Agrarian workers’ long struggle for labor justice in Peru: progress and an uncertain future

In December 2020, agrarian workers laboring for different agro-export companies in various coastal areas in Peru organized protests which soon spread out to multiple regions in the country. They demanded new labor regulations able to guarantee better working conditions and real salary increases. As conversations with state authorities stalled, manifestations continued throughout the month with police violence leading to the passing of three workers. After strained negotiations between the government, agricultural conglomerates and protesters, an agreement was finally reached, and a new agrarian law was issued which is expected to come into force this year. Which are the historical origins of Peruvian agrarian workers’ precarious labor conditions? How to understand the social and political circumstances that led to their uprising? And how to assess the significance and potential outcomes of new law? In this short piece, we provide some insights for answering these pressing questions.

The neoliberal origins of agrarian workers’ labor precarity and the Peruvian “agribusiness boom”

Manuela is a 22-year-old Peruvian seasonal agrarian worker at an agribusiness company in the province of Viru, in the coastal department of La Libertad. Like many other agrarian workers in the area, she is originally from a nearby rural community and migrated to Viru enticed by the increasing labor demand that resulted from the expanding production of blueberries over the past decade. Indeed, as Peru became the world’s leading exporter of blueberries last year, agribusiness companies reported that profits raised around 500% between 2019 and 2020 and that 2,000 new hectares are expected to be established annually in the next years (Agencia Agraria de Noticias 2020). This astounding success that is part of a more general rise of the Peruvian agribusiness sector, has nonetheless hardly benefitted workers like Manuela. Not only she is used to withstand long hours under the burning coastal sun during the harvest seasons for only 39,19 soles (or 10,75 dollars) a day, but she must also cope with standstill post-harvest periods in which she does not receive any income. While she is formally employed, she has a fixed-term temporal contract that prevents her from having a stable job. The employment insecurity feeds a haunting fear of dismissal if she fails to meet the company’s productivity demands, which staves off agrarian workers like Manuela to unionize, a right that has long been hampered by the previous law. Although Manuela’s salary was slightly increased in the last years, she says she still cannot make ends meet because housing and food prices have also swollen.

This brief depiction of Manuela’s labor conditions reveals the precarious situation of thousands of agrarian workers in La Libertad, Ica, and Piura, all coastal regions where, at least since the decade of the 1990s, various national agribusiness enterprises have dramatically increased their power to control land with the acquisition of large private properties that many compare to historical latifundia, so distinctive of Latin American agriculture and politics (Edelman 2018; Wolf and Mintz 1957). Crucially, and in contrast with land grabbing trajectories taking place in other countries, land concentration in this case has not relied on the expulsion of local communities from their territories, a typical phenomenon of accumulation by dispossession which has been well-studied in other latitudes and sectors (Harvey 2004). Rather, big capital has here chiefly depended upon the creation and subsumption a labor force that has only contingent access to land and that is cheap, atomized, and politically inarticulate. Such fragile political organization is reflected in the fact that even when companies incur in blatant infringements of labor rights as with the scarce provisioning of water during working hours, workers are rarely vocal and avoid reporting any inadequate treatment to state authorities. This kind of crushing dominance of capital over labor has been achieved through the establishment of an institutional and legal arrangement that was first set up during Alberto Fujimori’s mandate and that continues until today, notwithstanding the growing social opposition and recent legal modifications.

Legal devices such as the Lands Law (Ley de Tierras- 26505) of 1995, which first fostered the liberalization of the land tenure regime and later the Law for the Promotion of the Agrarian Sector (Law 27360), enacted in the year 2000, set the conditions for the development of what has been broadly vaunted as the “agro-export boom”. As part of a structural neoliberal reform marked by a modernizing and globalizing thrust, these laws institutionalized a new model of agrarian development that changed the meaning and purpose of land use to favor large scale capital. The incentives that the state started granting to agro-export corporations ranged from the unhampered access to land and water resources, the suppression of limitations to corporate investments and land concentration, income tax exemptions, the signing of multiple Free Trade Agreements and the state-led international promotion of non-traditional agrarian products such as blueberries, avocados, and asparagus, the recently introduced flagship commodities of the “boom”. Although this preferential treatment certainly boosted corporations’ profits, the agribusiness success would have not been possible without the creation of a flexible labor regime that suited the labor-intensive pursuits of agricultural enterprises. Indeed, the Law 27360 put up an especial labor framework for the promotion of investments in nontraditional products, according to which companies that exported more than 40% of their production were able to hire temporal workers indefinitely. In other words, while dismissing or denying fair working conditions to the laborers, the agro-industry benefitted from having its own labor regime, one especially designed for the purposes of generating profits for this business sector.

A transient window of opportunity: understanding the social and political underpinnings of the strike

Despite agrarian workers have been experiencing precarious working conditions for decades, overt confrontation between big capital and labor force only congealed during the first days of December 2020, when workers first in Ica, and later in La Libertad and other regions organized themselves to block key highways, take over government offices and stage protests. Many of them work for traditional consortia with properties between 20,000 and 60,000 hectares (the case of Grupo Gloria, Romero, or Wong) or for recently formed agribusiness companies with big estates (neolatifundia) of more than a thousand hectares (CGTP 2020). Former President of Peru, Martin Vizcarra, had recently extended the validity of the Law for the Promotion of the Agrarian Sector (Law 27360) for ten years through an Emergency Decree, which triggered workers immediate action. The development of mobilizations was facilitated by circumstantial events that only superficially (and not essentially) altered the previous rigidity of the political opportunity structure (Tarrow 1998).

On the one hand, the pandemic was a contingent phenomenon which provoked the worsening of working conditions, a situation that reached an unbearable limit (Ore 2021). In contrast with other business sectors which had to carry out rigid social distancing restrictions and undergo temporary closures in compliance with of one of the hardest quarantine policies implemented in the region, agribusiness companies continued operating normally. The government had exempted the sector from any restriction based on the designation of food production as an essential activity. Even though agrarian industries introduced safety measures such as the acquisition of vehicles for the transport of workers, infection rates escalated in the estates. As workers fell ill, they found themselves to be socially unprotected, having to face a collapsing health system as uninsured citizens, given their status of temporary labor force.  

On the other hand, agrarian workers’ mobilizations were also animated by the political momentum. Throughout the month of November, protesters had been flooding the streets to hinder the attempt of the legislative branch to remove President Vizcarra from office, who had been pushing for the advancement of anticorruption investigations and for the passing of a package of political reforms (the most controversial of them was precisely the withdrawal of parliamentary immunity). Developing against the background of the country’s endemic political crisis – expressed in a weak system of political parties, fragile political leaderships and every single living former President involved in serious corruption scandals- nation-wide mobilizations in defense of democracy took place after Vizcarra’s dismissal. Crucially, and as in the case of agrarian workers’ strikes, these protests were mostly led by millennials, or groups of young people who came to be known as the Bicentennial Generation, in commemoration of the upcoming anniversary of Peru’s 200 years of existence as an independent nation.

In this way, these circumstantial events opened a window of opportunity for agrarian workers’ mobilizations, which were likewise organized by an overwhelmingly young population as most agrarian workers are less than 30 (Araujo 2021). Among their most important demands were the elimination of the Law for the Promotion of the Agrarian Sector, substantial salary increases, and the overall improvement of working conditions. Protests soon intensified with three deaths and many injured, which adding to the already unstable political situation, hastened the freshly installed government of Francisco Sagasti to establish a negotiation table with all the stakeholders, namely, representatives of the agribusiness companies, workers’ federations, and different ministers. In the conversations, workers were able to publicly denounce their precarious working conditions and communicate the main reasons behind their petition to abolish the Law 27360.

A fragile agreement: the new agrarian law and its uncertain future

After various rounds of tense conversations, on December 31^st the government published a new law for the promotion of the agrarian sector, a norm whose regulation is currently in the process of public debate and negotiation. Two of the most important modifications are the salary increase for agrarian workers and the progressive rise of the income tax for agribusiness companies up until the year 2028. Despite the legal decision, neither workers nor the agribusiness sector are satisfied with its contents. While workers’ total compensation does improve with the new law, their demand of receiving a day’s wage of 70 soles (19.14 dollars) was not met. In addition, the law does not explicitly estipulate a salary increase, but an especial allowance corresponding to 30% of a minimum wage. The especial status of this compensation does not permit the calculation of extra working hours or holidays. Therefore, what the future for Manuela and other laborers will look like is still uncertain as it seems their demands will not be fulfilled in the near future. However, frustration emanates also from other fronts. 

The agribusiness sector expressed dissatisfaction too and reported that the implementation of the law could cost them millions of dollars in losses. However, and notwithstanding the open complaints from the agribusiness sector, agrarian scholars, activists, and social movements should be able to anticipate capital’s practice of selective accommodation to seemingly adverse institutional arrangements, a well-known and widespread strategy used with a view of perpetuating its own reproduction. As some have already noted and predicted, given that the law does not substantially alter the structures of the agro-export model, more land concentration and less employment could be two possible unintended consequences of its implementation (Eguren 2021). Indeed, business associations have already announced that they intend to incorporate new technologies so as to reduce their expenditures in labor force. Moreover, it will be hardly surprising to see agribusiness companies actively influencing the process of regulation of the law with the objective of adjusting its implementation to their own interests. It will be the task of critical agrarian scholars to follow these moves and to make sense of capital’s uneven and complex adaptation strategies to rising labor demands.

REFERENCES

Agencia Agraria de Noticias. 2020. “Hortifrut registra ganancias acumuladas por US$ 38.3 millones de enero a septiembre de 2020”, Accessed March 1st 2021. https://agraria.pe/noticias/hortifrut-registra-ganancias-acumuladas-por-us-38-3-millones-22982

Araujo, Ana Lucia. 2021. ¿Puede la concentración de tierra ser fuente de desarrollo? Un análisis de las condiciones y bienestar de trabajadores agroindustriales de la provincia de Viru, Perú. Lima: Centro de Estudios Sociales. 

Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú -CGTP.2020. CGTP apoya paro agrario por Asamblea Constituyente. Accessed March 1^st 2021. http://www.cgtp.org.pe/2020/11/29/30-11-cgtp-apoya-paro-agrario-por-asamblea-constituyente/

Edelman, Marc. 2018. “Haciendas and Plantations: History and limitations of a 60-year-old taxonomy” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 38(4) 387–406. 

Eguren, Fernando. 2021. “El modelo agroexportador: más allá de los conflictos laborales”. La Revista Agraria, número 192: 4-8, enero de 2021.

Harvey, David. 2004. The New Imperialism. Oxford, Nueva York: Oxford. University Press.

Ore, María Teresa. 2021. “Notas sobre el movimiento social de trabajadores de la agroexportación en Ica”. La Revista Agraria, número 192: 9-12, enero de 2021.

Tarrow, Sidney.1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolf, Eric, and Sidney Mintz. 1957. Haciendas and plantations in Middle America and the Antilles. Social and Economic Studies. Social and Economic Studies 6(3): 380–412.

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