AGRICULTURE: Landless Draw Attention to ‘the Other Argentina’

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 8 1998 (IPS) - Heavily indebted small farmers, landless indigenous peasants, squatters, slum-dwellers, illegal occupants of public and private tracts of land and others marginalised by Argentina’s rural economy held 20 protests and events Tuesday demanding access to land and development.

Rene Boneto, secretary-general of the Argentine Agrarian Federation, told IPS that the activities were aimed at “showing ‘the other Argentina,’ which is so different from the official Argentina in which agricultural is booming – the face of exclusion, the rural exodus and rural poverty.”

The contrast arises from grain harvests which become larger and larger every year, thanks to technological advances, biotechnology, the use of fertilisers and the lower costs of large- scale agribusiness.

But the most vulnerable sectors, those who have no access to credit or have lost their land due to bad loans, are far removed from such advances.

According to Boneto, the growing marginalisation in the countryside has to do with the increasing concentration of rural property. The number of farms in Argentina shrunk 31 percent from 1992 to 1997, when thousands of heavily indebted small farmers, incapable of competing with large-scale agribusiness, lost their land.

Small farmers who now swell the ranks of the unemployed and homeless in the capital and in the largest provincial cities and town