Paper short abstract:

A grounded analysis of accumulation mechanisms and shifting land tenure arrangements within campesino communities in the municipality of Cuatro Cañadas, Bolivia's epicentre of soy agribusiness expansion.

Paper long abstract:

Analyses of agribusiness expansion are typically centred around the practices of large capital. The focus is usually on macro-level dispossession resulting from processes of market predation and land grabbing. Such focus obscures the processes of 'accumulation from below' and microprocesses of dispossession amongst small-scale farmers. Based on ethnographic work, this paper offers a detailed account of what agribusiness expansion has meant for landed campesinos in eastern lowland Bolivia. It focuses on the accumulation mechanisms and shifting land tenure arrangements within campesino communities in the municipality of Cuatro Cañadas, Bolivia's epicentre of soy agribusiness expansion. My analysis shows how a state intervention triggered an incipient process of 'accumulation from below' that radically transformed land relations. This in turn fostered division and distrust within the campesino population weakening their sindicatos - the historical campesino unions that have been crucial to defend their interests. Campesino settlements in this region of the country can be linked to the reverberations of the 1953 agrarian reform. These were part of a state-sponsored migration of highland campesinos to the lowlands to increase labour supplies. In this sense, the shifting land tenure arrangements that are gradually concentrating land on the hands of emergent capitalist farmers could be considered an instance of counter agrarian reform. But one that is unfolding slowly and 'from below' in a context where the intensification of commodification processes brought about by agribusiness expansion is shaped by historic-specific forms of social organisation and state intervention.