Sandra Baquedano Jer and Sara Larraín
In Latin America, the seed protection movement was born and is still led by peasants and indigenous communities, from Mexico to Chile. It is at the heart of the movement for food sovereignty, which has created a dialogue, through the Via Campesina (International Peasant’s Movement) coalition, between the mestizo and indigenous peasants of Latin America, and the peasants of Asia, Africa, and Europe. This global coalition has been joined in recent years by local fishermen communities worldwide.
Food sovereignty in Latin America and the world does not just express a demand associated with nutrition and food production, as might be suggested by the concept of food security coined by national governments and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Rather, it embodies a serious cultural, social, and political dispute for access to the earth, water, seeds, and land and, in turn, to the forests, mountains, and water basins, which allow for the reproduction of life and the sustenance of all living beings, including humans. For this reason, food sovereignty and the movement for the protection of seeds as common goods, and as world heritage, includes the right of peoples to self-determination—to decide how to distribute and manage, from this day on, the water and the land that is sown and harvested and provides food—in other words, how to organize and maintain the food chain, which allows the subsistence of human beings, just as that of other species, but also the maintenance of knowledge, community, identity, and culture.
The environmental, cultural, economic, and political claims of both the peasant communities and indigenous peoples put, at the center of their demands, the protection and continuity of their relationship with their territories and with the biodiversity that supports their identity, knowledge, culture, and lives. This territorial claim was obviously neither understood nor respected by the conquerors and colonizers of America in the sixteenth century. Nor was it by nation-states, from the nineteenth century onward to today, following the declarations of independence from Spain. Neither is it a reality worth considering, nor a legitimate citizens’ demand, for the majority of current Latin American governments, who have sold the sovereignty of their territories and the rights of their peoples to the national and multinational corporations who drive the overexploitation of the natural resources in Latin America, and dominate the global market’s neo-colonization.
The worldview of the original peoples of Latin America—just like that of the peoples of India—envisioned the unity and interdependence of life, since in their practices and rituals, they thanked Mother Nature, the Pachamama. This great mother of the Andes mountain peoples also represents the preservation and reproduction of life. Thus, the original peoples would identify with their modern-day descendants as their children and counterparts, through the upholding of strong relationships of respect and reciprocity. The harmony of this relationship between human communities and Mother Nature was called “good life and living well,” or sumac causai, in the Aymara language. Currently, the peoples of Latin America are repositioning themselves and culturally and politically championing this concept as an expression of rebellion against the neo-colonization of the corporate-driven global economy and in opposition to economic growth and material progress, the way of life and development that their nation-states offer them.
Protecting and taking care of seeds, land, water, and ecosystems under the demand of food sovereignty and living well, peoples’ movements position themselves against so-called “progress.” In particular, indigenous peoples and peasant communities in Latin America put food and territorial sovereignty at the center of their resistance to and self-determination demands of nation-states. They are disputing shared assets—land, water, biodiversity, knowledge, production, and consumer patterns—and lifestyles that are based in extractivism, productivism, and authoritarianism, which have demeaned the human condition, social coexistence and relations, and the reproduction of life.
The Green Revolution, along with export-oriented agro-industry and the promise to resolve the problems of Latin America’s rural poor, arrived on the scene in the 1960s under the cover of the Alliance for Progress, driven by the United States. The alliance misappropriated the most fertile land in many countries of the region, also disregarding thousand-year-old species and crops that were the result of the knowledge of seed selection by peasants, and the fruit of a millenary reciprocal relationship between the rural peoples and Pachamama. Thousands of varieties of maize, potato, and quinoa, to name just some of the most important ones, were lost through genetic erosion or disuse, and part of the knowledge, the land, the culture, and the independence of the people was lost with them. Nevertheless, many varieties, just like certain cultures, were preserved in more isolated regions, or on land that the greed of the state-supported agribusinesses considered to be marginal or not productive enough.
During the 1990s, some varieties of genetically modified seeds arrived somewhat stealthily in several Latin American countries, such as Chile in 1992 and, more aggressively, in Argentina.1 By 2008, Argentina was second only to the United States in land acreage dedicated to genetically modified crops; GM soybeans began spreading in Argentina in 1996 and maize hybrids were introduced at the beginning of the twenty-first century.2 Currently, Argentina exports the majority of its genetically modified soybean crop and almost 70 percent of its maize produce to a market that is geared in equal measure toward the production of fodder for farmyard animals, and the bioenergy market for ethanol.
The introduction of crops aimed at reproducing seeds and monocultures, principally for animal feed, in addition to the genetic contamination of native varieties, has eroded the genetic heritage of countries like Mexico. Furthermore, it has had the effect of displacing crops used for both local and national consumption, generating new and intensive processes of concentrating land ownership in the hands of national and multinational agribusiness consortiums, and causing the forced displacement from the countryside to urban slums of not only families but also complete peasant communities. Thus it is that the mega, exporting agro-industry has colonized territories, greatly straining biodiversity and water resources, generating stagnant agriculture and the desertion of farmland. This phenomenon has separated both individuals and whole peoples from the Earth, disrupting their spiritual connection, knowledge, and culture, and consequently affecting the cultural identity, sense of belonging, and subsistence of millions of people.
Deforestation processes have been generated by industrial agriculture and extensive livestock farming in many countries, such as Brazil and Chile; but also by aggressive reforesting plans with commercial species, especially pine and eucalyptus, with the export of cellulose and wood in mind. In Chile, the establishment of a forestry industry supported by large state subsidies was the main cause for the loss of biodiversity and native forests between the 1970s and the 1990s.3
Subsequent studies show that, in 90 percent of the cases, this publicly financed destruction took place for the benefit of large companies, who first received subsidies to plant forest and then buy property rights to the land. This caused both land ownership concentration and the mass migration of peasant communities to urban centers—once a plantation is sown, there is no work for several years, it being necessary to simply wait for the trees to grow in order to then exploit them.4 Thus it was that the incredible Chilean “forestry boom,” paid for by its citizens through taxation, generated great profits for less than five or so companies and rich individuals, and simultaneously set in motion the irreversible damage to the ecosystems. Peasant communities, too, disappeared, converted into a mass of socially and economically vulnerable urban inhabitants and, therefore, a burden for the state’s subsidiary obligations.
In democratic societies, governments, as opposed to dictatorial regimes, need to obtain the majority vote of an electorate in order to be elected and form a government. The electorate votes every few years to choose between political continuity and a change in power. It is elementary that the people at least have a chance to pass judgment on their politicians and parliamentarians. Nonetheless, this is not enough on its own, since the brief periods that rulers spend in office prevent priority from being given to issues of great future importance, whose results may not be seen by those subjected to adverse measures and corresponding sacrifices. In practice, the majority of politicians are not prepared to risk taking nonpopulist measures in the interest of safeguarding future generations that do not yet exist and protecting interests that do not exclusively benefit the powerful economic haven that they defend. Doing so would require them to face up to the severity of a policy that would cost them votes and the rejection of those whom the measures affect.
An economy motivated by the pursuit of profit stands in contrast to a system characterized by greater rationality when measured against the Baconian program. Faced with this final legacy, nonconsumerist ways of life would morally be more equitable, fair, and superior in humane terms, to the extent that they meet collective needs better, and avoid unnecessary competition and the abuses of market production. If consumption were restricted, it would entail not just the saving of natural reserves, but also the assimilation of nature not as a means, but as an end in itself—as part of the telos, or meaning, of life.
An ascetic relinquishment of the market by the masses is something not only alien, but also contradictory to globalized, capitalist society. Although some features of asceticism are intrinsic to noncapitalist disciplines, the problem is that frugality has not necessarily been voluntary, but imposed. All the same, it is more equitable than a system that doesn’t encourage us to reduce our energyvorous standard of living. Such a system is not some kind of Earth Democracy to be applied to and directed at all species; rather, it involves a tyranny of our species and the submission of the rest. Nowadays, the fact is that the accumulative force of disturbing and destroying the natural reproductive cycle—together with the urban and demographic explosion, until now uncontrolled—has, for mere survival, made it necessary to not only plunder the planet, in a more and more unnatural way, but to cause the human species to be treated as an object, with the planet unable to yield further.
Protecting and taking care of the natural environment requires value being given to personal sacrifices and greater altruistic relinquishment, these being sensitive to the possibility of holistic suffering, rather than being regulated and steered exclusively by public policies. The role of ethics and environmental education, as with all things, is fundamentally important in order to develop an adequate socioenvironmental sensitivity.
Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, desertification, the demographic explosion, pollution, and other environmental problems put humanity within touching distance of self-destruction. Faced with the possibility of our species’ suicide, the near future looks like the place for specific, sharper, and more radical harm than that which has already been done. The effects of this harm are possible socioenvironmental upheavals that threaten humanity, not only with regard to its permanence or survival, but with regard to its quality of life—that is, the way of life that future generations may be forced to suffer.
Generally speaking, the governments that have ruled in Chile and Latin America until now have no institutionalized rules that advocate the protection of biodiversity, even when faced with the threat of humanity’s self-destruction. They foresee neither ecological disasters nor the risk of the environment’s radical decline. Given the fact that we have already destroyed the planet, we must take responsibility for the harm done. The concept of responsibility involves the identification of a particular element for which one has to answer, bestowing upon us an active role, since, as responsible agents, we have a mission to protect the natural environment, judging it to be vulnerable and in a potentially forever worsening state. We have seen that, in the name of being responsible for a nation, war has been declared against another people, devastating it through pain and destruction. Or how, in the name of being responsible for the interests of a specific business, dams have been built, native forests have been destroyed and waters polluted, causing irreversible damage from a socioenvironmental viewpoint. Where there is a lack of sensitivity about the essence of human suffering, and the suffering of other species being a mystery, it is difficult to avoid it, even when there are more than enough reasons to try. Holistic sensitivity, unlike the concept of responsibility, allows no biased exclusion of the word “for,” when it comes to being responsible for any detriment caused to others. Rather, it builds bridges with the word, to vindicate, socioenvironmentally, self-criticism.
In contradiction to the celebration of their bicentenary of independence from Spain, the majority of Latin American countries are suffering from accelerated processes of privatization and transnationalization of their territories and environmental heritage. Additionally, they have suffered from the dismantling of the state’s authority to administer natural resources, social policies, and national territory, all of which has de facto meant entering a new colonial era. Such processes, initiated with structural adjustment programs and the privatization of public assets and services some decades ago, were subsequently consolidated through free trade and investment agreements, negotiated as much by social democratic national governments as by those on the right, and even by “progressive” ones.5
Chile, for example, managed to become the country with, globally, the second-highest number of free trade and investment agreements to its name. This entailed opening up its economy, regulations, and institutions to economic players from anywhere in the world, so that they might invest in, exploit, and export environmental heritage, under the slogan of successive “pro-growth” agendas. The intensification of such a strategy through free trade agreements, investments, commerce, and services in all Latin American countries has brought about the removal of regulatory frameworks that were favorable to the internal economy and to local development. It has also included “national treaty” criteria for transnational economic players, favoring the integration of local economies into the global economy as the only viable national development strategy.
Chile’s integration into the global economy has meant an anti-democratic process of expropriating natural resources, state companies, and public services (with few exceptions), with detrimental consequences for Chileans, and the regions and territories where the natural heritage is located.6 A clear example is the case of water, where the new Water Act has caused serious conflicts between human rights and market rules. The Water Act, unilaterally approved by the military government in 1981 (when there was no National Congress), with a strong pro-market bias, not only privatized water ownership, but also “separated the domain of water from that of land, allowing its free sale and purchase.”7 Such a mechanism appropriated the common property of water and favored the extreme concentration of water ownership under private control. In Chile currently, just three companies own 90 percent of water rights for hydroelectric energy generation,8 and another three dominate water ownership for drinking water services.9 Privatization meant the loss of public control over freshwater sources, as well as serious environmental and economic management problems that the national state has little power to resolve.
In all of the Latin American region, there are now dramatic conflicts about access to water, especially in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and, more recently, Argentina. In all these countries, citizens are now mobilized and articulated in their demand for water access as a fundamental human right, over and above the rights of businesses. In this context, mining development is the activity that has most aggravated the destruction of biodiversity—water sources for example, including glaciers in the Andes—and created serious air, land, and water pollution in almost all the countries of the region. For this reason, mining is today the activity most strongly resisted and rejected by local communities and indigenous peoples who only experience its negative impact.
The wealth generated by mineral extraction and processing in Latin America has primarily benefited transnational companies and the countries they belong to. Chile is a sad example in this respect: today it is the largest producer of copper globally (35 percent) and one of the largest providers of minerals for the globalized economy. Over 70 percent of mining sector control is private (in 1972 it was just 15 percent) and in the specific case of copper is higher still, at 73 percent.10
As in Chile, the option chosen by the majority of Latin American governments, for development centered on macroeconomic growth through the extraction and exportation of environmental heritage, has caused a growing depletion of their means of development, an intensification of socioenvironmental conflicts, and serious problems for democratic governance. This was the case, for example, with then President Sebastián Piñera’s right-wing government’s repression of the people of Aysén in Chile, who were opposed to the building of five big dams on Patagonia rivers, and who asked for equal rights. Or when progressive Bolivian President Evo Morales repressed the TIPNIS indigenous march in defense of their land and against building an international highway for the regional and international market of raw materials, casting doubt on Morales’s indigenous leadership and his democratic integrity.
Development centered on exporting economic growth has at least three clear structural aspects that can be recognized in almost all the countries of the region, particularly in Chile, El Salvador, Peru, and Colombia. The first characteristic is that natural resources and territories are made available to the global economy; the second is that the expansion and intensification of markets, investments, and services (financial, environmental, cultural, or otherwise) occurs in accordance with the priorities of private economic players, principally transnational ones, and not for people’s benefit; the third is that the negotiation conditions for economic development and public policy are determined by market priorities rather than for the common good or in the public interest. The national state thus becomes an institution that responds to the priorities of private interests and corporations. The consolidation of these conditions in Latin America has brought about a policy of making decisions about national development using the logic of international competition, a logic dominated by transnational economic players and small local elites. In this context, the peoples of Latin America have increasingly resisted and rejected the processes of economic liberalization and global integration based on free trade and investment agreements. As an outcome of their resistance, Latin American social movements have, in recent years, managed to prevent the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA), driven by the United States, with the aim of tying regional economic integration to its own national economy. As an alternative to economic globalization and business integration, social movements and public interest citizen networks11 have proposed a Hemispheric Peoples Integration, based on grassroots cooperation and people’s alternatives, and on seven principles: (1) the promotion and defense of expanded social, environmental, economic, cultural, and political rights, and of collective human rights; (2) the protection and sustainable use of nature and ecosystems as common property for the reproduction of life (water, seeds, energy, land, and biodiversity), and the conservation of immaterial goods of the cultural and historic inheritance of communities and peoples; (3) the integrated management of natural resources and territories by human society, but under the recognition and respect of the complexity of living systems and the interdependence of species; (4) the sovereignty of communities and peoples over territory and common heritage, that is, the right to decide freely and independently how to live, and to the organization, production, and use of natural heritage without the availability of, or access to, said heritage, being affected for current or future generations; (5) the reciprocal and complementary nature of relationships and exchange of knowledge, goods, products, and services as an alternative to unequal competition, the ownership of resources, and the accumulation of capital; (6) the independence and self-determination of peoples, freely and from the perspective of their own land and culture, to decide on political orientations, rules, and regulations, and institutions for their coexistence and economy; as well as women’s sovereignty over their own lives and bodies, and the right to live free of violence, oppression, or coercion; (7) living democracy and active participation as an alternative to democracy being restricted to electoral participation, economic administration, and the imposition of “state” priorities over and above people’s rights.12
This concept of peoples integration has, in the past few years, generated huge mobilizations of people in various countries from the region, opening up great spaces for collective coordination and social articulation. One example is the World Social Forums, generally hosted in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, where the articulation of social movements’ agendas has been politically strengthened. This collective process has gone so far as to create a new ethical-political-social agenda in Latin America, based on the principles listed above. There are also some demands that have historically been promoted by diverse social movements: food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, free-flowing rivers, social and supportive economics, care for common property resources, cooperation between peoples, and respect and care for Mother Nature, among others. In turn, several governments, as in Ecuador and Bolivia, have included both the human right to shared assets and nature’s rights in their recent constitutions.
With a monumental effort and under this new model of ethical and social clauses, the citizens’ movements and some governments organized the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in 2010. This summit articulated an entirely different political agenda from the paradigm of development as economic growth, centered on the recognition of solidarity and cooperation among peoples and nations. Finally, as an even more radical alternative to the dominant economic paradigm, social movements have taken on the thousand-year-old principle of “living well” (sumac causai), a term coined by the Aymara peoples who lived, and still live, on the highlands and mountains of the Andes, from Bolivia to Chile.
The adoption of “living well” as a paradigm for the well-being (or good living) of human society, in harmony and reciprocity with Mother Earth (today and in the future), represents a direct and tremendous ethical, cultural, and political challenge to the visions and strategies of nation-states and global economic elites, driven by the expansion of investment, production, consumption, and markets. At the start of the twenty-first century, Latin American people called upon politicians and governments to adopt policies and actions for “living well” and for the abandonment of economic growth at any cost.
1. M. I. Manzur et al., Biodiversidad, Erosión y Contaminación Genética del Maíz Nativo en América Latina (Red para una América Latina Libre de Transgénicos, 2011), 165.
2. Ibid., 166.
3. Chile Sustentable, “Desafíos para la Sustentabilidad de los Bosques y el Sector Forestal Chileno,” in Por un Chile Sustentable: Propuesta Ciudadana para el Cambio (Santiago: Chile Sustentable, 1999), 138–157.
4. Ibid.
5. Such is the case with Ecuador, and Correa’s current government.
6. Sara Larraín, “Naturaleza y Mercado,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2012, 9.
7. Chile Sustentable, “Disponibilidad y Uso Sustentable del Agua en Chile,” in Por un Chile Sustentable: Propuesta Ciudadana para el Cambio (Santiago: Chile Sustentable, 1999), 218.
8. Ministry of Public Works, “January 2010—Proposal for Constitutional Reform, to Change the Articles Referring to Water Ownership” (law communiqué); Endesa Enel, Italy; AES Gener, United States; and Colbún, Grupo Matte, Chile.
9. Suez from France, the Ontario Teacher Pensions Plan from Canada, and Grupo Luksic from Chile.
10. Chilean Copper Commission, “Chilean and World Copper Mining Production, Percentages and Tonnages According to World Metal Statistics, 2009.”
11. Red de Vigilancia Interamericana para la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Red VIDA), Red Latinoamericana contra las Represas y por los Ríos, las Comunidades y el Agua, Plataforma Energética Latinoamericana, Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC, Vía Campesina), Programa Cono Sur Sustentable, Alianza Social Continental, Jubileo Sur, Red Intercontinental de Promoción de la Economía Social y Solidaria, Promoción de la Economía Social y Solidaria, Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres, Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas, among others.
12. Cono Sur Sustentable 2006, Santiago, Chile, 7–8.