Agribusiness moving through the Capitalocene: slow violence and renewed strategies of capitalist agriculture in Chile

ABSTRACT

Chilean fruit exports grew 252% between 1975 and 2016. This paper aims to analyze agribusiness’s readjustment strategies to face the socio-ecological impacts of the Capitalocene. For this purpose, our guiding questions are: How is agribusiness reading the current socio-ecological crisis, and what strategies are its main actors proposing?

The main strategies in progress are technical innovations in productive systems, the increasing scale of infrastructure, displacement toward the south of the country, and renewed narratives. This contributes to legitimizing the current agricultural model without questioning its principles, while becoming more profitable and adaptable to the Capitalocene era.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalocene
• agribusiness
• slow violence
• renewed dispossession
• Chile

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by ANID FONDECYT project n°11220783, ANID ANILLOS project n°ATE230072 and the FAPEI fund code 2250301-FP of the University of Bio-Bio. The authors appreciate the comments and reflections received at the Conference ‘Climate Change and Agrarian Justice’ organized in 2022 by Journal of Peasant Studies, Transnational Institute and Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists of the Global South. In addition, we appreciate the interesting comments received by anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Moore’s work has recently developed the role played by social struggles in greater depth, calling for an understanding of the Climate Crisis as a Class Struggle. The World-Ecology Perspective’s growing following has led other authors to deepen the agency dimension of social struggle. However, the imbalance between emphasizing the study of dominant capital actors and the secondary attention paid to social struggles remains significant.

2 An interesting work along these lines is the study by Newell and Taylor (2018) on the construction of hegemony by states and private agents to drive smart agriculture. Their analysis recognizes the discursive, institutional and material rearrangements to legitimize this type of agriculture.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico: [Grant Number 11220783]; Universidad del Bío-Bío: [Grant Number 2250301-FP].

Notes on contributors

Alexander Panez

Alexander Panez is an Assistant Professor in the department of Social Sciences of the University of Bio-Bio in Chile, with research experience in issues such as territorial conflicts and water questions in Latin America, and the political ecology of agribusiness in Chile. He holds a PhD in Geography from the Fluminense Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also a researcher at Centro de Estudios Ñuble (Ñuble Studies Center).

Jorge Olea

Jorge Olea is an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Temuco in Chile and a researcher at Estación Patagonia de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias (Patagonia Interdisciplinary Research Station) at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC). His main areas of research are historical geography, rural studies, and environmental history. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from PUC with the dissertation ‘Nature, Territory, and Conflict: Territory, and Conflict: Transmutations of latifundium in the Chilean Central Valley in the second half of the Twentieth Century.’