Читать книгу The New Latin America - Manuel Castells - Страница 23

In Argentina, as in other countries,¹ we can find the coexistence of different types or models of corporate development and informational extraction. At least three such models coexist in this context.

In the province of Jujuy, in the new extractive market for lithium, productive, organizational, and informational processes are mainly linked to transnational corporations. This creates a dual dynamic. On the one hand, there are the simple extractive processes, which, especially during the early stages, rely on local manual labor. On the other hand, there are processes of complex reworking and mineral processing that turn raw materials into a series of technological and informational products, relying in large part on labor from abroad. According to information offered by the company Sales de Jujuy, in 2017 it created 270 jobs, of which around 120 were for workers who resided in local communities (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming: 37).

Sales de Jujuy S. A. is a partnership that brings together the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota Tsusho, an Australian mining company called Orocobre Limited, and a company known as Jujuy Energía y Minería, Sociedad del Estado, based in the province of Jujuy. Financing is mainly provided by the Mizuho Bank of Japan, which also underwrites the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation. Of course, agreements between extractive corporations and the multinational corporations that require their products presuppose that the latter guarantee purchases in a given price range.

In the case of YPF, S. A., based in the Vaca Muerta formation in the province of Neuquén, we see a combination of industrial, oil-based extractivism and complex processing by technological and informational means, in networks that include systems for the importation and processing of gravel in China, wells for the extraction of gas and oil, digitally monitored through nodes installed by the corporation itself. In this context, new horizontal fracking technologies are also noteworthy, as are various commercial and financial systems, organized and managed through networks. This corporation is part of a global network of networks.

In the case of the soy produced by the company Los Grobo Agropecuaria, one of Gustavo Grobocopatel’s companies, the systems of organization and management are totally computerized. They include broad networks of workers, divided into specializations according to the activities they perform; they range from young people processing algorithms to experts in finance at the global scale. From its headquarters in Carlos Casares, a range of activities are organized and completed, from the extraction of soy to the global promotion, marketing, and financial management of the company. It is worth pausing briefly to consider this company’s workings.

The main business unit, based in Carlos Casares in the Province of Buenos Aires, is an informational corporation that is highly innovative and that is organized by a techno-informational division of labor, according to which various centers work on specific areas relevant to the different stages of production and circulation. These centers are interconnected as well as connected to other glocal networks. It is of particular interest that they are also associated with universities’ systems for agricultural research, and in particular with the Instituto Nacional de Technology Agropecuaria and the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

The company’s operational centers include sites for studying specific dynamics involved in technological production (at specific times of year) as well as for the processes of planting, harvesting, and storing crops in Carlos Casares. They also include sites for complex financial and commercial transactions, for the administration of trade, and for the development of production strategies. There are also sites for the study of business, sales, and projections for the price of soy on the various international stock exchanges. These, too, are, from the first, integrated into and connected with other sites in the country and the region where scientific and technological research takes place.

In cultural terms, this has generated a culture of informational work that valorizes innovation and the scientific and technological capabilities of workers. These qualities are seen to be pivotal for agricultural and land development, and this has influenced all other producers in the Humid Pampas as well as others in other regions and other countries in South America and the Caribbean.

In political terms, despite the partisan politics of the municipality and the region, the company’s activities and its efforts at social integration and cultural participation (for example, in public schools) are highly valued by local citizens. Opposition to the company comes mainly from outside Carlos Casares.

In a report by Leila Guerrero for the magazine Gatopardo, Gustavo Grobocopatel is quoted as saying:

Because of a flood, we learned to farm in fields other than our own, and I realized that it did not make sense to have land of your own. That you could grow enormously by planting crops in the ground with very little money and very quickly. After this, things got more sophisticated, but I think that this was the conceptual origin of our business model: the realization that you can farm without land, without capital, and without labor. Without land, because you rent; without labor, because you outsource it; and without capital, because they lend it to you. I don’t know if we are the inventors, but we are the people who have gone farthest with this idea.

Nevertheless, as Wahren adds, all of this takes place in a very complex territorial context. In the late 1940s, Argentina used only 10,000 liters per year of agrochemicals, a figure that increased to 3.5 million by the 1970s. But beginning in 1996 (the year when the use of genetically modified soy seeds was approved), more than 200 billion liters of glyphosate were added to the 69 billion traditional agrochemicals already in use. According to some sources, the former figure should in fact be closer to 300 billion. In other words, this is an unprecedented situation, involving 19 million hectares of genetically modified soy and around 370 billion liters of agrochemicals that have not been proven to be harmless, since the precautionary principle has not been observed.

In terms of their relations with and ways of organizing their workers, these three companies differ widely from one another. In Jujuy, Salar de Olaroz interacts with Andean community organizations, made up mostly of young people who participate in the company’s activities by performing both the hardest and the simplest tasks. It is also worth noting that there are communities that have refused to participate in the company’s undertakings. In other cases, communities have been dominated and divided by relations of distrust across the local social spectrum.

In Vaca Muerta, at the highest level of the stratified workforce, there is a sort of “worker aristocracy” that is highly technologically skilled and well paid. These workers shore up a culture of oil-drilling that has a long history and has been privileged in the region and in Argentina. They have their own trade unions that take practical measures to advocate for their interests. On the other hand, there is also a set of part-time and temporary workers who sustain the extractive system in a different way. Another key factor in the company’s success is the outsourcing of various activities both to other national companies and to international corporations.

Mapuche communities are key actors and significant territorial presences in this context, as are the labor organizing networks and non-governmental organizations to which Mapuche people belong. These networks are international in their reach, connecting them with Chilean Mapuches, for instance, and Sioux tribes in the United States. These communities’ critique of Salar de Olaroz is primarily ecological in nature; it points to the possible contamination of groundwater on their territory. Other labor and business organizations in the region interact and participate in oil-drilling ventures. In this context, research units from the Universidad del Camagüey stand out, making significant contributions.

Environmental impacts, including water pollution and various other alterations to the ecosystem, are just some of the many frequent consequences of these corporate projects. Lithium mining requires considerable amounts of water, which tends to be scarce in fragile ecosystems like the salt flats (salares) for which Salar de Olaroz is named. Even a slight alteration to the conditions of these ecosystems can cause major disturbances in their equilibrium. For this reason, lithium mining worries local and surrounding communities, which see the mining company’s use of nearby water sources as a threat, given that water is a scarce community resource, indispensable for both life and the maintenance of ancestral traditions including llama raising and mountain farming. In fact, in several interviews with local actors, we heard lithium mining called “water mining”; conflicts here are not over the extraction of lithium, but over the extraction of water.

The intensity of water use in lithium mining depends both on the method of extraction and on the concentration of lithium in the brine involved in this process. In keeping with the concentration of lithium in Salar de Olaroz, according to a detailed feasibility study, every ton of lithium extracted requires around two million liters of water; in other words, the extraction of every gram of lithium takes two liters of water.²

In Vaca Muerta, we find differing expectations about the ecological or environmental consequences of fracking. Corporate leaders, the provincial government, civil society groups, trade unions, and Mapuche communities all have different worldviews, different understandings of the cosmos. The Mapuche question the logic of extraction as such; companies see it as the road to development; local citizens’ views are somewhere in between, but suspicious. “Risk” is often argued over, as are the questions of whether risks are calculable and what the real costs of extraction are. People worry above all about the depletion of groundwater in the region. If the environmental effects of extraction could be mitigated and/or communities could ensure that these effects were no greater than those generated by traditional activities – that is, by the demands for energy, water, and materials for construction (steel, cement, and gravel, among others), within the limits determined by these activities – this would still entail territorial transformations at an unforeseen scale (Giuliani et al., 2016).

Pollution from farming is increasingly intense throughout the region. “Today, in Argentina there are 12 million people living in areas where more than 300 million liters of agrotoxins per year are disposed of” (Svampa and Viale, 2014: 150). High concentrations of genetically modified foods and agrochemicals, spread across so many hectares used for farming, have turned the country into a kind of open-air laboratory (Gras and Hernández, 2013).

According to Wahren’s baseline study, no major critical voices have emerged in Carlos Casares to question Los Grobo Agropecuaria in particular or the extractive economy of mining more generally. Nevertheless, in the region more broadly, the last few years have witnessed the emergence of ever more forceful assemblies and local associations that have begun organizing to put an end to the spraying of chemicals near towns and rural schools, a practice that has led to increases in respiratory illnesses, skin diseases, and cancer. These groups associate such increases with the indiscriminate use of agrotoxins, including glyphosate the most widely used herbicide in the region. Rural communities, located in areas that are at the center of agribusiness in Argentina, have joined the struggles of peasants and indigenous people who have been denouncing corporate practices of despoliation and subjugation, as well as the corporate pollution of land and water, since the mid-1990s.

Until now, none of these collective actions seems to have reached Carlos Casares or to have directly affected Los Grobo, a corporation that takes pride in its own manual of agricultural “best practices,” which has even been adopted by some local governments in the region, including that of Carlos Casares, of course.

As for conflicts in Salar de Olaroz, “broadly speaking, groups with opposing interests have been forming. In certain social sectors, we see the consolidation of an identity related to the universe of mining, with characteristics that follow from modernization, whereas in other social sectors people reject this model and seek to return to traditional activities or search for alternative approaches to local development” (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming: 45).

“Even more complexity is introduced [into this situation] when we note that neither of these groups is homogenous in its meanings. Instead we can identify subtle differences, expressed in the juxtaposition of identities present in the territory” (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming: 45). Within these communities, a first confrontation occurs between those who are in favor of and those who oppose the corporation’s presence; at the most fundamental level, this entails arguments about the ways of life that each group advocates, and the latent conflict that emerges when these ways of life turn out to be incompatible. Here a clear generational division emerges, a division between young people in these communities (many of whom study in San Salvador de Jujuy, the provincial capital) and the older inhabitants of the region, for whom cattle farming and traditional agriculture remain primary economic and cultural commitments. These indigenous young people have gone to school, and they know how to articulate their demands elsewhere, but in most cases they no longer depend on the pastoral economy. Social divisions are characteristic of the region’s society and of residents’ relationships to Sales de Jujuy (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming).

Meanwhile in Vaca Muerta, “increasing social differentiation in urban areas compounds the territorial, social, and environmental conflicts that lead to frustrated expectations for the future of oil mining. In this context, the Mapuche are key agents of resistance, questioning the model of informational extraction but disconnected from other agents engaged in the same sort of questioning” (Cretini, 2018: 83).³

Disputes over the meaning of land development ensue. The use of unconventional hydrocarbons has created various visions of such development, producing a range of opinions. There are those who question and oppose the logic of extraction (indigenous people and the union Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, CTA) and those who consider this logic indispensable for long-term development (the state at various levels, business interests, and bureaucrats). There is of course a broad middle range of opinions as well. Public debates persistently center on the risk of extraction, the question of whether such a risk is calculable, and thus also the question of what the real costs of extraction are. But often accurate information is lacking or ambiguous when it comes to environmental impacts.⁴

In this context, neither spaces for dialogue nor public, institutional channels for communication have been created. Instead, each side has largely refused to acknowledge the other and ignored its demands. This leads to uncertainty about how the territorial dynamics will play out, and in particular about the fate of the territorial and environmental disputes that were reactivated in 2017, after a violent confrontation. Overall, given these recent conflicts and a contraction in channels for mediation and spaces for dialogue, it is likely that social, environmental, and territorial conflicts will all increase in their intensity in the medium term.

In the area around Carlos Casares, by contrast, “Los Grobo seems to have built a nearly ‘perfect hegemony.’ In a region where farming has been foundational and continues to organize the reproduction of everyday life, whether directly or indirectly, for the vast majority of residents, the environmentalist critique prompted by the model of agribusiness seems not to have made a dent in the corporation’s legitimacy or the status of the Grobocopatel family” (Wahren, forthcoming: 149). Nevertheless, protests have begun to take place at a more general level, especially in cities responding to the consumption of agro-industrial products.

It is worth emphasizing that in the area surrounding Carlos Casares, in the humid pampa in Argentina, informational development and the culture of business are both essentially home-grown. The corporation and the “corporate culture of Grobo” form a particular productive system for marketing and corporate management at a global scale, one developed in concert with the scientific and technological research taking place in Argentina’s universities (Wahren, forthcoming).

Unconventional oil and gas in Vaca Muerta is produced through a partnership between the state-owned company YPF and a pool of transnational corporations that use fracking technologies in ways that are already computerized, in keeping with the workings of the global market. Here there is also a space for exchange and negotiation with scientific and technological systems of innovation. The state-owned company engages in these exchanges and negotiations with its transnational partners, presided over by powerful and capable transnational companies like Chevron, from the United States (Cretini, 2018). From this perspective, these companies have been integrated into diverse territories and multicultural situations throughout Argentina in new ways, with implications that are especially important for the environment and politics.