Agricultural adaptation strategies under Morales’s administration: The Case of a Guarni Community in the Bolivian Chaco

Abstract

In Bolivia, the Morales administration promoted agricultural projects in Guarani communities with the purpose of enhancing climate resilience and strengthening the communities’ production capacities and systems. Though aligned with the government’s broader goal of decolonizing Indigenous realities, this objective proved questionable in the light of the government’s neoextractivist development model. Scholars have shown that the enhancement of climate resilience in Bolivia faces significant difficulties due to socio-structural barriers. A study of one local project based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2016 in a Guarani community reveals that the limits of the decolonial horizon of radical pluridiversity in the MAS political project are key to understanding some of those difficulties. Rooted in the One World World paradigm (the dominant narrative of reality), the project reenacted a socio-ecological order that constrained Indigenous ways of life and agriculture and, therefore, the foundations on which Guaraní climate resilience has historically rested.

En Bolivia, el gobierno de Morales promovió proyectos agrícolas en comunidades guaraníes con el propósito de mejorar la resiliencia climática y fortalecer las capacidades y sistemas de producción de las comunidades, lo que estaba alineado con el objetivo más amplio del gobierno de descolonizar las realidades indígenas. Sin embargo, la descolonización y emancipación de los proyectos de vida indígena han sido cuestionadas a la luz del modelo de desarrollo neoextractivista del gobierno. Se ha demostrado que la mejora de la resiliencia climática enfrenta dificultades significativas debido a barreras socio-estructurales. El estudio de un proyecto local basado en el trabajo de campo etnográfico realizado entre 2015 y 2016 en una comunidad guaraní revela que los límites del horizonte decolonial de la pluridiversidad radical, en el proyecto político del MAS son clave para entender algunas de esas dificultades. Enraizado en el paradigma del Mundo Único (narrative dominante sobre la realidad), el proyecto recreó un orden socio-ecológico que limita las formas de vida y las agriculturas indígenas y, por lo tanto, los cimientos sobre los que históricamente se ha basado su resiliencia climática.

Bolivia is alleged to be one of the countries most affected by reductions in water supply caused by climate change (Vicente-Serrano et al., 2015). Increases in temperature, decreases in rainfall, and intensification of extreme weather events in combination with other regional anthropogenic factors are already causing health problems and posing significant threats to the agricultural production of peasant and Indigenous communities in the Bolivian Chaco region (Aparicio-Effen et al., 2016; Nordgren, 2011). Adaptative and mitigation strategies are underway, but studies have demonstrated that enhancing climate resilience in Bolivia faces significant difficulties due to socio-structural factors. One factor is the exclusion of a gender perspective in sustainable development and climate-change policy agendas (Boyd, 2002). A second one is the unequal participation of sectors and groups in environmental governance processes, which limits the possibility of seriously increasing the resilience of the most vulnerable (Wilk et al., 2018). A third is the power relations involved in contemporary patterns of resource use, which hinder the protection of fragile ecosystems and marginalized populations against climate vulnerability (Perreault, 2019). Finally, the ecological and social effects caused by the development trajectories of previous decades constrain the ability of rural people to cope with climate stressors (Walsh-Dilley, 2020).

In this article, I describe a factor specific to Bolivia, which impedes climate resilience and agroecological transition processes and is tied to the contradictions between official discourses of decolonization and the actual implementation of policy on the ground. These are intrinsically connected to the limits of the decolonial horizon of pluridiversity, which was implicit in the political project of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism, MAS) under Evo Morales’s presidency (2006-2019).

During Morales’s first mandate, the MAS administration expressed a fervent commitment to fighting climate change, particularly in international arenas. At the same time, it spoke of decolonizing society and the state and empowering the poor through the replacement of the historical Eurocentric development model with an anti-capitalist model based on the principle of Vivir Bien – a paradigm grounded in Indigenous people’s cosmologies and harmonious relationships with nature. This decolonizing agenda included dismantling the historical and hegemonic agrarian development model, for which the Morales administration approved the Plan for the Rural, Agrarian, and Forestry Revolution, created the Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria y Forestal (National Institute for Agricultural and Forestry Research Innovation, INIAF) in 2008, and promulgated the Law on Productive Community Agricultural Revolution (Law 144) in 2011. These changes moved the agroecological process in Bolivia to a new stage. It built upon the Indigenous principle of complementarity with Mother Earth and the rejection of profit and promoted the strengthening of agroecological production systems and sustainable family farming (Catacora-Vargas et al., 2017).

Yet, Morales’s anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and Indianist discourse was soon contradicted by the neo-extractivist model that the government adopted to move his political project forward (Bebbington and Bebbington, 2010; Gudynas, 2011; Svampa, 2012). The government’s environmental commitment was put into question in the light of state-led extractive activities which ironically made the MAS an active accomplice in deepening the climate crisis (Turner, 2010). Its political project also claimed to be grounded in a particular version of Indigeneity (Burman, 2014) that inhibited the emancipation of alternative Indigenous life projects by reproducing old social inequalities and their consequences such as the subordination of Indigenous rights and interests (Lalander, 2017), reaffirmation of old-age patterns of powers by the state and lowland elites (Fabricant and Postero, 2015), and social conflicts (McNeish, 2013). The government’s agrarian agenda simply did not break with previous extractivist agrarian development despite the inclusion of agroecology in national development plans. Agrarian policies still prioritized agricultural development programs and resource allocation in favor of mainstream extractive agriculture (Catacora-Vargas et al., 2017). In addition, the MAS administration pushed for the expansion of the agricultural frontier for the production of export crops such as soybeans, with consequent deforestation and transformation of natural areas into agricultural land for agroindustry (Albarracín, 2019).

This article examines the experiences and implementation of a local climate change project led by the INIAF in a Guarani community situated within the Indigenous District of Camiri (Cordillera Department) between 2015 and 2016. This community relies on rainfed agriculture and had for some years experienced intermittent droughts. Based on the observed and expected effects of the loss of native corn seeds on food sovereignty and local climate coping capacity, the project proposed the re-introduction of an improved native seed variety with the multiple purposes of enhancing local productive capacities, climate resilience, and agrobiodiversity. It also included the economic objective of transforming Guarani farmers into producers of that corn variety, which had not yet been marketed by then. This adaptive initiative implied the defense of native agricultures as a means to reduce the climate vulnerability in Indigenous communities, complying with the respect and commitment toward Indigenous ways of life implicit in the Vivir Bien paradigm. However, I argue that the success of this project in enhancing climate resilience was limited, due to the socio-ecological order that this state-led agricultural development strategy (re)enacted and that I contend constrains agroecological transitions.

This article focuses on the managerial practices, legal mechanisms, and market-based strategy involved in the INIAF project in order to reveal continuities with the previous agrarian model directly affecting Indigenous agricultures. If, in its rhetoric and development agenda, the MAS ostensibly advocated for a balanced coexistence of pluriversal agricultures, this article shows that in practice, it promoted an agrarian project incompatible with the enhancement of Indigenous ways of life and agriculture on which the climate resilience of Indigenous communities have historically rested. The set of policies aimed at the local level was contradicted by policies aimed at the larger scale. And the community project itself also contained internal contradictions. While the Morales administration decisively enhanced indigenous rights and involvement in decision-making processes, this article provides insights into the prevalence of colonial legacies in the MAS political project and contributes to a better understanding of the present and possible decolonizing futures of Indigenous lifeworlds and agroecological-based agricultures.

Theoretical Framwork: Pluriversal Agricultures

Against the dominant imaginary of the One World World – that is the Western-modern assumption that there is a single world made up of one reality (one nature) and many cultures – scholars, especially from the field of political ontology, have defended radical ontological ¹ difference and pluriversality claiming that multiple worlds and realities, built upon particular ontological assumptions, emerge from practical engagements with the environment (Blaser and De la Cadena, 2018; Escobar, 2018).

Pluriversal and radically different worlds come together and coexist under complex power relations dominated by the West, which managed to subject alternative ways of life to its rules by setting modernist science and its ontological understanding as the universal ground for worlding practices ² . Neo-extractivism is a fundamental component of these power disparities and alienation. It has recently been characterized as a global form of organizing life (Chagnon et al., 2022) which makes ontological particularities of indigenous life and world-making projects invisible and nonexistent (Ødegaard and Rivera, 2019). In the narrower sense, the term neo-extractivism is used to refer to the continuing and expanding reliance of Latin American economies on the extraction of natural resources. Since the early 2000s, the international boom in commodity prices facilitated emerging Latin American progressive governments to mobilize resource revenues to finance social programs and development (Svampa, 2019). Resource extraction helped increase public spending and economic growth but often with the negative effect of disrupting indigenous lands and lifeways.

In response, resistance movements and conflicts proliferated all over the region (McNeish, 2013; Svampa, 2019). While these conflicts had a political nature and revolved around the rights to consultation and self-determination, it has been argued that they transcended governance dynamics and emerged due to profound divergences regarding the conceptualization of nature-society relations (Merino, 2015). They are ontological conflicts involving conflicting stories about “what is there” and how they constitute realities in power-charged fields (Blaser, 2013: 548). Even in the cases of indigenous communities that did not oppose extractivist development but developed their life projects alongside extractive activities, encounters with extractivist policies are considered to involve incommensurable differences and frictions (Blaser, 2016). In these cases, extractivist development initiatives do help sustain indigenous life projects without exhausting their radical difference but are a source of asymmetries and socio-environmental problems that constrain them and steer their continues transformation (Anthias, 2018; Gustafson, 2020; Ødegaard and Rivera, 2019). Extractive operations have been proven to actualize questions of ontological difference and be a catalyst for forms of slow violence against alternative human-nonhuman formations (Ødegaard and Rivera, 2019).

Agriculture is a crucial site where extractivist endeavors usually overlook ontological divergences. From the lens of political ontology, agriculture has to be understood in plural terms as activities grounded on ontological assumptions, practices, and situated knowledges that have been historically produced by and have helped produce multiple worlds with their own socio-ecological particularities (Giraldo, 2019; Toledo, 2001; 2005).

Pluriversal agricultures are dominated by hierarchical relations. After all, the legitimation of modern extractive agriculture as a standard production modality and its worldwide expansion (Scott, 1998), particularly from the Green Revolution onwards, imposed practices and structural mechanisms such as laws and patron-client relations of production (Valdivia, 2010) that caused the displacement, replacement, and transformation of the so-called traditional agricultures and the subordinated inclusion of Indigenous and peasant communities into the market and dominant agro-food system (Giraldo, 2019). A global disruptive process that in turn brought about unprecedented ecological degradation.

The resulting oppression must be understood as a part of a broader, historical process of coloniality, which has legitimized and provoked both the repression of Indigenous modes of knowledge and signification (Quijano, 2000, 2007), and the granting of a privileged space to modernist techno-science in the field of public management and governance (Jasanoff, 1990; 2006; Lander, 2000). Intertwined with the globalizing project of enacting the One World World, the modern agricultural modality expands while imposing a particular socio-ecological order that suppresses other agricultural ways of life and the emergence of alternative futures.

In response, agroecology calls for a decolonizing shift in how to approach food production and consumption. Agroecology has its roots in the pluriversal agricultural and land-use practices of Indigenous and peasant societies and embodies the idea that agroecological systems can generate social justice and increase local resilience to stresses such as climate change (Pimbert et al., 2021; Sevilla, 2006). Despite increasing contestation of the dominance of modern extractive agriculture, there is still a long way to go for alternative, agroecological-based agricultures to (re)emerge in balanced alignment. Attention then has to be given to the conditions under which they are enacted and shaped today.

Methods

This article is primarily based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2016 during doctoral research which explored the socio-political and cultural dimensions of weather and climate change-related issues in Bolivian Guarani communities. The work draws on informal interviews conducted with community members in their homes and with Guarani leaders and the INIAF’s representatives and agronomist-technicians in their workplaces in the Camiri and Kaami districts. The information is supplemented by participant observation of everyday life and the project activities performed in one community during the first and only year of the project. The resulting field notes and interview data were processed, analyzed, and interpreted using NVivo qualitative data analysis software and the triangulation method. A literature and document review was also conducted to contextualize the results.

The Present State Of Guarani Agriculture

Situated in the northwest of the Camiri municipality, El Rodeo is a Guarani community with around 500 inhabitants, which belongs to the capitanía ³ Kaami. It lies amidst the lush thorny vegetation that covers a remote area of the municipality flanked by low hills, which is connected to the urban district by an unpaved road that community members – especially men – regularly cross in private and collective vehicles. The community’s land is in the hands of Guarani people under the titling modality of Original Community Lands (TCOs). Following the traditional collective system, the extension of cultivable land within this TCO is divided into communal and family plots, and its access is subject to agreements made in assemblies.

Most of the families cultivate one-to-three-hectare parcels, except for a few, who farm up to ten hectares. Agriculture is an important source of livelihood ⁴ , though it is usually combined with and increasingly displaced by wage employment in urban areas. It operates under a gendered division of labor: men prepare plots, sow, control crops, and harvest, while women participate in the sowing and harvest and are in charge of home gardens. Families cultivate corn, beans, squash, watermelon, peanuts, and fruits, generally using a traditional mixed cropping system. They also produce sorghum to craft and sell brooms. While local production is mainly consumed by the families themselves, and only a limited surplus is traded in local markets, there is a trend among those few families with larger plots to practice monoculture and produce for sale. The lack of rivers and abundant water springs in the area has impeded irrigation systems, making Guarani farmland dependent on the yearly seasonal rains between November and April.

In former times, agriculture was the backbone of local life, providing livelihood as well as the basis for neighborhood cohesion, political power, and the social prestige of the group and the capitán (Meliá, 1988; Susnik,1968). Today, agriculture is no longer embedded as it once was and accommodates the social and economic parameters of modern production systems. Its resulting hybrid and entangled nature does not exhaust its radical difference, as it is still imbued in particular forms of sociality involving community members and non-human entities. For example, mötiro was a cooperative practice that until recently determined agricultural work. It was based on reciprocity that involved the formal invitation for people to collaborate on their respective plots and an informal commitment to both reciprocate posterior work invitations and provide collaborators with food and chicha (fermented corn beer). While the mötiro is less common, its underlying principle of reciprocity still forms an intrinsic part of social life, especially in activities such as the organization of communal and household work, parties, funerals, and the exchange and loan of food and cash. Agricultural work still requires collaboration between relatives and is, therefore, a social activity that promotes the cross-generational transfer of knowledge and skills that involve a particular sensorial, interpretative, and practical engagement with the agro-landscape.

For the Guarani people, nature is owned and protected by powerful entities (Ñanderu Tüpa ⁵ and Iya reta ⁶ ), to whom humans have to pray when handling natural resources to obtain their permission, protection, and support. Before starting any agricultural work, community members are, in fact, supposed to approach these entities briefly – “we have to pray and talk to them when we go to the chaco (plot) because with their help, we don’t notice the long hours and hard work, but without their help, the task simply does not progress,” one of my interlocutors told me. When plagues break out in the field, the intervention of powerful agents is also necessary, as the ipaye reta (shamans) conducted ritual performances to treat plagues in the past. Today, community members either do nothing or apply the cures themselves which, like shamanic treatments, draw on the agency of different types of items – things with a metaphysical meaning that exceeds the Cartesian dichotomy between subjects and objects (Martín-Galán, 2020).

For instance, one cure requires taking a few worms that are causing crop damage and hanging them on a cross-shaped stick that the affected farmer has to nail in one corner of the cornfield and orient toward the sun. The act must close with a prayer and an offering. After a few days, the plague is expected to be gone. Another cure requires capturing a few locusts from the affected field and frying them in goat fat. It then takes some days for them to disappear. These cures and the relationships with powerful entities are not given the same importance by everyone in the community. “It seems that we already have lost belief. Not everyone values these rituals, and the iya reta isolate themselves because they are not taken care of by the community,” I was told. Nonetheless, agrochemicals are rare, which indicates that the Guarani still practice an agriculture of low ecological impact and economic cost. The use of trojes (traditional grain storage houses) and manual tools such as hand seeders, hoes, and wheelbarrows remains predominant, although there is also an increasing use of machinery (tractors, seeders, and shellers) that communities have obtained through the Morales government’s social programs.

The current state of Guarani agriculture may differ substantially from region to region, but cannot be understood without considering the historical encounter with the Karai ⁷ (the modernist Other). During and after Spanish colonial administration, Guarani agricultural systems were exposed to the influences of the religious missions (De Nino, 1912; Langer, 1987). At the same time they faced strong pressure from the conflict between “cows and corn” – that is, the slow but progressive penetration of the Spaniards’ livestock in Cordillera province that resulted in the devastation of Guarani people’ cornfields and drove them off their own land (Susnik, 1968). As a result, the lands and labor of Guarani people were gradually overtaken by colonial forces, while the rotation of plots, necessary for Guarani slash-and-burn agriculture, was forced onto smaller, remote and less fertile land (Meliá, 1988; 1996). Thanks to the 1996 Agrarian Reform Law, Guarani people recovered part of their lands, but due to their often-limited extension of cultivable land, the practice of agriculture in some communities remains limited. With the Green Revolution, Indigenous and peasant agricultural systems underwent new pressures, which triggered the displacement, replacement, and transformation of native agricultures and their agro-landscapes.

The resulting worldwide expansion of modern agriculture, together with charity-oriented programs, erosion of cultural heritage, entry into the labor work market, and adverse weather conditions have contributed, in general, to rupture the independence of Guarani traditional production systems and, in particular, to the loss of corn varieties and seeds adapted to the ecological conditions of the Chaco region. Today, most El Rodeo community members no longer store native seeds; they either purchase seeds in local stores or use commercial varieties periodically distributed by external institutions. The reliance on rainfed agriculture, together with the loss of native varieties and the changes in rainfall patterns during recent years, reveal the current vulnerability of Guarani agriculture and the risks it faces if predicted future climate scenarios materialize.

Situating The Local Productive Project

At the beginning of 2015, the INIAF built an alliance with Guarani leaders in the Kaami district to implement the “National Corn Program”, which pursued the collection, improvement, conservation, and re-introduction of native seed varieties. During the project’s first months, the INIAF distributed corn seeds in several communities to introduce an improved native corn variety in th area. Later, it decided to initiate broader productive projects only in communities with sufficient cultivable land suitable for cash crops. El Rodeo was one of two communities that met this condition. The main technician for the project told me that it would take about five years for this community to become a seed producer and that the first year would just be a trial period, which would serve to spread the seeds among families. After activities related to planting, weeding, pest control, and harvesting of corn, the INIAF arranged a final rural fair to share experiences with other producers. The harvested seeds were distributed among all families, but only a small group of middle-aged men participated in project activities. Over fifteen men attended the planting session, but the number of participants clearly decreased over time, and there were occasions when only the capitán and/or the community director of production participated. After the trial period, the project was suspended due to the allegedly low local engagement, which disappointed community members, although they accepted it with stoic resignation. When I paid them a visit two years later, they were already involved in another agricultural project, funded by the Fondo de Desarrollo Indígena (Indigenous Development Fund, FDI).

In this region, Guarani engagement with productive initiatives has a long history. In the 1980s, an NGO-State alliance between the Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (Center for the Investigation and Promotion of the Peasantry, CIPCA) and Corporación de Desarrollo de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz Development Corporation, CORDECRUZ), sponsored by the Cordillera oil industry, collaborated on a regional development program called Development Plan for the Peasantry of Cordillera (PDCC), which promoted projects in Guarani communities. Similar development initiatives were encouraged by decentralization reforms in the 1990s and by the MAS administration when municipal budgets grew in the 2000s (Martín-Galán, 2020). These endeavors had transformative effects on the social organization of Guarani, resulting in a governing structure, which was called PISET for its organization around five development fields: Producción, Infraestructura, Salud, Educación and Tierra (Production, Infrastructure, Health, Education and Land). This structure meant a clear assignment of duties for local leadership teams: the capitán and the community director of production (both (re)elected in local assembly every two or three years) are expected by their communities to actively seek and manage projects. They also have to explain the projects before local assemblies and ensure that benefits are distributed equally among all families. Project participation by community members is voluntary and only possible if they have spare time, therefore, the leaders are required to request collaboration consistently. Since missionary times, Guarani people have accepted external help but resisted participating in collective activities that clashed with the mötiro, their collective work rules (Saignes, 2007). While the PISET framework does ensure a basic yet functional team of leaders for the implementation of collective development initiatives, Guarani leaders recognize that the proactive engagement of other community members often poses challenges. Benefiting from productive projects is clearly coveted, and they are a significant driver of local political and social dynamics and tensions.

In the short term, productive projects generate material benefits that help people realize immediate needs, which contributes to a positive perception of them. “We want projects to support families, to improve the economy, and to reduce risks,” I was frequently told. When I asked one of my interlocutors why they wanted the INIAF project, the response was, “We have to work the land to make an income. We need a plan, and I think that the most important thing is to have both new technology and old practices and knowledge.” Community members see projects as a strategy to make life in the communities feasible and, therefore, build their autonomy as socio-economic unities.

Forms Of Doing And Knowing Prioritized

The INIAF’s project was not the first state-led productive initiative implemented in El Rodeo, but the first one with a participatory approach based on the dialogue of knowledge that is the integration of Indigenous and science-based knowledge systems for the co-management of local agriculture (see INIAF, 2010). This approach represents a paradigmatic shift in the field of public agricultural management and innovation in Bolivia because, for the first time, it recognizes the value of Indigenous knowledge systems, and promotes Indigenous agricultural practices. Previous national agricultural institutes adopted vertical models of modern knowledge and technology transfer and undervalued local actors, their realities, knowledges, and cosmologies (Cordoba et al., 2014; Cordoba, 2016).

Yet, despite the novel and horizontal approach of the INIAF, its local project clearly prioritized the application of scientific knowledge-based practices of modern agriculture. In particular, it promoted the practice of monoculture, the use of agrochemicals, and the mechanical execution of tasks – all elements that have material and epistemic consequences that restrain the local agricultural forms of doing and knowing.

Based on the uniform spatial distribution of one seed variety in plots, monoculture promotes the optimization of productivity and the sale of crops in large quantities. It allows, in short, the reproduction of the factory model in nature (Giraldo, 2019). In one of the first meetings between the INIAF’s team and the community authorities, government agronomists insisted without any discussion that the new corn seed would be planted in a demonstration plot from the community’s collective plot of land using monoculture techniques.

This procedure was chosen on the assumption that it would contribute to local food sovereignty in two different ways. First, it would generate seeds that community members would later reintroduce in their mixed cropping plots, which would help to reinforce the diversification of local agrobiodiversity and food supply. And second, it would show community members how to increase local productivity so as to be able to sell seeds and generate stable income for families.

This approach overlooked, however, two important elements. The mere delivery of seeds does not guarantee their successful (re)introduction in mixed cropping plots and family diets; it rather reinforces past practice that has led to replacing native seeds, accelerating the loss of native varieties and food changes. Furthermore, monoculture has adverse effects such as soil degradation and outbreaks of diseases and pests, which weaken the productive capacities of farmers, particularly in small-scale agricultural systems (Altieri and Rosset, 1996; Altieri and Toledo, 2010; Sevilla, 2006; 2015). The project did not oppose the local mixed cropping system but prioritized a particular articulation of cropping techniques and material conditions.

The project was also committed to accommodating local agricultural techniques, technology, and cultural habits – a barbecue was, for instance, organized during the sowing day to carry out the festive part of the traditional mötiro. However, it did not take Guarani cosmology and the ecological ethos underlying traditional agricultural practices seriously into account. In particular, local non-use of chemicals was dismissed, and local pest and plague control were not even considered as the use of agrochemicals was predetermined. For example, a fertilizer was sprinkled on corn seeds just before sowing them, and pesticides were applied to crops when an armyworm plague was detected some weeks later. The use of agrochemicals is highly effective in ensuring and optimizing agricultural production, but its incorporation in Indigenous communities does not take place in an onto-cosmological vacuum. It is based on and reinforces the reification of natural resources inherent in modern scientific thought (Giraldo, 2019) and, by extension, imposes the modernist way of understanding and interacting with nature. In the short term, it may bring economic benefits, but in the long term, it not only devalues local knowledge but has pernicious environmental consequences such as physical and biological soil degradation, water pollution, and genetic erosion (Altieri and Toledo, 2010; Sevilla, 2006; 2015).

The project also revealed the contradictions between a methodology that ostensibly valued a dialogue of knowledges and an implementation based on industrial agriculture. One of the main technicians for the project told me: “We cultivate plots with community members to show the steps required for producing healthier and higher yield crops. They learn that this is possible if we carry out a proper fertilization and a weed and pest control on time.” He made it clear that with the faithful application of their instructions, a successful production was almost guaranteed. At each step of the project, community members were invited and expected to actively participate as the agronomist-technicians gave general directives about how to proceed. In the planting session, the technicians handed over the sowing packet (improved native seeds and chemical products), spoke about the growth cycle of these seeds, helped community members prepare the seed-drill attachments, and told them to put 2-3 seeds per plating hole to increase the odds of germination. They reiterated that seeds had to be carefully pre-selected, uniformly planted, and required hand weeding during the growth cycle to prevent yield loss. They also suggested the need to use rain gauges to estimate soil moisture conditions as it is faster and provides a more accurate basis to sow than traditional methods. In the pest control session, three technicians from the municipality went to the community with a chemical pesticide and the use instructions given by the INIAFs technician who could not go because of another commitment. They helped community members to prepare the pesticide and water mixture for adequate coverage of the hectares affected and left while the latter were spreading it. Far from enhancing the interpretive and sensory skills involved in the local ways of engaging nature, the project endorsed a sort of technical and operational knowledge that strengthened the mechanical execution of tasks.

Furthermore, there was no serious dialogue or proposed solutions for clashes between the institutional and local agricultural management, such as the use of agrochemicals. Nor were there groundbreaking foundations for encouraging a more proactive engagement of community members. The communication between the technicians and community members only served to validate consent and organize project steps. At least three reasons seemed to impede a more extended and horizontal dialogue. First, project implementation relied on a team of technicians collaborating from different agencies and with busy parallel agendas, which inevitably led to quick and pragmatic field interventions. Second, the technicians had to guarantee a successful harvest in order to fulfill institutional objectives, which left no window for “uncertain” steps and cross-cultural negotiations. Third, the INIAF did not include special measures to promote structural changes and generate new habitus in field interventions beyond its rhetorical commitment to knowledge dialogues methodology. As a result, it delivered a technological package with instructions through a model of knowledge transfer that was consistent with previous vertical models. A dialogue of knowledge is not simply a communicative act between people but a dialogue-based governance that requires the rupture of the epistemic hierarchies that mediate between experts and growers by developing and establishing agreed protocols and pedagogies based on horizontalism (Anderson et al. 2019).

The INIAF did not introduce mechanization in Guarani communities – this process was already due to the interest of some Guaran� farmers. However, it promoted it through a top-down program that, while open to accommodating certain types of local practices and techniques, rejected both a serious dialogue between distinct agricultural modalities and the application of an ecological order different than that imposed by modern agriculture. In this sense, by reinforcing those modern agricultural practices and habits that have proved pernicious for traditional agrosystems, the INIAF engaged in a historical process of agricultural “innovation” that damaged the productive capacities of small-scale farmers and contributed to the vulnerability and food insecurity of Indigenous communities.

Producing Seeds Under Karai Rules

These dynamics are most clear in the practice of seed selection and use in the INIAF project. For the re-introduction of native corn varieties in Guarani communities, the INIAF had previously collected seeds from different parts of the Chaco region and improved them through technical methods of certification and control. ⁸ The resulting certified seed was the project’s star product because it was supposed to reinforce local agrobiodiversity and, therefore, enhance local climate resilience. However, the legal seed system under which the project operated paradoxically obstructed the achievement of such a goal. By legal seed system, I mean the complex international legal regulations that control seed production and commercialization, and the regimes of intellectual property rights (IPR) and protection of plant varieties and patents. This legal fabric is oriented toward protecting a narrow range of seeds; therefore, it imposes severe restraints to strengthen the agrobiodiversity on which climate resilience rests.

The first seed Laws emerged in the 1960s in the context of the Green Revolution and in connection with the Convention internationale pour la protection des obtentions végétales (International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, UPOV), which established standards for effective Intellectual Property Rights Protection of plant breeders – a measure oriented to providing recognition and economic compensation for intellectual creativity in the agricultural domain. Bolivia joined UPOV in 1999. Despite having universal coverage, the IPR are ontologically biased as they were initially formulated through the technical manipulations and creativity of the scientific community and industrial corporations, and disregard the historical labor, knowledge, and inventiveness of Indigenous communities (Younging, 2010), on the assumption that Indigenous peoples were primitive, without capacities to have transformed and co-produced their ecosystems, plants, and grains (Anderson, 2015).

In 1996, the Andean Pact countries approved Decision 391 on the Common Regime of Access to the genetics resources to promote an equitable distribution of benefits among ”traditional” breeder communities. Indigenous people were then granted the right to the intangible component (knowledge) of their genetic resources ⁹ . Yet, the underlying distinction between tangible and intangible components had no neutral foundations, as it presupposes that knowledge is outside the material object and that therefore seeds are “just” natural resources, an ontological condition that gives seeds no intrinsic value beyond the economic which helps legitimize their privatization and commodification. The IPR did not just follow an approach to knowledge and nature that clashes with Indigenous ones, but it also imposed capitalist criteria as the point of reference, disregarding other value systems that sustain the thriving proliferation of seeds (Anaya, 2014; Muelas, 2000; Posey, 1999; 2002). Hence, the inclusion of Indigenous people into the IPR system, rather than amending their initial neglect, caused the submission of their seeds and creativity to the mercantilist logic, forcing them to accept the privatization of their genetic resources and prioritize rental value over all others.

In Bolivia, the Constituent Assembly that convened in 2006 to rewrite the Constitution offered the possibility of modifying this legal situation. The Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní (Guarani People’s Assembly, APG), ¹⁰ for instance, asked the Bolivian State to grant them the authority to protect and regulate the IPR of their genetic resources (APG, 2006: 11). This request was, however, denied in spite of MAS’s promises to increase power-sharing with Indigenous people. The new Constitution maintained the rights of native communities over the intangible component (knowledge) and stipulated that the administration of natural resources belonged (exclusively) to the state. The reason for keeping control over these resources was to grant the state the power to regulate the benefits derived from them in favor of the common good and to ensure an equitable distribution (Lalander, 2017). The MAS has defended the Indigenous philosophy of Mother Earth, suggesting that seeds should be treated as a source of food and life rather than as merchandise. It, however, has maintained a property regime with an understanding of genetic resources that clearly contradicts such a definition. This regime excludes Indigenous understandings of the world.

Government regulations stipulate which seeds can be sold, which cannot, and under what conditions. Only plant varieties registered in national registries are subject to legitimate circulation today. Other seeds, among which peasants and Indigenous communities cultivate many varieties, are considered illegal (Grain, 2015). Bolivian regulation even criminalizes them because it explicitly prohibits the production, commercialization, import, and transport of seeds that have not gone through the registration process (Law 144, 2011). It also prioritizes the generation of improved seeds and clearly specifies that only those varieties meeting the criteria of distinctness, uniformity, and stability (DUS) (that is, the scientific criteria established by the UPOV and skillfully managed by the industrial sector) can supply markets.

This legal regime forcefully obstructs the proliferation of native seeds. First, because the restricted circulation of plant varieties impedes the free exchange system of seeds that characterizes and historically has prevailed in traditional agricultural systems (Grain, 2015; Serratos, 2009). And second, because the resulting predominance of scientific seeds in fields and markets causes genetic erosion of native plants either via direct displacement of local varieties or via the natural process of genetic pollution; the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the Bolivian Chaco raises special concerns in this regard (Anzoátegui, 2020). The reinforcement of seedbanks is the solution proposed by the state to contain the resulting erosion of native seed diversity. When I visited the INIAFs facilities in Yacuiba, one of the technicians showed me seed bank materials and told me “Native corn seeds are contaminated for their contact with improved and hybrid corn varieties. Thus, we take the native seeds that communities prioritize, purify them by self-pollination, and give them back to the communities. They will be contaminated again, and we will have to do that work again for native varieties not to disappear.” In the Constituent Assembly of Bolivia, the APG also asked the Morales administration for support to open alternative seedbanks with the native germplasm of Guarani communities. A Guarani leader explained to me “The idea was to obtain funding and training to be able to manage our own seedbanks.” However, the government’s answer was to centralize the gene-bank service and give the INIAF the responsibility to administrate it. Apart from enforcing a seed system that constrains seed production systems based on traditional mechanisms, the MAS reinforced the role of the scientific community as reliable guardians of national germplasm, while de-legitimating Indigenous people’s role. Despite all the limitations, Guarani people may still produce, preserve, and circulate their seeds within their social circles, but their unregistered native grains can only proliferate in the private and restricted space of family plots.

One of the reasons that justified the design and implementation of the project in El Rodeo lay in the connection identified between agrobiodiversity and climate vulnerability. It cannot be denied that the introduced seed – had the project succeeded – might have helped Guarani people with the short-term production problems caused by recent droughts. Some community members lost their harvest that year and the project offered them seeds to be planted the next season. However, I argue that the project was never committed to seriously promote climate resilience in the long term because it overlooked the structural mechanisms causing local genetic erosion. After all, the project was embedded within a legal system that acts to the detriment of seed-growers and native agrobiodiversity (Müller, 2014).

Embracing Formal Market Networks

Under the MAS government, opportunities for “development,” means of rural subsistence, and the possibility of Guarani territorial political autonomy all relied on access to hydrocarbon rents (Anthias, 2018; Gustafson, 2020; Postero, 2017). As one of the INIAF’s technicians explained to me, such a funding source posed a problem: economic dependency on the extraction of a non-renewable resource. By making Guarani farmers producers of a particular corn variety, the INIAF intended to offer the community an alternative and long-term source of income beyond the gas-based benefits. Yet, while the integration of the community into the broader agro-food market can generate profits, it does not necessarily improve local economic self-sufficiency. The INIAF’s project shows that it can lead to perpetuating, in a different way, the dependent position of Indigenous communities within the dominant social order.

The project took for granted that the introduction of local seed production into formal market networks was feasible. The main technician for the project told me: “In our first entry in the field, we show our corncobs and compared them with the corncobs of the community members, and when they see them, they say: what a beautiful corncob! This is what we want to sow!” The visibly tight, healthy, and uniform corn cobs that the INIAF had obtained from native corn seeds were the trait used to prove the product’s quality as well as to attract the attention of Guarani producers in the INIAF’s first encounters with the communities. The similar dimensions, shapes, and colors of fruits, vegetables, and legumes sparkling on the tables of markets are part today of a normalized aesthetics that responds to dominant food habits and preferences as much as to technical and sanitarian criteria operating in the broad agro-food sector. Yet, this perfectionist aesthetic of uniformity, which governs many aspects of our everyday life, provokes, by default, the discredit of the imperfect, different, or deformed (Saito, 2017), rendering native products (of different dimensions, shapes, and variable quantities) inferior, and making local practices, knowledge, and techniques look inadequate for commercial production.

When the INIAF presented its corn cobs to Guarani communities, it did not directly question local expertise, nor the use-value of local production. It had even taken into consideration traits of importance for Guarani farmers such as color, taste, and degree of resistance to drought when selecting the corn variety to be reintroduced in communities. However, it did prioritize the quantitative and aesthetic values of modern agriculture over other traits such as food or fodder quality, competitive ability, performance on intercrops, storage quality, cooking properties, and other social and symbolic aspects (Altieri, 2001). At the same time, it raised the need to enhance the local management of crops through external assistance. If Guarani people wanted to produce for sale successfully, then they had to favor the market and scientific-based criteria and practices over local ones. This in turn, implied the need to establish a “contractual relationship” with the agrochemical sector (Sevilla, 2006).

Indeed, producing aesthetically suitable seeds for sale in optimal quantity and quality levels requires the use of external inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers that are manufactured by specialized companies. Today, modern farmers no longer need to select and keep seeds nor collect organic matter to nourish soils. To produce crops successfully, they just need to go to the store and buy the pertinent inputs. These provisions can increase crop yield and generate great benefits, but they also increase the costs of crop production and the dependence of small farmers on markets. In Guarani communities, where families generally have low and unstable incomes, the purchase of manufactured inputs can cause debt when harvests fail.

For project implementation, the INIAF provided most of these inputs (seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides) free of charge. But for future plantings, the community was expected to assume all the expenses as well as potential economic risks and losses. Paradoxically, the possibility of improving economic autonomy lies in local producers dropping their low-cost agricultural practices and becoming buyers and suppliers of the agro-technical industry. The economic benefits, that would derive from entering into the market as seed producers, rendered this contractual relation worthwhile, although the project did not succeed in achieving it.

In the Bolivian lowlands, the corn market is large and an important source of economic growth (Gamarra, 2017), but it is dominated by large-farmer businesses with the capacity to cover market demands and the power to move market prices to serve their interests. With a low capacity to compete, Indigenous communities occupy a dependent and marginal position in this market. The project’s intention was not to throw the community into the market networks monopolized by large producers but rather to identify an appropriate niche in the regional market for its products that would allow for generating better and fairer marketing and income conditions. In particular, the INIAF would identify a reliable buyer with whom to establish a stable commercial relationship. However, the connection between the latter and the community never took place as the project was called off. After a one-year period of cooperation with a technical-agronomist team, the community found itself at the same point of departure: no advances have been made regarding the marginal embedding of local production into the formal market. The objectives of the project turned out to be failed promises that fed local aspirations for economic development that remain out of reach.

Conclusions

Consolidating spaces for commercial production within Guarani communities to break their dependency on the hydrocarbon industry seems a reasonable strategy to enhance local self-sufficiency, though it has the potential to weaken it instead, especially if the hierarchical articulation between dominant and subaltern systems that have caused socio-economic marginalization and dependency of the latter are not confronted but accepted and embraced.

The vertical management of agricultural innovation that prevailed in the INIAF’s modus operandi demonstrates the persistence of the old coercive model of rural modernization, which calls into question the seriousness of the MAS’s environmental commitment to creating true climate resilience. In its rhetoric, the MAS agrarian agenda ostensibly advocated for Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. In practice, however, it granted a privileged space to market values and techno-scientific creativity and expertise. Although it failed, it promised the promotion of an agricultural modality that constrains Indigenous agricultural systems and agroecological transitions. By default, this agenda contributed to reproducing the coloniality of doing and knowing in agriculture, showing itself unable to overcome the socio-structural barriers that constrain the productive capacities of small-scale farmers in the light of changing climate conditions.

The project also succumbed to the indifference to ontological divergences that characterize the extractivist ethos. Still, this did not provoke community member opposition to project implementation at any stage. The project was accepted on the premise that it would provide new tools for improving local production. Embracing the technology and expertise of the Karai seemed to be for the Guarani a way to seize upon the life of abundance allegedly promised by extractivist modes of production without necessarily accepting a profound transformation of their agriculture. After all, they were not forced to replicate the “lesson learned” from the project in their own chacos, although there is an inevitable porosity between local and dominant agricultural forms which work to the detriment of the former across time. In this sense, this article shows that structural violence against indigenous people is latent and intrinsically linked with violence against particular human-non-human formations. This is ontological violence that takes place through vehement disregard for what is considered unrealistic or irrelevant and, therefore, unreasonable (Blaser, 2016), and that slowly unleashes the displacement and disruption of “traditional” practices.

It is in no way the intention of this article to question the commitment and efforts of science, in general, and the INIAF, in particular, to protect and promote agrobiodiversity and agricultural ecosystems. The knowledge and creativity of modern science is an important component of environmental conservation, though not the only one (Tallis and Lubchenco, 2014). Neither do I deny the need and/or willingness of some Indigenous people to (re)constitute themselves in conjunction with modern agriculture. My intention is to highlight the contradictions between decolonialism in policy discourse and practice during the MAS administration, which reveal durable power asymmetries between environmental ways of knowing and doing that still strongly condition both the proliferation and the way to proliferate Indigenous lifeworlds and agroecological-based agricultures.

Despite the increasing concern and commitment of Nation-States and multiple other actors to deal with the current climate crisis, socio-structural barriers limit the possibility of enhancing the effectiveness of mitigation and adaptive responses. A political-ontology approach to agriculture in Indigenous communities helps to reveal that such an impediment is intrinsically connected to the difficulty of resisting and overcoming the ontological, epistemological and structural foundations of the One World World project. It also shows, however, that there is the possibility to widen spaces for the (re)constitution of pluriversal agrarian realities and, therefore, different socio-ecological orders.

If agrobiodiversity, as it is widely recognized, is a key element in dealing with environmental changes and enhance climate resilience, then it is not unreasonable to state that all of those pluriversal practices, mechanisms, and value systems generating it have to be equally enforced and reinforced. While the MAS political project is not exempt from ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions, it still creates spaces for the emergence of counter-hegemonic projects (Burman, 2014). Structural changes are, however, needed to strengthen the emergence and balanced coexistence of pluriversal worlds and agricultures so as to create more resilient and sustainable environmental futures.