Poverty, Injustice and the Ecological Crisis

1
Poverty, Injustice and the Ecological Crisis
2
The Capitalization of Nature

• 1950s U.S government assumed a more active role
  in the expanding capitalist development in
  Central America
• Rockefeller family
• National Security Council
• 1961 The role of the U.S. became greater with
  the advent of the Alliance for Progress which
  aimed to promote to social and economic stability
  in Central America through modernization,
  diversification, and expansion of the capitalist
  export agriculture and industry.
• gave landed oligarchs, bankers, and military
  officers the power to appropriate the majority of
  newly created wealth

3
The Capitalization of Nature and the Alliance of
Progress

• El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua
  oligarchies and security forces used the U.S.
  economic and military assistance to promote the
  development of large-scale agricultural estates.
  
• Forest land, wildlife habitats, and peasant
  communities were cleared to make way for the
  large latifundios devoted to the production of
  export crops, primarily coffee, cotton, sugar,
  bananas, and cattle.
• Honduras and Costa Rica foreign capital was used
  by small peasant farmers, the urban bourgeoisie,
  and landed oligarchs to modernize and expand
  smaller coffee farms and cattle holdings, in
  addition to large-scale banana plantations.
• Because capitalist governments took a more mixed
  form of both large-scale and small-scale farms,
  state repression was much less significant.

4
The Capitalization of Nature Cotton

• 1950s -1970s almost all of the coastal
  hardwood forests were destroyed, as well and
  coastal savannas, evergreen forests and
  mangroves. Many species of animals were
  eliminated or reduced.
• Peasants were evicted from their traditional
  landholdings.
• This gave peasants the only option to earn an
  income through wage labor during the short
  cotton-picking season.
• By the late 1970s, the 10,000 farms and over 1
  million acres of cotton fields carved out by the
  landed oligarchy and the agrarian bourgeoisie,
  employed one-half million workers.
• By this time Central America was the third
  leading producer of cotton the world and only 2
  of the original coastal forest remained

5
The Capitalization of NatureBeef

• Beef The expansion of large-scale cattle ranches
  and the displacement of peasant farmers was
  funded by grants and/or loans from U.S.
  government agencies, international financial
  institutions, and the Central American Bank for
  Economic Integration
• 1970-1980 15 of the regions total forests were
  destroyed
• 400 increase in trade between 1961 and 1974
• Over two thirds of Central Americas lowland and
  lower montane rainforests have been destroyed
  since 1960 (most suitable to cattle). Today,
  over 22 of the regions land mass is in
  permanent pasture.
• Nicaragua and Guatemala thousands of peasants
  who resisted eviction were killed in U.S.
  supported counterinsurgency operations during the
  1960s and 1970s to ensure the capitalization
  and privatization of nature for their own
  personal gain.

6
Disarticulated Development

• Intensification of Central Americas dependency
  on the U.S. and on international capital
• sectoral and social disarticulation industries
  that produce commodities and industries that
  produce agricultural commodities into another
  commodity have been developed in the process
• peasantry and working classes possesses little
  consumption capacity and are not the primary
  sources of aggregate consumer demand, making the
  economy vulnerable to world market conditions.
• the production and consumption capacities of
  Central Americas capitalist sector are increased
  by minimizing costs, including expenditures
  relating to environmental protection.
• Industries that grew under the Alliance are
  compelled to externalize the social and
  ecological costs of capitalist production

7
The Ecological Costs of Disarticulated Development

• Since the 1960s peasants, workers and the
  environment face costs in the form of
  increasingly polluted and disease-ridden water
  supplies, and health problems.
• worst offenders are beneficios, or coffee
  processing plants which often discharge high
  levels of boron, chloride, and arsenic-laden
  wastewater into the environment.
• For example, beneficios in Costa Rica produce 66
  of the countrys water contaminants.
• The U.S. corporation Pennwalt
• Central American capital maintains its
  competitive edge by minimizing the cost of labor
• This requires capital to resist costly procedures
  designed to protect worker health and safety as
  well as the environment.
• This creates dangerous working and living
  conditions, especially for seasonal laborers
• Its estimated that as many as 73,000 pesticide
  poisonings occurred during the 1970s
• Today, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans have more DDT
  in their body fat than any other human population.

8
Ecological Impoverishment of the Peasantry

• Cotton, sugar, coffee and bananas requires the
  availability of hundreds of thousands of
  migratory low-wage laborers.
• Reduces labor costs by perpetuating the peasant
  subsistence sector
• Peasant plots lowers the cost of labor-power, but
  is inadequate to ensure the freedom of the
  peasant family from the bonds of wage slavery.
• Maintaining the peasant subsistence sector has
  been the main prerequisite for continued
  accumulation in the capitalist export sector, a
  relation called functional dualism.
• The overdevelopment of the export sector and the
  underdevelopment of the subsistence sector which
  forces peasants to work as migratory,
  semiproletarian laborers.
• Between 1950 and 1968 the export sector claimed
  73 of all newly developed agricultural land,
  while peasant farms occupied 8.

9
Ecological Impoverishment and the Cattle Boom

• The cattle boom
• mechanism for maintaining the ecological
  impoverishment of the subsistence sector, by
  continually displacing the subsistence sector
• a tool for land speculation and monopolization,
  and requiring a much smaller labor force.
• Displaces peasant farmers onto unfertile lands
  ecologically unsuitable for slash-and-burn
  (traditional) agriculture that are prone to
  severe erosion and fertility loss.
• State policies and private practices deny
  favorable marketing, financial and technological
  assistance and services.
• The capitalist export sector receives over half
  of all the institutional credit allocated through
  national banking systems.
• The creation of the necessary human conditions of
  production for disarticulated capitalist
  development
• Therefore, the harvest of most export crops
  (except bananas) occurs during the dry season,
  while basic grains raised on peasant plots are
  cultivated during the rainy season.
• Health effects of functional dualism

10
Ecological Collapse of the Minifundio

• The peasantry response overexploiting the
  limited natural resources However,
  disarticulated capitalist development not only
  produces severe ecological exploitation, but
  depends on it for the subsidized reproduction of
  semiproletarian labor generation.
• Overexploitation of agricultural soils
• Sustainable systems of slash-and-burn agriculture
  are evolving into semi-permanent or permanent
  agriculture which results in
• accelerated erosion
• fertility loss
• watershed degradation
• Desertification
• climatic changes
• The major causes of death in Central America are
  infectious diseases related to poor environmental
  quality and nutritional status.

11
Population Dynamics and the Ecological Crisis

• Transformation of the household division of labor
  by gender and through the superexploitation of
  familial labor.
• This burden falls particularly hard on women (and
  children) in a double sense
• Women are charged not only with doing womens
  work, but also joining their male partners as
  seasonal wage laborers.
• Bearing children as production agents for
  incorporation into the household labor
• By age seven, children in the subsistence sector
  are usually producing more income for the family
  than what they cost.
• Older children in search of income often migrate
  to the cities
• Increase in population has benefited the
  oligarchy and the agrarian bourgeoisie by
  providing a growing supply of workers
• Under functional dualism individual economic
  rationality leads to quantitative and qualitative
  demographic contradictions and reproduce
  conditions on impoverishment in rural areas.
• However, the problems of ecological deterioration
  of the peasantrys resource base are also
  damaging to the capitalist production and cause
  millions of dollars damage annually to the
  capitalist sector and state infrastructure.

12
Toward a Sustainable Future

• Authentic economic reform
• Just distribution of land and natural resources
• Foreign policy of alignment
• An end to U.S. military intervention
• Comprehensive agrarian reform
• Fertile land held idle or in pasture by large
  growers could go into sustainable production for
  basic food crops, allowing for marginal lands to
  be restored.
• Redirection of credit
• Training and technical assistance to small
  farmers
• Environmental and social restoration efforts
• Government promotion of appropriate technology
• International support for radical ecology.
• A lasting U.S. policy of peace and reconstruction
  for Central America