Commodity Prices, Political Incentives, and Land Dispossessions: Evidence from Paraguay

• In Event: Landholding Inequality, Development, and Political Conflict in Latin America

Abstract

This paper investigates the local conditions under which landed elites may dispossess peasant populations from the lands they inhabit, a phenomenon that has gained salience in the past two decades. Conventional explanations underscore the incidence of the 2000s commodity boom that made land a valuable asset to both domestic landowners and international investors. We argue that, in addition to the economic environment, dispossession is a political-motivated decision. We propose a framework that focuses on landed elites’ incentives to dispossess. Landed elites have to selectively target communities and, to that end, they evaluate the resources and opportunities that can facilitate or hinder dispossession. We present a novel comprehensive database of rural conflict at the municipal level in Paraguay since democratization (1991-2015), which is based on archives and secondary sources collected over four years of fieldwork. We offer preliminary evidence showing a relationship between landholding inequality, potential for export-oriented agriculture (especially soybean production), and land dispossessions. Finally, we explore a number of hypotheses to evaluate the strategic component of dispossessions, paying attention to factors such as collective capacity of landowners to forcibly displace communities, the partisan affiliation of mayors, and the power of peasants to resist expulsion attempts.

Author

• German Feierherd