Latin American progressive governments still bet on 'extractivismo'.

• Author: Ruiz-Marrero, Carmelo

Surely no Bolivian head of state has ever been as famous an international celebrity as Evo Morales. His pronouncements on environmental protection and against the capitalist system have earned him much fame. His participation in the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009 was key in exposing to the whole world the hypocrisy and inaction of major polluting countries regarding global warming.

It was in response to the Copenhagen fiasco that Morales took the initiative of organizing and hosting an alternative civil society summit meeting in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April 2010. His opening speech at the summit, officially named the World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, was the most important and right-on-target statement ever made by a head of state on the subjects of ecology and climate change. His declarations and actions have earned him the esteem of environmentalists and progressives from all over the world.

However, it seems President Morales does not practice in his own country what he preaches in in-ternational forums. When he came to power in 2006, hydrocarbons, or fossil fuels, were his country's main source of income. Mining followed closely behind in second place. The activities of both economic sectors are highly polluting and predatory of natural resources, and hydrocarbons are precisely the main cause of global warming. If anything has changed since then, it's that Bolivia is nowadays more dependent on hydrocarbon and mining exports, according to a recent report by the Center of Studies for Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA).

CEDLA explains that in 1988 hydrocarbons and mining were responsible for 47% of the country's exports and today they constitute 80%. "Between 2004 and 2005 the growth of the hydrocarbon sector accounted for nearly 25% of the country's economic growth, and in 2008 the mining sector's growth explained almost 40% of economic growth."

Given the growing importance of fossil fuel ex-ports for Bolivia's national economy, one can hardly conceive of Evo Morales' government making a useful contribution to moving the world towards a post-carbon economy in the near or middle term.

Environmental aspects aside, dependence on raw materials exports sentences the countries of Lat-in America and the rest of the global South to the lowliest state of economic underdevelopment. The writings of thinkers like Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Eduardo...