Agribusiness, Peasant Agriculture and Labour Markets: Ecuador in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The consolidation of capitalist agriculture in countries such as Ecuador has led to a recent revaluation of territories (central highlands) where cheap labour has facilitated agribusiness development linked to the world market. This process generates growth in the numbers of rural wage workers and the creation of a labour market that, in relation to others in several Latin American countries, has certain particularities: permanent jobs, gender balance, an absence of intermediaries and low levels of precariousness. Small‐scale peasant producers are marginalized in this context and play functional roles within the current dynamics of agribusiness firms. The organizational weakness of rural wage earners and the pursuit of clientelist relationships by firms do not allow rural workers and local communities to devise economic and social strategies that might improve their position in this ‘field of forces’ in the territory.

Trajectories of Vulnerability of Rural Territories in the Ecuadorian Andes: a Comparative Analysis

“…The example of the Victoria del Portete parish is also interesting because it reveals that despite a renewal of the political discourse in Ecuador, the project led by Rafael Correa has reproduced for the national primary sector an economic pattern comparable to that of the last decades (Acosta and Cajas Guijarro, 2016;Villalba-Eguiluz and Etxano, 2017). In the end, the direction taken by the former Ecuadorian president helped to prolong the trajectory of vulnerability of the Andean family farmers, since beyond the province of Azuay alone, multiple mining projects affected the farming communities of the Ecuadorian Sierra (Latorre, 2015), and few major steps have been taken to change an agricultural model that values intensive crops, especially those for export (Martinez Godoy, 2015 andClark, 2017;Martínez, 2017).…”

Social and Solidarity Economy in Ecuador: Fostering an Alternative Development Model?

“…A growing number of studies illustrate the limits of a "frustrated" development model transition during Correa's administration in several areas, such as the promotion of food sovereignty, land reforms and rural transformations [38][39][40][41][42]; the democratic renovation encouraging citizen's participation and relationships with social movements [43]; or the rights of nature, sustainability and socio-ecological conflicts [11,[44][45][46]. Many of these studies tend to conclude that there were novel and transformative policy proposals during the start of the Citizen's Revolution (2007)(2008)(2009), but that subsequently these were not implemented, or that what was enshrined in the 2008 Constitution was distorted [47].…”

Concentración económica y poder político en América Latina

“…Por tanto, cuando los tres factores operan en favor de los pequeños propietarios, esto puede conducir a un proceso de crecimiento inclusivo. También se pueden encontrar situaciones intermedias (Martínez Valle, 2017). Sin embargo, tal proceso de crecimiento inclusivo ha sido la excepción, ya que depende de políticas públicas que favorezcan a los campesinos.…”