Accumulation by Dispossession and Socio‐Environmental Conflicts Caused by the Expansion of Agribusiness in Argentina

By Daniel M. Cáceres. 2015

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drawing upon the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, this paper analyses the expansion of agrarian capital in Argentina. A case study illustrates the social and environmental impacts of the expansion of agribusiness in central Argentina and the social struggle – both rural and urban – that has arisen to resist this process. Although government policies after the 2001 crisis differ in many ways from those of the 1990s, current agrarian policies are not significantly distinct from those followed during the pre-crisis neoliberal period. Rather than ‘post-neoliberal’, the new model could thus be better described as ‘neo-extractivist’. With the connivance of the state, agribusiness is producing the largest-ever transformation of natural capital into economic capital in the history of the region. Moreover, the latest policy developments suggest that Argentina is on the threshold of a new and deeper stage of agrarian capital expansion and wealth concentration, this time operating at a much larger scale.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53e7318f940385923adea77316488a6d886ac5f6

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Furthermore, in SAM, the main actors involved in soybean are agribusiness companies producing for the global market, with little involvement of smallholders, resulting in land property concentration and numerous social conflicts (Caceres 2014).”
Drivers of agricultural land-use change in the Argentine Pampas and Chaco regions (2018, unknown): “This decade had the highest agricultural expansion rates and agricultural production since the 1940s (Cáceres, 2015; Pengue, 2014).”
Rents, Actors, and the Expansion of Commodity Frontiers in the Gran Chaco (2018, background): “The governments of the Kirchners’ Argentina, Lula’s 690 Brazil, Lugo’s Paraguay or Morales’s Bolivia acquired legitimacy with their base by adopting 691 policies to defend smallholder and indigenous rights, tax commercial agriculture and curb 692 deforestation and foreign land acquisitions, while co”
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, unknown): “Both landbased climate change mitigation and agricultural expansion, when deployed at the large scale, can undermine local livelihoods, create access problems, and intensify social conflict (94).”
On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism (2017, background): “This is the case for instance with the extensive soy cultivation in ever more marginal areas of the Latin American pampas (Cáceres 2015) or through deforestation in the Amazon (Petras 2013).”