Declaration regarding the Covid-19 pandemic in rural Latin American countries

On the 10th day of the month of Pachamama, Abya-Yala, Planet Earth

The global crisis caused by the unprecedented spread of Covid-19 forces us to rethink the very nature of the civilizational, multidimensional and environmental crisis that is shaking the contemporary world. 

We still lack the cognitive tools to fully understand what is happening in our daily lives in general, and in rural areas in particular. As Latin American communities have been pointing out, this global health crisis is rooted in previous crises: ecological, civilizational, economic, social, and political. These crises are now intensifying and pose a constant threat to life in all its forms.

This imbalance in the world order, manifested in a health emergency, also impacts another highly problematic sphere: the care of children, adolescents, dependent persons, and the elderly. It highlights what women, the feminist movement, and Indigenous peoples and nationalities have been arguing for decades about unpaid work—work that not only generates wealth but also sustains human and non-human life, and that allows for the maintenance of ecological interdependence. This crisis reveals the systematic abandonment of care by states and its delegation to working women, who perform essential work under precarious conditions, with excessive workloads and subjected to gender-based violence. This delegation is justified by placing care activities in the private and, simultaneously, feminine sphere. Through our work, activism, and research with peasant economies and rural women, we know that in this pandemic context, the intensification of care work, as well as the inequalities surrounding it, has increased. If guaranteeing dignified lives was already difficult before this moment, in these strange, uncertain, and extraordinary times, this situation has worsened due to the impossibility of ensuring dignified deaths and mourning, as has been happening in various countries of Latin America. Thus, the slogan “stay at home” is only possible for some, excluding many populations, especially the working class, women and children, workers and peasants, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities who lack the material resources for dignified survival and access to healthcare. In this context, the Latin American elites reveal their most criminal face: our lives mean nothing to them.

The pandemic crisis exposes and exacerbates other crises already underway: the food issue has reappeared at the center of the Latin American and global political stage. It is becoming increasingly clear that the agribusiness model's agro-food system, by its very nature, cannot guarantee food security for countries, let alone the food sovereignty and autonomy of our peoples. The concentration, hoarding, and dispossession of land and territories belonging to peasants, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants is intensifying, leading to food shortages due to the mass production of commodities for the global market and for biofuels; it generates overcrowding in large cities as a result of migration from the countryside to the city due to lack of access to land and decent work; it concentrates enormous profits in very few actors: large transnational companies of seeds, agro-export, distribution and collection, added to the financial corporations that use agricultural production and land as mere speculative commodities.

Although Covid-19 continues to devastate our populations, plans and solutions to the post-pandemic crisis are emerging. The proposed solutions bear a striking resemblance to old recipes familiar in rural Latin America: intensifying the intensive exploitation of nature. Extractive industries are seeking new legitimacy, now under the pretext that they are the only viable option for reviving Latin America's battered economies. Agribusiness, mega-mining, conventional hydrocarbons and fracking, lithium, and large-scale forestry projects maintain their presence, this time as an (apparent) solution to escape the labyrinth of post-pandemic isolation and confinement.

Faced with these scenarios, we ask ourselves how, from rural areas, we can begin to weave together alternatives from the realm of possibility and reduce the uncertainty that surrounds us as a kamanchaca, like a thick, dark fog. 

Covid-19 and the mandatory lockdowns highlight the world's retreat into itself. Community ties and the potential for their development are severed, threatened, and/or unable to strengthen in rural areas, where sharing land, habitat, and community customs are the pillars of organization, resistance, and survival in the face of advancing capital. In response, we are committed to rebuilding our communities using our autonomous capacities, in a pluralistic yet interconnected way. This involves considering the complexity of rural life from the perspective of local territories, encompassing the lives of collectives, individuals, and generations.

In these times, as in others, when territories are left alone and the State does not respond, solidarity emerges from below and by below, making visible the struggles rooted in the dispute of the territory to prevent the spread of the virus, to extend care networks and/or for the production and distribution of food, for example.

The question of how we produce and market food also brings into play old and new discussions surrounding agrarian issues: agrarian reform, food sovereignty, agroecology, and agrobiodiversity. These are all key concepts for building potential solutions for extraordinary times like these, debates that were previously confined to rural areas but are now expanding, revealing the possibility of building alternatives from the ground up, through rural social movements and alliances with other urban social groups. This is exemplified by the expansion, during the pandemic, of alternative marketing spaces for peasant and indigenous food in cities through networks and hubs of urban consumers and social movements.

We call for sharing and debating these reflections, to listen to and spread this urgent cry that emerges from the most remote territories of Our America / Abya-Yala to build alternative solutions to this global crisis, anchored in the knowledge and struggles of indigenous peoples, peasant movements and Afro-descendant communities.

As scholars and researchers of rural Latin America, and also as activists and supporters of rural social movements across our continent, we know that extractivism is not the solution to the current crisis. We have a duty to denounce it and contribute our small efforts to building civilizational alternatives to this crisis—alternatives that, far from exploiting nature's common resources, are rooted in the land and its people, fostering the creation of vibrant territories, full of life and reciprocity among their inhabitants and with Mother Earth (Pachamama).

10 2020 August
CLACSO Working Group
Critical Studies of Rural Development

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group Critical Studies of Rural Development, resistances and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.

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