Working farmers struggling to survive have to compete with often-subsidized goods from agribusiness in the European Union and the United States, as well as other Latin American countries. According to an article in the December 28 New York Times, for example, trucks at La Fragua’s huge distribution center in Guatemala City regularly unload apples from Washington State, potatoes from Idaho, pineapples from Chile, and avocados from Mexico.

In addition, small farmers have to meet the costly specifications for food production the large supermarket chains demand.

“They wanted consistent supply without ups and downs,” Mario Chinchilla, a tomato farmer in Palencia, Guatemala, told the Times. “We didn’t have the capacity to do it.” For a time, the farm cooperative Chinchilla heads managed to sell vegetables to the Stop and Shop supermarket chain, owned by Ahold. Chincilla’s cooperative, which once had more than 300 members, is now down to eight farmers. Ahold requires farmers to use drip irrigation, expensive pesticides, and modern greenhouses for growing produce, but small farmers don’t have the resources to meet such requirements which are increasingly being demanded.

Dairy farmers throughout Latin America face similar rigid requirements to sell their milk to food retail chains. According to the Inter Press Service news agency, “Tens of thousands of small dairy farmers cannot afford the investments in equipment they need to be able to sell to the supermarkets. The chains require mechanical milking equipment, cooling tanks and ultra-high temperature treatments, demands that can close small farmers out of the supply chain.”

Farmers who do manage to sell their goods to the supermarkets often wait two or more months to get paid for their produce, according to the International Policy Research Institute.

Supermarket chains, often owned by companies from imperialist countries, control 10 to 15 percent of fruit and vegetable sales in Guatemala. But in Argentina, their slice has grown to as much as 30 percent, while in Brazil it’s up to half the total market.

Through the “free trade” offensive by Washington and its imperialist allies in the past two decades, finance capital has stepped up investments in Latin America and other semicolonial countries. Latin American governments have abolished price subsidies on food, slashed tariffs on imported goods from imperialist nations, sold off state-owned companies, and targeted workers’ wages and unions—all in the name of attracting foreign investment. Millions of peasants have been forced off the land as a result.

Although the capitalist economic depression that has engulfed most of Latin America and the Caribbean has affected many professionals and other middle-class layers, working people in the city and countryside—the large majority—have been the hardest hit and their living and working conditions are deteriorating. The number of people living below official poverty lines has grown from 200 million in 1990 to 224 million last year—or 44 percent of Latin America’s 512 million people. In rural areas, 60 percent live under officially defined poverty.

In Guatemala, 75 percent of the population lives below the government-defined poverty line, and 50 percent of Guatemalans are employed in agriculture. With the downward slide of world prices for coffee, sugar, spices, and other agricultural goods, many small farmers have lost their livelihoods and been forced to migrate elsewhere for work. According to the Times, José Luis Pérez Escobar, who belonged to the same cooperative as Chinchilla, migrated to the United States after his potato crop failed last year and couldn’t make enough money to pay off debts and keep his land.

In response to these conditions, peasants have intensified struggles for land and government aid for development throughout Latin America in the past decade. In Brazil, for example, 8,000 landless rural workers and others marched in the country’s capital, Brasilia, in November to demand more government funding for land distribution.

The Washington Post reported in September that 2,000 police officers were sent to evict peasants occupying a cattle ranch near Champerico, Guatemala, and were met by a demonstration of 3,000 peasants, some armed with AK-47 rifles.

The fight for land has also been a major feature of developments in Venezuela, where peasants, encouraged by a new agrarian reform law passed by the government of President Hugo Chávez in 2001, have waged fierce battles against big landowners. Largely through such struggles, more than 75,000 landless peasant families in Venezuela had obtained titles to some 5 million acres of land as of the spring of 2004.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home