The agrarian political economy of left‐wing governments in Latin America: Agribusiness, peasants, and the limits of neo‐developmentalism

Abstract

This paper concludes this special issue. It draws on the findings of the individual contributions and provides a comparison of the agrarian policies of left-wing governments in Latin America. We identify common trends and offer an explanation of why these governments did not change the agricultural model in the direction of food sovereignty, but continued to heavily support agribusiness while redirecting some resources to peasant and family producers. They improved the living conditions of the rural poor, mostly through populist anti-poverty and social protection programmes financed by the commodity boom. They expanded programmes to integrate small farmers into commodity chains and improved the working conditions of rural wage labourers, but did not carry out a redistributive agrarian reform. They instead continued to support agribusiness with numerous policies and measures. We argue that these governments did not curb the power of the dominant rural classes because these are highly intertwined with capital, making them part of a coalesced bourgeoisie that occupies key positions in the state.Leftist governments did not have a real agenda of social transformation or a strategy to tackle the rentier nature of the state.Contradictorily, their policies furthered peasant differentiation thereby weakening the previous alliance of rural subaltern classes.

The politics of agrarian change in Bolivia's soy complex

“…Nonetheless, as has been argued here, the underlying productive and agrarian structure remains highly unequal in terms of resource access and control and continues to marginalize and exclude the (rural) majority. While this paper has focused on these dynamics within Bolivia, recent studies across the Latin America left reveal similar dynamics whereby left‐wing parties which have assumed state power have become so highly intertwined with classes of capital that any possibility for structural transformation is eclipsed by the need to maintain the balance of forces in society (see Vergara‐Camus & Kay, ).…”

Neo-Developmentalism and Regional Integration: IIRSA Impact in the Environmental Agenda in the Amazon

“…Programmatically, the elected candidates in these countries had left-wing programs in which the environmental agenda was associated with other electoral strategies based on developmental actions whose legitimacy was based on popular acclaim. The Latin American leaderships, as elected, combined developmentalism policies not considering environmental problems accrued from development strategies and relegated sustainability to a secondary policy level [19,20].…”

Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

“…In addition to the domination of downstream activities such as processing and exporting by a handful of companies (e.g., Cargill, Bunge, Dreyfus, Nidera, AGD), the upstream side was controlled by the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta. The particular form of “produced socionature” associated with GM soy provided oligopolistic biotechnology companies with the opportunity to extract rents (e.g., royalties from seeds) based on IP rights that are normally safeguarded and enforced by the state (Andreucci et al., 2017; Lapegna, 2017; Vergara-Camus and Kay, 2017).…”

“…The particular form of "produced socionature" associated with GM soy provided oligopolistic biotechnology companies with the opportunity to extract rents (e.g. royalties from seeds) based on IP rights that are normally safeguarded and enforced by the state(Andreucci et al, 2017;Lapegna, 2017;Vergara-Camus and Kay, 2017).…”