| The Rise of Food Fascism in Bolivia |
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Allied
to global agribusiness, the agrarian elite of Bolivia are fomenting a
coup as they struggle for control of the life-blood of the economy,
writes Roger Burbach.
2nd July - Roger Burbach, Transnational Institute As in most other countries affected by the food crisis, the overall rise in food prices is attributable to the workings of the free market—when the price of one or several commodities goes up, the consumers turn to other food stuffs, thereby driving up these prices as well. In an effort to halt the effects of this unregulated market, the government has enacted price controls and even prohibited the export of beef, most of which is produced on haciendas. But these measures have been largely ineffective: A black market flourishes as agrarian commercial interests openly flaunt the central government’s price controls, even directly exporting commodities like beef and cooking oil at higher prices to the neighboring countries of Chile and Peru. Like many third world countries Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets.
This is taking place as Bolivia’s first Indian president, Evo Morales,
is facing a sustained challenge by a right wing movement for autonomy
that is integrally linked to the very agribusiness corporations that
are profiting from the upsurge in food prices. Based in the eastern
province of Santa Cruz, a powerful agrarian bourgeoisie is determined
to upend the government’s agrarian reform program and to halt Morales’
efforts to more equitably distribute the wealth that flows from
Bolivia’s oil and gas fields. Its ultimate goal is to topple Morales
and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) that backs him.
The corporate dominated agro-industrial complex in Santa Cruz is
centered on the growing, processing and export of soy beans. Two of the
world’s largest agribusiness multinationals, ADM and Cargill, play a
major role in the regional economy. They are primarily exporters of
Bolivian soybeans and sunflower seeds while ADM co-owns with a Bolivian
firm the largest vegetable oil processing plant, Sociedad Aceitera del
Oriente.(1)
Giant agribusiness corporations like John Deere have commercial outlets
in Santa Cruz as Bolivia manufactures no heavy agricultural machinery.
Multinational companies supply most of Bolivia’s agrichemicals, while
Monsanto and Calgene are promoting genetically modified seeds. Peruvian
and Colombian agribusiness interests have also set up processing plants
in Santa Cruz, including the Romero Company from Peru which has joint
international operations with Cargill, while large soy growers from the
neighboring Brazilian state of Mato Grosso have settled on Bolivian
lands.
The agrarian bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz is orchestrating the movement
for provincial autonomy in order to seize control of the region’s
extensive resources from the national government. The referendum on
autonomy that was unconstitutionally voted on and approved in Santa
Cruz on May 4, 2008 would allow the provincial administration to write
its own contracts with multinationals and to exercise direct control
over the police and law enforcement agencies. Autonomy would also
enable the province to override national legislation promoted by
Morales and MAS on agrarian reform and the control of public forests
and subsoil rights, including natural gas and oil.
The economic policies favoring the rise and consolidation of the
agrarian bourgeoisie allied to global agribusiness took shape in the
mid-1980s when the International Monetary Fund stepped in with a
structural adjustment program. Hyper-inflation had gripped the country
from 1983-85 and in exchange for the refinancing of Bolivia’s public
and international debt the government agreed to a series of “market
reforms,” including the reduction of tariffs and the slashing of state
subsidies and assistance for the growing of basic food commodities.(2)
These measures overturned the strong role the state had come to play in
the economy with the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Along with the
nationalization of the tin mines, the worker and peasant backed
revolution led to an agrarian reform that broke up the hacienda system
in the Andean highlands which had bound much of the Indian population
to the land in virtual servitude. With the takeover of the large
estates by peasants, rural unions and Indian communities, the
production and marketing of basic food stuffs increased, particularly
in the 1950s and early 60s. (3)
But another agrarian dynamic began to take shape in the eastern part of
the country during these years. Bolivia has three main geographical
zones; the Andean highlands or plateau in the west where the agrarian
reform was concentrated; the valleys located more in the center and to
the south; and the plains or low lands that extend into the more humid
and tropical regions in the east.
In the 1960s and 70s, a new landed class emerged in the low lands
centered in the province of Santa Cruz. Seizing control of large swaths
of the plains and rain forests, often illegally or through government
concessions acquired through bribes, the new landed barons raised sugar
cane and cotton while plundering the rain forests for lumber. The
reactionary character of this region was manifested early on when
General Hugo Banzer from Santa Cruz overthrew a leftist general backed
by a popular assembly in 1971, ruling the country with an iron hand for
seven years, much like the military regimes in other countries in the
Southern cone that took power in the 1970s.(4)
The IMF reforms of 1985 privileged the role of Santa Cruz vis-à-vis
other parts of the country. With the privatization and closure of many
of the state tin mines in the Andean highlands, tens of thousands of
miners were thrown out of work. Many migrated to the Chapare region in
the south-central part of the country, becoming coca farmers, while
others went to the east to squat on small patches of land and serve as
an agrarian labor force for the large estates that were favored with
credits and infrastructure loans backed by the World Bank. Then in the
1990s vast tracts of land were turned over to the cultivation of
soybeans and by the turn of the century Bolivia’s export revenue from
soy production was second in importance only to that of the natural gas
and oil fields.
The rise of this agribusiness complex has plundered the natural
resources of eastern Bolivia. As the frontier for soybeans advances
further into the rainforests, the older depleted lands are either
abandoned or turned into extensive cattle grazing pastures. Given the
highly mechanized nature of soy farming, there are few employment
opportunities in the countryside for either the local indigenous
population or for those who migrate from the Andes searching for work.
As Miguel Urioste, the director of the Land Foundation in La Paz
explains: “This mono export model—promoted actively by the World Bank
for 15 years—is a lamentable demonstration of how, those that decide
public policies…in the third world, do not take into account the
enormous environmental costs or the lamentable economic and political
effects produced by this model. The monocultivation of soy has
concentrated land in a few hands, it has transnationalized property
rights, it has impeded new humanely planned settlements and
concentrated thousands of poor peasants without lands to generate
wealth, employment and well being.”(5)
While Bolivia ranks among the world’s ten top soy exporters, the
production of domestic food stuffs by the peasantry has stagnated or
declined and the urban population has come to rely more and more on
imported grains. Today Bolivia imports sixty-nine percent of its wheat,
forty-five percent of its rice, and forty-two percent of its corn.(6)
In 2004, even the World Bank was compelled to admit: 'the rural economy
is increasingly polarised between the small peasant sector producing
foodstuffs, on the one hand, and the agro-enterprise sector producing
cash crops for export, on the other’.(7)
The Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, a business organization lead by
agribusiness interests, is at the center of the drive for provincial
autonomy. According to Bret Gustafson, an analyst of the Santa Cruz
elite and its political and cultural institutions: “The Civic Committee
is an unelected entity dominated by business and agro-industrial elites
who have a long history of resisting control of, and demanding
subsidization by, the central government. Typical business members
include the private chamber of commerce, the cattlemen, the
agro-livestock chamber, the industrialists, the forestry chamber, the
soy-producers chamber, and professional organizations (doctors,
lawyers, architects). Other “civic”members include representatives of
provincial civic committees, of carnival comparsas, and of social clubs
or “fraternities.”(8)
Branko Marinkovic, the powerful head of the Civic Committee whose
parents migrated to Bolivia from Croatia in the 1950s, is the largest
landowner in the country with 300,000 hectares, much of it obtained for
pennies or fraudulent maneuvers under past dictatorial and oligarchic
governments.(9)
He also has considerable business investments, including IOL S.A., one
of Bolivia’s largest soy and sunflower processing plants. A political
ideologue of the autonomy movement, Marinkovic funds and sits on the
board of the think tank Fundacion Libertad y Democracia that has ties
to the Heritage and Cato Foundations.(10)
The Cruceño Youth Union (UJC), a junior men’s organization affiliated
with the Civic Committee, is the strong arm of the Civic Committee,
often acting as shock troops for the autonomy movement. During the
plebiscite in May its members, mainly in their teens and early
twenties, roamed the streets of the city of Santa Cruz and surrounding
towns violently attacking and repressing any opposition to the
referendum by local indigenous movements and MAS-allied forces. Not
wanting to provoke a violent confrontation, Evo Morales did not deploy
the army or use the local police, leaving the urban areas under the
effective control of the UJC when the voting took place.
The other less densely inhabited provinces in the east that make up
what is called the Media Luna—Pando, Beni and Tarija--have held
referendums calling for autonomy under similar conditions. On the
national level, the major political party of the right, Podemos (We
Can) tied up the efforts of a popularly elected Constituent Assembly to
draft a new constitution for over a year and it is now maneuvering with
other political forces in La Paz to block a national referendum to
enact the constitution.
Simultaneously, the right wing lead by the Civic Committee is sewing
economic instability, seeking to destabilize the Morales government
much like the CIA-backed opposition did in Chile against Salvador
Allende in the early 1970s. As in Chile the business elites and allied
truckers engage in “strikes,” withholding or refusing to ship produce
to the urban markets while selling commodities in the black market at
high prices that cause alarm among the poor. The national Confederation
of Private Businesses of Bolivia is calling for a national producers’
shutdown if the government “does not change its economic policies.”(11)
The social movements allied with the government are mobilizing against
the right wing. In the Media Luna a union coalition of indigenous
peoples and peasants has campaigned against voting in the autonomy
referendums and taken on the bands of the UJC as they try to intimidate
and terrorize people. In the Andean highlands, the social movements
have descended on La Paz in demonstrations backing the government,
including a large mobilization on June 10 that stormed the American
embassy because of its support for the right wing, particularly over
the US refusal to extradite a past president who ordered the shooting
of demonstrators in the streets in 2003. Because of this growing
unrest, the country is awash with rumors of a coup, and Morales went to
a summit in Caracas in mid-June with Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega of
Nicaragua and Carlos Lage, vice president of Cuba, to discuss how to
defend his government.
The ability of the agrarian interests of Bolivia to take the country to
the brink of civil war is reflective of the powerful agrarian
bourgeoisies that have arisen in many countries of the third world in
tandem with global agribusiness. When national governments attempt to
control the steep increase in food prices, or popular movements agitate
for agrarian reform and food sovereignty, they encounter powerful
internal agro-industrial interests, in effect a fifth column nurtured
and developed by the multinational corporations in conjunction with the
World Bank and the IMF.
This new configuration of power is particularly manifest in South
America. In Argentina when President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner
tried to levy an export tax on soybeans, the large growers orchestrated
a rebellion that has tied up the country’s exports and food marketing
system for over three months. In neighboring Brazil, the agrarian
bourgeoisie is perhaps the strongest and most entrenched in the Global
South. Over the years it has fought a running war with the Landless
Movement, violently repressing the efforts of the poor to peacefully
occupy and till idle lands. In October last year at the genetically
modified seed experimental station of Syngenta (the world’s largest
agrichemical corporation) five peaceful demonstrators were shot and one
killed: The NT Security company that carried out the attack has close
ties to the Rural Society, a right wing growers association known for
repeated acts of violence against the Landless Movement.(12)
Some argue that that we are witnessing the rise of “petro-fascism” as
multinational corporations and nation states struggle for control of
the life-blood of the global economy.(13)
Now with the efforts of the multinational agribusiness corporations and
the agrarian bourgeoisies to control the very sustenance of human life
we may be facing an even more violent period of repression, conflict
and upheaval.
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas
(CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA. He has written extensively on Latin
America and US foreign policy. His first book, co-authored with
Patricia Flynn, was “Agribusiness in the Americas.” See www.globalalternatives.org for CENSA activities and publications.
(1)
Ximena Soruco (Coordinador) Wilfredo Plata and Gustavo Medeiros, Los
Barones del Oriente: El Poder en Santa Cruz Ayer y Hoy, Fundacion
Tierra, Observatorio de la Revolución Agraria en Bolivia, La Paz,
Bolivia, pp. 206-12. www.ftierra.org
13. See Michael T. Klare, “Behold the Rise of Energy-Based Fascism,”
Tomdispatch.com, January 20, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/story/46838
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