Monoculture tree plantations and agrarian conflicts along the democratic transition in Latin America

Múcio Tosta Gonçalves

Universidade Federal de São João del-Rey – UFSJ

(Brazil)

• Description of research I have been realized in Brazil since the 1980’s and of some readings and observations about the situation in the Cono Sur region.

• It was realized utilizing reviewing of articles and conference papers from 1990 to 2012, interviews with scholars and social activists (mainly from Brazil, Uruguay e Paraguay) e field research at Brazil between 1990 and 2001.

• Modernization and Democracy in LA

• Independent nations based on formal democracies more than on substantive democracies (the problem of autonomy of individuals).

• Pattern of political relations: patrimonialism, clientelism, "symbiotic" relations between economic elites and the state, military tutelage.

• From the mid-1970s: democratic transition: liberalization of authoritarian regimes and the establishment of civil governments with elections (the rule of law and formal channels of popular participation).

• “The society is on the streets, but without an aim that unifies its claims and demands”.

• On the other hand, the Latin American economic development processes has produced vigorous markets.

Latin America GDP, 1950-2010

Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_per_capita_LA-Chile.png

Latin America GDP, 2010

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21528979

• I’ll try to discuss the relationship between a model of agricultural and agrarian development that despite its positive economic effect generates negative results in democratic terms for rural populations, especially for the so-called traditional people.

• Conservative modernization: concentration of land ownership, the despoliation of nature and the dependence of industrial structures and strategies geared towards to the export of primary goods have determined a dynamic modernizing that combines growth with inequality.

Poverty in Latin America, 2011: poverty line USD2,5 per day

Source: SEDLAC (CEDLAS and World Bank), access May 2013.

Poverty in Latin America, 2011: Gini Coeficient

Source: SEDLAC (CEDLAS and World Bank), access May 2013.

Poverty in Latin America, 2009: famine

• The formation and the expansion of monoculture of trees to produce inputs and raw materials for industrial use (especially oil palm, rubber, firewood, charcoal and pulpwood) are examples of how this model of rural modernization articulates the action of industrial oligopolies with maintaining inequalities, undermining the effectiveness of democracy in the countryside of Latin-American countries.

• […] the significant rise in so-called industrial tree plantations (ITPs) is a relatively recent phenomenon dating from the 1960s and 1970s. ITPs in the global South are large-scale, intensively-managed, even-aged monocultures, mostly exotic trees like fast-growing eucalyptus, pine and acacia species, destined for industrial processes that produce pulp and paper as well as rubber and oil palm products. ITPs also increasingly supply industrial fuels. Typically owned and promoted by corporate actors, ITPs can also be partly or totally state-owned; they are seldom peasant or community-controlled, although communities can get involved in the ITP business by signing contracts to establish ITPs on their lands as part of a strategy of out-sourcing by ITP firms. ITPs also tend to be harvested mechanically, in the case of pulpwood, and cover large areas, from hundreds up to hundreds of thousands of hectares.

(Overbeek; Kröger; Gerber, 2012)

• ITPs corporations have been treated as preferred and also protected clients of the several governmental agencies.

• Financial and tax incentives, loosening of environmental policy and of control mechanisms on employment relationships.

• 13 million hectares of ITPs in at least fifteen Latin American countries. Almost half of this area is occupied by eucalyptus trees.

• However, many social conflicts have been developed around plantations. In fact, social conflicts involving these trees monocultures have been and yet are impressive worldwide. The main issues concerned to impacts of ITPs are:

1. Local people are not involved in planning decisions and development of installing the industrial plants and the tree monocultures

2. Corporations convert fertile and adequately-watered lands; expulse traditional populations and peasants; and inflate land prices what leads to the concentration of rural land.

3. ITPs huge projects often deprived people of their original livelihoods (such as food production and the collection of non-timber forest products).

4. Physical and symbolic violence against traditional people and peasants and human rights violations.

5. Extinction of native forests with damage to biodiversity and the availability of natural resources used by the traditional and rural population.

6. Reduction and even the extinction of water bodies and humid areas.

7. Pollution of soil and water by the use of agrochemicals.

8. Forest fires.

9. Degradation of work conditions and workers quality of life.

10.Spoil the work of trade unions, that are undermined and including closed.

11.“Fencing in” and “imprisoning” local communities.

• Against that, there are no public spaces guaranteed, even formally, to the people in order they could to express their complaints and to negotiate alternatives in terms of projects.

• As a result, it seems impossible to expect that the expansion of ITPs generates a democratic sphere. To produce an such sphere it is necessary to join the unionism, the agrarian and the environmental movements towards a new coalition of interests against the monoculture of trees. But that scenario appears do not exist in the near horizon.