The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Owners and Fences 89
the expense of pregnant women and children and that people are
now eating far less than they did before agribusiness development.
The environmental health hazards attributable to this development
compound the nutritional problem. The mills discharge their effluents
into the rivers, the main supply of drinking water, and all
sources of water are fearfully contaminated with fecal matter, according
to repeated surveys by bacteriologists. Infestations by hookworm
(in 50 percent of the population), Entamoeba histolytica
(25 percent), Stiongyloides (20 percent), and Ascaris (70 percent)
abound. The sewage system is abysmal, and people commonly go
barefoot. None of the wealth of the agribusinesses is invested in the
public services that are needed to overcome the damage wrought by
agribusiness.
Political tension and crime are a constant preoccupation. Official
"states of emergency" are in force more often than not. In such situations,
which are common in much of Colombia although the
country is formally a democracy, military law prevails most of the
time, preventing, for example, popular assembly and group meetings.
The owners of large estates like the two sugar plantations closest
to town have to travel with armed escorts of police and soldiers
for fear of kidnapping. For the same reason, their high-level administrators
have their jeeps fitted with two-way radios connecting
them to the army in Cali. The plantation workers' trade unions are
nowhere weaker than in this area, and salesmen for John Deere
claim that the amount of sabotage of mill machinery and field
equipment is staggering—higher here than in the rest of the valley
where there are far fewer peasants.
Contrary to all the propaganda of the large landowners, it is by no
means true that this large-scale farming provides a more efficient
use of land, labor, energy, or capital than does peasant farming, even
though yields are generally higher due to the capital and energy intensive
character of their inputs. Efficiency can be computed in
many different ways, but it is surely significant that the sugar plantations
supply fewer jobs per hectare and less cash return to the
worker (and the owner) per hectare, and demand a far greater human
energy output per day than do peasant farms, traditional or modern
(see Table i). Traditional peasant farming in this area is some six
times more efficient than that of the sugar plantations in energy
yielded in food compared with the energy input required to produce
that food. Furthermore, even though the yield per hectare of peasants
growing modern crops (such as soya) is only around half of that
of the large-scale farmers growing the same crops, production costs
of the peasants are so much lower that their return on capital in-