will be taken for the development of rural areas without guarantees for the poor population. And in Colombia, the extractive sector has taken control as a driving force of the economy, on the one hand with several initiatives that will have negative impacts in areas of conservation such as the possibility of mining extraction in areas of forest conservation (Salento-Quindio) or near important towns (Ibague-Tolima), and the extraction of oil by the fracking system (Macarena National Park); and on the other hand by the implementation of policies like the Zidres law which permit the transference of public lands to promote agribusiness, thus restricting access to land for landless peasants. Thus, we consider the territorial perspective brings additional elements which make a contribution to the analysis of capitalist expansion in rural areas in the current stage of accumulation by dispossession because, on the one hand, it helps to identify the specific mechanisms of how these relations are materialised in the territories, and, on the other hand, because when a territory is understood in its different scales and dimensions, the focus of analysis is not limited only to the material aspects but also includes immaterial notions such as a perspective for interpretation, and is not taken from an instrumental form. Ultimately, the notion of territory is inserted deeply in the narrative of peasants’ movements, where their space of struggle is not only important for natural goods such as land, water and so on, but also because their space is the territory where it is possible to reproduce material and immaterial relationships – ie the reasons for their individual and collective existence. Finally, this study leads us to ask ourselves deeper questions about what the implications of these dynamics are in other latitudes of the Agrarian South.

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Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding This work was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) under Grant #2013/20189-0.

Notes on Contributors Luis Felipe Rincón is a postdoctoral researcher at Sao Paulo State University with a grant from São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). He has conducted research on rural territorial development, public policies, and land grabbing and socio-territorial movements, and has fieldwork experience in rural areas of Latin America and Africa. Bernardo Mançano Fernandes is a professor at UNESP (São Paulo State University) and UNESCO Chair in Territorial Development and Education for the Countryside at UNESP. He has been an active research Fellow for Scientific Productivity of CNPq (Level 1B) since 2001. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the following Latin American universities: Equator, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, México and Mozambique. Since 2008, he has been a member of the research group Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS) of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), in the Netherlands.

Notes 1. Rincón, “(Neo)extrativismo E Despojo.” 2. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System; Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism and the Agrarian Question.” 3. Borras et al., “Land Grabbing and Global Capitalist Accumulation,” 408. 4. Ibid., 408. 5. Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, “Food Crises, Food Regimes.” 6. Amanor, “South–South Cooperation in Africa.” 7. World Bank, “Middle Income Countries.” 8. Giarraca and Teubal, “Disputas por los territorios.” 9. Svampa, “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives,” 118. 10. Harvey, The New Imperialism; Harvey, El enigma del capital. 11. Harvey, “Breve Historia Del Neoliberalismo.” 12. Levien, “Special Economic Zones.” 13. Levien, “Da Acumulação Primitiva Aos.” 14. Svampa, “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives,” 117. 15. Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism,” 62. 16. Fernandes, “Território, Teoria Y Política”; Fernandes, “Sobre La Tipología.” 17. Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism,” 73. 18. Borras et al., “Land Grabbing and Global Capitalist Accumulation,” 404; Borras et al., “Land Grabbing in Latin America.” 19. Peluso and Lund, “New Frontiers of Land Control”; Borras and Franco, “Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories.” 20. Levien, “Special Economic Zones,” 456. 21. Fernandes, “Sobre La Tipología.”


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22. Fernandes, “Sobre La Tipología.” 23. Gras and Hernández, “Agribusiness and Large-Scale Farming,” 343. 24. Giarraca, “De las Fincas.” 25. FAOSTAT, “Food and Agriculture Organization.” 26. Murmis and Murmis, “Land Concentration and Foreign Land Ownership.” 27. Craviotti, “Which Territorial Embeddedness?,” 6. 28. Murmis and Murmis, “Land Concentration and Foreign Land Ownership.” 29. Craviotti, “Which Territorial Embeddedness?” 10. 30. An important characteristic of Argentina’s soybean complex is that a big part of the production undergoes a prior process of transformation before exporting; thus, in 2010 this local transformation was 69% (57% flour and 12% oil). Craviotti, “Which Territorial Embeddedness?” 31. SIIA, “Sistema Integrado de Información Agropecuaria.” 32. Murmis and Murmis, “Land Concentration and Foreign Land Ownership,” 504. 33. Wilkinson, Reydon, and Sabbato, “Concentration and Foreign Ownership of Land.” 34. Binsztok, “Integração Nacional.” 35. Oliveira, “Geopolitics of Brazilian Soybeans.” 36. Borras et al., “Rise of Flex Crops and Commodities.” 37. Fernandes, Welch and Gonçalves, “Agrofuel Policies in Brazil,” 38. Sauer and Pereira Leite, “Agrarian Structure, Foreign Investment.” 39. Fernandes, Welch and Gonçalves, Land Governance in Brazil. 40. Ibid., 796. 41. Fernandes, Welch and Gonçalves, Land Governance in Brazil; Sauer, “Land and Territory.” 42. Fernandes, “Re-Peasantization, Resistance and Subordination.” 43. FAOSTAT, “Food and Agriculture Organization.” 44. UNICADATA, “Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association.” 45. Ibid. 46. Borras et al., “Rise of Flex Crops and Commodities.” 47. In the Brazilian case, the mixture of ethanol has reached 27% in gas. 48. Borras et al., “Rise of Flex Crops and Commodities.” 49. Fernandes, “Re-Peasantization.” 50. Fernandes, Welch and Gonçalves, “Agrofuel Policies in Brazil.” 51. The Pontal do Paranapanema was characterised by maintaining an important rainforest, being the epicentre of a land rush process since a century ago by the illegal appropriation of public lands by landowners called grillagem, who later introduced productive activities such as the wood extractive industry and other productive matrices such as cattle farms, coffee plantations, cotton and soybean, and in the last few decades have experimented with the expansion of sugarcane. 52. Fernandes, “Re-Peasantization, Resistance and Subordination.” The region integrates 32 townships and covers an area of 1.2 million hectares, which is part of the intense dynamic of struggles for land access, and currently has 114 settlements with approximately 6000 families settled covering an area of 142,000 hectares. 53. Landless Workers’ Movement; see Vergara-Camus, “The MST and the EZLN Struggle.” 54. Dataluta, “Database of Struggle for Land.” 55. Canasat-INPE. 56. Rincón and Cristancho, “The Agrarian Question as the Driving Force.” 57. DANE-CNA, “Censo Nacional Agropecuario 2014.” 58. The region is characterised for being the epicentre of the territorial and commercial expansion of the State of Antioquia, which promoted a series of colonialisation efforts in the interest of integrating new territories and widening their range of influence to the southern region. 59. Cifuentes and Palacios, “El departamento de Caldas.” 60. Caldas was the epicentre of the rural development policies promoted by the National Federation of Coffee Growers (Fedecafé), which not only subscribed to the ones related to coffee production, such as technical assistance, introduction to new varieties, transference of technology, commercialisation, etc., but were also developers of infrastructure such as roads,

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electricity for plantations and aqueducts, and the building of schools. This activity implies that Fedecafé was considered, in the areas where it is present, a state within another state. 61. Cifuentes and Palacios, “El departamento de Caldas.” 62. Cruz and López, “Territorios en Mutación.” 63. Rochlin, “Boom, Bust and Human Security.” 64. In Spanish, Paisaje Cultural Cafetero. 65. Clements and Fernandes, “Land Grabbing, Agribusiness and the Peasantry.” 66. Martinez-Alier et al., “Is There a Global Environmental.” 67. Harvey, The New Imperialism. 68. Borras et al., “Land Grabbing and Global Capitalist Accumulation.”

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