The agro-environmental question in South American: complex of developmentalist power, resistances and social alternatives. The case of the province of Córdoba Province, Argentina

Abstract

In the last decades, we have witnessed a renewed territorialization of capitalist development, both on a global scale as well as in its diversities of forms and logics according to the factors that are put into play at local scales. Particularly, in the rural areas of the province of Córdoba, Argentina, there is a territorial and socio-productive reconfiguration given by a productive intensification on the part of the hegemonic development complex, through the expansion of soybeans of the Pampean core zone and cattle raising at the northwestern zone and sierras, resulting in a permanent socio-environmental crisis in one of the largest commodity export territories worldwide. As part of a wider environmental problem, the drifts of agrarian development involve a series of territorial tensions and conflicts due to the multiple metabolic ruptures and the environmental degradation that the agribusiness paradigm and the technological package that is inherent in it entails. In this article, we present results of qualitative research work (based on ethnography and documentary and journalistic review) of the dialectical relationship between the complex of agrarian-political-techno-scientific-media-police-military power and the diverse organizational expressions, social movements with their alternatives to agricultural and environmental development. We specifically addressed three dimensions of such a process: the territorial dimension, including both territorial transformations and tensions, the positions and dispositions of the bodies in a geographical and social space, the relations that are established; the institutional dimension, as long as there are devices in a conjunction of public and private agents; finally, and linked to the above mentioned issues, the discursive dimension, which involves the construction of hegemony and the counterhegemonic struggle for the material and symbolic appropriation of nature in the rural spaces.