The political agenda of ‘green agroextractivism’ in Latin America

Abstract

What is the political agenda that animates, justifies, and legitimizes resource extractivism in the context of sustainability transformations and climate action enhanced? This is a question of growing relevance across geographies and sectors of activity that we aim to address from the Latin American countryside. To this end, we start with a discussion on the political economy and ecology of contemporary agrarian extractivism. Then, we turn to examine the role of diverse state and social actors in the rise of agroextractivism for climate stewardship in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. In Bolivia, the alliance of Evo Morales with diverse classes of capital and reliance on the extractive economy ultimately led to his downfall as he lost support from his social bases and was unwilling to give up state power. The rise of the flex sugarcane and oil palm complexes in Guatemala since the mid-2000s relies on the new political agenda of ‘authoritarian corporate populism’. This involves political concessions to the underprivileged through public grants and multistakeholder governance, as in conventional populist political regimes. But additionally, authoritarian corporate populism involves concessions to working people and the environment in the private production realm. Violence, however, remains foundational to this political agenda, even if it is now cloaked in the rule of law. In Paraguay, the fierce rejection of Fernando Lugo’s tepid attempts to regulate the agribusiness sector culminated in a “parliamentary coup” orchestrated by the landlord class and preceded by spectacular acts of violence against peasants. The coup paved the way for the continuing expansion of an agroextractive export model characterized by the adoption of new genetically modified soy varieties, recurring state violence, and increasing campesino and indigenous dispossession and marginalization. Following the three country-analysis we discuss how the alliance among state actors, elites and agroextractivist capital, including through multistakeholder initiatives, have limited the transformative potential of progressive governments to improve the living conditions of the working people. In so doing, the triple alliance relies on the traditional strategies of influencing regulatory frameworks and legitimizing discourses. But it also relies on new political strategies that combine the manufacturing of popular consent to the agroextractivist order with violence and selective repression cloaked in the rule of law. We conclude stressing how the ´green´ ecomodernist turn of the agroextractivist agenda shifts attention away from the paradox of increasing the use of natural resources to cool down the planet. Rather, it privileges the sort of technical-administrative innovations that various flex crops complexes require to reproduce their necessary natural and social conditions of production of bioenergy and biomaterials for ‘the common good.’.