RETHINKING RURAL CITIZENSHIP IN COMMODITY REGIONS. LESSONS FROM THE LOS LAGOS REGION, CHILE

Abstract

Recent literature on commodity frontiers and resource-based economies has reopened the debate surrounding the effects of extractive economies on people’s connection to a political system that sustains predominant modes of production. However, the debate has focused on struggles and broader political tensions between social movements and private companies or the State. The present article adopts a different approach, reflecting on the emergence of distinct forms of citizenship in rural territories. Through examining the salmon industry in the Los Lagos region of Chile, I identify connections between commodity production, place-based identity politics, and citizenship performance. I argue that the concept of rural citizenship understood here as the set of practices of relating to the state grounded in a rural sense of belonging and assessment of the place rural areas have in the frontier project is central to understanding political participation in commodity regions and is informed by the trialectic relationship between place identity, commodity production, and the democratic institutions in place. The article concludes with an invitation for further research into frontier politics from a commodity perspective.

Keywords:

• Chilean Patagonia
• commodity frontiers
• rural citizenship
• salmon industry

Acknowledgment

The author thanks Alvaro Roman and Lindsey Carte for their comments for earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹ As part of the ethics protocols approved for the research, we changed all names for generic descriptors.

² Decree Law 600 was passed in 1974 to promote foreign direct investment by means of a reduction (or elimination) of taxes and fees. Decree Law 701, also passed in 1974, sought to attract investment in the forestry sector and to turn over the landscape of southern Chile to timber-related industries. Both pieces of legislation have been identified as key in the neoliberalization of regional economic activities.

³ According to the Chilean State, the Patagonian territory stretches from the Province of Palena in the Los Lagos region to Cape Horn in the Magallanes region.

⁴ Moore defines it as the prevailing mode through which capital organizes nature, wealth and power to create cheap labor and cheap nature that sustain accumulation.

⁵ Sanitary food regulation, Supreme Decree 977/96.

⁶ Interviewees estimated that the addition of services would double the price of beef from US$4 to US$8 per kilogram.

⁷ Solanum tuberosum L., a potato disease caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary.

⁸ https://www.latercera.com/noticia/inedito-estudio-satelital-detecta-30-toneladas-basura-playa-chiloe/(accessed June 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (CONICYT-ANID) Fondecyt Nº. 1160848.