The constitution of hydrosocial power: agribusiness and water scarcity in Ica, Peru

Abstract

During the 2000s, the Ica region, located on the Peruvian coast, gained notoriety as the main stage of what the media and politicians called the "agricultural export miracle." The exponential growth of nontraditional exports that ensued, along with the rising importance of the agroindustry in generating foreign currency, led to the emergence of an agribusiness elite as an important new social actor. Through a range of strategies aimed at consolidating and expanding its power over state and nonstate actors, the agribusiness elite has been able to overexploit scarce groundwater resources in the pursuit of economic growth without opposition. Thus, the question that guides this article is, how did the agribusiness elite secure access to valuable groundwater resources to the verge of depletion despite the attempts of regional and local authorities to regulate water use? Based on a political ecology perspective, I argue that a political settlement between the agribusiness elite, certain state sectors, and local actors, based on a shared neoliberal development discourse, has laid the foundations for the agribusiness elite to concentrate its hydropower in the region. In developing this argument, I analyze the elite's strategies to reproduce the different dimension of hydropower as well as the fragmented and sometimes contradictory political positioning of different state agencies. This article contributes to the literature by unpacking the extractivist state and the elite's strategies to reproduce its hydrosocial power.

Toward a feminist political ecology of household food and water security during drought in northern Nicaragua

“…The FPE approach also suggests using future studies to analyze potential limits as these grassroots networks attempt to scale up promising strategies (e.g., increasing women's voice in governance decisions, and their expanding roles in cooperatives; see Lyon et al 2017) into regional, national, and global institutions dominated by neoliberal logic (Dupuits 2019). The possibility of stronger community and women's voices in resource governance could influence local power relations, affecting which farmers secure water access (Damonte 2019), and could open new spaces for how smallholders can manage their farms (Zimmerer et al 2019), make their livelihoods, and creatively struggle to sustain access to food and water.…”

Cascading socio-environmental sustainability risks of agricultural export miracle in Peru

“…Water scarcity is often caused by multiple drivers, such as low water endowments, socio-economic development, weak governance, social transformation, political conflicts, urbanization, and climate change (Bytaert and De Bievre 2012; Damonte, 2019). In the case of the "Ica-Villacurí" Aquifer, the agribusiness expansion in the Andean countries during the 1990s, which was greatly facilitated by the reduction in tariffs through the ATPA, was a key driver in accelerating the abstraction of groundwater.…”

Challenges to Water Management in Ecuador: Legal Authorization, Quality Parameters, and Socio-Political Responses

“…More recently, flowers-particularly roses-have become a crucial export in Ecuador [13]. Financial power at both national and local levels enables water-intensive floriculture production to persist even in water-stressed areas [85]. As flower companies frequently occupy larger portions of land with respect to their representation within the population, they often pay higher irrigation and management rates than smaller water users [36].…”