LATIN AMERICA: Campesinos Bear Brunt of Poverty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

María Cecilia Espinosa

SANTIAGO, Aug 24 2005 (IPS) - Without dynamic, sustained and inclusive economic growth, accompanied by strong social policies, the rural population in Latin America and the Caribbean is doomed to disappear, warns a new FAO regional office report.

Luis Gómez Oliver, head of the Policy Assistance Branch of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS that unless these conditions are met, “there is no possibility of overcoming rural poverty.”

Gómez Oliver noted that this was the conclusion reached in a new report, “Trends and Challenges in Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries in Latin America and the Caribbean – 2004”, which analyses the state of agricultural and rural development in the region’s 33 countries.

The FAO study maintains that food insecurity in the region cannot be explained solely by the volume of food production, but is also linked to the problems of poverty and marginalisation.

Moreover, agricultural development is not only conditioned by internal variables in this sector, but also by macroeconomic policies, the availability of infrastructure, access to services, the quality of institutions, and other external factors.

The majority of poor people in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has a total combined population of 590 million, live in urban areas. Over two-thirds of the region’s poor and more than half of those who live in extreme poverty are city dwellers.

But in relative terms, the incidence of poverty and extreme poverty is much greater in the countryside.

A full 62 percent of the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean lives in poverty, with 38 percent facing extreme poverty, while the corresponding figures for the urban population are 38 percent and 14 percent, according to the data contained in the new FAO report, released last week.

“In all episodes of economic crisis, poverty in Latin America increases, independently of the policies adopted at the time, and in all periods of economic recovery, poverty is not alleviated to the same extent that it was aggravated during the preceding crisis,” noted Gómez Oliver.

He believes it is crucial “to achieve growth that is more inclusive, and to avoid the heavy concentration of income that has characterised Latin America in recent decades.”

This would entail designing a development policy that includes social measures aimed at extending the benefits of economic growth to the marginalised sectors currently mired in extreme poverty.

The FAO representative remarked that alliances among countries can contribute to combating the poverty, marginalisation and food insecurity faced by the region’s campesino (peasant farmer) population “as long as they imply a gradual trend towards trade opening.”

Alleviating poverty and marginalisation in the region will require the application of “measures that compensate for the adaptation of economic actors to the changing conditions brought by trade opening.”

He believes that one of the most serious problems in Latin America and the Caribbean is that it remains “the developing-world region with the smallest proportion of foreign trade among its own economies.”

Meanwhile, the greatest obstacle to agricultural sector development in the region’s countries is that “the marginalisation faced on an individual basis translates into difficulties in establishing efficient chains of agro-commerce and agro-industry,” he added.

Economist Manuel Riesco of the non-governmental National Centre for Alternative Development Studies (CENDA) told IPS that the precarious conditions found today in rural areas stem from “the transformation of the style of life and work of the Latin American population over the 20th century, from an overwhelmingly agrarian population to a mainly urban one.”

In Chile, according to figures from the 2002 census, the campesino population accounts for only 13.4 percent of the country’s 15.3 million inhabitants. But although they only represent a small share of the total population, “it is in the rural areas that the pockets of the most extreme poverty are found in Chile today,” said Riesco.

“The majority of campesinos carry out subsistence farming, which means that rural poverty is also linked to climate cycles. During a bad year, life in the countryside gets extremely hard,” he remarked.

In cities, the main instrument for combating poverty today is social protection, including unemployment insurance benefits, old age pensions, and education and health care programmes, but this problem is more complex in the countryside.

For rural areas, Riesco recommends the implementation of “policies to provide microcredit, education and health care programmes, and technological support, adapted to the process underway in a region that is undergoing a major transformation from its agrarian and campesino past to its urban and rural present.”

Riesco, who is also one of the directors of the non-governmental Foundation to Overcome Poverty, said that trade opening has had a “painful” impact on traditional peasant farmers.

“In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) brought catastrophic effects for corn farmers, who must now compete with big U.S. agroindustrial companies, most of whom produce transgenic crops,” he commented.

To prevent negative repercussions for the agricultural sector, Riesco recommends that extreme care be taken with regard to the vulnerability of the region’s farmers, “because trade opening policies very frequently lead to veritable massacres of campesino communities, and this is the way it has been since the birth of capitalism.”

Elvia Montoya, the northern region coordinator of the non-governmental group Youth for Development and Production, told IPS that this area of Chile, north of Santiago, is comprised of semi-arid lands used for non-irrigated farming and a small amount of goat raising.

The 170 agricultural communities in this region practice subsistence farming and “have not been benefited by the major investments made in dams and reservoirs. They continue to work non-irrigated lands where it is very difficult to develop an agricultural sector that could effectively compete on the market, because this would require a volume of production that they will never achieve,” explained Montoya.

Because they are entirely dependent on the weather, these communities need emergency programmes for times of drought, when they are plunged into even deeper poverty by the death of their crops and livestock, “and can only wait and hope that the next year brings more rain,” she noted.

Most of these small farmers “have no access to credits from financial institutions or government programmes, and this is especially true of the people living in agricultural communities who are limited by the fact that they don’t own their land individually, but rather collectively,” she said.

Government programmes that provide small farmers with subsidies aimed at boosting their production and marketing capacity are not enough to help them effectively compete on the market, Montoya commented.

Moreover, despite the government campaigns to educate the population about trade agreements, “campesinos are a long way off from being able to participate in these treaties,” she added.

Transportation difficulties and a lack of electrical power and communications services further heighten the isolation of many of these communities, making access to global technology an impossibility.

“I recently visited a family in the region and in order to get to where they live, we had to travel for two hours by truck and then another two hours on burros. In conditions like these, it is very difficult to achieve progress,” concluded Montoya.