A few days
ago, the fascist, genocidal and traitorous president Dina Boluarte said that
with 10 soles a day one could eat a complete meal (soup, main course and
dessert), thus mocking the growing misery of the masses, who suffer from
chronic hunger as a consequence of the old semi-colonial-semi-feudal society in
which a bureaucratic capitalism operates at the service of imperialism, mainly
Yankee. Although the country's problems are not a problem of government, but of
the character of society and the State, with each reactionary government, the
country's problems and the situation of the masses worsen, that is why we say
that Boluarte's government is more hungry than all the previous ones.
The reality
of the country, which is expressed in the growth of hunger and poverty, is a
consequence of unemployment, the lack of adequate employment for the
reproduction of the labor force of the immense peasantry and the great masses
of the cities in our country, and unemployment in any of the forms in which it
manifests itself, and hunger and misery - unemployment is a consequence of the
general crisis of the old society, of backwardness, of the semi-colonial and
semi-feudal base on which the dominant path of imperialism, bureaucratic
capitalism, is developed. The land ownership system marks the entire process of
the country from its economic base to its most hidden institutions and ideas.
The figures
of hunger and malnutrition in Peru
We
transcribe some paragraphs from the editorial of LA REVISTA AGRARIA 207,
September 2024, by J. Urrutia, www.larevistaagrariaperu.org, which give us some
figures of the problem:
„The
National Household Survey (Enaho) of 2023 estimates that 31% of our
agricultural population is hungry. But already in 2022 the FAO reported that we
were the country with the most food insecurity in all of South America. Indeed,
a recent IEP survey indicates that, in 57% of those interviewed,
«in the
last three months at least once their household ran out of food». The response
of the population lacking resources has been the proliferation of common pots
that alleviate the hunger of the marginalized.
As Miguel
Pintado's article in this issue shows, while the incidence of hunger affects
33.1% of the rural population and 30.6% of the population directly linked to
agriculture, the percentage rises significantly to 37% in urban areas,
resulting in an average of 36% for the entire country. In more direct words:
one third of Peru lives in conditions of famine. Given that our agrarian
reality is extremely heterogeneous, the figures that portray hunger in our
regions are also different: in Pasco (59%) and Huancavelica (46%), around half
of the farming families suffer from hunger, and the figures are equally
alarming in La Libertad (46%), Moquegua (45%), Lima (39%) and Arequipa (36%).
The rates
of malnutrition and anemia: in Peru, 40.1% of children, from 6 to 35 months,
suffer from anemia; That is, almost 700,000 children under three years of age
(out of 1.6 million nationwide). We can also cite Jessica Huamán —dean of the
College of Nutritionists of Metropolitan Lima— when she highlights that,
according to the latest report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in
the World, by the United Nations, “51.7% of the Peruvian population, equivalent
to 17.6 million people, face moderate or severe food insecurity. In addition,
20.3% of Peruvians live in a situation of severe food insecurity.” The expert
explained that this condition means that these people have run out of food and
have gone a day or more without eating, which is a clear indication of hunger.
(…) 33% of
the population daily seeks its survival through solidarity and soup kitchens.”
Hunger and
the development of bureaucratic capitalism based on large-scale semi-feudal
property and semi-colonial domination of imperialism
We take
another article from the same magazine, which says:
“President
Boluarte stated that the unblocking of mega irrigation projects aimed at
agro-exportation, such as Chavimochic, will strengthen food security in Peru.
However,
according
to data from Sunat, Peruvian agro-exports increased from 786 million dollars in
2000 to
10,545 million in 2023, without this exponential increase being reflected, as
we have seen,
to the same
extent in the indicators of food insecurity.
On the
contrary, the 2023 Demographic and Family Health Survey (Endes) has revealed
that, in Ica —shown as an example of the positive social effects of the
agro-export model—, anemia in children under 6 to 36 months increased from
32.7% to 38%, and chronic malnutrition in children under 5 years of age rose
from 6.5% to 7.3% between 2022 and 2023 (MCLP, 2024). This deterioration
occurred despite the agro-export boom.
Government
and exporter representatives often ignore the analysis of the negative
externalities that come with mega irrigation projects geared toward
agro-export” (Beatriz Salazar,
APEC and
food security, cited magazine).
Of course,
the author criticizes the mega-projects for export, but she does not say
anything directly about the basis on which this is developed: the semi-feudal
system and the semi-colonial domination of imperialism. But in the article,
Approaches to the expansion of the agro-export frontier on the coast, Ana Lucía
Araujo Raurau analyzes the development of export agriculture on the basis of
the latifundia and on the other hand, referring to small farmers, that is, the
latifundia-minifundia relationship, see her conclusions:
“Conclusions
The land
grab on the coast has been, without a doubt, a central strategy for the
agro-export business in these almost three decades of boom. Regardless of the
variability in the markets,
the
agro-export frontier has continued to expand. The provinces of Virú and Ica
remain as paradigmatic poles (older and more active) of this process, and the
Olmos area, in Lambayeque, is configured as the most recent permanent frontier.
However, in addition to the constitution of large poles of activity, we note
that the constitution of agro-exporting centers has also been part of the
behavior of agribusiness in the provinces of Paita, Sullana and Trujillo.
The
evidence presented in this article suggests that the agro-exporting frontier enters
the territories with a pattern of abrupt accumulation, monopolizing large
extensions of land at an accelerated pace in the first years of its
establishment, to then move on to moderate or stable growth. We know better the
factors that allow the constitution of agro-exporting farms in coastal
territories; among the most important: the availability of large extensions of
uncultivated land and the availability of water through irrigation projects.
We need
more research to identify which factors determine the continuity or
stabilization of its expansion over time: for example, resource limits
(availability of water resources, workforce), business limits (which do not
appear to be constrictors), or the presence of other actors in the territory
that restrict its advance, such as peasant communities or small-scale
producers' farms.
This
article raises alarm bells about the impacts of agro-export expansion on the
worsening of inequality over land. The damages of the constitution of bipolar
property structures
are well
known in Peru and internationally; among the most important: the spiral of
intensification and depredation of resources (soil, water) and the
environmental externalities that are unleashed by this, and the loss of
territorial control and erosion of livelihoods of peasant communities and small
farmers; but also, accelerated demographic growth due to immigration and the
radical transformation of local societies.
Given the
trends analyzed, it is possible that a new, more contentious stage in the process
of land grabbing and reconcentration in Peru will unfold in the following
years.
In 2015,
issue 169 of La Revista Agraria paid special attention to the topic of land
concentration in Peru, which quantified the process of land grabbing by
agro-exporting farms on the coast. Almost ten years later, this article aims to
update our understanding of the reconcentration of land on the Peruvian coast.
To do so, I examine the dynamics of expansion of the agro-exporting frontier in
the territory of six provinces, between 1985 and 2022, using land use and land
cover data produced by the MapBiomas Perú platform. From this analysis, I
identify the dynamics of the agricultural surface dominated by agro-exporting
activity, and its repercussions on the land ownership structure in those
provinces. Approaches to the expansion of the agro-exporting frontier on the
Peruvian coast” (Approaches to the expansion of the agro-exporting frontier on
the coast, Ana Lucía Araujo Raurau”
ON THE
CONTRARY, THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEASANTS HAVE NO OR LITTLE LAND WHICH THEY
ALLOCATE MOST OF THEIR PRODUCTION TO SELF-CONSUMPTION
“The
countryside, Predominance of the PAF units (i.e. small farmers) which has been
rigorously estimated at 2.13 of a total of 2.19 million agrarian units. That
is, with a weight of 97% (2017).
Another
important characteristic is that it is made up of 73% self-employment in
agricultural family units (independent workers and their unpaid family members)
and 27%
by company
jobs (employers and workers) The employed EAP of family units, according to
natural region, is distributed as follows: 12% on the coast, 62% in the
mountains and 26% in the jungle.
Regarding
direct access to food products of agricultural origin, at least half of the
agricultural units allocate most of their production to self-consumption.
While
people who are not poor show a high consumption of purchased food, which
represents
more than 90% of total expenditure on food, the poor and especially the
extremely poor continue to depend largely on food produced by themselves. Among
people who
suffer from
extreme poverty, food produced by themselves constitutes about
42% of
total household consumption, a fact that reflects that a large percentage of
the extremely poor continue to carry out agricultural activities oriented
towards subsistence.
Infra-subsistence
units that would be concentrated at 78% in the mountains, 11.9% on the coast
and 10.1% in the jungle (Maletta, 2017, p. 158). With less predictability in
the jungle region where the agro-forestry production system predominates with
multi-farms dispersed between river banks and sandbanks, the majority destined
for self-consumption, which the census minimizes and the statistics
standardize” (. FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG - PERUVIAN AGRICULTURE, POST COVID-19
SITUATION AND PERSPECTIVES, Marlene Castillo Fernández, 2021):
In general,
a deterioration of the main assets of family farming is observed. The average
equivalent surface area has fallen from an average of 1 hectare to 0.66
hectares, a fairly pronounced drop. There is also a significant drop in the
value of livestock stock (in soles in 2022) from about 4,600 to 4,000 soles
between 2012 and 2022.
The general
scenario shown by the analysis of the evolution of the explanatory variables is
one of relative
impoverishment
and decapitalization of family agriculture during the last decade in Peru with
serious
problems in initiating a process of agrarian transformation. This also reflects
the limitations of
national
public policy to reverse processes of socioeconomic deterioration of this broad
sector of
national
agriculture (Cabrera Cevallos 2023; Escobal et al., 2015; Grisa & Sabourin
2019; Zegarra 2018).
Latifundia
and minifundia: low agrarian productivity-backwardness and semi-feudalism
“In a
general overview, results are consistent with those obtained for the
agricultural variables based on the ENAHO for the sociodemographic and asset
variables. In this case, the effects of the equivalent surface area and access
to irrigation are more marked (25% in the first case
and more
than 100% in the second). The strategic importance of access to land and
irrigation to achieve higher levels of agricultural production, productivity
and income is evident (Cornia 1985;
Hussain
& Hanjra 2004; Sheng et al., 2019). The impacts of the equivalent surface
area and labor supply on land and labor productivity are negative to the extent
that these variables
are the
denominator of the dependent variable. “FAMILY FARMING IN PERU: CHALLENGES AND
POSSIBILITIES FOR ITS TRANSFORMATION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDG)”, National Institute of Statistics and Informatics,
2024, Eduardo Ariel Zegarra Méndez