The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question: An Introduction

During the twentieth century, the agrarian question was key to debates concerning capitalist development and socialist revolutions. Social-democrats like Kautsky (1988 [1899]), revolutionary Marxists such as Lenin (2004 [1899]), or capitalist modernizers like Rostow (1961), even though they had antagonistic political programs, coincided in seeing the peasantry and indigenous communities as an outdated form of social relations, out of sync with industrial productive forces. In other words, peasants and indigenous communities were seen as a symptom of backwardness by both capitalist ideologues and socialist vanguards.

An alternative perspective was originally presented by Chayanov (1966), who pointed to the perennial character of the peasantry and their mode of life throughout the long durée. Chayanov proposed that if the peasant economy had persisted historically in the loopholes of every economic mode of production and social formation, it was because it worked as a pulsating and permanent alternative for working class people. Indeed, in 1920 Chayanov (1976) wrote about a unique “peasant and cooperatives utopia” in his novel My brother Alexei’s journey into the land of peasant utopia, imagining a society where the peasant economy had “won” the battle against the so-called modernization. He argued that the peasant rationality preferred autonomous self-organization of subsistence on a piece of land (even if it was small), rather than to depend on other structures which frequently subordinated them. Chayanov’s peasant-centered perspective was followed by Shanin (1972, 1979), Van der Plog (2008; 2016), and others, who theoretically framed the more recent research agendas regarding the socio-ecological role of peasant communities’ way of life against many forms of structural violence and environmental destruction promoted by capitalism.

It is in this vein that we organized the thematic issue “The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question” as a research agenda for Latin American Studies, connected to three broad questions: (1) How does making ecology central to the agrarian question alter the contours for framing political, economic and social contradictions concerning Latin American agroecosystems? (2) Which resistance projects have emerged against ecological damage caused by agrarian capitalism and what are their forms of struggle and organization? (3) What are the technical, scientific and political challenges for agroecological transitions in Latin America?

Critical social sciences and humanities in Latin America have long been concerned with the agrarian question as an ecological question. The origins of this research agenda can be found in the debates about colonization and its central role as a “nature exporter” for capitalist accumulation (Acosta, 2012). During the period of the old colonial system, agricultural labor exploitation was institutionalized by different land and labor contracts, such as encomiendas, mitas, and sesmarias. ¹ Through these forms of organizing labor, agriculture in the Americas was reorganized to promote commercial monocultures for export which significantly destabilized and destroyed socio-ecological balances, particularly affecting indigenous people (Patel, 2013; Shiva, 2008; Galeano, 1997). This created a model of uneven and combined development for Latin American agrarian capitalism premised on racist and patriarchal political powers, authoritarian social hierarchies, structural violence and extractivism (Prado Jr, 1961; 1973; Furtado, 1969, 2006; Mariátegui, 1971; Amin, 1976; Svampa, 2016; 2013; 2012). Under this model, rural landowner oligarchies have ruled agrarian policies in Latin American republics, subordinating working people and nature.

However, the Latin American peasantry (including indigenous people whose epistemology is attached to land and territory) also created their own “everyday form of resistance” and “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1987; 1976), “in addition to using their traditional agro-diverse knowledge and productive technologies to sustain their communities (Van der Plog, 2008; 2016; Shiva, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2007). Due to this agrarian struggle, Latin American contestation over labor rights, economic power, production practices, and the rights of nature have increasingly revolved around agriculture and land use policy. Considering the long duration of socioecological destruction and the coloniality of agrarian economies, this thematic issue scrutinizes different active forces within Latin American agrarian systems, structures and dynamics of commodity frontier expansion in the last two centuries, the influence of ecological crisis as well as the responses, such as resistance from below, arguing that agrarian and ecological perspectives are (and always have been) inseparable. This emphasis is even more pressing considering the unfolding of climate change in the twenty-first century, a major alteration in the biosphere driven in major part by: land use change converting biodiverse forests into agricultural land (especially monocultures) thereby releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere; fossil fuel dependence of agricultural machinery; and, industrial-scale production of synthetic inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, with their application’s consequent contamination of soil and water (Campbell et al., 2017). Climate change, while tied into central aspects of articles in this issue, is a broader topic that deserves specific attention beyond our current scope.

In what follows, we provide a brief discussion of the agrarian question’s historical construction in Latin America, focusing on a productivist formation that became hegemonic in capitalist and many orthodox-socialist circles. Specifically, we emphasize the Green Revolution model and its role in carrying out the material practices of the productivist ideology. Then, we turn to the rise of ecological critique in response to the Green Revolution, the “socio-ecological turn”, and how this shapes contemporary agrarian struggles in Latin America. We end by providing summaries of the different articles present in this thematic issue, separated into three parts: “Political Ecology and Agrarian Economy in Latin America,” “Peasant-indigenous Territorial Struggles,” and “Agrarian Neoliberalism and Financial Power”.

Agrarian Reforms, Political Battles, And The Green Revolution

Historically, the agrarian question in Latin America was primarily concerned with addressing land inequality and rural poverty through land redistribution (Kay, 2015). Different types of agrarian reform policies in the twentieth century, frequently with different goals, tried to dismantle large estates owned by a few wealthy elites (the colonial inheritors), and allocate the land among landless peasants, small-scale farmers, or (less common) Indigenous communities. The first structural agrarian reforms in the region appeared as agrarian revolutions from below: in Mexico (1910), Bolivia (1952), and Cuba (1959), peasants and/or Indigenous people had promoted their agenda of agrarian change (Bartra and Barrera, 2018; Gilly, 2008; Santana, 2007; Gómez-Quiñones, 2015; Smolski, Castro, and Ross, 2018; Salém Vasconcelos, 2023). As a capitalist response to the agrarian revolution in Cuba, agrarian reform was incorporated by US imperialism and Latin American elites in the 1960s, technically guided by the principles of ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), the Alliance for Progress, USAID money, and nation-state top-down control. This agrarian reform model happened in Venezuela (1960), Colombia (1961), Chile (1962; 1967), Peru (1969), and others (Petras and Laporte, 1971).

Gunder-Frank (1965) identified these as different types of agrarian reform: the “integrative” agrarian reform executed by ECLAC political operators and US guardianship and the “revolutionary” agrarian reform by the peasantry and indigenous organizations articulated with left-wing political parties. Despite their radically different goals and dynamics, Latin American agrarian reforms found an “inconvenient” common point: they disregarded the ecological issue and shared technological models. This curious similarity between political and ideological antagonists resulted from the common productivist belief that increasing agricultural yields was the key to achieving either capitalist or socialist development (Kay, 1998; Svampa, 2016).

In part, this is because of the productivist answer to the classical agrarian question centered on the capacity of industrial technology to increase yields without regard for social fragmentation and ecological destruction in rural territories. The decade of 1950 represented a turning point in terms of the technological power of agrarian capitalism in Latin America and the rest of the Global South. Since then, Latin American and Caribbean agriculture has suffered from a new layer of intervention based on the employment of war technologies (developed by the arms industry) in agrarian systems that changed the forces and relations of production, known as the Green Revolution (Patel, 2013; Kay, 2005; 2015; Carson, 1962; Bombardi, 2023; Shiva, 2008; Barkin and Suárez, 1983). These war-agri-technologies promoted land concentration, wreaking a de-peasantification process that saw Latin America and the Caribbean convert from principally rural into primarily urban by amplifying dispossession and accelerating an exodus that exploded a chronic social crisis in urban peripheral communities. Territorial control by capital exploited nature as profitable resources responding to capitalist pulsations and commodity market volatility, determining renewed cycles of land dispossession and monoculture imposition. That dynamic was a direct consequence of the peripheral industrialization process, contrary to what was foreseen by ECLAC.

Countries like Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Brazil became laboratories for deploying the results of agricultural sciences in the service of capital accumulation. Firstly, Agent Orange and other chemical weapons were adapted from the arms industry through the new agro-chemical industrial complex (especially the oligopolies formed by Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow Chemical, and BASF). Secondly, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were developed and linked to the intense use of chemical controls, as cultivars were modified to be resilient to herbicides produced by transnational agrochemical companies. Such pesticide-GMO combinations have led to increasing levels of soil and water contamination, defoliation, ecosystem destruction, environmental health hazards, and – despite initial claims to the contrary – an increase in pesticide applications. The Green Revolution has also led to an overaccumulation of nitrogen and phosphorus, a reduction of biodiversity, soil degradation, and contamination of vital water sources (Mancus, 2007; Clark and Foster, 2009). As such, with the Green Revolution the primary tendencies of ecological destruction shown by Latin American colonial monocultures reached its paroxysm, forming a system materially incapable of long-term healthy reproduction at the ecological and social level (Patel, 2013).

In scholarship, the productivist perspective of capitalist and socialist policies regarding the agrarian question in the twentieth century created an illusion of “technological consensus” in the middle of Cold War battles. Indeed, even socialist countries were examples of technologically intensive models of agrarian development, with their own vast use of agrochemicals. Socialist productivism was framed as a main strategy to achieve social justice and equality. The Cuban Revolution is a primary case study of this dynamic. The most radical and empowered, peasant-supported revolution in the region was not able to overcome the inherited structural motivations toward a sugar-based monocrop economy (Smolski, 2022; Salém Vasconcelos, 2023). Thus, while engaging land redistribution toward the goal of social welfare policies and industrialization, its technological model was anchored on the Green Revolution during three to four decades.

This critical lens on socialist-led agricultural development leads us to a fundamental question: how does the mode of production determine the outcomes of agrarian technologies and productive forces? Is it possible to build an alternative mode of production using the so-called “technological conquests” of capitalism? In the 1970s, with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, implementing the liberalization of financial markets, the abandonment of peripheral industrialization, and a notable embrace of market-oriented priorities, it became evident that capitalist megacorporations were in charge of the Green Revolution, and that agro-technology could never be “neutral” in terms of accumulation.

The Latin American Eco-Agrarian Question

Despite the apparent “technological consensus”, from the 1970s onward a socio-ecological and peasant-centered critique emerged. Departing from and criticizing the classical developmental school of ECLAC and orthodox Marxists traditions, some Latin American scholars have linked ecology, and more specifically political ecology, with the notion of development. They employ this perspective as a framework to analyze historical change and structural transformation centered on ecological factors (Gudynas, 2009; Acosta, 2012; Puig, 2019; Farah and Wanderley, 2011; Köpke, 2021). This viewpoint examines socio-ecological conflicts, relations of power, and natural resource distribution, as key factors of decoloniality, modernity, and the Latin American position in the international economy (Puig, 2019).

That critique focused on the degradative drivers of agricultural modernization with its emphasis on standardization, techno-fixes, land concentration, and a shifting of the rural population into urban areas. Politically, it argued for a process of re-peasantification that could act as an anticapitalist alternative, building non-exploitative social relations of production, communitarian labor relations, peasant and indigenous land recoveries, and an ecologically sustainable impulse for technological development as a peasant-path against agrarian capitalism (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). This re-peasantification agenda employs a sub-set of theories, such as agroecology (Rosset and Altieri, 2018), political ecology (Martinez-Alier, 2007), ecological economics (Barkin, et. al., 2020), social metabolic analysis (Foster, 1999), extractivism and commodity frontiers (Svampa, 2005, 2012), coloniality of power and knowledge (Quijano, 1999; Lander, 1993, 2014), ecologically unequal exchange (Bunker, 1985), and treadmill of production (Schnaiberg, 1980). Through these theories, scholars interrogate the role of industrial-commodity agriculture in producing a series of irreparable ecological degradations and social violations while searching for alternative paradigms of social technology, popular power, and communitarian-economic organization.

These concepts and theories are built from really-existing-struggles carried out by peasants, indigenous communities, quilombolas (in Brazil and Uruguay), and palenques (in Colombia) who strengthened their political organization, sought representation, fought for land redistribution, and claimed to be political protagonists of their own territorial decisions (Bartra, 2010; Teubal, 2009; Van der Plog, 2008; 2016; Svampa, 2016; Shiva, 2008; Shanin, 1979; 1972; Scott, 1987; 1976; Fernandes, 2010; 2005; 2004; Escobar, 2016; Rosset and Martinez-Torres, 2016; Barbetta, 2020). There are countless other examples of these struggles throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, even though they did not stem the tide of capitalist imposition that fundamentally reorganized the countryside.

Therefore, as time passed and socio-political landscapes evolved, the limitations of the twentieth century agrarian reform, which prioritized land redistribution but adhered to the technology of the Green Revolution, became evident. The emphasis on land redistribution associated with the free-market paradigm, as well as the preservation of latifundia (without de-commodification and de-concentration of the land) failed to address underlying structural issues, such as the agrarian border expansion, land-grabbing, extractivist political power, rural violence against peasants and indigenous territories, and ecological destruction (Shattuck et al., 2023; LVC, 2017; Rosset and Altieri, 2018). Indeed, land distribution policies in several Latin American territories lacked sufficient government support, reproduced exclusion, and upheld a neocolonial agenda. For instance, despite the efforts of the Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST), Brazil’s progressivist governments partnered with agribusiness and approved hundreds of new types of pesticides, expanding the territory occupied by the so-called Green Revolution agrotechnology.

In response to these limitations, a paradigm shift has occurred toward a more comprehensive understanding of the land issue as an integral component of territorial development (LVC, 2017; Borras, 2023; Gerber and Veuthey, 2010; Porto-Gonçalves and Leff, 2015). Organizations such as Vía Campesina propose a transition from focusing solely on land to considering the entire territory. This approach encapsulates a holistic view of the rural world, highlighting participatory and inclusive strategies that empower local communities, all while retaining its historical significance (LVC, 2017; Borras, 2023, Porto-Gonçalves and Leff, 2015). This shift acknowledges the multifaceted nature of rural territories and their intricate connections to livelihoods and nature. It recognizes that well-being transcends mere land ownership and should encompass elements like fair livelihoods as well as the human relationship with nature. As a result, scholars have begun to reassess the role of ecology in the agrarian question, considering the socio-cultural, political-economic, cosmovisions, geographical, and biological diversity of Latin America. Some of these discussions recognize ecology as a fresh approach to expanding and “reclaiming” the agrarian question or questions, highlighting their significance in the context of rural societies (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010; Fernandes, 2004; McMichael, 2014; Shattuck et al., 2023; Gerber and Veuthey, 2010; Isakson, 2009).

In considering the role of ecology in redefining the agrarian question, Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010) emphasize that one of the three problems of capital identified by Bernstein (1997) in the agrarian question is the examination of how the current global food system operates. Indeed, scholars argue that the emergence of the “world farm” whose production decisions depend on large global value chains, financialization of food, chemical inputs, and urban consumer tastes have increased the interconnectedness of rural and urban spaces (Arboleda, 2020; Kay, 2015; Shattuck et al., 2023; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009). As a result, the contemporary agrarian question’s debate has expanded to include the complexities (and contradictions) of food production, distribution, and consumption. Simultaneously, the framework of the agrarian questions remains valuable for analyzing country-specific conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the circulation of agrarian capital, all occurring at the “glocal” scale (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010).

These perspectives prove advantageous in discussing the role of ecology in extending the “agrarian question” beyond rural labor and food production to the world food systems (Arboleda, 2020; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010). The literature on food regimes enhances the understanding of ecology’s role in addressing the agrarian challenges of the twenty-first century. According to Campbell and Dixon (2009: 263), it situated agri-food within established structures of capitalist development. An ongoing trend is the growing integration of financial and food markets, which can be seen in supermarkets, agricultural derivatives (such as soybeans, crude oil, wheat, and maize), agricultural inputs, farmland, and global trade (McMichael, 2014; Isakson, 2014; Clapp, 2014). These changes lead to increasing price volatility, which adversely impacts small-scale farmers and consumers, rendering them more susceptible to dispossession, hunger, and other adverse consequences. Thus, food production is not the only factor at play. Consumption, as well as non-productive elements like financial markets, technological breakthroughs in food science, and labeling standards, also contribute to the overall picture.

The ecological relationships within broader agro-food transitions are significantly influencing and redefining the new agrarian question. The intricate and interconnected interaction between ecology, food systems, and capital can be observed in the Guatemalan highlands (Isakson, 2009). Isakson demonstrates how Guatemalan peasants integrate capitalist income from different sources into their livelihood strategies, while still preserving a significant degree of food sovereignty by cultivating milpa crops for household consumption. This act represents a form of resistance to the dominant corporate food system, while simultaneously serving as a means to preserve local agricultural biodiversity. Note that food sovereignty transcends production and includes connections to the distribution and consumption of food. This compels us to contemplate vast transformative processes and the agrarian question through the lens of agrarian subjects.

Therefore, the concept of ecology contributes to redefining the agrarian question by centering on a holistic and dialectical comprehension of agri-food systems, extending the complex networks of ecological interdependencies between the health of the soil, the quality of water, the diversity of species, and the well-being of humans. Employing an ecological framework has the potential to tackle the multifaceted challenges stemming from food production, distribution, consumption, and the availability of resources or common goods. In this context, ecology could hold the key to unlocking sustainable solutions to the intricate issues posed by the agrarian question, notably industrial farming, livestock management, rural dispossession, and their respective resistances. Exploring and analyzing global agrifood systems from a political ecology perspective becomes imperative to delve into interconnected matters such as malnutrition, agricultural commodity trade, water politics, and land control (LVC, 2017; McMichael, 2014).

The Ecological Basis Of Contemporary Agrarian Struggle

Neoliberal agriculture has increasingly compromised agrarian commodities’ exchange value by merging with the war and chemical industrial complex, in the service of corporate profitability rather than fulfilling the human need for food (Kay, 2005; 2015). Each agrarian commodity expands the frontier of this destructive pattern of production, destroying biodiversity and turning it into ruins of monocrops: “green deserts” and Carson’s (1962) “silent springs.” The expansion of the extractive frontier, the climate crisis and the agrotoxic contamination often triggered socio-ecological conflicts between indigenous communities, peasants, ecologist movements, against the profit-oriented objectives of governments and large corporations. This socio-ecological conflict included the progressive administrations of the Pink Tide, which joined the “commodities consensus” (Svampa, 2019; Gudynas, 2009), and consequently a sort of “glyphosate consensus” by amplifying the surface of pesticides use during their mandates (Santos and Salém Vasconcelos, 2022).

The Latin-American agrarian popular subjects were especially active in the 1990s and 2000s focusing in disputes concerning ecological factors in specific territories. Svampa (2005) named this shift as “the eco-territorial turn of social movements.” These conflicts highlighted the deep-seated inequalities ingrained in the region’s socio-economic fabric and stress the significance of incorporating ecological dimensions into the broader discourse on agrarian policies, moving development toward alternatives like local economies, and the revival of traditional knowledge based on peasants and indigenous agrarian practices, instead of “progressivist agrarian development” (see Kay and Vergara-Camus, 2018, which is reviewed in this issue). Additionally, some of these rural political subjects, anchored their actions in alternative epistemologies and became a new anticapitalist reference for a whole generation of young activists – following indigenous leaders, such as Ailton Krenak (2022; 2020a; 2020b) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2014). ²

Social movements and grassroots organizations struggle for food sovereignty as a powerful opposition to the domination of capital by recognizing the delicate balance within the agri-food system and ecological interdependencies. This principle advocates for the communities’ autonomy in determining their own agricultural and agrarian policies, which are closely intertwined with the environment. Peasants and indigenous communities (which are not exempt from conflicts), are increasingly articulated, mixed, and promoting politically active networks. Relatedly, the indigenous concepts of “buen vivir” or “sumak kawsay,” for instance, also inspired peasant organizations within CLOC (Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo), and Vía Campesina (with more than 182 peasants’ movements, 200 million peasants in 81 countries around the world). The indigenous cosmovisions are influencing peasant agrarian production, agro-ecological techniques, agro-forests and new sets of relationships between humans and nature, sometimes influencing the political identities of these organizations (Gerber and Veuthey, 2010; Gudynas, 2009). It can be seen in Brazil, for example, when the Brazilian Indigenous People Articulation (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil - APIB) came to be a political reference and allied to the peasant-based Agroecology National Articulation (Articulação Nacional de Agroecologia – ANA), or in Peru and Bolivia, where peasant culture is historically rooted on indigenous culture.

Granting local communities the authority to determine their food systems leads to the adoption of ecologically sensitive methods such as agroecology, which generates long-term ecological resilience. Agroecology as a science, practice, and movement has provided the basis for understanding the possibility of alternative relations and forces of production (Rosset and Altieri, 2018). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, peasant movements and their regional and planetary articulations, like the CLOC and Vía Campesina, have promoted agroecology as a form of production capable of stimulating culturally-relevant foods providing a basis for food sovereignty and ecological sustainability. These movements have called for the abolition of intellectual property rights regimes that reproduce the concentration of power in the hands of agribusiness, the redistribution of land, horizontal relationships between small food producers and urban consumers, and the funding of research and extension in agroecological practices (Moyo and Yeros, 2005; Nyéléni, 2007; Nelson et al., 2009; Meek, 2014; Rosset and Martinez-Torres, 2016; Rosset and Barbosa, 2019).

The ecological perspective of the agrarian question in Latin America has not only expanded the scope of inquiry but also provided a more holistic comprehension of the dynamics of resistance, including the structural perspective on gender and race. As we consider the consequences of these ecological aspects, it is crucial to approach the agrarian question from a multidimensional, critical standpoint, one that acknowledges and addresses the diverse challenges faced by the region.

In conclusion, the agrarian question from an ecological perspective helps to rethink the way that economic interests and power relations shape environmental policies and practices in rural spaces. In the case of climate change, the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions puts pressure against the agribusiness mode of production, which is a factory of green deserts and silent springs. Similarly, the agrarian question involves struggles over land tenure, land reform, and agricultural policies that affect the balance of power between small farmers, landless peasants, and large agribusiness corporations. As we delve into ecological dynamics and the agrarian question in Latin America, it becomes evident that the political economy of this relationship is fraught with challenges that will define our future and require careful consideration.

What You Will Find In This Issue

For this special issue, the editors selected 15 articles by 36 authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and the United States, which constitute a representative panel of Latin American research on the agrarian question in ecological perspective. The fundamental lines of investigation rely on the following topics: neoliberal agricultural and ecological destruction, peasant resistance and indigenous territorial struggles, unequal development of agriculture and rural inequalities, extractivist economies, and agroecological alternatives. The issue is divided into three parts.

In the first part, “Political Ecology and Agrarian Economy in Latin America,” the reader will find a selection of three articles that present the agrarian and ecological question in Latin America as a regional phenomenon, explaining theoretical concepts on political ecology and agrarian economy, as well as analyzing two or more countries in comparative perspective. The opening work, “Agroecology and Political Economy: The Peasant World and the Contradictions of Capital” by Raúl Gustavo Paz, establishes an interesting conceptualization of the antagonism between the agribusiness model and peasant economies in Contemporary Latin America, articulating the critical theories of political economy and ecology, with focus on the social relations of production. It explains how rural labor arrangements respond to different economic and ecological dynamics and analyzes the agroecology movement as a relevant counter-hegemonic force against agrarian extractivism.

From a complementary point of view, the article “A Political Ecology of Resistance: Actions and Reactions of Agrarian Socio-territorial Movements in Latin America,” by eight researchers from Brazilian and Argentinian universities (Joana Tereza Vaz de Moura, Leandro Vieira Cavalcante, Cristian Emanuel Jara, Julieta Saettone, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Ana Eliza Villalba, Silmara Oliveira Moreira Bitencourt, and Claudia Yesica Fonzo Bolañez), uses political ecology as a theoretical framework to investigate socioterritorial movements against corporate agrarian neoliberalism in the continent. Territory is a key category to explain the dynamics of social conflicts and agrarian antagonisms, considering its multiple determinations. In addition, the authors use DataLuta Network (Red DataLuta) to create a typology of territorial/agrarian conflicts based on Brazilian and Argentinian rural conflagrations of 2021.

The previous works are both consistent with the results presented by Timothy P. Clark and Andrew R. Smolski, who authored “The Crop Land Expansionary Dynamics of Agricultural Production in Latin America: A Panel Study of Fourteen Countries, 1970-2016.” The authors employ a critical political economy framework for an empirical analysis of environmental withdrawals from agricultural production in Latin America, using extensive statistical data of fourteen countries from 1970 to 2016. Considering the treadmill of production approach, and the concepts of ecologically unequal exchange and extractivism, the authors applied an empirical model to demonstrate how semi-peripheral and peripheral countries based on agrarian export-led economies had experienced an increase in their cropland footprint. It concludes that in these countries the augmentation of agricultural production generates an intensification of ecological destruction and environmental risk.

The second part of the Special Issue refers to “Peasant-Indigenous Territorial Struggles.” with seven articles focused on peasant and indigenous resistances against agribusiness expansion, pesticides, dispossession, and displacement, as well as their demand for territorial rights and the development of agroecological alternatives. Many of them combine the political ecology/economy theoretical apparatus with interviews in peasants and indigenous communities. These sources help readers to understand the popular knowledges and experiences in their “everyday forms of resistance,” as well as in extraordinary moments of collective effort against agri-capitalist colonialism.

It starts with “‘Na’guara!! We peasants do practice agroecology’: Territorial Symphonies in La Alianza, Venezuela,” by Olga Domené-Painenao, Fernando Aguirre, Mateo Cacho, Peter Rosset (from Mexico), and Miguel Natera (from Venezuela). They sustain that agroecology is an existential and survival need for Latin American rural communities and analyze the history of La Alianza agroecological movement in Lara (in western Venezuela) from 1975 to 2020. Methodologically, the oral interviews with peasants allow us to hear their voices and examine their political agenda. The key struggle for territory structures is the possibility of building a “divergent existence from the hegemonic one, by collective, organized and thinking subjects.”

In the article, “Agroecology and Institutional Framework in Eastern Antioquia, Colombia: A Case Study,” Andres Felipe Mesa-Valencia and Mary Hendrickson analyze the role of power and social capital in the capacity to construct an economically viable and ecologically sustainable supply chain for smallholder communities. Specifically, they underline the role of violence and displacement in the development of social capital within communities and between communities and the state. They call for a participatory model founded on pluralist collaboration to build the social infrastructure necessary for carrying forward agroecological supply chains.

In “Transforming peasant politics into ecological politics: The CSUTCB in Bolivia 1979-1990,” Olivia Arigho-Stiles studied the emergence of the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) in 1979, the major peasant union in the country, addressing the ecological politics of the peasant culture, and arguing that “the natural world became the nexus of interactions between the local and the global in Bolivian peasant politics’’. She explains why CSUTCB’s environmental conceptions reflected a critique of state-led modernity. Still on Bolivia indigenous agencies, Vanesa Martín Galán wrote “Agricultural adaptation strategies under Morales’s administration – The case of a Guarani community in the Bolivian Chaco,” to examine the contradictions between Evo Morales administration and the concrete demands of Chacho indigenous community in the east of the country. She explains how “the decolonization and emancipation of indigenous life projects have been questioned in the light of the government’s neoextractivist development model,” despite MAS (Morales’ Party) official ecological and emancipatory narrative.

From Chile, Alexander Panez Pinto, Pablo Mansilla-Quiñones, and Jorge Olea Peñaloza present “The Struggle for Water as a Source for Agricultural Re-existence in Chile: Rethinking the Agrarian Question in Latin America,” in which they examine the Chilean water crises as a consequence of the commoditization of water and its appropriation by agrarian companies since Pinochet’s Water Code of 1981. Based on three case studies located in the Petorca, Itata, and Imperial river basins in central Chile, they explain the dynamic of water access inequalities and private appropriation of water resources. The authors argue that water dispossession must occupy a central role in Chilean agrarian question analysis, as a political and theoretical premise. From that emerges the powerful slogan “water for those who work the land,” as an unfolding of the historical and emblematic “land for those who work it.”

From Chile there is another original approach entitled “Mining Extractivism, Commodification of Nature and Indigenous Peasantry in the Atacama Desert: The Political Economy of Yareta (Azorella Compacta) in Historical Perspective (1915-1960),” by Matías Calderón and Manuel Prieto. They articulate the political economy of mining and agricultural labor in a historical perspective, focusing on peasant-indigenous subsistence work of collecting yareta on the Atacama Desert surrounding the copper export sector since 1915, narrating its importance, contradictions, and crisis.

The territory of Piauí (Brazilian Northeast) is the next stop on this Latin American route of peasant and indigenous struggles, with the article “The Last Agricultural Frontier, Piauí (Brazil): The Agrarian Issue, Agrobusiness, and the Gamela Indigenous Territory,” by Maria Do Socorro Silva and Lucineide Medeiros. The authors recount the silenced history of Gamela indigenous communities in the deep South Piauí, explaining how indigenous people are challenged to “prove” their identity as a requisite to protect their territory, within a context of ethnicity invisibilities and structural agrarian violence.

Part 2 closes with an innovative article by Hugo Goeury, “The Rise of Urban Agriculture in Cuba and its Current Impact on Household Food Security,” of the Cuban agrarian and food crisis from the 1990s until today. He examines the successful policy of urban agriculture born from a popular initiative in Havana and then converted into state policy. He describes the concept of urban agriculture based on three pillars: land redistribution, agricultural diversification, and agroecology. The author expands the comprehension of “agrarian subjects” to the city’s peripheral territories, and the urban agriculture phenomenon, measuring its capacity to assure food security through self-consumption and local commerce, its importance in the context of the US blockade against the socialist island, as well as discussing its obstacles and limits.

Finally, part 3 gathers four articles about Agrarian Neoliberalism and Financial Power, investigating capitalist dynamics in different Latin American contexts and cases. Rafael Neves Fonseca and Thiago Lima presents “The Rising Financialization of Açaí in the Amazon: Evidence of an Ongoing Process,” in which they explain how financial capital matters in controlling the popular economy of açaí production in Brazilian Amazonia. They interviewed laborers from the production chain. They show how financial corporations are beginning to appropriate surplus from this traditional fruit, considering the use of açaí as raw material for the ultra-processed food industry, and the increasing consumption of it by urban citizens.

The financial power over Brazilian land is also the topic of Lucas Trentin Rech and Daniel Lemos Jeziorny in “The State, Political Power, and the Financialization of Agrarian Space in Brazil,” in which they explain why the Brazilian state has been a central power to assure the “environmental surplus” and “land grabbing” in the agrarian context. The authors maintain that Worker’s Party governments (2003-2016) had established agrarian policies favorable to financial corporations, by subsidizing financial products and advantages for agribusiness with public budgets. However, they conclude it “was not only a government choice but more a reflection of economic power exercised by financial and agrarian capital.”

Still in Brazil, Frederico Daia Firmiano and Paula Maria Rattis Teixeira present “Metabolic Rift and Structural Crisis of Capital: The Productive Specialization Pattern Based on Commodities and the Progressive Elimination of Ecological and Natural Resources in Brazil.” They argue that the agrarian export-led economic model adopted by Brazilian elites since the colonial and imperial periods can only result in more environmental risk and ecological destruction, deepening what they diagnose as peripheral capitalist ecological exploitation. The authors suggest the need for a brand new social-developmental model, which must create economic alternatives outside the capitalist system to escape from environmental catastrophe.

Finally, the Chileans Constanza Gutiérrez and Octavio Avedaño present “Productive Modernization and Challenges for Chilean Peasant Agriculture during the Phase of Post-Agrarian Reform.” They explore the specificity of the Chilean neoliberal model of water resources privatization since the 1981 Water Code of the Pinochet dictatorship. The authors stressed the challenges of the peasant economy in the context of water dispossession, the struggle, and demand for access and democratization of water resources as indispensable to agriculture activities and peasants’ lives, and also the protagonistic political role of peasants’ organizations in the criticisms on neoliberal management of water in different territories.

The huge volume of manuscripts we received for this special issue shows how relevant and strategic are these topics. We thank all authors who sent their work to be part of this debate, which we find essential to the present and future of Latin American societies. Future research at the intersection of the agrarian question and ecology should explore the role of social reproduction in sustaining smallholder farms and peasant cooperatives, critical interdisciplinary approaches bridging social and agricultural sciences, and multi-scalar, intersectional examinations of agroecological transitions. These are only a few of the possibilities in a scholarly area whose importance will grow as the agri-food system challenges of the twenty-first century become more apparent with the unfolding of the climate crisis.