Conquering the desert to serve a global diet: oases agriculture in central-western Argentina at the rise of the capitalist world-ecology

Abstract

This article focuses on the historical productive restructuring of the oases in the semi-arid region of Cuyo, in central-western Argentina, particularly in the provinces of Mendoza and San Juan. From the 1990s onward, as in various latitudes of the arid-South American diagonal, the famous slogan of “making the desert bloom” has found in the agro-export boom its new raison d'être. Several areas of oasis agriculture production, traditionally structured around a surface-water distribution network, have undergone an expansion of their agricultural frontiers through intensive exploitation of its aquifers. Through groundwater access and the systematic application of modern irrigation technologies, domestic and foreign investors converted land branded as “dry”, “marginal” or “empty” into sources of profit. As a result, several oases are increasingly serving export markets and ultimately a global diet. In these dry environments, commodity flows, as either fresh or processed goods, depend of course on significant water supply. In the case of world wine capitals like Mendoza and San Juan, such rural dynamics go hand in hand with the commodification of the countryside for the tourist and real estate sectors. By exercising effective control over land and (mostly underground) water corporate actors contribute to the growing commoditization and enclosure of spaces of the arid piedmonts.
In this work we propose an analytical conceptualization of the oases as built environments, historically constructed through intensive and systematic water management. But we also understand them as an epistemic and ontological approach, challenging the usual society/nature dualism, as produced natures (Smith, 1984; Moore, 2015). Although the most recent agro-export restructuring of the oases were carried out within the framework of the current neoliberal and corporate agro-food regime, we show that such transformations are the culmination of a long insertion in the development of capitalism as a world ecology (Moore, 2015; Walker and Moore, 2019). From this hybrid, cross-border, and relational perspective we trace how the logic of endless capital accumulation and the production of nature have been central to the region's history.
Cuyo rivers originate in the snow-crested mountain range of the Cordillera de los Andes and flow toward the lower plains providing diverted water for five main oases developed on the piedmont. In this arid land with 100-350 mm of annual precipitation, no rain-fed agriculture is possible; water control is thus essential for the subsistence of the created and domesticated oasis ecosystems. The irrigation of the piedmont oases dates back to remote times but an important change in land use came in the colonial period when oasis economy was gradually modified in order to develop cattle fattening activities dependent on irrigated alfalfa, and complemented by wine production and subsistence crops. Another mayor revolution came in the late nineteenth century with the arrival of the railroad and a massive wave of Mediterranean migration. At the time, the provincial government and elite became active in a hydraulic mission by financing the expansion of a run-of-the-river irrigation system. This hydraulic mission goes hand and hand with a process of land and water commodification that results in the dispossession of native and peasant groups from their traditional land and water rights. Concomitantly, such massive hydraulic infrastructure has been at the core of a winegrowing and winemaking historical production model, supplemented by other fruit and vegetable crops. This model, which has been boosted by the growth in the domestic consumption of low-quality table wine, entered into absolute collapse in 1980. Since the late 1980s larger and better capitalized firms began a process that would become known as the reconversión of the Argentine wine industry.
As the decade of the 1990s progressed, Mendoza's oases started arousing great interest from transnational investors. At the same time a restructuring process started to reveal its spatial consequences: while some areas were abandoned, others expanded. In particular, the expansion of the agricultural frontier was made possible by intensive aquifer exploitation in the context of loosely regulated groundwater management. Led by intensive, mainly large-scale and export-oriented projects, this conquest of the piedmont involved not only the high-quality wine-making sector but also the production of fruit, tree nuts, vegetables and olive oil. Former “marginal lands” were now in the sights of firms, who saw the peripheral areas of the oases as potentially highly profitable. With access to groundwater, corporate actors became disconnected and independent from the complex run-off-the-river irrigation system by irrigating their fields at their leisure. In particular, drip irrigation was used not only to overcome physical constraints in conquering the new space of production but also to optimize farming performance, guaranteeing quality and quantity. Many business groups, seeking to diversify their activities or finding stability in the face of financial market turbulence, have chosen to combine export wine production with other sources of profit, such as tourism and luxury real estate complexes.
Our article is structured in three moments. Firstly, we propose an ontology of the concept of oasis through the thesis of the production of nature. We will give an account of different forms of internalisation of nature through production in general, for exchange, and finally through the circulation and accumulation of capital. Secondly, we develop a periodization of capitalism in its relation to the production, commercialization and consumption of food, resorting to the discussions on the so-called agro-food regimes. From this approach, we propose to reconstruct the fragmented spatial trajectory of the main oases of Cuyo from their pre-Hispanic origin to their articulation in three successive regimes: the diaspora-agro-export, the mercantile-industrial and the neoliberal corporate regimes. Thirdly, drawing on the concept of commodity frontiers we focus on three products for export-markets: wine, olive oil and pre-fried potatoes. Drawing upon these short examples and in resonance with the world ecology approach we will show that the oases as such represent a renewed attempt to expand, but also to maintain active commodity frontiers. We argue that strategies employed by investors to gain access to the land and water –or to maintain their initial business plans– may encounter obstacles, such as policy shifts, legal constraints or lack of economic openness. In other words, the commodity frontier is not always a worry-free process. Finally, this work aims to show that the relational processes embodied by such commodities and frontier-making not only transcend the Cartesian binary society/nature, but also make more complex the comfortable compartmentalisation between local and global processes.