The Social Metabolism of Tropical Agriculture: Agrarian Extractivism in Colombia (1916–2016)

Abstract

Extensification and intensification of current agrarian systems through the industrial model are responses to the increasing demands for food, feed, new biofuels, and raw materials, driven by growths in population, urbanisation, and incomes. At the same time, these changes have been responsible for the acceleration of climate change and the socio-ecological crisis. These challenges are especially true for developing countries, where this agrarian change have become more intensive. Rainforest was the primary source of agricultural land in the tropics from 1980 to 1990 and developing countries have more recently experienced the major growth of fertilizer use in agriculture.

This change in tropical agriculture in developing countries was embedded in the institutional changes of the Second Globalization (since c. 1980). Since the 1980s, the adoption of the deregulation function by the state in promoting national policies of agricultural production and establishing the agro-export model has complemented filling the shelves of supermarkets in developed countries. The decoupling of production from consumption, fuelled by international trade, was designed to serve foreign debt after the 1980s crisis. In this context, the promotion of new agricultural products in exports like tropical fruits and fresh vegetables became the rule in developing countries.

Opposed to this agro-export model, an agro-ecological, small-scale, peasant-based family-farming model has been promoted by peasant and other social movements. Rooted in the understanding of agroecology as a social movement, a practice, and a science, this new model of agriculture allows us to think in terms of the design of resilient agrarian and food systems in both ecological and social respects, thus reconciling sustainable goals with peasant agency. In this vein, the FAO’s tool for agroecological performance evaluation (TAPE) measures the level of achievement of this agroecological transition based on the five levels including the efficiency of current practices, substitution by more agroecological based managements, redesign according to ecological processes, and the re-building of social networks and democratic participation.

Therefore, understanding the interactions between the institutional constraints (both domestically and internationally) and the economy's material bases making the path of tropical agroecosystems and its changes in long-term history become key to informing the process of transitions from the unsustainable model towards more resilient scenarios grounded in agroecology.

This thesis aims to understand the changes in the material bases of tropical agriculture throughout its transition from the organic model to the current conventional one and the socio-environmental consequences of this transformation, as well as the role of institutional settings that have driven this process, both nationally and internationally. The thesis addresses three main research questions:

• How did agrarian change take place in Colombia from a biophysical point of view? • What were the main forces driving these changes? • What were the environmental consequences of this socio-ecological transition of agriculture?

The main argument is that the extractive profile of the biophysical flows of matter and energy in extractive agriculture simply reflect the extractivism of the institutional setting. The global changes over time in the power relationship between the political elites ruling the state, the local agrarian elites, and the poor peasants, together with the international incentives and constrains, have shaped the material profile of extractive tropical agriculture. This thesis transits through quantitative and qualitative research on the long-term trajectory of Colombian agriculture to answer these questions and prove this argument.

First, I analyse land use and biomass production to set the broad picture of the agrarian system as a system devoted to the extraction of pasture and cash crops. Then, while the historical bias towards cattle ranching and the agrarian policy cast some light on this profile, I introduce the broader context of the ecologically unequal exchange in international trade for the whole economy of the Latin American region and focus on agricultural trade and armed conflict in Colombia to understand the market and non-market mechanisms that have created food dependence and tropical specialization since the Second Globalization. Finally, the analysis of agroecological energy performance and its comparison with temperate agriculture in developed countries helps establish the timing of the socio-ecological transition in Colombia and the environmental burden of the agrarian change towards intensification after the 1980s, as a differential trait of the socio-metabolic transition of tropical agriculture. The overall material profile and its changes are understood in light of the proposed framework of agrarian extractivism and are supported by the stylized facts of the country's agrarian history in the twentieth century.