Browsing by Subject "water grabbing"

This thesis examines water grabbing for the avocado agribusiness in the Petorca River located in Central Chile. I argue that avocado agribusiness has turned into what I will call avocado extractivism. Avocado agribusiness functions within an extractive export-development model that perpetuates coloniality under the current economic and political world system. Avocado extractivism alters the bodies, minds, and eco-social spaces of humans and other-than-humans. Furthermore, avocado extractivism prolongs gender, race, and indigeneity inequalities ingrained in Chilean society since colonial times. The research questions that allowed me to unravel the eco-social vulnerabilities and barrenness created by avocado production are the following: • What has the avocado agribusiness done in Petorca? • Why has the expansion of avocado plantations been promoted as development? • How has avocado extractivism impacted communities in the Petorca Province? Through ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews, I carried out a thematic analysis that led to the following global themes: Mentality of inquilinaje; imaginary of development; accumulation by dispossession; encounters and contentions between water ontologies; barrenness; resistances; alternatives to avocado extractivism, and the political agency of water. These themes explain how avocado extractivism exists thanks to a water governance system that privatizes water and separates water and land rights stated in Pinochet’s 1980 constitution. Under this legal structure, avocado producers maneuver the current water code to accumulate water and land to grow avocado plantations. Unfortunately, this process has exacerbated vulnerabilities among humans and other- than-humans in the area. I conclude that avocado extractivism is, in essence, maldevelopment supported by the Chilean state and immersed in the global development apparatus that serves the global capitalist system. Avocado extractivism works within a neoliberal framework reinforced by the coloniality of power and unequal power relations between the Global South and the Global North. Furthermore, this thesis examined resistance and alternatives to avocado extractivism articulated by grassroots and eco-feminist movements. These alternatives contest the dominant ontology of water as a natural resource by proving that a more harmonious future is possible if a multiverse of onto- epistemic perspectives participates in the design of water governance. Ultimately, the resistances and alternatives to avocado extractivism aim at introducing relationality in the existences of humans and other-than-humans in Petorca.