State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

Abstract

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures – the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two – is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.

Keywords:

• Via Campesina
• Gramsci
• hegemony
• Polanyi
• food regime
• peasant organizations

Introduction

The Via Campesina (VC) presents the food sovereignty movement (FSM) as a counter-hegemonic ‘movement of movements’ attempting to radically transform the neoliberal food regime. The discourse of food sovereignty emanating from peasant organizations and the analysts and activists who promote and defend it articulates a radical alternative to neoliberalism. However, counter-hegemonic discourse is not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice. This contribution will critically examine the VC’s FSM as a political project attempting to transform the neoliberal food regime in favour of environmentally sustainable and democratically operated production systems. It will look at the extent to which VC organizations in Mexico and Ecuador, CIOAC (Central Independiente de Obreros Agrícolas y Campesinos)¹ and FENOCIN (Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas y Negras) in particular, may or may not be considered transformative forces that challenge the political foundations of the current food system. The analysis will focus on how the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures is central to determining not only the nature and relative success of peasant movement struggles, but also the extent to which these struggles are, in practice, counter-hegemonic.

Methodology

This paper is based on 10 months of fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2013 with CIOAC in Mexico and FENOCIN in Ecuador. The national leaderships of both organizations provided me with full access to their archives, facilitated my access to rural communities in which they work, and allowed me to interview members and leaders at all levels. In Mexico I carried out semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation with CIOAC’s members and leaders in the southeastern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero. I then spent six weeks with the national leadership in Mexico City, where I also interviewed leaders of Mexico’s other VC organizations.² CIOAC currently works in 28 of Mexico’s 31 states. The majority of the organization’s members in the southeastern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero are land poor (on average accessing between 0.25 and two hectares of marginal land) and depend mainly on off-farm income for survival, supplemented by subsistence cultivation and coffee production.

In Ecuador I similarly carried out semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation with FENOCIN organizations in the coastal provinces of Los Ríos, Esmeraldas and El Oro, and the Andean provinces of Imbabura and Tungurahua. I then spent one month with the organization’s national leadership in Quito, from where I also interviewed the leaders of Ecuador’s other VC organizations.³ FENOCIN is composed of 65 organizations working across 19 of Ecuador’s 24 provinces. The organization’s coastal members typically cultivate cacao on smallholdings of four to five hectares, and also work year-round on nearby banana and palm oil plantations. In contrast, FENOCIN’s indigenous Andean members occupy on average 0.25–1.5-hectare plots dedicated almost exclusively to subsistence crops. Off-farm wage work predominates household income, and landed production acts mainly a wage subsidy.

The food sovereignty movement: counter-hegemonic or defensive?

Much has been written on food sovereignty as an alternative model of food and agriculture (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011; Rosset 2011; Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012), the contradictions within its own discourses (Patel 2009; Agarwal 2014; Alonso-Fradejas et al. 2015), and challenges relating to its practical application (Burnett and Murphy 2014; Edelman 2014; McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley 2014; Schiavoni 2015; Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder 2015). However, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which peasant organizations use the food sovereignty discourse to wrest concessions from the state within the existing neoliberal model. The literature tends to assume that, in the words of Carroll and Ratner (2010, 8), ‘contemporary social movements are, prima facia [sic], agents of counter-hegemony in their organized dissent to the existing order’. The VC is typically presented as a movement struggling for social transformation based on a rejection of the existing hegemonic neoliberal food regime and its replacement by a sustainable, peasant-based model of food and agriculture (McMichael 2006, 2008; Desmarais 2007; Teubal 2010; Rosset 2011). However, a focus on discourse alone, without an examination of organizational practices, can easily lead to the misrepresentation of the movement’s actual goals and its transformative potential.

This contribution will argue that peasant organizations that constitute the VC are not necessarily counter-hegemonic, despite being portrayed as such by much of the food sovereignty literature. As McKay Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley (2014, 1177) argue, food sovereignty cannot be conceived of as a finite outcome; it is better understood as a political space and terrain of struggle for influence over food and agriculture policies. Analysed in Gramscian terms, a counter-hegemonic social organization is guided by a revolutionary political project that seeks to fundamentally transform society and capitalist social relations as the basis for a new state and economic system (Gramsci 2007, 153). However, rather than seeking to transform the state and capitalist social relations, many contemporary peasant organizations are better understood as defensive anti-neoliberal counter-movements along Polanyian lines. For Polanyi, attempts by the forces of economic (neo)liberalism to construct market society (the subordination of political and social structures to the principles of a self-regulating free market economy) are met by contending forces that seek social protection against the inherent dangers of relegating the needs of society to those of a self-regulating market system (Polanyi 2002, 138). Although the rhetoric of VC organizations may be counter-hegemonic, this is often a political tool used to mobilize their bases and guide (defensive) negotiations with national states implicated in the promotion of neoliberal policies systematically destroying the viability of the peasant economy. As Trauger (2014, 1140) argues, concrete demands framed in the discourse of food sovereignty often call for more regulation and state oversight to displace the power of transnational capital with territorial state-based policies, not systemic transformation towards a post-capitalist model of food and agriculture. In reality, many contemporary peasant organizations of the VC call for a reform of neoliberal capitalism, not the replacement of capitalism as such, and are therefore better understood as Polanyian defensive reactions to the imposition of market society (Silva 2009, 15–18).

Whereas counter-hegemonic movements seek to transform the neoliberal food regime’s underlying mechanisms of exploitation, oppression and impoverishment, defensive counter-movements seek protections and entitlements within this regime (i.e. they seek to reshape existing hegemony, rather than to transform it). This paper will argue that peasant organizations’ internal structures and their relations with the state heavily shape the extent to which they are able to mount and sustain counter-hegemonic projects, or whether they more accurately represent protective counter-movements that seek to defend their members from the impacts of neoliberal capitalism.

Of particular importance to the success of peasant movement struggles is the role of peasant leaders in negotiating with the state and organizing and shaping the demands of their bases into coherent and effective political strategies. However, the food sovereignty literature in general fails to critically examine the relationship between movement leaders and those they represent, tending to assume rather than demonstrate internal democracy (Fox 1992, 2). As Edelman (1999, 185) points out, a relatively unproblematic view is taken of how organizing takes place, with most scholars tending to uncritically accept leaders’ downplaying of their own impact and their related efforts to represent movements as spontaneous expressions of popular discontent.⁴ In reality, representation within peasant organizations is a complex issue. Most movements are built on partial rather than full representation of a specific constituency (Robbins 2015, 453), and the social base(s) they represent are often dynamic and shift over time (Henderson 2016).

Peasant organizations also face the constant threat of leadership cooptation as the state attempts to neutralize or selectively incorporate opposition into its own project for the purpose of social stability and legitimacy. As Otero (2004) argues, forms of representation and accountability between leaders and their bases can either inhibit the state’s strategy of neutralizing counter-hegemonic threats by embedding leaders in their organizations (e.g. ‘popular democratic’ organizations), or facilitate this strategy if leaders and their decision-making power are relatively autonomous from those they represent (i.e. more ‘authoritarian’ or hierarchical organizations). As we will see below, the level of accountability, or ‘embeddedness’, of leaders within the structures of their organizations has major consequences for the nature of peasant organization demands.

Throughout this contribution, peasant organizations’ internal structures will be examined on the basis of the class characteristics of their mass bases, their national leaderships, and the modes of interaction and representation between the two. This corresponds to Gramsci’s (2007, 152) model for the modern prince in which, he states, three fundamental elements must converge for the creation and development of a counter-hegemonic force; (1) ‘a mass element’ – the mass bases of CIOAC and FENOCIN in our case; (2) ‘the principle cohesive element’ – both organizations’ national leaderships; and (3) ‘an intermediate element which articulates the first element with the second and maintains contact between them physically, morally and intellectually’. This element will here refer to the modes of interaction between the national leaderships and the bases, i.e. accountability and forms of representation.

Different peasant organizations use their membership in the VC and its powerful food sovereignty discourse for very different purposes. In Mexico, CIOAC and other VC members have been neutralized as potential counter-hegemonic threats since the early 1990s by the state and its clientelist policies. Peasant organizations’ functional dependence on the state has encouraged the use of the discourse of food sovereignty completely decoupled from any form of its practice; rather than transformation of the neoliberal food regime, the discourse is invoked as a political tool aimed at defending and increasing access to palliative state resources within the current neoliberal model. However, within the restrictive conditions of neo-corporatism, the food sovereignty discourse is still very useful politically and has acted as a defensive tool in struggles to prevent the Mexican state from completely abandoning the peasant sector to the self-regulating market. Mexico’s VC organizations frame their demands as transformative, but their goals are overwhelmingly protective, seeking greater state intervention to support the peasantry within the existing model. In contrast, Ecuador’s peasant movement – historically relatively more politically autonomous vis-à-vis the state than its Mexican counterpart – has combined a food sovereignty discourse with sustained actions for its practical implementation, culminating in the inclusion of food sovereignty in the National Constitution. However, the alliance made between FENOCIN and President Rafael Correa from 2006 has distanced the organization’s leadership from its bases and weakened its transformative potential in the face of Correa’s backtracking on promises to implement food sovereignty. As peasant leaders lost contact with their bases, Correa’s project reached down to rural communities, garnering widespread support for both his presidency and his own definitions of food sovereignty which are far removed from those proposed by the national peasant movement. Nevertheless, constitutional articles pertaining to food sovereignty are used by the latter as a defensive political tool now that food sovereignty is enshrined in the nation’s constitution.

The institutionalization of the Mexican peasant movement and its organizational structures

Following President Cardenas’ (1934–1940) sweeping agrarian reform programme, the mass of the Mexican peasantry was incorporated into the PRI (the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional) via the CNC (Confederación Nacional Campesina) – the PRI’s official peasant organization. The corporatist relations developed by the PRI through the CNC were imbued with authoritarian, patrimonial and patron–client traits. Ejidos (rural communities constituted on social property relations) created under agrarian reform were politically controlled by the PRI which organized their internal affairs through ‘comisariados ejidales’ – local strongmen responsible for administering federal resources and social welfare programmes in return for social and political control of their populations (Mackinlay and Otero 2004, 77–80).

The ‘Central Campesina Independiente’ (CCI – precursor to CIOAC) was formed in 1961 as the rural branch of the Mexican Communist Party and implemented very similar internal organizational structures to those created by the PRI via the CNC. The CCI was constructed on a Leninist political party model (Terán 2010, 38) characterized by hierarchical leadership structures, centralized decision-making processes, and the implementation of organizational activities and strategies via directives transmitted down from the national leadership committee to the bases. CIOAC’s current structure and practices remain heavily shaped by its Leninist party origins with national, state and municipal leaders not democratically elected by the organization’s mass base. Instead, regional political elites (caciques) with access to clientelist state resource channels form the organization’s state level committees. The national leadership – where power is centralized – is decided upon by, and drawn from, the most influential state-level leaders whose position within the organization depends largely on the mobilizational capacity of their bases, and their ability to maintain and expand their regional membership through successful management of state resource channels.⁵ This centralized organizational structure and Mexico’s history of state corporatism are mutually constitutive and continue to shape both the state’s strategies of social control and VC organizations’ capacity to mount and sustain transformative political projects.

In the late 1980s, Mexico’s national peasant movement entered into crisis when President Salinas institutionalized formerly ‘independent’ peasant organizations, including CIOAC, by formally incorporating them into clientelistic state resource channels in order to bolster his administration’s legitimacy following a fraudulent 1988 election victory. In return for guaranteed access to state resources these organizations ceased demands for land redistribution and tacitly accepted Salinas’ reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which ended the state’s obligation to agrarian reform. Social protests against the regime could lead to withdrawal of these resources, threatening organizational leaderships whose ‘success’ in the eyes of their members came to increasingly rely on channelling state projects to their communities. The peasant movement’s institutionalization also reconfigured the ways in which peasant organizations conceived of, and organized to bring about, social change.

Following Salinas’ administration (1988–1994), CIOAC’s centralist structure increasingly became a mechanism of state resource channelling in return for leaders’ social control of their own bases.

As social organizations we have been a factor in controlling various things that could have caused big problems in this country …  . We have been part of the control of people’s anger, of movements and more dangerous things. The government has wanted to control this with projects, state resources, across the whole country …  . This is how it works with the handouts, which are palliatives for poverty but at the same time they become an instrument of control.

(José Dolores López Barrios, CIOAC’s former national secretary, personal communication, 29 January 2013)

Critical to this control was the leadership’s ongoing ‘consent’ of the state’s legitimacy and its application of neoliberal policies. This ‘consent’ is a relative and complex notion whose understanding requires analytical separation between the organization’s discourse and its practice. CIOAC’s leaders sustain demands for food sovereignty with an official organizational discourse that consistently rejects neoliberal policies. However, in practice the organization has become dependent on the state’s apparatus of legitimation in a way that severely restricts its ability to actively contest the neoliberalism it discursively rejects. Nevertheless, CIOAC uses the discourse of food sovereignty to wrest material concessions from the state, even if these concessions do not seek transformation of the existing model despite the organization’s stated commitments. Analysis of the movement ‘El Campo No Aguanta Mas’ demonstrates how this discourse is used in practice, and contemporary state-peasant movement relations continue to be defined by the consequences of this uprising.

Mexico’s food sovereignty movement and ‘El Campo No Aguanta Mas’ (‘the countryside can’t take any more’)

Mexico’s FSM emerged in the mid-1990s in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the impacts of trade liberalization on the peasant sector. Luis Meneses, UNORCA’s national leader at the time, highlights how, from the outset, the uptake of the discourse of food sovereignty represented a protective counter-movement to the implementation of neoliberal policies.

In the context of NAFTA it [food sovereignty] became a unifying banner for us and other organizations. We proposed that to defend food sovereignty meant that the government could not abandon the countryside. It meant organizing a national system of production – with campesinos. It meant defending the small producer. It meant forming our own instruments to confront the market, to feed Mexico.

(Luis Meneses, founder and ex-national president of UNORCA, personal communication, 21 February 2013)

The demands of Mexico’s VC organizations for ‘food sovereignty’ are ideologically guided by the policies of the period of economic nationalism (1940–1982) and the defense of the wide array of mechanisms present during this period to protect the peasant sector from the full force of the market. As Silva (2009, 20–21) argues, despite its problems, this period remains the benchmark by which to measure contemporary achievements for many of Latin America’s social movements. For many peasant organizations, President Lopez-Portillo’s (1976–1982) SAM (Sistema Alimentario Mexicano) programme implemented between 1980 and 1982 – which aimed to achieve national self-sufficiency in basic grains through state support to the peasant sector – heavily shapes contemporary conceptions of what ‘food sovereignty’ means. Although the programme tended to benefit the most capitalized peasant classes, actually widened rural inequality, and suffered from a lack of accountability and efficiency (Fox 1993, 57–86), its ideological underpinnings – state support for the peasant sector with the aim of achieving national food self-sufficiency – remain a reference point for many peasant leaders.

Fundamentally the concept of food sovereignty is based on this experience [the SAM programme], in us producing what we consume …  . Peasants, on their land, to feed themselves and the general population.

(Leticia López Zepeda, national coordinator for ANEC, personal communication, 8 February 2013)

The desire for a national agricultural system based primarily on peasant production supported by the state is in stark contrast to Mexico’s rural policies in the neoliberal era that have decoupled the issue of economic development from that of poverty reduction. While the majority of state resources for productive development are focused on the most ‘efficient’, or capitalized, producers in the north of the country (Fox and Haight 2010; see also Subsidios al Campo en México [2016] for data on the geographical distribution of Mexico’s main agricultural subsidies), the masses of the peasant sector have become recipients of paternalistic social policies that aim to alleviate the worst aspect of poverty without dealing with their root causes (Bartra 2001, 11). However, the capacity of peasant organizations to defend their members’ livelihoods against neoliberal economic policies, and promote national food systems supplied by peasant production, is heavily restricted by (neo)corporatist relations with the Mexican state and their own internal structures.

The defeat of the PRI in Mexico’s 2000 national elections and Fox’s victory as a PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) candidate marked the start of a new era in Mexico’s political history, following 70 years of PRI rule. Soon after taking office Fox acted on the promises of his electoral campaign to do away with PRI’s neo-corporatist strategies, and financial support was withdrawn from peasant organizations (Grammont and Mackinlay 2006, 36; José Dolores López Barrios, CIOAC’s national secretary, personal communication, 29 January 2013). Instead, the government turned to transnational corporations, dynamic national capitalist producer sectors and agribusiness organizations as principal interlocutors with the state. For peasant organizations this was seen as an attempt to break all ties (and responsibilities) with the peasantry in its goal of promoting capitalist efficiency in the countryside (Grammont and Mackinlay 2006, 55). The national peasant movement responded with mass mobilizations and a coherent anti-neoliberal food sovereignty discourse which, on the surface, appeared to be converging into a counter-hegemonic movement and a serious challenge to Fox’s government. However, the organizational structures and embedded political culture, especially among the movement’s peasant centrals, would demonstrate that their counter-hegemonic rhetoric was ultimately a political strategy founded on the defense of state corporatism, not a movement for social and structural transformation guided by the principles of food sovereignty.

In November 2002, 12 national and regional peasant organizations (seven of which either have been or remain members of the VC), including CIOAC, united to contest the withdrawal of their financing, the worsening economic situation for the mass of Mexico’s peasantry and the imminent liberalization of 12 agricultural commodities in accordance with NAFTA. Together they made a public declaration published in the national press titled ‘The countryside can’t take anymore: six proposals for the salvation and revaluation of the Mexican countryside’ (MECNAM). In synthesis, these proposals demanded a moratorium on the agricultural chapter of NAFTA, a total restructuring of rural financing in favour of peasant production of domestic staples, and rural budget assignment of 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for productive development, and 1.5 percent for social and environmental development of the rural sector (ANEC, personal correspondence).

On 31 January 2003, the group mobilized its bases and over 100,000 people descended on Mexico City’s main square demanding a response to their proposals. Freed (against their wishes) from subordination to the state’s client channels, the national peasant movement was constructing a programme that fundamentally questioned the existing neoliberal agricultural model. The withdrawal of access to state resources forced CIOAC and other organizations to make demands on the state from outside its spaces and use a counter-hegemonic discourse and confrontational tactics to challenge political and economic stability. However, the state’s response to the uprising fed on the deep-rooted corporatist structures and practices of Mexico’s rural organizations.

In response to the mobilizations, the government was forced into dialogue with the peasant movement. On 23 April, following negotiations between peasant leaders and the highest levels of government, nine organizations of MECNAM signed the National Agreement for the Countryside. However, the final agreement did not include any measures that could be considered ‘pro-food sovereignty’ and did not resolve any of the movement’s core demands, namely the exclusion of corn and beans from NAFTA and exceptions to tariff cuts and reductions to the rural budget. It did represent some significant advances for the peasant movement, such as an emergency fund for urgent rural projects and the update and amplification of Programa de Apoyos Directos al Campo (PROCAMPO),⁶ a national subsidy programme for corn producers (Rubio 2004, 34). Between 2001 and 2008, spending on agriculture and rural development almost doubled in real terms, reaching 204 billion pesos (USD 19.2 billion) for 2008 (Scott 2010, 73), driven mainly by both MENCAM and the power of farm interests in the legislature (Fox and Haight 2010, 28). In addition, as a result of MECNAM the state designated USD 23.8 million for a rural housing fund and USD 36.6 million for the extension of rural health services, and USD 196 million was channelled to emergency projects such as temporary employment, the resolution of agrarian (namely land rights) conflicts, and programmes for rural women and the elderly (SAGARPA 2003). National peasant leaders were reincorporated into rural project design and implementation, and ‘Oportunidades’ – a government programme designed to combat poverty through cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health check-ups and nutritional support – was extended to rural zones (Puricelli 2008, 118). However, all of these demands could be addressed by the state as they could be incorporated into the existing neoliberal accumulation model. Also, by engaging with them the state could be seen to be acting on the peasant movement’s demands thereby neutralizing and (partially) incorporating opposition into its project, helping to reproduce its own hegemony and weakening the threat from below. Why then did nine of the 12 organizations sign an agreement that did not resolve any of the movement’s core demands?

Mexican peasant centrals of the VC represent some of the most marginalized landed peasants in the country. These organizations share the goal of food sovereignty, as defined by the VC, as a stated organizing principle. However, their political strategies are defensive, focused primarily on forcing the state to provide basic social infrastructure and services to their members, channelled through their organizations, in order to ameliorate the most immiserating impacts of neoliberal policies. The centrals’ adhesion to MECNAM and the mobilization of their bases under the banner of food sovereignty must be understood in this light, as a political strategy to re-access state resource channels. It was not a struggle, as it appears on the surface, for the state’s transformation and the development of an alternative food and agricultural system. The centrals’ leaders employed the discourse of food sovereignty as a mobilizational tool to highlight the state’s complicity in the impoverishment of the peasant sector through the implementation of neoliberal policies. However, they were attempting to meet the demands of their social bases whose conditions and livelihoods, they believed, could be significantly improved through access to basic social services and support for production within the existing neoliberal model.

[Some say] we were only interested in securing organizational budgets, not in changes to public policy, but you also have to ask another question – what do the people gain? So yes, you need to have a strategic long-term vision, structural transformations, but at the same time you have to be always giving solutions to the people in a concrete way.

(Max Correa, CCC national president, personal communication, 11 February 2013)

In contrast to Mexico’s peasant centrals, UNORCA and ANEC represent predominantly market-oriented peasants whose core demands are not social in nature. They tend to be previously relatively well-established producers who worked closely with state institutions responsible for productive and marketing assistance in the developmentalist era, and who have seen markets for their goods, and their ability to viably produce them, adversely affected or destroyed by neoliberal policies (Moguel 1992; Rodarte 2003). Instead of being hierarchically structured, they operate more as a hub in a network of regionally autonomous producer organizations. Not only are their members relatively better off than most of those in the centrals; more importantly in terms of their class composition, they are more market dependent. Rather than a logic of production based on seeking (relative) autonomy from volatile and potentially proletarianizing commodity markets through strengthening subsistence capacity (see Ploeg 2008) as the majority of the centrals’ members do (Henderson 2016, 7), the members of production-oriented organizations seek more equitable integration into markets through state support and the restriction of the power of agribusiness firms to shape markets in their favour. The latter necessarily demands structural change to the neoliberal accumulation model that has removed state support for production and allowed heavily subsidized imports to flood the internal market they previously provided for. Structural change, guided by the principles of food sovereignty as an alternative socio-economic model, is seen as the only way that their members’ demands can be met (Victor Suarez, national leader of ANEC, personal communication, 8 February 2013).

For the centrals, whose members’ core demands focus on social service provision followed by support for subsistence production, leaders work on the basis that real material improvements can still be made to their members’ lives within the current model. According to these organizations’ leaders, this is best achieved through a close working relationship with the state and ensuring that corporatist ties are strengthened, not cut.

Being a social organization with a social base, we have to negotiate with the government. If you dedicate yourself to attending to a group of people, but for this group of people you have to deal with SEDESOL [Secretary for Social Development], but you don’t get on with the representative then they’re not going to attend to you and that’s going to screw the people.

(José Dolores López Barrios, CIOAC’s former national secretary, personal communication, 11 February 2013)

Despite hierarchical organizational structures and a relative lack of internal democracy, the leaders of Mexico’s peasant centrals are nevertheless held accountable to their members on the basis of their ability to successfully negotiate access to state resources and channel these to their grassroots members. As Fox (1992, 3) argues, relatively undemocratic leaders can still face significant pressures to deliver benefits to their members, demonstrating that internal democratic practices are not the only explanation for accountable leadership.

We joined CIOAC 20 years ago through necessity … [here] there’s no work, no resources. We looked for an organization that could bring us projects, and CIOAC is an organization that manages projects [es una organización gestora] … the majority here have a strategic relationship with CIOAC. More joined this year because Mario [CIOAC’s state leader in Oaxaca] has become a Federal Deputy, so people think they have a better chance of getting a project if they’re with CIOAC for the next three years.

(Homilio Martínez, CIOAC member, personal communication, 9 December 2012)

Prior to Fox’s election, CIOAC’s entire working practices had become based on clientelist resource channelling from leaders to their bases, making the re-establishment of neo-corporatist relations with the state of paramount importance. According to production-based organizations (Celis 2005) this approach has terminally weakened the counter-hegemonic force of MECNAM and its potential to bring about structural transformations to the neoliberal model in favour of food sovereignty. However, Mexico’s peasant centrals face the difficult challenge of balancing meeting their members’ pressing short-term needs with struggles for longer term structural changes in the context of historical processes of state corporatism and centralized organizational structures. Clientelism has shaped the internal structures and practices of peasant centrals at all levels, and their relationships with the Mexican state. As a result, the centrals’ use of the food sovereignty discourse is defensive and not, in practice, counter-hegemonic as it seeks the continuation and expansion of the state’s neoliberal legitimation apparatus, not its transformation. This is not to suggest that CIOAC’s leaders are in favour of neoliberal economic policies. However, their subordinate dependence on the state’s apparatus of legitimation means that continued access to state resources for an expectant membership is dependent on not actively disputing the state’s role in promoting neoliberalism.

The movement’s growing strength in opposition under the banner of ‘food sovereignty’ elicited the response sought by the centrals themselves; it successfully re-opened institutionalized client channels and spaces of negotiation within the state. The latent contradictions between MECNAM organizations deriving from their different internal structures and historical relations with the state were further sharpened by the government’s strategy of negotiating access to financial resources on an individual organizational basis (Puricelli 2008, 114). Increasing the presence of the ‘autonomous’ peasant movement within the state apparatus contributed to deepening the former’s dependence on the latter. It also increased the peasant movement’s subordination to the state, and its role in the social control of its own bases. Counter-hegemonic struggles have been rejected or taken on a simulated, functional form aimed at demonstrating mobilizational and electoral strength to secure or retain state resource access, not to challenge and oppose the state and its role in promoting an accumulation model systematically destroying the viability of the peasant economy. Nevertheless, demands and mobilizations of Mexico’s VC organizations under the banner of ‘food sovereignty’ constitute an important defensive counter-movement that has prevented the state from completely abandoning the peasantry to liberalized global markets. While the peasant movement has been unable to address underlying mechanisms of exploitation, oppression and poverty, it has still forced the Mexican state to provide protections and entitlements to the peasant sector within its hegemonic neoliberal project.

The following section will examine how Ecuador’s national peasant-indigenous movement, FENOCIN in particular, has engaged with the ‘post-neoliberal’ project of Rafael Correa. It will show that FENOCIN’s integration into the state apparatus, rather than resulting as expected in increased influence to promote food sovereignty, has weakened the organization’s counter-hegemonic force, albeit via very different mechanisms to those experienced by CIOAC, as a result of distinct organizational structures and state-peasant movement relations.

The Ecuadorian peasant movement and Rafael Correa’s ‘anti-neoliberalism’

Compared to CIOAC, FENOCIN’s organizational structure and practices have historically been relatively more conducive to the maintenance of political autonomy (namely due to the relative weakness of the Ecuadorian compared to the Mexican state) and the development of political projects that challenge neoliberal policies. FENOCIN is a pyramidally structured confederation but, unlike CIOAC, its base organizations exercise considerable autonomy with respect to internal decision-making. Local and regional constituent organizations are not subject to the decisions of the national leadership which instead acts as a central hub for articulating the demands and struggles of its bases (at least until the rise of Correa). State intervention, a central factor in shaping the potential to construct, retain and exercise counter-hegemony (Otero 2004), has historically not been defined by such heavily corporatist relations and has, as a result, helped Ecuador’s peasant organizations retain their political autonomy to a greater extent than is the case in Mexico.⁷

Rather than the ‘top-down’ state-led corporatism that historically defined the Mexican state’s relationships with organized social groups, Ecuador’s ‘bottom-up’ corporatism throughout the twentieth century (led by subordinate social groups, including the indigenous peasantry) drove processes of political participation from below and the democratization of the Ecuadorian state (Coronel 2011, 994–96). Pressed by emerging indigenous-peasant organizations over the course of the 1990s, the Ecuadorian state (working with organization leaders) created institutions that sought to address indigenous rights and rural exclusion issues in ways that fostered the development of political representation defined by Chartock (2013, 52) as ‘dimished corporatism’. Through such institutions, the Ecuadorian state structured, subsidized and exercised a degree of control over indigenous interest groups. However, unlike Mexico, corporatism was limited; the Ecuadorian state did not have the financial capacity of its Mexican counterpart and its methods did not involve direct financing of individual organizations, but rather indirect subsidies shared among social organizations through their joint control over, and participation in, development projects.

In Otero’s (2004, 225) terms, FENOCIN, at least until 2006, was a relatively ‘popular-democratic’ organization. Rather than top-down dissemination of leaders’ decisions, FENOCIN’s proposals had, until the rise of Correa, tended to be driven from the bottom up. This is not to downplay the organization’s internal problems, namely the historic domination of Andean over coastal interests, or decisions taken unilaterally at times by some national leaders. Despite these, the organization remained a transformative social force – as evidenced by its participation in powerful mobilizations against neoliberalism in the course of the 1990s to the early 2000s that overthrew two national presidents (see Zamosc 1994) – until the rise of Rafael Correa and his political movement.

In the run-up to Correa’s 2006 election, Ecuador’s social movements presented a powerful challenge to the prevailing neoliberal model. Correa’s anti-neoliberal campaign fed on this social unrest, and its eventual success depended on the support of the country’s social movements. Prior to 2006, the ‘Mesa Agraria’ – a coalition of four peasant organizations (FENOCIN; CNC-EA; FENACLE; CONFEUNASSC – Confederación Nacional del Seguro Social Campesino- Coordinadora Nacional Campesina) – signed an agreement with Correa in which he committed, if elected, to initiate an ‘agrarian revolution’ based on the peasant movement’s demands for food sovereignty. At its core, these demands centred on the democratization of land and water access and state resources for the reactivation of the peasant economy (Giunta 2014, 1212).

For Ecuador’s VC organizations 2006 was marked not only by their support for Correa’s presidency but complete adhesion to his government (Trujillo 2010, 16). FENOCIN’s national leader at the time, Pedro de la Cruz, became a delegate for ‘Alianza Pais’ (AP), Correa’s newly instituted political movement, while other peasant organization leaders did likewise in the belief that they could most effectively influence the contents of the country’s impending new constitution by working within Correa’s government (Becker 2011, 50). This decision would later prove critical for their organizations’ political autonomy and transformative demands once Correa began to backtrack on the pre-election promises he had made to the movement. As Edelman and Borras (2016) warn, a ‘gap’ can form between leaders and their social bases if transnational activities (for example with the VC) are emphasized over domestic, national or local politics. The experience of Ecuador’s peasant movement demonstrates that such a gap can also develop through peasant leaders’ emphasis on national-level politics to the neglect of internal organizational work. The integration of FENOCIN’s leaders into the state apparatus led to a vertical ‘stretching’ of the organization’s internal structure, and the distancing – both physical and ideological – of leaders from their bases.

The institutionalization of food sovereignty in Ecuador

In April 2007, Correa followed up on one of his central campaign promises to convoke a national constituent assembly. During the assembly process the power relations at the time allowed the FSM to institutionalize many of its core demands, namely state support to distribute land to the peasant sector, to be complemented by affordable credit and state funded training. Given the prevailing balance of political forces, for its own legitimacy Correa’s government was forced to recognize the principles of food sovereignty and incorporate them into its project. However, Correa has subsequently appropriated the food sovereignty discourse without implementing the practical measures required to make the organization’s proposals reality. This has been aided by food sovereignty’s lack of conceptual clarity which, in the case of Ecuador, has left it open to misrepresentation and reformulation in government policy (Godek 2015, 528).

On 18 February 2009, Ecuador’s new food sovereignty law came into effect, enshrining in the country’s legal system articles 281 and 282 of the new constitution. Article 281 states that food sovereignty constitutes ‘a strategic objective of the state’ to guarantee Ecuador’s self-sufficiency in healthy and culturally appropriate foods. Article 282 guarantees that the state will regulate equitable access to land and that the latifundio and the concentration of land are prohibited (Political Database of the Americas 2011). However, as Correa’s regime has consolidated it has become clear that his rural policies contradict the peasant movement’s vision of food sovereignty enshrined in the constitution. From their high point in 2006, peasant organizations have increasingly been forced to use the discourse of food sovereignty as a defensive political tool in an attempt to prevent Correa’s administration from totally abandoning the FSM’s core principles.

The government has stopped talking about the agrarian revolution. [It] provided the social organizations with spaces to influence public policies, because of this we are now so weak. Now MAGAP [The Ministry of Agriculture] isn’t taking into account the suggestions of the organizations. It gave us the agrarian roundtable just to justify that it is including the opinions of social organizations when in reality it isn’t. In terms of food sovereignty, credit and training there still hasn’t been a response – the government wants to control everything.

(Romelio Gualán, national president of CNC-EA, personal communication, 11 April 2013)

Although not officially articulated, the administration’s own conception of food sovereignty has been demonstrated to (1) not be based on democratization of Ecuador’s still highly unequal agrarian structure,⁸ and (2) be focused on increasing the productivity and efficiency of small- and medium-sized producers conceived as private farmers along capitalist lines (Carrion and Herrera 2012; Clark 2015). This is opposed to the FSM’s central demands for land redistribution, sustainability and the promotion of crop-diverse agro-ecosystems. Amongst many peasant organization leaders there is growing concern over Correa’s government and its success in reshaping the discourse of the movements that took him to power in a way that does not question the prevailing agrarian structure yet has managed to consolidate his administration and its legitimacy in the eyes of the mass of the population.

The internal fragmentation and weakening of the peasant-indigenous movement – namely the wedge the state has driven between CONAIE (La Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador – Ecuador’s largest and most influential indigenous organization) and other smaller, previously marginalized organizations such as FENOCIN – has certainly not helped the FSM respond to Correa’s deviation from the FSM’s demands and the constitution itself.⁹ However, Correa’s policies have received support not only from wide sectors of Ecuadorian society, but also from many grassroots members of peasant organizations themselves despite the protestations of their national leaderships. Fundamental differences between FENOCIN’s mass bases in the Andes and on the coast have been a major factor in weakening FENOCIN’s transformative force over the course of Correa’s presidency.

FENOCIN’s coastal and Andean bases

Over the last 25 years FENOCIN’s national leadership has been dominated by Andean organizations that have focused FENOCIN’s struggles and definitions of food sovereignty on democratization of land and water access, agroecology and indigenous autonomy. Commercializing concerns of coastal peasants – who typically gained more than their Andean counterparts from agrarian reform (1964–1994) both in terms of land area received and its quality – have been left to FENOCIN’s coastal organizations to resolve independently. This led to growing criticism from coastal members that FENOCIN is concerned only with the land struggle, not the ability of landed peasants to make a commercially viable living from production.

According to Correa, ‘food sovereignty’ can be achieved through improved productivity on existing holdings without the need to expropriate and divide large landed properties. Peasant organizations, those on the coast in particular as producers of cash crops, are set to play an important role in administering state resources channelled into productive development. The production and reproduction strategies of FENOCIN’s coastal members are far more dependent on commodity markets than those of their Andean counterparts who typically seek (more) land and support for agroecology to increase subsistence production which, as mentioned above, acts primarily as a wage subsidy for the organization’s highly proletarianized Andean bases. Correa’s strategy of improving the productivity and efficiency of small farmers along capitalist lines and re-centring the state as the driver of development is responding to the historically neglected demands of coastal organizations. As such, Correa’s productivity focus has, not surprisingly, been well received by FENOCIN’s more market-dependent coastal members who are overwhelmingly supportive of his government.

Correa has done so many things for us … there’s the rural schools programme, technical training, and support for commercialization. He has given us [cacao] plants, we have an agreement to receive plants and ongoing training [from the Ministry of Agriculture].

(Manuel Morales, coastal FENOCIN member, personal communication, 15 April 2013)

In contrast to their Andean counterparts who tend to seek more land as a wage subsidy and subsistence guarantee against adversity in the labour market (on which their reproduction strategies overwhelmingly depend), FENOCIN’s coastal members are not focused on land redistribution. By implementing rural policy that improves their productivity and market competitiveness, Correa has garnered a great deal of support from coastal groups. This not only helps legitimize his government and market-oriented state policy, but also weakens organization leaders concentrated in the Andes that are demanding radical structural changes based on a rejection of the neoliberal market, not improved integration into it. However, in the Andes there has also been a significant weakening of FENOCIN under Correa’s presidency despite the focus of demands supposedly reflecting the interests of indigenous Andean peasants.

Correa’s government has gained support from many Andean communities whose leaders were increasingly drawn from their bases physically and ideologically as a result of their adhesion to Correa’s government in 2006. As a direct result of an emphasis on achieving presence and influence in state institutions at the expense of community level work, FENOCIN’s national leaders have failed to construct the organization’s demands for food sovereignty on the basis of ongoing dialogue with their bases. As a result, Correa’s own notions of the term, and the policies that support it, have gained consensus among much of the Andean rural population whose national organization appears increasingly redundant now that the government is ‘on their side’. The case of Ecuador’s land law demonstrates how the consolidation of Correa’s administration has been accompanied by a weakening of the FSM as a result of peasant movement–state relations and the internal structures of peasant organizations themselves.

COPISA and the land law

COPISA (Conferencia Plurinacional e Intercultural de Soberanía Alimentaria) was set up as a joint initiative between the Ecuadorian state and social organizations in 2009 ‘to generate a wide process of debate for the construction of proposals for law, public policies and programmes around the issue of food sovereignty, with the active participation of organizations of civil society and institutions of the state’ [COPISA 2014]). According to Peña (2015, 3 and 10) COPISA cultivated a synergistic relationship between civil society and the state and its policymaking workshops spawned instances of participative and deliberative democracy, strengthening social organizations while lending legitimacy to the state. However, after much organizational effort was dedicated to working within COPISA to elaborate law proposals over the following years, the administration simply ignored the institution as power concentrated in the executive. The ‘participative democracy’ of COPISA turned out not to involve the actual decision-making of elected citizen representatives, the power of which is instead held by the President. As a result, COPISA has served much more to legitimate Correa’s government than it has to develop a genuine process of participative democracy. The FENOCIN national leadership’s focus on working within state institutions such as COPISA centralized the organization’s decision-making in the national committee which became increasingly ‘disembedded’ from its network of regional organizations. This led to FENOCIN’s political strategies and radical demands for redistributive land reform becoming increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of the organization’s bases.

In light of the potentially politically destabilizing implications of constitutional articles relating to land, the elaboration of a promised land law was delegated to COPISA. The final version of COPISA’s proposal was released in December 2011 and, as stipulated in the 2008 constitution, its most controversial aspect was the prohibition of the latifundio. The proposed law defines maximum extension limits for landed property: 500 hectares on the coast and in the Amazon region, and 200 hectares in the Sierra (COPISA 2011). In short, the document implied the peasant movement’s partial withdrawal from Correa’s project with a counter-hegemonic proposal that rejected the direction of the government’s rural policy. It demanded a radical transformation of Ecuador’s agrarian structure that would necessarily involve mass expropriation of private property and its redistribution among the peasantry. Due to its controversial implications, the proposal remained stuck in negotiations between the executive, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the national assembly, with no foreseeable advance. In response, various peasant organizations (including FEI and CNC-EA of the VC), led by FENOCIN, took direct action in an attempt to force the government to approve the peasant movement’s ‘own’ land law proposal.

Under the Participation Law, social organizations are able to present legal proposals to the national assembly with the support of 25,000 national citizens. On 20 March 2012, FENOCIN led a march to deliver their proposal backed by 41,780 signatures. This proposal, claimed by the organizations submitting it as their own, was actually the work of SIPAE (Sistema de Investigación sobre la Problemática Agraria en el Ecuador), a research institute based in Quito. Like the COPISA proposal, it advocated the same extension limits and the expropriation of properties exceeding these or not fulfilling their ‘social and/or environmental’ functions. FENOCIN’s decision to force the proposal through the assembly via the participation law represented a direct challenge to Correa’s administration from a peasant movement up until that point either unconditionally supportive of the government or ‘critical’ without being confrontational. This marked an important turning point between FENOCIN’s national leadership and the government, and the latter would become increasingly aggressive towards the former in response to this emerging challenge from below.

As Mallon (1994, 70–71) argues, hegemony cannot be reproduced without the constant, though partial, incorporation of counter-hegemony, though crucially without threatening the material basis of hegemonic rule – capital accumulation. Correa’s partial incorporation of counter-hegemony in the form of legitimating and incorporating into his project peasant organizations such as FENOCIN had reached its limit. As soon as peasant leaders began questioning the material basis of Correa’s project – private property as the foundation of the accumulation model – they could no longer form part of Correa’s (legitimation) project. As a result, their proposals became ever more marginalized within increasingly uninfluential state ‘participative’ institutions such as COPISA, or simply ignored and discredited by MAGAP and the National Assembly.

Henderson: The government is never going to approve an extension limit, right?

Córdoba: No, never …  . An extension limit would mean expropriation. If we’re talking about the sierra with extensions of more than 200 hectares it would mean the expropriation of a good part of the productive land and would cost the state billions of dollars. We’re talking about a total structural change that would imply an enormous economic regression.

(Dr. André Córdoba, MAGAP’s land law director, personal communication, 16 May 2013)

However, in addition to Correa’s attempts to neutralize dissenting peasant organizations by co-opting their leaderships, appropriating and reinterpreting their discourses and discrediting their demands, FENOCIN’s leaders have been complicit in their organization’s own weakening as a direct result of their distancing from their bases. FENOCIN’s land law proposal, rather than an instance of organizational strength, is better understood as a manifestation of this weakness.

The proposal submitted to the National Assembly by FENOCIN was not the organization’s own, but that of SIPAE. When the organization sought signatures from its members in support of the proposal, not only had the majority not participated in its elaboration; they had never before even seen or discussed the document.

Any proposal that is made has to come from the bases, but it doesn’t work this way. The Land Law couldn’t be approved because it comes from the [FENOCIN’s] offices without knowing what is required in the communities, because they don’t come to consult us.

(Juan Ulquianga, Andean FENOCIN member, personal communication, 1 April 2013)

This is manifested in the fact that the organization has been unable to mobilize its bases in response to the law’s lack of progress in the National Assembly, as the majority of FENOCIN’s bases did not feel the proposal was their own. Meanwhile, transformative demands for food sovereignty have become less viable as important sectors of the organization’s mass base, on the coast in particular, have come to largely support Correa and his ‘post-neoliberal’ project. As FENOCIN’s bases were neglected by a leadership focused on change from within the highest levels of the state, Correa’s project reached down to grassroots rural communities which increasingly bought into AP’s project and rejected the legitimacy and demands of their own leaders.

Recentring the state and bypassing social organizations

While the government has certainly sought to co-opt and divide social organizations (De la Torre 2010, 164; Trujillo 2010) and link the state directly with rural communities¹⁰ (Novo 2010), Correa’s presidency and his anti-poverty programmes have also improved the lives of many of Ecuador’s poorest and received widespread support across much of the country.¹¹

Before his [Correa's] government we had dirt roads, we didn’t have drinking water; no services at all. Thanks to this president we now have drainage, in every house there’s drinking water, and he gave us free telephones …  . Before there was nothing, absolutely nothing. I’m 59 and it’s the first time they have given us something.

(Manuel Torres, Andean FENOCIN member, personal communication, 26 March 2013)

FENOCIN’s internal structures were transformed during the mid-1980s by the proliferation of development agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that attempted to fill the institutional spaces of social development and welfare left by the retreating state (Bretón 2013, 104). According to its own leaders, this resulted in FENOCIN becoming an organization of paternalistic support based on providing the membership with resources from a reconfigured development apparatus (FENOCIN 1999, 48). Accessing and distributing NGO projects came to dominate the organization’s work over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and FENOCIN’s members came to increasingly conceive of their organization’s role in terms of providing its communities with these resources.

Henderson: Why did you join FENOCIN?

Palacios: We joined because of their projects and proposals, but now there’s nothing. Now the one who supports us is the government. Now we have the help of the government, something we never had before.

(Silvio Palacios, Andean FENOCIN member, personal communication, 25 March 2013)

Some of the leaders came here seven years ago and talked to us about the importance of organizing ourselves to receive sources of employment and the possibility of receiving projects …  . However, since the new leadership was installed [2008] the supports [apoyos] have stopped coming … and they have neglected [descuidaron] the organization.

(Luis Gómez, Andean FENOCIN member, personal communication, 20 March 2013)

Correa’s policy of recentring the state as the driver of development, and restricting and regulating the work of NGOs (ICNL 2015) has simultaneously bypassed FENOCIN’s organizational structures as a means of delivering social projects, and restricted the organization’s access to development resources. As a result, social organizations have seen their functions become increasingly obsolete as the Ecuadorian state has ‘returned’ to its role as the central provider of social development. Since their high point in 2006 when they were able to shape the national debate and constitution in ways that challenged the neoliberal model, peasant organizations have been increasingly forced onto the back foot and into ever more reactionary responses to a government that has (partially) institutionalized their demands, incorporated some of their most influential leaders, appropriated their discourses, appealed to and garnered support from these organizations’ mass bases, and moved to progressively close spaces of participation and influence within the state that these organizations created and occupied. In the eyes of many of its members, FENOCIN’s adhesion to Correa’s project, rather than strengthening the organization and its ability to turn its proposals into concrete policies as its leaders had imagined, actually made the organization increasingly unnecessary. With demands historically based on anti-government and anti-neoliberal foundations, the rise of Correa and his anti-neoliberal discourse made these issues appear increasingly irrelevant. Between 2006 and 2012, as FENOCIN’s members came to see their organization as an uncritical ally of Correa’s project and the government began to invest in social programmes and infrastructure development, many saw little reason to continue actively in the organization.

The problem [for FENOCIN] is the policy of the Citizen Revolution – the discourse against neoliberalism and resources for the people. With all this our biggest challenges are reduced …  . There have been substantial improvements to people’s lives and we, who fought for land in the seventies, were fighting for the very things that are now happening. But FENOCIN and CONAIE want to carry on fighting against the government.

(Arnaldo Banchen, coastal member and ex-finance secretary of FENOCIN [1995–1999], personal communication, 24 April 2013)

FENOCIN’s Andean-dominated leadership, ideologically guided by socialist struggles for democratization of land through expropriative agrarian reform, became increasingly openly critical of Correa’s administration from 2012 onwards due to the government’s rejection of redistributive land reform. However, the national leadership had by this time already lost the support of much of its mass base who supported Correa’s presidency. Even though many of FENOCIN’s Andean members agree on the need for land reform, their heavily proletarianized condition means that they have often benefitted from Correa’s social programmes and economic policies not specifically targeted at the rural sector. Since coming to power, Correa has instituted free education and healthcare programmes, and the rate of unemployment has fallen from over 10 percent in 2006 to 4.28 percent in 2016, while average monthly wages have increased from USD 321.55 to USD 478 over the same period (Trading Economics 2016). Edelman and Borras (2016) highlight the problem of movement leaders potentially wearing blinders regarding differences between movement discourses and the practices and beliefs of grassroots supporters. This was certainly the case for FENOCIN, and by 2012 the national leadership’s counter-hegemonic proposals and strategies in opposition to Correa’s rural policies had become largely untenable as the bases for the most part bought in to Correa’s project.

In FENOCIN’s 2013 national congress held in Guayas (at which I was present), the outgoing leadership retained its critical stance towards the Correa administration, emphasizing that in the past eight years the countryside had not been revolutionized as promised, that the state continues to favour agribusiness and export agriculture, not small and landless peasants, and that land concentration has continued with no sign of redistributive policies. This would prove the final critical act of the organization as former national leader Pedro de la Cruz, AP member and Correa ally, was a central influence in installing a new leadership with greater representation from coastal organizations and those from the sierra explicitly supportive of the government. From 2013 onwards FENOCIN’s discourses and political strategies have changed significantly as it has become once more a vocal supporter of Correa and the Citizen Revolution. Rather than calling for the radical transformation of Ecuador’s agrarian structure through mass expropriation and redistribution as the foundation of a ‘food sovereign’ Ecuador, the organization’s current leadership uses the food sovereignty discourse as a defensive political tool to negotiate projects and resources for its bases from within Correa’s ‘anti-neoliberal’ project while also pressuring the government to fulfil its promises to revitalize the productivity of peasant agriculture. By recentring the state as the driver of economic and social development, Correa’s project has responded to many of the more reformist demands of peasant organizations’ mass bases for protective mechanisms against liberalized markets, and in so doing weakened the FSM’s more transformative demands for an alternative socioeconomic model articulated by peasant leaders.

Conclusion

The relationship between the state and peasant organizations is central to determining the nature of struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. Peasant organizations’ internal structures are not only critical for their capacity to retain their relative autonomy from the state (Otero 2004, 48), but also shape whether organizations are counter-hegemonic (i.e. whether they seek to transform the political and economic foundations of the neoliberal food system) or whether they are more accurately conceived as Polanyian protective counter-movements that seek to reform, rather than replace, the existing hegemonic model of food and agriculture.

The utopian framing of demands for small-scale, democratic and environmentally sustainable production systems provides a powerful set of principles with which to mobilize peasant organizations’ bases against national states responsible for the implementation of neoliberal policies systematically destroying the livelihoods of all but the most capitalized rural classes. However, despite the VC and much of the food sovereignty literature’s focus on systemic transformation, revolutionary rhetoric often guides reformist demands. Rather than struggling for a post-capitalist socio-economic model based on a revitalized peasant agriculture, many grassroots members of VC organizations struggle simultaneously for entitlements within the existing neoliberal model, and for the reform of this model based on recentring the state as the driver of a more equitable and inclusive capitalist development.

Free market policies of the neoliberal era severed the connection between organized subaltern groups and the state, leaving the former to fend for themselves against capital and the market (Silva 2009, 266). The motivation for many peasant struggles under the banner of food sovereignty has much more to do with reestablishing this connection than with establishing an alternative development model based on small-scale farming and agroecology (Edelman 2014, 970). For most peasant organizations, food sovereignty serves as a manifesto and political discourse, rather than a programme of world-historical ambition (Bernstein 2014, 1031) as it is portrayed in much of the food sovereignty literature (for example Desmarais 2007; McMichael 2006, 2008; Rosset 2011; Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012).

Even when the discourse of food sovereignty is employed without any policy proposals for its practical application, as is the case for Mexico’s peasant centrals, it is still a very useful political tool for negotiating with the state for access to resources within the existing neoliberal model. MECNAM, understood as a Polanyian defensive counter-movement, forced the state to reopen and reconfigure spaces occupied by peasant organizations which, even if not accompanied by any steps towards food sovereignty in practice, has channelled essential resources to the central’s grassroots members and helped prevent the state from abandoning the peasant sector to the full forces of the market. However, Mexico’s long history of corporatism and non-democratic, hierarchical organization structures means that the ability of Mexico’s peasant movement to move beyond defensive strategies and mount and sustain transformative political projects is heavily restricted. This does not simply constrain peasant organizations’ transformative potential but, more importantly, is a constituent element of their structures, from the expectations of the bases to the actions of the leaderships. In spite of this, organizations such as CIOAC cannot simply be ignored and discredited as universally and irreversibly ‘contaminated’ by state corporatism, dead-ends in struggles for social change. The seeds of discontent are ever present among CIOAC’s bases, and counter-hegemonic strategies of its origins – struggles for land and labour rights in the 1970s – to the more sporadic acts of the not so distant past – land occupations in Chiapas in the mid-1990s (Villafuerte 2002, 228) – are ever present in the ideology, if not the practice, of the organization. While CIOAC’s transformative potential is heavily circumscribed by its structure and relationship with the Mexican state, it is still able to deliver important material benefits to its bases within the existing neoliberal model.

For Ecuador’s VC organizations, support for Correa’s post-neoliberal project in 2006 resulted in the institutionalization of food sovereignty within the state apparatus. This has been backed up by concrete programmatic and policy proposals which, however, Correa’s administration has increasingly been able to reshape and reject as its ‘post-neoliberal’ project has consolidated around the promotion of scale-intensive capitalist production and agro-industrial chains. FENOCIN’s counter-hegemonic demands and practices of 2006 became increasingly untenable over the following six years as Correa’s anti-neoliberal policies achieved widespread support across Ecuador. Having lost contact – physically and ideologically – with its bases, FENOCIN’s national leadership and its sustained demands for redistributive land reform lost legitimacy and support from its members. Rather than a counter-hegemonic organization struggling for the transformation of Ecuador’s agrarian structure, FENOCIN has become more of a protective counter-movement that seeks to work within Correa’s anti-neoliberal project to ensure that its membership benefits from the administration’s promise of revitalizing the peasant sector through the provision of state-subsidized credit, technical assistance and productive resources. However, FENOCIN’s weakening from 2006, and its renewed support for Correa, is by no means necessarily final. Despite oil revenues falling 44 percent between 2014 and 2015 (Alvaro 2015), Correa’s administration has so far not made significant cuts to social spending. However, with Ecuador’s economic growth rate stalling and no foreseeable oil price hikes on the horizon, rural protest may reignite, especially if rates of unemployment rise and the issue of land concentration in the Andean sierra remains ignored. The indigenous peasant movement has shown itself capable of regrouping as a counter-hegemonic force in the past (following its disastrous incorporation into Gutierrez’s government [2003–2005]) and there is little reason to believe that this could not happen again if Correa’s social policies stall.

Acknowledgements

This contribution is based on fieldwork carried out for a PhD at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I would like to thank Leandro Vergara-Camus, whose advice helped me write the thesis on which this paper is based. I would also like to thank the four anonymous reviewers whose criticisms improved the paper. Thanks also to the people at CIOAC and FENOCIN who helped me with my research in Mexico and Ecuador.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Paul Henderson

Thomas Paul Henderson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Chiapas and the Southern Border (CIMSUR) at The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His research interests include agrarian political economy, rural social movements, food sovereignty and rural labour in Latin America. He holds a PhD in development studies from SOAS in London and is currently working on a research project investigating coffee-sector restructuring and producer struggles for market autonomy in South East Mexico.

Notes

1 CIOAC joined the VC in 1996 but, owing to long-running concerns over the VC’s mismanagement in Mexico, CIOAC and all other Mexican VC organizations apart from UNORCA (Unión Nacional de Organizaciones Regionales Campesinas Autónomas – the VC’s coordinator organization in the country) declined the invitation to the VC’s Jakarta conference in June 2013. The issue has yet to be resolved, leaving UNORCA the only currently active VC member in Mexico.

2 UNORCA; ANEC (Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras); CNPA (Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala); CODUC (Coalición de Organizaciones Democráticas, Urbanas y Campesinas); CCC (Central Campesina Cardenista).

3 FEI (Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios); FENACLE (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores Agroindustriales Campesinos e Indígenas Libres del Ecuador); CNC-EA (Confederación Nacional Campesina – Eloy Alfaro).

4 A notable exception is Otero (2004) whose theory of political class formation proposes that three key factors – regional cultures, state intervention and leadership types – mediate between class structural processes and political outcome in the political formation of class.

5 This organizational structure is characteristic of Mexico’s other VC peasant ‘centrals’, including CODUC and CCC.

6 The creation of PROCAMPO in 1994 was motivated by Mexico’s entry into NAFTA that same year. It replaced previous state agricultural development policy with a per-hectare fixed payment each productive cycle that was designed to reach some of the poorest, subsistence-oriented producers who had previously been excluded from productivity oriented state agricultural subsidies. While MECNAM contributed towards its amplification, it has been an important programme politically since the January 1994 Zapatista uprising; it has played an important social role in moderating conditions of poverty for millions of peasants that could potentially threaten political stability if totally abandoned to liberalized markets. While its guaranteed yearly payment does not alleviate conditions of poverty for the most marginalized rural landed classes, it at least provides a basic minimum income towards survival (Merino 2010, 66 and 69).

7 So too did the proliferation of non-governmental organizations in Ecuador from the 1980s onwards which, while arguably having contributed to the gradual substitution of radical structural demands for a focus on identity politics decoupled from issues of land and wealth concentration (Bretón 2008, 2013), nevertheless allowed peasant organizations to retain a far greater degree of political autonomy than their Mexican counterparts did.

8 Despite the country’s two agrarian reform laws (1964 and 1972), the Gini coefficient for land had fallen by just 0.06 from the pre-reform period (0.86) to the year 2000 (0.80).

9 Correa has been highly successful in weakening CONAIE – one of the most vocal and powerful critics of his presidency – through co-optation of other social movement leaders into AP (De la Torre 2010, 164) and support for competing, smaller organizations such as FENOCIN that align with his project (Novo 2010). However, tensions within the indigenous-peasant movement were already prevalent prior to Correa’s rise to power. These were based on the perception of smaller organizations that CONAIE was increasingly dominating spaces within the state and control of state resources at the expense and active exclusion of other organizations following its participation in Gutierrez’s government (2003–2005).

10 The most important state rural programmes implemented under Correa’s government have been based on forging direct links between the state and communities or intra-community groups. Correa’s direct poverty subsidies such as ‘socio-bosque’ and ‘socio-paramo’, both monetary transfers, for preserving forests and marginal highland soils respectively, and ‘bono de vivienda’, another state hand-out to pay for housing materials, are direct cash payments.

11 Between 2006 and 2009 social spending more than doubled, from 0.7 percent of GDP to 1.8 percent (Ray and Kozameh 2012, 12). Public-sector investment increased from 21 percent of GDP in 2006 to 44 percent in 2013, the vast majority of which was destined to energy, infrastructure, and social development projects (World Bank 2014).