Almaraz: MAS embraces capitalist model in agriculture

Almaraz, who was one of the main proponents of land distribution to peasants and indigenous people until leaving office in February 2010, observes a “government abandonment of the transformative social mandates on the agrarian question”.

This can be observed, he says, in the official statistics themselves, which show that in recent years there has been a “drastic decline in the results of the agrarian sanitation and distribution of public land, as well as the figures in productive public investment in the indigenous peasant sector, insignificant compared to the national economy and the needs and possibilities of the sector ". 

The shift to the large agricultural enterprise model is evident in “legal reforms with which the Government commits formally to substantially amend the agrarian legal framework to honor its public agreements with agribusiness and benefit them to the extent of their demands".

This is particularly the case of the Food Production and Forest Restitution law, dubbed the “forgiveness” law, which according to the ex-authority “exonerates the reversion of lands to the state, legally required for about three million hectares of forest which have been illegally cleared in medium and enterprise lands".

The same is true for several other bills submitted by the Executive Body that exempt, for five years, large and medium owners from their constitutional obligation to fulfill the land’s social-economic function.

From the achievements to the agribusiness shift

The former Vice-minister recognizes that in the earlier years of the Morales’ administration tangible achievements were gained in regard to the redistribution of land in favor of peasant and indigenous peoples: up until December 2015 “around 25 million hectares across the country have been titled in favor of indigenous and peasant communities”.

 “As Communal Lands of Origin (TCO), which are considered communal, inalienable and indivisible property to indigenous peoples and communities, we have 16 million hectares. We also have close to 4 million hectares as community ownership, equally collective and indivisible, for peasant communities that do not explicitly recognize themselves as indigenous”, Almaraz points out.

In addition, there are "between 2 to 3 million hectares as small scale, individual holding for the peasant sector. Of all that, what is effectively redistribution is just over four million, understanding redistribution as land ownership or control passing from one hand to another".

Almaraz also recalls that it was 4 million hectares that were expropriated, first of all, fom timber companies that had these lands under concession -which for legal purposes it is the same as ownership-, and also from landowners such as those from Alto Parapetí, close to 2 million hectares.

Another historic achievement, according to former Vice-minister, was the actual abolishment of serfdom situations (a semi-slavery regime) that existed among many communities known as “captive communities” in the Chaco region in Santa Cruz and Chuquisaca.

“In the case of Chaco in Santa Cruz, in Alto Parapetí, a land consolidation process has been applied. Those 40.000 hectares were immediately given to those same communities that were once captive and subservient to the estates, and which now have become communal landowners. The beneficiaries are close to two thousand people in Alto Parapetí”, said Almaraz.

The consolidation of speculation and agribusiness 

The former Vice-minister believes that these achievements are at risk of being lost because the government is now committed to the agenda of the large agribusiness.

Standing out among the agribusiness agenda are demands such as: "legal security for medium and large land ownerships against legal mechanisms for redistributing large unproductive estates or ill-gotten lands; unrestricted commercial freedoms (even if it jeopardizes the country’s food security); maintenance of subsidies and tax exemptions with which the state finances the agribusiness, such as the 700 million dollars a year spent on subsidizing diesel; full legalization of GM crops ".

All of this, says Almaraz, under the only condition of increasing production. “Neither to achieve food sovereignty, nor environment and nature preservation, nor respecting of workers’ social rights; not even the vague call for sustainability often made by past neoliberal governments. Only production”.

 The problem of building on and consolidating this type of model is that history has shown its limitations, even in achieving the sole purpose of increasing production.

According to the former deputy’s account, for decades, the dominance of about “40 million hectares by the business sector, in addition to the diverse and important state subsidies, have only generated two million cultivated hectares (mainly for export) and a deficient extensive cattle ranching model, whose technical conditions are, in many cases, essentially the same with which it was introduced four centuries ago".

Considering this background and the measures the government is agreeing to implement, Bolivia is under way to be operating according to the will of "mere speculative mood", the "anachronistic latifundist habits of the Bolivian entrepreneurs”, the "agribusiness model, Monsanto and glyphosate, which is operated by its most skilled architects and under the direct control of transnational capital".

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Almaraz: El MAS tiene modelo capitalista para la agricultura