Book Review: The Agrarian Question in Contemporary Latin America and the Pink Tide’s Limits: A Critical Approach

La cuestión agraria y los gobiernos de izquierda en América Latina. Campesinos, agronegocio y neodesarrollismo, edited by Cristóbal Kay and Leandro Vergara-Camus, was published by CLACSO in 2018 and is available for free online. ¹ Among its achievements, this volume is the first systematic attempt to evaluate the agrarian policies of the Pink Tide ² from a regional and comparative perspective. Readers will find it to be an essential compilation to understand the contradictions and limits of 21^st Century Latin American progressive politics relative to agrarian development, production paradigms, agribusiness power, peasant movements, and indigenous communities.

In total, the book is made up of 11 chapters from 15 contributing authors (including the editors). Of these chapters, the majority are framed in terms of nation-states, analyzing the contemporary agrarian question in Paraguay, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Brazil. The remaining chapters represent thematic approaches focusing on theory and the role of peasant women in agrarian reforms. Throughout the volume, authors share a common methodological strategy that addresses similar historical and political question including: How did the progressive Pink Tide governments govern the agrarian economy under neoliberal pressure and patterns of accumulation? How did these governments build their class alliances and political power blocs in relation to the agricultural sector? And, why did land concentration remain or, in some cases, get worse during their mandates?

A key strength of the book is the significant volume of information about the nuances and differences among the agrarian policies and class alliances within the Pink Tide, and how the editors curated a panoramic, comparative regional analysis of the specific constellation of forces in agriculture for each country. Below I provide a brief overview of these chapters.

In their introductory chapter examining agribusiness, campesinos, and progressive leftwing governments, Kay and Vergara-Camus argue that the majority of the Pink Tide governments “did not have the capacity or the will to change the rural development model inherited by the neoliberal globalization process” and “despite the fact that the rural poverty had diminished [. . .], levels of inequality remained high” (Kay and Vergara-Camus, 2018: 17). ³ Simultaneously, they stress that “all these governments [. . .] had mobilized the ideas of food sovereignty or Buen Vivir in public speeches, but only a few of their most relevant agrarian policies were truly oriented to building a new post-neoliberal model of rural development” (Kay and Vergara-Camus, 2018: 17). In a similar vein, Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete’s and Ramón Fogel’s chapter on Paraguay explains how extreme land inequality (1% of the landowners had 79% of the agrarian land) and significant political power held by landowners coalesced to block all of President Fernando Lugo’s initiatives designed to benefit the peasantry and Indigenous communities. This obstruction was accomplished in such a way that “no action was developed by Lugo to recover the land illegally granted by IBR and INDERT, that could be used for redistribution to peasants” (Ezquerro-Cañete and Fogel, 2018: 105). However, peasants and indigenous movements had supported him precisely because of his (failed) promise for agrarian reform.

In Pablo Lapegna’s chapter on Argentina, he describes how the presidential administrations of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had unsuccessfully tried to increase export taxes for soybeans from 23.5% to 35%, but met strong resistance from agribusiness. Paradoxically, this policy was part of an “agriexport-oriented populism,” which depended entirely on monocultural enclaves. According to the Lapegna, “the Kirchners challenged neoliberal principles and agribusiness in discursive terms and disputed land income with the agrarian elites [. . .], but do not make efforts to change the material bases of rural inequalities, nor the maldistribution of power” (Lapegna, 2018: 158). It is also notable that the Kirchner administrations promoted the approval of transgenic seeds and expand pesticide-use permits.

The chapters examining Bolivia (Webber, 2018) and Ecuador (Clark, 2018) coincide in their analysis of the growing levels of conflict between the Evo Morales and Rafael Correa administrations and their original peasant and Indigenous social bases. As Webber and Clark demonstrate, both presidents were highly innovative in their plurinational constitutionalism and “Rights of Nature” perspectives. However, these concepts were not translated into meaningful territorial gains for Indigenous cosmovisions nor into substantial benefits for peasant communities. Both administrations pursued agrarian redistribution policies and expanded the assignment of property titles for Indigenous communities and peasants, which did not significantly affect land inequality, as it was based more on bureaucratic regulation than on expropriation of latifundias. On the contrary, the Bolivian and Ecuadorian agrarian landowners received economic incentives, monocultures were expanded, and a pesticide-based agricultural model achieved impressive records in terms of tons of pesticides per hectares.

The remaining chapters provide relevant and well-documented analyses of the contestation of Latin American Pink Tide progressive politics. In the case of Bolivarian Venezuela, Purcell (2018) describes how the relative failure of agrarian reform is contextualized by the structural dependence on the oil sector and the speculative behavior of food markets, both perpetuated by Chavismo. Despite the redistribution of more than 4 million hectares, re-peasantification incentives, “food imports went from US$ 1.7 billion in 1998 to a ceiling of US$ 10.4 billion in 2013” (Purcell, 2018: 135).

Meanwhile in the case of Brazil, Sauer and Mészáros (2018) portray how the class coalition between the Worker’s Party governments and the agribusiness sector (both occupying the state, as a “condensation of class forces”), and the left-wing choice for a “market agrarian reform” (which allows land concentration mechanisms to operate freely) were politically sold as “inevitable,” despite the party’s evergreen historical alliance with the Landless Worker’s Movement, MST (Sauer and Mészáros, 2018: 315-348).

In their chapter on Uruguay, Piñeiro and Cardeillac analyze the extraordinary expansion of soybean monocultures during Frente Amplio governments, from 30,000 hectares in 2000 to 1,300,000 hectares in 2014, occupying 72% of the cultivated land of the country (Piñeiro and Cardeillac, 2018: 269). Examining Nicaragua, Baumeister and Puig discuss how “neo-Sandinismo” reproduced agrarian neoliberalism, perpetuated the agri-export model with a “light” redistribution of land, and set off increasing tensions with peasant organizations that demanded greater political participation and autonomy (Baumeister and Puig, 2018: 287-314).

And finally, Deere compares the strength of women’s peasant organizations in the recent agrarian changes in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, and the directly proportional gains of land deeds in women’s names during progressive governments –which were highest in Brazil and Bolivia, and lower in Ecuador and Venezuela (Deere, 2018: p. 51-88).

La cuestión agraria y los gobiernos de izquierda en América Latina represents a cutting-edge theoretical effort to explain the strategic role of agrarian neoliberalism in Latin America and global capitalism. Throughout the volume emphasis is centered on the concentration of economic, territorial, and political power in giant agribusiness corporations and their primordial function to “accumulate by dispossession” during an epoch of structural crisis; the performance of the Pink Tide is framed in this broader scenario. And, the authors raise the important question of whether it would have been possible for Pink Tide governments to “do things differently”? In general, all agree that yes, there were (narrow) margins for alternative political choices oriented toward structural change, social emancipation in the countryside, and peasant empowerment. However, they demonstrate how responding to different economic pressures and constellation of forces, in terms of agrarian policies, the Pink Tide governments took the route of structural continuity, combining a nature-dependent export model, with insufficient land redistribution and provisional rural poverty relief measures.