Protests of Abundance: Distributive Conflict Over Agricultural Rents During the Commodities Boom in Argentina, 2003–2013

• Author: María Victoria Murillo,Jorge Mangonnet
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414019897417
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019897417

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(8) 1223 –1258

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414019897417

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Article

Protests of Abundance:

Distributive Conflict

Over Agricultural Rents

During the Commodities

Boom in Argentina,

2003–2013

Jorge Mangonnet1

and María Victoria Murillo1

Abstract

Whereas the scholarship on rural contention mostly focuses on austerity and

busts, we study protests by agricultural export producers in times of high

agricultural prices. Aware of price volatility, farmers seek to take advantage

of cycles’ upswings to maximize their income and resist sharing the rents

generated by higher prices. When farmers lack the formal political influence

to avert redistribution, they are more likely to protest as their tax burden

increases although they benefit from higher prices. Their strongest protest

tool is lockouts, which halt commercialization activities and have significant

economic consequences, but require coordination by farmer associations.

Membership homogeneity and lower exposure to state retaliation by these

organizations heightens contention. We test this argument using a local-level

data set on rural lockouts across Argentine departments between 2003 and

2013, a time of high prices for Argentina’s key export commodity: soybeans.

We complement our empirical strategy with in-depth, semi-structured elite

interviews.

1Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

María Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, International Affairs Building, Office 832,

420 W. 118th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.

Email: mm2140@columbia.edu

897417CPSXXX10.1177/0010414019897417Comparative Political StudiesMangonnet and Murillo

research-article2020

1224 Comparative Political Studies 53(8)

Keywords

economic policy, Latin American politics, politics of growth/development,

subnational politics, conflict processes

Among farmers, what’s more usual, is that when you have the feeling of

increasing welfare and you perceive that’s being threatened, that’s a reason for

mobilization.

—Jorge Solmi, former vice-president of the Argentine

Agrarian Federation (June 28, 2018).

Whereas the difficulties of collective action by dispersed farmers have long

been noticed (Bates, 1981), their protests seem more puzzling at times of

high agricultural prices when their grievances should decline. Indeed, a body

of conventional literature focusing on both farmers and peasants underscores

the impact of negative shocks on agrarian unrest. Farmers are exposed to

climate risks and sudden fluctuations in agricultural prices, both of which

jeopardize farm income. Thus, natural disasters (Mooney & Majka, 1995;

Wells, 1979) and negative price shocks (Klepper, 1974; North, 1974) have

been highlighted as major factors in fomenting farmers’ contentiousness.

Similarly, the literature on the political economy of contention emphasizes

the impact of material grievances generated by austerity and economic liber-

alization to explain recent protest by agricultural producers in advanced

nations (Bush & Simi, 2001; Della Porta, 2015) and Latin America (Eckstein

& Wickham-Crowley, 2015; Simmons, 2016). By contrast, high agricultural

prices are not expected to trigger farmers’ protests even though price upswings

have been associated with peasant unrest in reaction to the expansion of

agrarian frontiers into common lands, landholding concentration, and envi-

ronmental degradation (Hall, 2011). Protest in “moments of affluence,” how-

ever, have been noticed in nonagrarian contexts by Kerbo (1982), who

pointed to the higher prevalence of labor strikes in times of low unemploy-

ment and postmaterial protest movements in times of economic abundance.

We follow this tradition, seeking to explain the conditions that underpin con-

tention by farmers who benefit from the agricultural commodities boom.

The commodities super cycle that started in 2003 had a dramatic impact

on soybean prices. Indeed, while the four major grains (maize, soybeans,

rice, and wheat) doubled their price between 2003 and 2013, the price of

soybeans reached the highest levels driven by Chinese demand. By 2012,

wheat and corn hovered around US$200 per ton and rice at US$300, whereas

soybean prices grew above US$500 per ton.1 In response to world prices, the

Mangonnet and Murillo 1225

fertile South American countryside turned to soybeans, which became a

major export product in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Surprisingly, as prices peaked in 2008, soybean-producing farmers protested

in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These farmers were reacting to govern-

ments’ efforts at redistributing to their constituencies part of the rents pro-

duced by high soybean prices, either through taxes or regulations. Paraguayan

soybean producers took their trucks to the roads in December 2008 to avert a

tax on soybean exports and the imposition of regulations in the use of agro-

chemicals by a newly elected left-wing president. Similarly, soybean farmers

in Bolivia mobilized against leftist president Evo Morales in 2008 to resist

export quotas and the obligation to sell a portion of their production at lower

domestic prices, effectively taxing it.

In these cases, as in the Argentine one, farmers’ perception of low political

influence was crucial in explaining their mobilization in defense of the rents

generated by higher agricultural prices. Yet, there were important variations

in the incentives to join these protests at the local level. We focus on this

variation to further our understanding of rural contention in times of afflu-

ence. Our argument focuses on the distributive conflict over rents generated

by higher agricultural prices between farmers and governments while point-

ing to distinct organizational incentives shaping collective action.

Export crops have also been taxed in other Latin American countries and

in much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (Anderson, 2009; Estrades

et al., 2017). Taxing export crops becomes especially tempting during com-

modity booms as these rents are easy to capture in export ports (Saylor,

2014). Therefore, our findings have broader implications for understanding

incentives for rural contention in the context of high agricultural prices

beyond Latin America. In addition, our study also contributes to the literature

on the political economy of the commodities boom in Latin America by illu-

minating the revenue-side dynamics that sustained the expenditures of the

Left Wave governments that ruled the region during the 2000s.

We study Argentina because soybeans were its main export product and

we have access to local-level data to test our argument in the period of the

commodities boom. We focus on farmers’ lockouts, which interrupt commer-

cialization activities—for example, withholding production, sabotaging the

sale and transportation of food at customs and ports. As rural lockouts imply

forgone opportunities to sell at high prices and contract cancelations while

requiring storage capacity, they are used as a last resort by farmers. Yet,

farmer lockouts are their strongest protest tool due to their significant eco-

nomic impact. Freezing trade can induce macroeconomic instability by drain-

ing foreign-exchange reserves. If the government relies on tax monies levied

from the agricultural sector, rural lockouts may also diminish fiscal revenues