The expansion of monocultures in Amazonia: from the global to local level, from China to the Tipnis

Abstract

The paper highlights the socio-environmental impacts caused by extractive activities carried out in indigenous and biodiverse territories in South America between 2000 and 2015, in the context of the increase in exports of natural resources from countries in the region for China, in economic growth in the same period. During this period, several countries in the region faced a series of conflicts between progressive governments, which implemented national and regional economic and social development programs based on extractivism, and indigenous organizations, fighting to maintain control over their territories and ways of life. The conflict around the construction of the road that crosses the Indigenous Territory and Isiboro Sécure National Park, in the southern Bolivian Amazon, synthesizes this tension by exposing the different civilizing projects in dispute in the Amazon region. On the one hand, it exposes the advance, over the forest and its peoples, of monocultures that structure the paradigm of western capitalist and colonial modernity (in addition to the soy monoculture). On the other hand, it reveals the struggle of lowland indigenous people who, anchored in the Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien concept and in the Rights of Mother Earth, resist against the consolidation of the road in the central area of the park and, more broadly, the establishment of progress as an inevitable and universal social path for all peoples and nations, from China to Tipnis.