Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 157, March 2019, Pages 80-91
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Mapping and Analyzing Ecological Distribution Conflicts in Andean Countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.11.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Changes and growth in the social metabolism of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia cause environmental conflicts.

  • We analyze 296 conflicts against "extractivism" in these countries, combining ecological economics and political ecology.

  • Outcomes vary from success in stopping projects to compromise solutions to naked violence against environmental defenders.

  • Local and national social movements are born from such conflicts, and also new Andean concepts such as buen vivir

Abstract

The extractive sector is increasingly important in the GDP and export basket of the four Andean countries under study (ACs) (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia). The analysis of an updated inventory of 296 environmental conflicts in the EJAtlas for these four countries reaches the following conclusions: extractivism causes environmental conflicts related to mining, fossil fuels, hydropower and biomass; indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities are the most affected; behind the conflicts, there are not only environmental impacts but also social impacts that concern livelihoods, land deprivation and work insecurity, and also loss of cultural practices and cultural identity; most of the forms of collective action used in protests are peaceful, most notably petitions, street marches, media activism, lawsuits, while States and companies criminalize activists and are often violent (with about 75 cases in which there are deaths or disappearance of environmental defenders); socio-environmental movements (that sometimes include environmental NGOs) have achieved relative success, stopping 59 of the 296 conflict-generating projects and giving birth to new forms of resistance. While successfully stopping single projects cannot be construed as a general critique of economic growth, such attempts are congruent with post-development, community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive Andean visions such as buen vivir or sumak kawsay. They are also congruent with policy proposals put forward from a post-economic growth perspective such as “leaving unburnable fuels in the ground” and “resource extraction caps”.

Introduction

Our purpose is to reach conclusions from the analysis of many cases of environmental conflicts in the Andean countries in a framework of comparative, statistical political ecology drawing from three main concepts in ecological economics: “social metabolism”, “ecological distribution conflicts” and “valuation languages”. We delve beneath the surface manifestations of environmental conflicts related to mineral ores, hydroelectric dams, public infrastructures, biomass or fossil fuels extraction in order to uncover their material causes in the growth and changes in the social metabolism accompanied by changes in public policies and trends of the world economy. In Latin America (LA) and the Andean countries (ACs), a process known as reprimarization or neo-extractivism has grown in the last decades (Acosta-Medina, 2011; Azamar, 2017; Gudynas, 2009, Gudynas, 2010, Gudynas, 2013; Lander, 2014; Nadal, 2009; Slipak, 2013; Vallejo, 2010). As a consequence, there have been increased collective disputes over territorial rights, pollution and loss of ecosystems services.

Ecological distribution conflicts is a type of social conflicts not co-terminous with economic distribution conflicts on salaries vs. profits, land rents, prices of agricultural products, interest rates paid by debtors to creditors. In Ecological Distribution Conflicts (Martinez-Alier, 1995; Martinez-Alier and O'Connor, 1996), which is being distributed are the burdens of pollution and the access to natural resources and ecosystem services. Complaints on ecological distribution are often expressed in valuation languages (Martinez-Alier, 2002) different from economic compensation for damages. Thus, in gold mining in Latin America complaints against water grabbing and water pollution are often expressed in the grassroots aphorism El agua vale más que el oro, meaning “water is more valuable than gold”. What is meant is not that 1 kg of water is more expensive in money terms than 1 kg of gold but that water is more valuable than gold in other standards of value.

Primary specialization has generated a large literature in LA on the accumulation of capital based on the exploitation of natural resources, which has been denoted by various terms, including reprimarization, deindustrialization, extractivism and neo-extractivism. Reprimarization is understood as the reorientation of an economy's resources or productive profile towards predominantly primary-extractive activities with reduced added economic value (Slipak, 2014).

Reprimarization rejects the possibility of establishing one long-term scheme for the consolidation of those productive lines in which a country could become competitive through a dynamic process (Schuldt, 1994). In the name of “comparative advantages”, specialization in primary producers is promoted, increasing environmental pressures (Perez-Rincón, 2006, Pérez-Rincón, 2008). The volume of exported primary products increases, and structurally their prices are low compared to imported products. As often discussed in ecological economics, there is ecologically unequal exchange (Hornborg, 1998; Perez-Rincón, 2006; Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016; Samaniego et al., 2017). In the present article our focus is on the local effects and struggles around “extractivism” rather than on national policies to cope with negative terms of trade.

Recently, several authors note that from the 1990s on, AC and South America as a whole deepened the trend towards an extractivist or neo-extractivist model (Gudynas, 2009, Gudynas, 2013; Svampa, 2012; Acosta Espinosa, 2012), applied by both “neoliberal” governments (such as in Colombia and Peru) and by “nationalist-popular governments” (such as those of Ecuador and Bolivia). The term “extractivism” can refer to all types of economic activities involving the extraction of natural resources (Gudynas, 2013), including sectors such as mining, forestry, fisheries, the agro-industrial sector and infrastructure projects. Some activities transform the environment moderately, whereas others alter it beyond ecological and social thresholds (Sarmiento, 2017). In Ecuador and Bolivia there was a progressive “neo-extractivism” (Gudynas, 2009), allowing for a more active role of the State through greater control over natural resources and the benefits of their extraction. These activities finance social programs, ensuring new sources of social legitimacy and situating extractivism as an essential means for combating poverty and promoting “development”. However, many of the pathologies of traditional or neo-liberal extractivism (as in Colombia and Peru) are maintained in progressive neo-extractivism.

Regardless of their name, economic activities linked to the extraction and commercialization of natural resources with little added value and emphasizing the external market are linked to large social and environmental unpaid liabilities. As argued elsewhere in this issue (Abulut et al., 2018) the common ground that conjoins post-growth (or degrowth) and environmental justice is not merely a call for a reduction in social metabolism. It is also the pursuit of internal and international socio-ecological justice. Communities living at the commodity extraction frontiers lose ways and means of life, social networks, cultural structures and their customary rights over the common goods upon which they depend, and they complain accordingly in an “environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous” (Martinez-Alier, 2002). The expansion of the frontier often includes territories with great wealth in ecosystem services such as páramos, wetlands, tropical forests, mangroves, etc., which is why many environmental groups and institutions seek to defend those territories.

Externalities (which are more accurately seen as systematic “cost-shifting”, Kapp, 1950) are generated by changes in land use, the introduction of new extractive activities, changes in production technologies, the expansion of economic frontiers. This process contradicts the property rights, usufructs, activities pursuant to which these geographical spaces have been used by the local communities which become victims of the “coloniality of power” (Quijano and Ennis, 2000) and of “environmental racism” (Bullard, 1983, Bullard, 1990).

Such conflicts can be seen as the manifestation of social contradictions in the human-nature relationship between two or more actors (communities, national private companies, foreign companies, non-governmental organization or the State) because of human activity that modifies the conditions of a place in terms of use of the environment. Such changes generate nonconformities that are manifested through vocabularies of protest or repertoires of collective actions of rejection such as marches, blockades, lawsuits, petitions to the authorities, etc.

The mobilized groups put forward different arguments that seek the conservation or preservation of nature and also the conservation of ethical, cultural and aesthetic values in their relationship with the natural environment, and the consideration of the environment as a provider of livelihoods for communities. In well known cases in Colombia and Ecuador, local indigenous communities (the U'Wa, the Sarayaku) anticipated the calls to “leave oil in the soil” or, equivalently, to leave the “unburnable fuels” underground. This became public policy for six years in Ecuador with the Yasuni ITT proposal, 2007–2013 (Vallejo et al., 2015). As we shall see below, there are currently many attempts in AC to stop mining and hydropower projects, and also oil palm plantations. Environmental conflicts lose their local character, generating a vast global movement for environmental justice (and for a less unsustainable economy) through participation in networks that seek to visibilize and resist on broader territorial scales (Scheidel et al., 2018; Martinez-Alier et al., 2016; Temper et al., 2015; Pérez-Rincón et al., 2018) developing a whole new vocabulary of environmental justice (Martinez-Alier et al., 2014). The EJAtlas itself (see below) is a product of this global movement for environmental justice and seeks to support it.

This article aims mainly to characterize the conflicts in the AC region, focusing on four countries only (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia). It is structured as follows. After this introduction, the methodology used to identify the extractivist process is presented in both chrematistic (monetary) and metabolic terms; evidence of conflicts will then be drawn from the EJAtlas for the four Andean economies studied. Then, the results of the analysis of conflicts, the discussion and the conclusions are presented.

Section snippets

Materials and Methods

For the analysis of productive specialization and environmental conflicts in ACs, both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used. Two major activities were performed: the construction of a database that includes economic and metabolic flow information and the inventory of environmental conflicts in the region.

Monetary statistics were taken from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) for the period 1990–2014. For the Material Flow database (MFA), the

Economic and Metabolic Dynamics of Andean Countries

Under the impetus of static comparative advantages and internal and external policy decisions, ACs emphasized their specialization in the production and export of natural-intensive goods. In monetary terms, and at the aggregate level of the four countries analyzed, the primary sector went from representing 64% of all exports in 1990 to 73% in 2014. This increase can be attributed partly to a decline in the share of manufactured goods, which went from representing 20% to 12%; that is, whereas

Discussion

The ecological distribution conflicts in AC respond to the characteristics of these countries' social metabolism. Compared to Europe, Japan, the United States or Argentina, the absence of nuclear power and nuclear conflicts is obvious, while the incidence of fossil fuels and metal mining conflicts is remarkable. Among the protagonist of such conflicts, peasant and indigenous population abound in the Andean countries (both in the uplands and in the Amazonian lowlands), often the victims of

Conclusions

Biophysical or ecological economics highlights the growth and changes in the metabolic patterns. One general conclusion is that the many conflicts reported originate from the changes in the extractive economy of the region, specialized towards the primary sector as reflected in both monetary and metabolic terms.

The four AC under study have experienced growth in the extraction of materials, and also in their export. The growth of the abiotic sector of the economy (mineral ores, fossil fuels) has

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to projects MESOCA-ANCA, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia and ERC Advanced Grant EnvJustice 2016-21, ICTA-Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. We also thank the reviewers.

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