Abstract
For more than a decade, social scientists have been analyzing the implications of the neoliberalturn in development policy and the implications of market-led agrarian reform for agriculturalproducers in the global South. Among this work is a spate of recent scholarship celebrating anumber of flagship movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the landless movement inBrazil, which are interpreted as efforts by rural communities to resist the threat posed by thecommodification of livelihoods and the privatization of natural resources. In this article, we aimto problematize what we diagnose as the Polanyian analytic underlying accounts of thecurrent conjuncture which emphasize the imminent potential of neoliberalism to spawnprotective counter-movements of the sort described in The Great Transformation. We do sothrough an analysis of the Unidad Cafetero Nacional (UCN) movement, an organization ofColombian coffee farmers that effectively mobilized large numbers of cafeteros in the 1990s toprotest the liberalization of the global coffee market and the decline of state support for thedomestic coffee sector. While the UCN may be read as a struggle to resist the dispossession ofColombian coffee farmers, we argue that it represented a particular segment of rural producerswho wanted, first and foremost, a restoration of their relatively privileged status within thepolitical economy of Colombian agriculture. Our interpretation of the UCN suggests thatwhether movements emerge in response to neoliberalism depends on the political imaginaries ofthe social actors who would create them, and further, that these imaginaries are producedthrough processes of class formation over the longue durée that shape the meaning ofdispossession in particular contexts.
Highlights
The abrogation of the international coffee agreement’s coffee export quota and pricing regulations in 1989 and the subsequent dismantling of the domestic price support system that was administered by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (Fedecafé) had a31 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH devastating impact on the country’s small landowning coffee growers, a class of independent farmers widely depicted throughout the postwar developmental decades to be a bastion of Colombian political stability and social and economic progress (Bergquist 1986; Sánchez 2001; Rettberg 2010)
Colombian coffee producers organized to form what became known as the Unidad Cafetero Nacional (UCN) movement, a protest organization that effectively mobilized over 100,000 cafetero militants onto the streets of the largest cities in the coffee-growing regions and eventually led a series of national civic shutdowns that forced the Colombian government to accept a number of their key demands (Robeldo 1998)
We offer a different reading of the UCN movement—one that engages with the social and historical conditions of the Colombian coffee sector
Summary
The abrogation of the international coffee agreement’s coffee export quota and pricing regulations in 1989 and the subsequent dismantling of the domestic price support system that was administered by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (Fedecafé) had a. The mobilization of Colombia’s cafeteros resemble several other struggles against dispossession that are described in a recent spate of scholarship, of which David Harvey’s The New Imperialism is the best known example These would include the efforts of peasants and agricultural commodity producers elsewhere to maintain access to the land (McMichael 2006; Akram-Lodhi 2007; Desmarais 2007; Walker 2008), those of organized labor to protect collective bargaining rights (Silver 2003; Barchiesi 2007; Lee 2007), and the many examples of popular-civic unrest triggered by the privatization of natural resources and the retrenchment of public services (Hart 2006; Dunn 2007; Spronk and Webber 2007). These imaginaries are produced through processes of class formation over the longue durée that shape the form and meaning of dispossession in particular contexts, as well as the kinds of struggles that do or do not emerge in response to it
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