During these first years of the 21st century, Bolivia finds itself again in the throes of an agrarian crisis affecting vast numbers of its struggling indigenous campesino citizens. Purchasing power for rural dwellers is falling, prices of key food crops are dropping, food production is stagnating, highland plots continue to shrink in size, highland droughts are becoming more common and the carrying capacity of the land in campesino communities is declining.
Small farmers are scrambling to stay afloat in an economy molded for more than 18 years by neoliberal economic reforms. Under these reforms, Bolivia has become one of the most socially and economically unequal societies in Latin America, as measured by the Gini index, the UN’s yardstick for economic disparity. In the countryside, this increasing inequality is underscored by the reconcentration of land ownership.
The agrarian crisis has generated new social conflicts reflected in the frequency, intensity and duration of rural road blockades. The new century opened explosively in September 2000 with perhaps the most tenacious Andean rural road blockades in modern history. Campesinos effectively sealed off the city of La Paz from the surrounding road system and closed the principal international border crossing into Peru, a major trading partner, for three weeks. This dramatic episode foreshadowed the barrage of indigenous and popular protests of subsequent years.
But protest has not been the only response of the rural poor. Undaunted by the larger economic forces at play, a variety of rural actors at the micro-level are charging ahead with innovative strategies for more participatory, equitable and sustainable grassroots development. Such creative initiatives, often operating below the prevailing neoliberal radar, are turning the logic of longstanding conventional development paradigms on its head.
Bolivia’s current agrarian crisis is the culmination of various historical and contemporary developments. The hacienda system, introduced in the Andean altiplano (highland plateau) under Spanish colonialism and subsequently expanded, originally despoiled traditional Andean kinship-based rural communities, called ayllus, of their collective livelihoods.[1] The ayllu’s territorial control became limited to mostly remote herding communities whose pastoral economies had little appeal for the landed oligarchy.
Later, the 1953 agrarian reform, a product of the Revolution of 1952, liberated campesino service tenants from social bondage and liquidated the haciendas of the western highlands. However, the reform simultaneously planted the seeds of another highly inequitable landholding system in the eastern and southern tropical areas, representing two-thirds of the country’s territory. Giveaways of huge tracts of “public lands,” mostly in the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni, created a new agricultural elite.[2]
Land reform had such opposite effects in the two regions due to their vastly different contexts. The lowlands were much more sparsely populated and contained various frontier areas. Private haciendas and ranches were less pervasive than in the highlands. The indigenous residing in the lowlands, some under the domain of evangelical and Catholic mission projects, had no connection with broader movements and failed to establish any type of organization by which to affirm their rights. They were referred to as “jungle groups” in the l953 agrarian reform law, underscoring how the wider “revolutionary” movements disrespected them for their cultural identity and lack of political participation. With so few privately titled and occupied lands, and with indigenous rights unrecognized, much of the territory was dubbed “public land” that the state could give away in large chunks since there were few counter-claims for ownership. The resulting reconcentration of private wealth in the lowlands enabled powerful agribusinessmen, cattle ranchers, timber barons and assorted neo-latifundistas to dominate national politics and agricultural policy during the second half of the 20th century.
The agricultural modernization processes stemming from the Revolution of 1952 also underpin today’s rural situation. The National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) party sought to mold “backward Indians” into mestizo rural producers though a monolingual and monocultural approach to public schooling and similarly culturally homogenizing Western agricultural policies, programs and technologies. Such efforts overemphasized imported technical resources, land management systems, livestock and crops at the expense of time-tested native alternatives.[3] This cultural bias has influenced policy ever since, resulting in many environmental problems such as widespread deforestation; indiscriminant use of petrochemical products in agriculture; desertification from over-farming, overgrazing and tractor mechanization; and rampant erosion of genetic plant and animal biodiversity.
Finally, the opening of the national economy in l985, in the most textbook application of neoliberal economic reform in Latin America, came down especially hard on small-scale food producers. They were poorly equipped to compete globally due to their historic marginalization, and the influx of agricultural products from neighboring countries progressively worsened the terms of trade for rural producers.[4]
The agrarian crisis has forced much of the rural poor to migrate away from the countryside altogether. Most small farmers who decide to stay seek out supplementary off-the-farm income to survive—often from occasional wage employment, petty commerce or trading activities, including contraband smuggling into neighboring countries. While these pursuits can be less economically risky than agriculture, they are seldom lucrative. Many of Bolivia’s rural poor, however, have sought to creatively rebuild their agrarian livelihoods and collectively confront the trends that so limit their hopes and options. As they swim against the tide of the contemporary crisis, they are also actively opposing deep-running historical currents.
Already during the l990s, vigorous pan-indigenous organizations resisted the landholding status quo of the eastern and southern lowlands, demanding territorial rights through marches, lobbying efforts, strategic alliance building and participation in governmental ministries. As a result, pathbreaking agrarian reform legislation passed in l996, but to date the government has transferred only 10% of the land designated for redistribution due to bureaucratic inertia and the continuing grip of the landed oligarchy.
Such frustrating results produced the emergence of the Bolivian Landless Movement (MST) in 2000. Meanwhile, national campesino coordinating bodies representing local associations, such as the Coordinator for the Integration of Campesino Economic Organizations (CIOEC), are forcefully condemning unfair trade liberalization through public campaigns, seminars, books and political lobbying, and also by occasionally refining the socioeconomic agendas of rural protestors.
In another innovative response, social entrepreneurs and energetic local organizations have continued a quiet revolution that began in the late 1970s by fashioning alternative development frameworks and participatory methodologies for mobilizing native resources—food, crops, livestock, medicinal plants, pastures, trees, art, organizational forms and languages. New micro-level institutional configurations and grassroots development strategies have opened new paths to the marketplace for previously excluded and under-appreciated native resources. Two examples of this phenomenon—a case involving native livestock and another involving an agro-industry founded on ancient Andean organizational principles—demonstrate how rural actors in certain micro-regions are turning back the clock on the unjust legacies of colonialism, Western modernization and neoliberalism.
The llama, a member of the andean camelid family, was long disdained by public policy, the market and middle class urban society. Picking up on a trend initiated in the 1970s, in the 1990s many social activists promoted the llama as an economic resource, and subsequently the state and the private sector have taken a keen interest in its commercial potential. The modern llama economy is at an incipient yet highly promising stage, and it is growing. Thanks to the legacy of its advanced Andean agrarian civilizations, with 2.5 million llamas, Bolivia is by far the foremost llama-producing nation.[5]
Within the rugged Andean terrain, llama-raising occupies an altitudinal, climatic and vegetative niche (piso ecologico, or ecological floor) between 9,800 and 13,800 feet above sea level. The llama is the ideal livestock for the altiplano’s challenging climatic conditions: llamas can resist the region’s frequent and lengthy droughts better than other livestock. It is also an “ecological animal” par excellence. Its hooves and grazing style are much gentler on the easily eroded altiplano soils than those of other foraging animals, such as sheep. Environmentalists are actually repopulating “protected areas” with llamas to displace sheep and better conserve altiplano grasslands. Moreover, llama meat has low cholesterol and is nutritionally superior to beef, chicken, lamb and pork; its hide and fleece are also of excellent quality, and lend themselves to various commercial applications.
Yet, historically, this important development resource was subject to profound discrimination. The prevailing agricultural modernization paradigm assigned the lion’s share of development resources to sectors of the eastern lowlands. Among those who benefited most were white and mestizo cattle ranchers. Aymara and Quechua llama herders in the altiplano, associated with the pastoral economy of Bolivia’s surviving ayllus, received little public attention or resource support for this livestock.[6] The land reform and modernization policies initiated by the MNR further displaced llamas from their traditional grazing areas. The absence of municipal slaughterhouses equipped for llamas in altiplano cities such as La Paz and Oruro penalized indigenous camelid herders as well as poor urban consumers by preventing fresh llama meat from entering the marketplace in sanitary condition. Instead, uncertified llama meat was marketed in quasi-clandestine fashion—often camouflaged as sausages sold in hotdogs on street corners of downtown La Paz—and its unauthorized possession could be punished by municipal fine. This, in turn, guaranteed low prices and middle class consumer disdain. The baseless consumer perception that llama meat carried the whipworm parasite was ostensibly an expression of racism toward indigenous herders.[7] These measures and prejudices combined over many decades to define llama meat as a low-value, unsanitary “Indian food,” appetizing only to the altiplano’s wretched.
From such cumulative discrimination, it seemed unlikely that the llama would ever play a significant development role in Bolivia until several visionary Aymara professionals belonging to MINKA, Bolivia’s first indigenous nongovernmental organization (NGO) in grassroots development, stepped forward to defend the llama. Luis Ticona and Max Paredes, hailing from altiplano communities themselves, established the country’s first federation of camelid herders, the Camelid Herders Association of the High Andes (AIGACAA), in l979.[8] The organization was remarkable for its focus on the developmental potential of the llama and for harnessing the ancient Andean ayllu as its organizational motor. It became the first collective voice to defend the interests of this marginal and oppressed camelid livestock sector.
AIGACAA’s persistence led to the overturning of discriminatory laws, paving the way for other breakthroughs such as the construction of the first rural llama slaughterhouse, which permitted new sanitary standards and legal acceptance of llama meat in mainstream urban markets.[9] Bolivia’s first national camelid livestock fairs began in l995 and have since become international. Leading social entrepreneurs are promoting llama meat in the large potential markets of Bolivian cities. Municipal governments are investing in slaughterhouses to accommodate llama livestock—a potential new revenue source for cash-strapped local governments—generating a synergy between municipal town-based government and their ayllu constituencies. Llama sausages and fresh llama meat now appear in supermarkets and on restaurant and hospital menus. Charque de llama (llama jerky), the sun dried variety of the meat, which is 56% protein, has become popular even in Bolivian cities where llama meat was previously unknown. Llama hides have been “rediscovered” for producing finished leather goods—from soccer balls to carrying cases for palm pilots. And AIGACAA recently created its own private company for processing llama fiber for domestic and foreign markets with the intention of competing with better-known elite natural fibers, such as cashmere and mohair, at the high end of the international value chain.
These grassroots initiatives are generating a more equitable development model for rural Bolivia that contrasts sharply with the elite-dominated ranching and agricultural paradigm of the eastern and southern regions of the country. Small, low-income herders are uniting to form their own community-based producer associations, which together play an instrumental role in setting municipal and even regional agendas for investment and service programs to bolster this economy. The associations are integrated to varying degrees with local ayllus, which are undergoing their own political revitalization through the efforts of organizations such as the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ). In this regard, the social process unfolding is also more participatory and equitable than that which characterized the late l9th and early 20th century formation of Peru’s major sheep and alpaca fiber industry, which was dominated by powerful hacienda interests.
Bolivia’s herder associations are further joining together in federations that function as decision-making bodies for achieving consensus and commitment. These bodies are also being used to attain economies of scale for the provision of necessary livestock services, and to fashion coordinated strategies for improving herds and recuperating degraded native pastures, a serious problem in the Bolivian altiplano. In such ways these formerly marginal poor producers are organizing collectively to secure a better future.
Upwards of 50,000 Bolivian families now participate in llama herding. Some individuals who had temporarily migrated to highland cities for part-time wage employment or to engage in street commerce are returning to the countryside to participate in the emerging llama economy. This evolving economy seems to hold genuine developmental promise. The tapping of this native resource has rendered quality of life improvements for some of the poorest members of rural society, and has generated various spin-off economic activities in the processing and marketing of related consumer goods.
In projecting the future potential of these efforts, recent experience with quinoa, a native grain, offers some valuable insights. Experts consider quinoa, dubbed “the golden grain of the Andes,” to be one of the world’s most outstanding nutritional foods. Its cultural revitalization began in the late l970s and its takeoff in export markets during the l990s. Official quinoa export sales from Bolivia reach about $2.5 million annually and two of the five leading exporters are grassroots federations: the Federation of Campesino Agricultural Cooperatives, “Operation Earth” (CECAOT), an organization of 14 community-based cooperatives, and the National Association of Quinoa Producers (ANAPQUI), an association of various ayllu federations.[10]
Similar to the llama, quinoa is a food resource derived from the campesino economy of the rugged arid and semi-arid altiplano. The commercially popular, bitter tasting variety of quinoa known as quinoa real is grown by some 15,000 small farmers from altiplano communities in the departments of Potosí and Oruro.[11] Small-scale farmers, 45% of whom belong to producer associations, control the primary production of quinoa real. And producer organizations account for 55% of Bolivia’s quinoa real exports, private companies for the other 45%. Since the early l990s, export demand has outpaced production and in response many farmers have doubled the amount of land they dedicate to quinoa real cultivation. Producers have benefited materially, and anecdotal information suggests that out-migration from their communities has declined. This experience suggests that the initially equitable structure of a native resource economy sets the tone for its future growth, so that small farmers continue to be the main participants and beneficiaries of production.
The quinoa experience further suggests that producer associations are effective at achieving negotiated agreements in defense of common interests—another positive sign for the future of llama development. For example, the increased market pull to grow more quinoa via tractor mechanization caused serious soil erosion and lower production yields. But the producer associations themselves have become the key players for insuring and negotiating higher standards for natural resource conservation; they provide training services for organic technologies and economic incentives for producers by connecting them to markets that pay more for goods produced by sustainable methods.
The experience with quinoa, however, also offers an important lesson: grassroots export businesses have demonstrated a low capacity to transform their raw materials into value-added products. The cooperative federation CECAOT, one of Bolivia’s largest quinoa export firms, has been unable to successfully cross this threshold. Its processed products—popped quinoa, quinoa flours and granolas—represent a small part of its sales despite over 20 years of collective effort to increase the sale of these value-added products. Supporters of the llama economy are likely to encounter the same challenge as they seek to expand the value-added llama hide and fiber industries.
Another grassroots initiative may provide a solution to the challenge of adding value to the labor and products of the altiplano rural producer. The Irupana Andean Organic Food company represents another innovative Andean response to the debilitating legacies of colonialism, flawed agrarian reform, rural modernization paradigms and neoliberal market debacles. Irupana has forged partnership relations among the private sector, NGOs and producer associations from Andean communities to create and market new food product lines combining diverse native resources.[12]
This new-style industry has borrowed from the “verticality” or “vertical archipelago” model practiced by ancient Andean kingdoms, by which polities sought to maximize their access to non-contiguous ecological zones as a basic economic strategy.[13] The model ensured self-sufficiency in bountiful, diverse and nutritious foodstuffs by extending control from the Andean altiplano downward across various altitudinal, vegetative and ecological tiers of the inter-montane valleys and tropical Andean foothills. Irupana is reinventing this ancient model to shape a socially and culturally responsible agribusiness for the 21st century.
Based in the city of La Paz at almost 12,000 feet above sea level, Irupana targets the altiplano and many of the ecological niches on the eastern side of the Andes, including parts of the Amazon basin, for their agricultural and natural products. Named after the town in the high Yungas valleys where its first product, organic gourmet coffee, is grown, Irupana has expanded into a diverse agro-industrial organization over the past 17 years. It has worked with over 1,800 indigenous families—whenever possible through producer associations—and utilized 34 kinds of raw material to develop over 80 different products. Recent annual sales reached more than $2 million through its 18 stores and 300 additional commercial outlets nationwide.
Irupana’s highest grossing products include natural honey, organic gourmet coffee and whole grain breads containing Andean food crops that were historically overlooked by national agricultural policies—grains such as quinoa, canahua and amaranth, and the legume tarhui. One of Irupana’s major achievements was to create a market for these “health foods” in Bolivian cities. Access to these foods is not limited to better-off consumers, however; Irupana supplies 60,000 children from La Paz’s low-income neighborhoods with nutritious Andean granolas through school breakfast programs subsidized by the city’s municipal government.
For millennia, Andean farmers have grown the extremely nutritious tarhui on small mountain plots for use as green manure as well as for food. Although it fails to promote the commercial exploitation of this native legume, the Bolivian state continues to support the razing of eastern tropical forests to grow soybeans on an industrial scale by the agribusiness beneficiaries of Bolivia’s l953 agrarian reform along with foreign companies and commercial producers. State agencies also refused to provide agricultural credit and marketing support to Quechua and Aymara cultivators of quinoa, favoring instead the politically influential commercial producers and crops of the eastern lowlands.
Irupana is now making up for lost time with its vigorous utilization of native crops within an agro-ecological production system. Its practices are undoubtedly inspired by the values and aspirations embodied in Bolivia’s Aymara-led Katarista social movement of the l970s and early l980s. Irupana’s visionary founder and CEO, Javier Hurtado, wrote the definitive account of this movement.[14] The movement reinvigorated Bolivian democracy with greater indigenous participation and cultural politics, and called into question the established Western development model that generates regional and social inequalities and campesino impoverishment. The movement was named after Túpaj Katari, who mobilized many ayllus during the 18th century to mount one of South America’s largest anti-colonial indigenous revolts. Hurtado is now mobilizing native communities around their traditional food crops to implement a long-term vision of Latin America’s most indigenous nation as a kind of postmodern, agro-ecological world leader.
Irupana plans to produce export-quality cereal and protein-concentrated bars to tap the growing popularity of “power bars” in international markets. One such bar has already achieved domestic success. With a concessionary loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank, which has selected Irupana as an exemplary “grassroots business enterprise,” Irupana will be expanding its physical plant over the next year to increase and improve the quality of its health bar production. For its chocolate, Irupana will enter into a joint venture with El Ceibo, one of Bolivia’s largest chocolate enterprises, an entity managed and owned by campesinos of Aymara, Quechua and Moseten descent. Its members produce some of the world’s most highly regarded cocoa beans with organic technologies in the Amazon basin and transform them into chocolate products in their factory on the edge of La Paz. This Amazonian-to-Andean connection is another example of the Andean verticality model in action.
Irupana is striving to work squarely within the Fair Trade movement framework that certifies campesino producers and seeks partnerships with socially responsible private companies. They are promoting the concept that poor countries such as Bolivia can export value-added finished food products, rather than simply raw materials, to the United States and Europe rather than simply raw materials. Other aspects of Irupana’s approach that are innovative for a private company include: gaining a brand name for these products within the United States, providing a stable market and fair price for peasant farmers and enabling small farmers and employees to buy a significant number of shares in the company. Planted solidly on ancient cultural foundations and modern business practices, this grassroots initiative is opening another hopeful and more equitable path for future rural development in Bolivia.
Over the past 25 years, there have been many other examples of rural communities revitalizing native resources for grassroots development. Although positive in their effects and promising in their example, these innovative efforts are relatively modest in scale. Additional economic alternatives that build on the equitable approach of these emerging models are badly needed. Efforts in this direction should count on the resilience of traditional rural communities and the deep reservoir of cultural wealth from which they can draw. Such alternatives are already finding support from the country’s strong indigenous and popular movements as these continue to advance a more inclusive political agenda.
There is also reason to hope that the government will help to build upon such grassroots initiatives and to shape, in the long run, a new Andean rural development paradigm. The social movements imposed on President Carlos Mesa’s government a popular mandate for change last October. Only eight months into his term, the new president signed more land titles than the three previous governments combined. Mesa’s new Minister of Indigenous Affairs and Original Peoples, anthropologist Ricardo Calla, combines his knowledge of Bolivia’s indigenous social movements with deep insight into Bolivia’s rich agrarian cultural heritage—another promising sign.[15] Calla has publicly announced his interest in promoting this heritage by incorporating an indigenous focus into all Bolivian government ministries, such as agriculture and health, rather than confining it to one specialized ministry.
One might also look at the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party with an expectant eye, given its agrarian roots, its grassroots constituencies and its success in putting into the halls of congress a record number of indigenous senators and representatives. Although the MAS is currently in transition from a campesino union movement to a functional political party, and is still struggling to elaborate a coherent set of socioeconomic development alternatives, there have been some promising indications of its possible future agrarian policy orientation. For example, Esteban Silvestre, Aymara MAS Senator of the La Paz region and former Katarista altiplano agrarian union leader, recently presented a proposed “Agro-Ecological Law” to the Senate from his position on the Committee on Sustainable Development and the Environment. Among its important articles, some spell out a role for the state in supporting the country’s growing organic sector of small producers.[16]
Innovative micro-level actors, with emerging political leverage, are creating some quintessentially Andean economic options for the Bolivian altiplano, one of the region’s most impoverished areas. Native Andean resources, maligned for centuries due to cultural prejudice and narrow developmental vision, hold real economic promise for some of the poorest members of Bolivia’s rural society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Healy is adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and author of Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate, Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia (University of Notre Dame, 2001).
NOTES
1. The hacienda system expanded especially during “growth periods” like the republican years of l880-l920, when nation-building doctrines greatly accelerated the destruction of indigenous communities. See: Klein Herbert, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. Miguel Urioste, Segunda reforma agraria, campesinas, tierra y educación popular (La Paz: CEDLA, l987).
3. Kevin Healy, Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate, Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
4. M. Pérez, ¿El ultimo capitulo? Posibles impactos del ALCA en comunidades campesinas e indígenas de Bolivia (La Paz: CEDLA, 2004); Prudencio B. Julio, Integración regional y produccion campesina, La urgencia de políticas de soberanía alimentaria (Bolivia: CIOEC, 2004).
5. With alpacas outnumbering llamas five to one, Peru’s Andean pastoral economy is almost the mirror opposite of Bolivia’s.
6. In fact, rightist military regimes, tied to commercial cattle-ranching interests of eastern Bolivia, passed anti-camelid decrees prohibiting the marketing of llama meat, presumably to protect their beef markets in altiplano cities.
7. Clare Sammells and Lisa Markowitz, “Carne de llama: Alta viabilidad, baja visibilidad” in Didier Genin, Hans-Jachim PIcht, Rodolfo Lizarazu and Tito Rodríguez (eds.), Waira pampa un sistema pastoril camelidos-ovinos del altiplano árido boliviano (La Paz: OSTROM, CONPAC, and IBTA, l995).
8. Ticona and Paredes were steeped in Andean studies and took advice from several North American anthropologists under the tutelage of Cornell anthropologist John Murra.
9. Healy, Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate.
10. There are also the more abundant sweet quinoa varieties that are of less commercial value and are consumed locally and in Bolivian cities.
11. Healy, Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate.
12. The Inter-American Foundation is currently subsidizing PRO-RURAL, a La Paz-based NGO, to work hand in glove with Irupana and grassroots producer associations to provide technical services to campesinos who join this new export program.
13.Alan Kolata, Tiwanaku, the Portrait of an Andean Civilization (Cambridge Blackwell, l993).
14. Hurtado holds a PhD in rural sociology from the University of Berlin and worked for six years in grassroots development in Aymara communities with NGOs.
15. Calla was previously director of the Universidad de la Cordillera, has written many articles on indigenous social movements and has also produced extensive reports on indigenous development resources for European donors and the Inter-American Development Bank.
16. This initiative originated with the National Association of Ecological Producers of Bolivia, reaching Silvestre and the Senate through the effective coordinated lobbying of new indigenous political leaders and networks of small-scale producers.
