Número 26, 2011 Imprimir
26

Editorial

Foundations and Debate

  • Kostas Vergopoulos
    The food crisis: the earth trembles

    Abstract: The aim of the paper is to analyze the factors that affect the global food crisis, where financialization of agricultural raw materials and food stands out. Also important are the deviation of grains to the production of biofuels and the decline in the growth of agricultural yields. It is noted that the hunger riots have historically caused revolutions, so that today’s food crisis is an essential factor that destabilizes the world in the environment of international capitalist crisis.

  • Armando Bartra
    Hunger, Alimentary Dimension of the Great Crisis

    Abstract: Starting by define the food shortages as a problem that combines trend scarcity and speculation, ranks it as the most dramatic expression of the civilizatory crisis which is characterized by the rarefaction of natural and social factors of life, and which subjective dimension document the insurgencies of North Africa, Middle East and the shift to the left of various countries andean amazonian. The discourse of the multilateral agencies in favor of small farming is seen as a conservative neo-peasantism oriented to recreate bimodal agriculture that half a century ago CEPAL drove in Latin America, while the purchase of large tracts of land by countries, corporations and investment funds performs a race by future territorial rents that are part of monopoly speculative profits that characterize modern rentist capitalism. This constitute a neo-developmentalist, unviable when both the development such as progress and modernity are discredited, and oppose them the building of new paradigms inspired by those that encourage the rural economy.

  • Alfonso Fradejas
    Crisis of accumulation in the North and agrarian restructuring in Central America

    Abstract: This article entails a critical analysis of the political economy and ecology of the current territorial re-structuring processes associated with the deployment of a flexible regime of agrarian capitalism in Central America, in light of its determinations over the human and social vulnerability of indigenouspeasant farmers in the territories of expanding oil palm plantations in Guatemala. Attention is paid to the main discourses of public and private stakeholders as well as to the specific material and cultural dispossession practices of this revisited dynamic that generates agrarian and resource-use conflict, once again catalyzed by demand drivers emerging from world (northern) markets related to the revalorization of commodities and the agrofuels fever. The discussion derived from comprehensive applied research since 2006 focuses on the impacts on two fundamental components of the livelihoods of Guatemala´s indigenous-peasant population, as core determinants of social vulnerability: i) the ability (means, processes and relations) by which actors are enabled to gain, control and maintain access to arable land and natural resources; ii) the household/community productive and reproductive strategies, including the labor implications and the social relations of production and reproduction.

  • Sergio Pereira Leite y Sérgio Sauer
    Expansion of agribusiness, land market and land foreignization in Brazil

    Abstract: The recent world “rush for farmland” has made Latin America, in general, and Brazil in particular target in the process of land deals with a great increase of foreign investments on purchasing land, including the financial enterprises. Even having a very illiquid market, land deals and foreign investments in agribusiness are not new in Brazil, but has increased considerably after 2002, as it is possible to see in the registration system of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform. According to some field researches, most of the recent investments are related to the production of grains (especially soybeans) and sugarcane (to produce sugar and ethanol), but also for mining resulting among other consequences in a great increase of land prices in some regions of Brazil. Such rush for land has led the Brazilian government to reestablish a legal mechanism to “control” these foreign investments in land deals. This article is going to discuss the recent process of foreign investments in purchasing land in Brazil, looking especially for the main causes for such investments and its main consequences, including possible influences on land prices and social and political impacts over the disputes for accessing land in Brazil.

  • Guillermo Almeyra
    The danger green, Soy threatens food security in Argentina

    Abstract: This article reviews the profound changes caused by the expansion of soy monoculture not only in the small farming, but also in the territory (which is object of desertification), the concentration of the population in the cities and the decline in food-producing (such as wheat, corn, meat, vegetables and fruits).

  • Francisco Hidalgo
    Food crisis forehead food sovereignty: the case of Ecuador

    Abstract: The argument of this article is based upon four points: firstly, brings an analytical perspective that emphasizes the importance of looking at variations in patterns of capital accumulation to interpret the changes that agriculture suffers as a subordinate branch of the capitalist system. Based on this approach the paper contextualized the general relations between the financial crisis of 2007 and the food crisis that is beginning between 2008 and 2009. Secondly, the paper addresses the food and agriculture situations in Ecuador, especially along the period 2008 – 2012. This analysis was based upon information about changes in land use, pricing and market access. Thirdly, it analyzes changes in Ecuadorian public policies related to agriculture and food situation in the context of a post-neoliberal arena. And finally, the paper supports the hypothesis that the most serious consequence that Ecuador could face in a worldwide food crisis scenario, is that the model of export-oriented agriculture will be strengthened. This model is nowadays supported by transnational pressures towards an expansionary phase which is founded on investments in growing biofuel crops; this model does not consider the new Constitution’ principles about food sovereignty and good living.

  • Oscar Bazoberry Chali
    Bolivia: (de)limited sovereignty

    Abstract: Bolivia adopted, since 2009, with the new constitution approved by referendum, the concept of food security and sovereignty as a state policy. More importantly, it establishes that the peasant sector, indigenous, native and the economy communal are the support and the privileged subject of the new approach of Plurinational State. There are important advances such as the delimitation of the size of agrarian ownership and collective ownership ever closer to the demand of territory. However, apart from the difficulties shown by the public administrators to assume the transformation that deserves the bolivian process, there are internal structural limitations, such as poverty and its colonial and republican precedent, and external, as the context of international crisis and the renewed impetus of capital in South America that threatens to discipline dissidents.

  • Jaime Peña
    The short trajectory to the alimentary fragility in the case of Mexico (1980-2011)

    Abstract: The article analyzes the main trends of food production the last thirty years, as well as some demographic and social aspects that accompany the productive processes of the agricultural industry, orientated by certain policies deployed during this time, in order to explain the meaning of the impacts in our country of the food crisis of 2008. The phenomenon of the crisis, in the opinion of the author, doesn’t define famine in our country, for example, but they refer to the already impoverished and malnourished rural villages. Also some urban areas identified by specialists dedicated to nutrition, due to the fact that the supply and distribution of food is in the hands of the transnational food corporations who gain greater power with every phenomenon of crisis, which they exert on producers and consumers with no way to stop them. During this time, we have rapidly entered in an external food dependency, but especially, food production has stayed in hands of the speculative profit, with a state that answers to the orders of the great agricultural and financial capital.

  • Blanca Rubio
    Food sovereignty versus dependence: policies forehead the food crisis in Latin America

    Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze public policies implemented in Latin America as a result of the capitalist crisis and food crisis that broke out in 2008. The idea is to demonstrate that those countries that are strengthening their native agricultures in order to recover their food sovereignty based on small producers, are those who have faced the crisis in better conditions. In contrast, those countries that insist on continuing the neoliberal model unchanged, are deepening food dependency and poverty, while they tend to be inserted in adverse conditions in the new world order that is emerging.

Articles and Miscellany

  • Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez
    Territory and industrial location: some general considerations

    Abstract: The purpose of this article is up the idea of land or space and its relationship to industrial location, to mar kits explanatory power of the transformations that have suffered as a result of space factors are caused not only economic processes, if not for social and cultural facts. That this to display the innovative capacity of a territory must be considered sociological causes, to a greater or lesser extent, can determine the success or failure of local development.