Bolivia Diaries: Day 2, Part 4 - Controversial Highway Through the Jungle (TIPNIS)

This diary is part of a series describing my trip to Bolivia to study food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate change. On our second day, we saw a presentation from the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development (FOBOMADE) and then took a tour of the La Paz foodshed. This diary covers the second section of the FOBOMADE presentation, which was surprisingly fascinating.

When FOBOMADE told us they were presenting on TIPNIS, I was not sure what to expect. TIPNIS - the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park - is a protected area (for environmental reasons) that is also a TCO, a Tierra Comunitaria de Orígen, or an indigenous territory. Thus, the land is twice protected - once for environmental reasons, and once because it is an autonomous indigenous area. Yet the Bolivian government is planning, against the will of the indigenous, to build a highway right through it. The issue turned out to be MUCH more interesting and complex than meets the eye.

TIPNIS was originally created in 1965 as a national park. At the time it was just PNIS, because it was not yet an indigenous territory. Then, in 1990, it was established as an indigenous territory, expanded, and renamed TIPNIS. The area then contained 1,225,347 hectare.

TIPNIS is a region of Andes to Amazon transition ranging in altitude from 3000m to 189m and including land in the provinces of José Ballivián, Marbán and Moxos in the department of Beni, and Ayopaya and Chapare provinces in the department of Cochabamba. Within the area are many different ecosystems and a wealth of biodiversity.

FOBOMADE says the following about TIPNIS:

Its forests regulate the water runoff on the plains and regulate the climate in the surrounding highly productive valleys; while large areas of wetlands, swamps and bogs play an important role in the regional hydrological functioning. This region records the highest amount of precipitation in all of the country, from 5700mm/year in Villa Tunari to about 3500mm/year towards San Ignacio de Moxos.

This territory faces serious threats from the spread of coca cultivation, drug trafficking, oil exploration, logging and commercial and sport poaching.

As early as 1992, the indigenous were negotiating with colonizers over where the colonization within TIPNIS must end. Representing the colonizers was none other than Evo Morales. In 1994, they agreed upon a Red Line that divided the indigenous territory from the area settled by colonizers. But conflict between the groups continued. In 2004, there was a proposal to redefine the Red Line.

In 2008, the indigenous and the colonizers finally agreed to the location of the Red Line that limited future settlements. However, that same year, Morales announced the awarding of the contract for the construction of a highway between Villa Tunari and San Ignacio de Moxos, right through the middle of TIPNIS, to the Brazilian company Constructora OAS Ltda.

Efforts to build a road in this area began in the 1990's. The groups interested in the completion of the 306km highway include neoliberal governments, political groups with interests in logging and ranching, oil companies, and colonists (likely coca growers) in the Chapare region seeking access to new farmland. Of course, during that time, Bolivia was under a neoliberal government.

The hated, neoliberal Goni had a development plan called "El Cambio para Todos" (Change for All), which led to Decreto Supremo 25134 of 1998. The Supreme Decree established a national road network consisting of 10,401km of roads, including some mega highways. FOBOMADE accuses the plan of prioritizing the needs of Bolivia's international neighbors over the needs of Bolivians. Building roads needed for Bolivians was left to local governments, who did not have the funds to do so. FOBOMADE feels that the plan was designed according to the powerful business interests, without reflecting the needs for roads linking regions of Bolivia.

In 2000, under neoliberal president and former Bolivian dictator, Hugo Banzer, Bolivia joined onto the project of IIRSA, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America. This was a plan that rose out of a meeting of South American presidents in 2000. It calls for an integration of South American infrastructure to make trade easier among and through each of the various countries. Here's a picture of all of the roads Bolivia has built or plans to build:


In the map, the blue roads are functioning, yellow exist but in terrible condition. All in all, about 30% of the roads on this map exist in a functional way.

The plan for a road between Villa Tunari and San Ignacio de Moxos was announced in 2003 under Goni, shortly before the Bolivian people forced him out of office. His vice president and successor, Carlos Mesa, continued with the plan, seeking financing for construction of a road linking the cities of Cochabamba and Trinidad in late 2003.

Looking at the big picture, Bolivia sits in the middle of many other South American countries. Starting in the north and working clockwise, Bolivia borders Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Brazil, now the top soybean producer in South America, engages in massive soybean exports to China. Much of the soybean growing is centered in the Brazil state of Mato Grosso, which borders the Bolivian state of Santa Cruz. To get its soybeans to China, Brazil needs to take them across Bolivia to ports on the Pacific coast.

Even where there are roads in Bolivia, they are often terrible. In some places the roads are made of dirt and in some places the roads don't exist at all. Bolivia's lack of roads - and lack of good roads - are one of the reasons why the Bolivian people are so effective at exerting their will by blockading the roads. There often isn't another road that drivers can use to go around the blockade.

Brazil wants an East-West road through Bolivia and a North-South road through Bolivia to reach ports in Peru and Chile. It currently takes Brazil $1900 and 45 days to send 1 container from its Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast through Bolivia. With all of Bolivia's planned highways, it will take only $1260 and 4 days. Additionally, Brazil wants to get at Bolivia's Amazon. They are buying an awful lot of land in the industrial agriculture area in Santa Cruz too. Currently, 40% of Santa Cruz agricultural lands are in foreign hands.

Thus, since 2003, this highway has been part of the plan to link Brazil to ports in Chile and Peru through Bolivia under IIRSA. It runs parallel to the Sécure Oil Block, which the oil company Repsol has operating rights for (from a 30 year agreement signed with the neoliberal government of Bolivia in 1994). And even through Bolivians threw out the presidents who were pushing the construction of this highway (Goni and Mesa) and elected Morales instead, Morales continues to follow the same agenda as his predecessors.

The highway is to cost $415 million dollars, 80 percent of which will be financed by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). The financing was secured with an agreement between Brazil and Bolivia in August 2009. FOBOMADE says, "The government of Evo Morales chose to build the road bypassing technical and environmental standards, national legislation, and especially the rights of the indigenous peoples established in the constitution." They feel that this project is being done more for the needs of Brazil than Bolivia.

FOBOMADE has a long explanation of the harm that will be done to TIPNIS if the highway is built. There will be logging, oil exploration, cattle ranchers entering from the north, and coca growers from the south. Brazilian transnationals will benefit, and Bolivia will be flooded with more Brazilian products displacing Bolivian ones in its markets. And indigenous autonomy and rights will be utterly violated.

While I was in Bolivia, some 1500 indigenous people began marching from Trinidad to La Paz, demanding to speak to Evo Morales and ONLY to Evo Morales. As of a few days ago, they had marched 70 of the 375 miles and tensions were high:

Upon their arrival in San Ignacio de Moxos, the marchers were welcomed by local residents but also confronted by a mob of campesinos, cocaleros, and other MAS loyalists who broke windshields of their support vehicles and initially blocked their exit route. Stores and public facilities were closed, depriving the marchers of access to food and water.

While the MAS government denied responsibility for these provocations, the government’s consistently disparaging remarks about the indigenous protestors created a climate of hostility that invited confrontation.

In other words, this is an ongoing controversy that encapsulates a number of different struggles Bolivia is going through. Deforestation of a precious protected area of high biodiversity is certainly important, but this also involves national sovereignty, indigenous rights, oil exploration, coca and cocaine production, and more.

Bolivia Diaries: Day 2, Part 3 - GMOs and Local Food in Bolivia

This diary is part of a series describing my trip to Bolivia to study food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate change. On our second day, we saw a presentation from the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development (FOBOMADE) and then took a tour of the La Paz foodshed. This diary covers the first section of the FOBOMADE presentation, which covered their work food sovereignty in Bolivia.

FOBOMADE stands for Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development. When we met with them, they began with a presentation on food sovereignty that largely emphasized the issue of GMOs. The end of the presentation went beyond GMOs to other issues of local food in Bolivia.

FOBOMADE opposes agrochemicals, large scale monoculture, and the concentration of land in the hands of a few, especially in the hands of Brazilians, who are eager to get in on GE soy production in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. But another major issue with GMOs in Bolivia is the incredible biodiversity that would be impacted by them. Wiping out the genetic wealth of Bolivia's native crops (and non-native crops like corn for which they are also a center of biodiversity), either via GMOs of those same crops or simply by the expansion of large-scale monoculture wiping out the previous biodiversity of campesino agriculture, would harm not just Bolivian indigenous and campesinos but truly the entire world.

The campaign for food sovereignty at FOBOMADE comes from their campaign resisting GMOs. This began in 1994, when there was an effort to introduce GMO potatoes. This was long before Evo Morales was in power, during the neoliberal period of Bolivia's government.

Especially in 2005, when the Argentine government and Monsanto positioned themselves to legalize GM soy, that's when civil society and indigenous and campesino groups truly got organized against GMOs. There was an executive degree passed in 2005 to legalize production and commercialize GM soy in Santa Cruz.

(Bolivia has some 1 million hectares - 2.47 million acres - of soy monoculture in Santa Cruz, much of which is now genetically engineered. Argentina was the first country in South America, I believe, to legalize GE soy, and now some 97% of Argentina's soy is GE. Paraguay, a smaller country than Bolivia, has four times as much land in soy - much of which is GE - and it's disastrous. This is what FOBOMADE is fighting against.)

Even then-Senator Evo Morales, who was elected later that same year, was part of the opposition to this. That year, the social movements were successful in stopping the legalization of GE corn because Bolivia's a center of genetic diversity of corn. They did this through a resolution through the ministry of environment. But they lost on GE soy and continued to fight on it.

When the Morales government initiated the writing of a new constitution, FOBOMADE and others organized around that process, advocating an article (Article 405) that banned GMOs in Bolivia. This was included in draft versions of the constitution. However, it was ultimately softened into language in Article 409 saying that GMOs will be regulated by the law.

FOBOMADE and others also got Article 275 into the constitution, which is about Free Trade Agreements. There, they got stronger language against importation, production, and commercialization of GMOs. This actually made it into the final version of the constitution.

Now there's an apparent contradiction in the constitution between Article 409, which is vague and weak, and Article 275, which has stronger language. So now they are involved in processes attempting to get the constitution interpreted so that the stronger language has the priority over the weaker, vaguer language. There's a lot of negotiation still going on over interpretation of these various clauses.

They had a lot of hope with Evo Morales, who initially said that Bolivia should be a country free of GMOs, and yet what has happened is the opposite. There's been a 300% increase in imports of agrochemicals since 2005, and there's been an expansion of GE soy as well. Over 80% of Bolivia's soy is genetically engineered.

In the lowlands of Santa Cruz, that is dominated by industrial farmers, but there are also smallholders, largely colonizers from the highlands. Unfortunately, they've come under the influence of agribusiness, including a government agency for support of food production (Empresa de Apoyo a la Producción de Alimentos, EMAPA) which has been distributing GE soy seed to smallholders in Santa Cruz. FOBOMADE is also seeing a lot of problems with land grabs, particularly by Brazilian companies.

Beyond GMOs
Thus, the initial anti-GMO alliance has turned into the Alliance for Responsible Consumption and Solidarity. It includes a broad civil society alliance of indigenous organizations, campesino organizations, NGOs, chefs, and consumer organizations.

Throughout the entire country, because Bolivia's the center of genetic diversity for many crops, they are working with producers, farmers, and consumers to educate them about the big picture on what's happening at the global level of GMOs and agrochemicals and how to revalue local food consumption.

They are carrying out informational campaigns with print materials and their website. Also, they are working with grassroots groups in each region of Bolivia. One thing they are doing is working with chefs with experience with native campesino crops to go to each region and work with local people. For example, in the Pantanal, which is a region right on the border with Brazil that has an ecosystem similar to the Everglades, trying to help them solidify their own local food identity.

One of the organizations they are working with is the Federation of Domestic Employees so that they can bring education to their employers and to their families. In Potosi and Oruro, they are working in the area that grows quinoa that is almost 100% for export. This is an area that experiences high malnutrition because they sell the nutritious quinoa and then buy less nutritious food (like white bread and noodles) with their profits. The bulk of FOBOMADE's work is political, but they also want to bring producers and consumers closer together, similar to the local food movement in the U.S.

As FOBOMADE was working with the producers, they came to realize that one of the biggest problems was markets. So they decided to take advantage of another article in the constitution which prioritizes state purchasing of smallholder products. They realized that the medium and large producers had the advantage and they want to help smallholders access state purchasing benefits.

In parts of the Amazon, a major product is Brazil nuts, which are almost entirely for export. So one of the projects they are working on is with a Bolivian program similar to WIC. Bolivian employers are required by law to provide a "lactation subsidy" every month for a year after an employee has a child. The employer gives the employee a ticket to redeem for food.

So FOBOMADE got Brazil nuts (70% of which actually come from Bolivia - 20% are from Brazil, and 10% from Peru) included in these packets of food for 2 years. After that, there were problems after that because the price of Brazil nuts went from $2.50/lb to $4/lb. Then, a state entity was created that took over purchasing the Brazil nut and keeping it included in the lactation subsidy packets. Since then, they've been able to include other products as well, like local honey and amaranth. Before these efforts, FOBOMADE told us, the lactation subsidies were nearly all milk products, which can't even really be produced in the same regions that produce Brazil nuts.

Another program they work with is the school breakfast program, which began before the Evo Morales presidency. They found that most of the food provided came from large companies and the food was transported from far away. The food was either packed with preservatives or it even arrived rotten. Now they are working to encourage purchasing from local producers.

For example, they are now working in Yungas, the mountainous area between the highlands and valleys. For Yungas, one of the only markets is for coca. Now they are encouraging amaranth production and opening up a market through the school breakfast program to buy it and serve it to the children. This is just one example of how they work with local producers to create markets for state purchasing and for local consumption.

They are also trying to take advantage of the fact that there is an indigenous government, to see if they can have them replace junk food with healthy native foods. They go around the country having fairs to showcase native foods and to have tastings. They are also working at the municipal level to prioritize local production for local consumption there.

Through all of these projects, they are working to create a real alternative based in campesino agriculture while also educating producers on what is happening at the global level. For this, they are working with a group called the Unity Pact that is made up of a number of groups working alongside the government.

The Most Recent Fight
The different organizations were working to promote and pass a law of "The Productive Decade," which had to do with strengthening community food production from agrarian reform to credit to more. Unfortunately, as the law moved up to the government and arrived to the executive level, there were many changes made to the original law proposed by the social movements.

FOBOMADE's role was to act as a liaison and to alert the social movements to what was happening, such as the inclusion of GMOs in the law, which had been absent from the original proposed version. When the law got to the executive, they formed working groups that inserted language about importation, production, commercialization of GMOs. FOBOMADE brought that information back to the campesino groups. The Minister of Regional Autonomy, a role created in response to the Media Luna departments' effort to become autonomous, who represents the interests of agribusiness in Santa Cruz, was pushing hard for more permissiveness on GMOs.

The social movements claimed that this was a law originating from social movements and thus it was important to take out the language on GMOs. They succeeded to some extent. The many organizations launched a massive public awareness campaign, even at the international level, with a letter for people to sign in opposition to GMOs, and the letter was given to Evo Morales. With this massive mobilization, people were protesting in the streets against the law including the language on GMOs.

FOBOMADE was highly critical of the law as a whole because it did not represent the law that was proposed by the campesinos and social movements. The law has already been passed. After it was passed, they brought together social movements on how to move forward. One idea is to propose new legislation to remove some of the articles of the legislation. Also, there's a legal path to denounce the law as unconstitutional because it goes against the articles mentioned previously in the constitution as well as the Law of Mother Earth.

This law, if you want more information on it, is called the Law of Productive, Communal and Agricultural Revolution. Here are some articles on it:

• The UK Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/20/bolivia-food-security-prices-agriculture
  
• Argentina Independent: http://www.argentinaindependent.com/currentaffairs/newsfromlatinamerica/bolivia-enacts-law-of-productive-revolution-/
  
• Latinamerica Press: http://www.saynotogmos.org/ud2011/index.php/2011/06/23/law-under-fire/comments/

As one of the closing comments, FOBOMADE said that they have been quite successful in many ways, considering that the effort to legalize GM soy began in 1997 and they held it off until 2005. They have also kept GMOs out for any crops for which Bolivia is a center of biodiversity.