Search

This paper concludes this special issue. It draws on the findings of the individual contributions and provides a comparison of the agrarian policies of left-wing governments in Latin America. We identify common trends and offer an explanation of why these governments did not change the agricultural model in the direction of food sovereignty, but continued to heavily support agribusiness while redirecting some resources to peasant and family producers. They improved the living conditions of the rural poor, mostly through populist anti-poverty and social protection programmes financed by the commodity boom. They expanded programmes to integrate small farmers into commodity chains and improved the working conditions of rural wage labourers, but did not carry out a redistributive agrarian reform. They instead continued to support agribusiness with numerous policies and measures. We argue that these governments did not curb the power of the dominant rural classes because these are highly intertwined with capital, making them part of a coalesced bourgeoisie that occupies key positions in the state. Leftist governments did not have a real agenda of social transformation or a strategy to tackle the rentier nature of the state. Contradictorily, their policies furthered peasant differentiation thereby weakening the previous alliance of rural subaltern classes.

This paper provides an introduction to this special issue by presenting a general picture of the economic and political situation of the Latin American countryside at the dawn of this millennium, when a wave of left-wing parties and leaders assumed power in several countries of the region. We argue that after more than a decade in power, few of the promises to reform the agrarian sector in favour of peasant and family producers were fulfilled. This situation constitutes a paradox, because these governments came to power partly on the back of a wave of social mobilization in which peasant and indigenous movements had been key actors. However, rural social movements were incapable of pressuring the state to change this situation. At the heart of this paradox lies a contradiction, which is that in their political proposals rural social movements called for an interventionist state, but they did not have the ability to control it through their alliance with political parties and politicians. This introduction offers a theoretical framework to better comprehend the struggles of the peasantry and the rentier nature of the state in Latin America, in order to contribute to the discussion on agrarian class reconfiguration under neoliberalism.

Contains fulltext : 91748.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)