Poverty, Injustice, and the Ecological Crisis

1. Poverty, Injustice, and the Ecological Crisis By Daniel Faber

2. The Capitalization of Nature • After WWII Central America was considered “underdeveloped” and was dependent on the markets of the “first world” • Regional exports were dominated by coffee and bananas • In the 1950’s America assumed a more active role in expanding dependent capitalist development in central America • Alliance for Progress (1961): Aimed to promote social and economic stability through the modernization, diversification, and the expansion of capitalist export industry.

3. Alliance for Progress Results • Gave oligarchs, bankers, and military officers power to take newly created wealth • Resulted in impoverishment that led to revolutionary struggles in the 1970’s • Promoted large-scale agriculture • Forests, wildlife habitat, and peasant communities were cleared away.

4. Displaced peasants began working as wage laborers in cotton fields • Cattle ranching in Central America began to expand • Ecologically disastrous • Forests destroyed to create pasture • Deboned frozen beef became a major export in the 1970’s

5. Disarticulated Development • Export diversification (capitalist development) has intensified Central American dependency on the U.S. and international capital • Sectoral disarticulation • Industries that produce agricultural items (ex. machines) and industries that produce items(ex. rope) from raw agricultural goods have not been developed in the processing of the primary commodities produced by the capitalist sector.

6. Social Disarticulation • The region possesses little consumption capacity for commodities produced by the capitalist export sector. • Peasants and the working class are not sources of consumer demand • As a result the regions economy is very vulnerable to world market conditions • This condition is magnified by the smallness and openness of the region’s economy

7. Competition pushes firms to cut as many costs as possible. Usually pollution control is the first to go • Central American companies are fairly free of effective environmental and community health regulations. This allows industries to freely damage the environment • Costs become externalized • Some of the worst industries are coffee plants and tanneries

8. Labor • Central America maintains its competitive place in the world market by minimizing the costs of labor • The health and safety of workers are neglected • Workers have no protective devices and are exposed to pesticides

9. The Creation of Migrant Workers • Central America’s capitalist export sector reduces labor costs by maintaining the peasant subsistence sector. Part of the subsistence costs of hired labor are provided by unpaid family members who labor on subsistence plots. Therefore the capitalist sector offers wages lower than the cost of maintaining the worker. • Functional Dualism

10. Functional Dualism • Involves the overdevelopment of the export sector and the underdevelopment of the subsistence sector that is revealed in the social and ecological impoverishment of peasantry • Peasants need for survival forces them to work as migratory laborers. The most important mechanism for the impoverishment of these peasants is land tenure

11. The harvest of export crops occurs in the dry season, when peasants are not cultivating their own crops. This means that peasant families can migrate and work while minimally affecting their own crops • This plays into functional dualism • Typical wages of $1.25-$1.50 a day • Health problems from functional dualism include • Malnutrition • Endemic parasite infestation • Infectious diseases • Work injuries • Increased alcoholism, stress, and increased STD’s

12. Costa Rica and the Honduras • Relatively stable subsistence sector • The development of a large, prosperous class of family coffee farmers • Higher incomes and better employment and living standards for banana workers • Small number of large-scale cotton growers (less demand for labor) • Fairly secure land titles and better services for peasants • More extensive agrarian reform programs • Relatively low percent of agricultural production is exported

13. Peasant Resources • In functional dualism, peasants depend on adequate social and natural resources. • Central America’s peasants are denied access to state extension programs to promote sustainability (intercropping, organic fertilization, etc.) as well as to credit and social services. • Peasants respond to impoverishment by overexploiting natural resources

14. The Environment and Subsistence Production • Deforestation • Declining fallow cycles • Land degradation • Severe soil erosion • Watershed destruction • Fish, wildlife, and wood shortages • Droughts and floods • Studies have shown that farmers who own their own land are more likely to practice conservation measures than those who rent or sharecrop

15. Other Peasant Issues • In Guatemala the ecological and social crisis is being magnified by the army. The army has murdered citizens, eliminated villages, and destroyed forests and fields. • The marginalization of peasants is offset through migration. • In San Salvador, 75% of the population lives in illegal settlements. • Untreated sewage, protein shortages, low standard of living

16. Gender Roles • After the revolution, women in the work force dramatically dropped • Woman are especially burdened • Raising animals, preparing food, gathering wood and water, shopping for food, helping with farming. • The poorer families become, the larger they become • Children are needed for labor • Insurance against infant mortality • Can protect parents who are disabled, old, or unemployed

17. Population Control • Designed to maintain control over populations in order to meet labor requirements • To maintain the myth that poverty is created and reproduced by the oppressed themselves • Sponsored by the U.S. (tens of millions) • Population control or controlling the population? • Some forced sterilization

18. Proposed Solutions • Changes to popular organizations • Trade unions • Farmer associations • Women and student groups • Need to • Respect human rights • Genuine democratization of the state in terms of broad-based participation • Economic reform and a just distribution of land and natural resources • A foreign policy of nonalignment • An end to U.S. military and economic intervention

19. Proposed Solutions • Agrarian reform: redistribution of export estate land to bring farmers off marginal lands (eroded hillsides) • Environmental and social restoration • Reforestation, toxic cleanup, habitat recuperation, watershed protection, • Government promotion of appropriate technology and land use • Public investment is social programs

20. Proposed Solutions • International support for radical ecology • Foreign help in reconstruction efforts • Regulation of transnational corporations and financial institutions • Promotion of food self-reliance • Price supports for primary commodities • Accountability of private and multilateral lenders to environmental and social concerns • Overall transformation of disarticulated capitalist development