Abstract
This paper explores the connections between indebtedness, discipline and economic growth in the context of rural Colombia. It investigates the expansion of interest-bearing debt and the transformations that this has elicited on the lives of peasants in the country's most important hub of cocoa production: El Carmen de Chucurí. Within a framework combining agrarian studies, political economy and economic anthropology, the study is based on ethnographic data which allowed a nuanced understanding of the phenomena at play. In order to comply with timely debt repayment, peasants have been forced to adopt “maximizing strategies” based on a specific (capitalist) form of economic rationality, and to extend their work routines at the expense of their health. Theoretically, I argue that these transformations of their mindsets and bodies, respectively, can be understood as part of the overarching disciplining effects of debt. In particular, the changes brought about by debt have materialized in a renewed push towards increasing cocoa's productivity and profitability. By focusing on the consequences of indebtedness on the debtors' lives, this paper challenges the conventional idea that economic growth is only the outcome of a “natural desire” for improvement. Instead, rising productivity of cocoa can also be read as the result of a compulsion for growth in order to repay loans. This has important implications for analysing the rise and evolution of capitalism. In advancing some of its key imperatives (i.e. accumulation and profit maximization), debt repayment can be seen as a major channel for the reproduction of capitalism in the countryside.
Highlights
Financial indebtedness is a dominant feature of Colombian rural areas, as a result of the widespread expansion of bank credit
Following the creation of the National System of Agricultural Credit (Sistema Nacional de Cr edito Agropecuario -SNCA) in 1990, bank credit was conceived as one key instrument of rural development
There is a con trasting literature that do recognizes this link, based on the assumption that credit facilitates the realization of an innate desire for innovation and growth. Within these currents emphasis has been primarily conferred to credit -the ‘positive’ side of the credit-debt couple– and much less so the analysis has focused on the nature of debt and being a debtor
Summary
Financial indebtedness is a dominant feature of Colombian rural areas, as a result of the widespread expansion of bank credit. In 2016, El Carmen was designated as a site of increasing expansion of bank credit, and became the largest hub of cocoa production in the country. Both these designations are, as we will see, intrinsically related. Consequences of indebtedness, with special reference to the rural world Subsequent sections problematize such analytical frameworks by ana lysing debt as a disciplining device in light of the Colombian case
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