Acceso usuarios
Leonardo Rossi
El siguiente trabajo tiene como objetivo trazar una problematización de la noción de Antropoceno desde una clave agroalimentaria. En esa búsqueda, apoyado en la perspectiva general que ofrece la Ecología Política del Sur, el artículo adscribe a la formulación crítica de Plantacionoceno a partir del cual estructura una serie de entradas para construir una mirada tanto diacrónica como sincrónica que permita comprender las implicancias profundas de los regímenes alimentarios en tanto forma ecológico-política de primer orden. Para ese objetivo se rastrea, primeramente, desde aportes fundamentalmente antropológicos, rasgos clave de la interrelación entre comunidad y territorio con el alimento como nodo en formas no y pre capitalistas. En ese mapeo se contrastan antecedentes de producción de habitabilidad frente a las narrativas que sitúan a la especie humana como un agente genérico eco-socio-destructivo. En segundo orden, se describe desde un registro socio-histórico, las características principales del régimen de Plantación, en tanto tecnología erosiva de la habitabilidad basada en metabolismos comunales. Se remarca la especificidad espacio-temporal de esta forma de relación inter y trans-especie, y sus efectos inmediatos en términos ambientales, demográficos, alimentarios y onto-políticos. Un siguiente bloque aborda la noción de Plantacionoceno como crítica a la noción de Antropoceno, a partir de aportes provenientes de discusiones del campo de la antropología, la sociología y la ecología política. Desde una profunda crítica colonial, se avanza en vislumbrar las implicancias de largo aliento del régimen de Plantación en tanto base de una grave afectación onto-política que ha desmembrado las tramas entre sujeto-comunidad-territorio como base de la reproducción de la vida, y de forma ampliada a desafiliado a la humanidad de la Tierra con consecuencias extremas. El apartado posterior conecta esas raíces coloniales con los efectos contemporáneos del régimen agroalimentario del capital. Apuntalado en especial por estudios e informes alimentarios, sanitarios y ambientales, se describe un estado de situación de los territorios y cuerpos afectados por modos de producir, distribuir y consumir mercancías alimentarias bajo un sistema global orientado al lucro antes que a la reproducción de la vida. Por último, se concluye con una serie de reflexiones acerca de la centralidad de incorporar la clave del Plantacionoceno a los abordajes de la crisis ecológica y civilizatoria como a la construcción de alternativas en tanto revela la centralidad de la alienación alimentaria como perturbación ecológico-política que debe adquirir relevancia primordial frente a las urgencias que afronta la especie.
The following research was conducted by an author located in the Global South, specifically in Argentina, at the southern tip of Latin America. From this geographical perspective, and rooted in the Latin Ameri-can critical intellectual tradition, this work invites us to understand the continent's colonial past as a material and political print with effects on the present at different spatial scales. The aim is to further contribute to the current scholarship that identifies the Conquest of America as a turningl point in the trajectory of the planet and the human and non-human populations that inhabit it.In the last couple of decades, the Anthropocene concept has established itself as a key term to describe the profound and speedy mutations taking place within the bio-geo-chemical flows of the Earth. It has been employed to explain the role of human activity in the disruptions that endanger habitability as the species had known it. The notion has been problematized by different critical perspectives for attributing the activities that have affected the biosphere and its cycles to a generic and global agent (the anthro-pos), thus giving way to fertile dialogues among diverse scientific disciplines. Within that framework, this paper seeks to offer an ecological-political problematization of the Anthropocene notion with respect to the modes of food production, distribution and consumption by drawing on the Plantationocene con-cept. It argues that food’s mediation of the humanity-Earth relationship is central to the configuration, development and biological and political-cultural modulations of human lineage across millennia. This paper recovers—by relying on the general perspective offered by the Political Ecology of the South as a critical epistemology—the formulation of the Plantationocene to structure a series of sections tracing a diachronic and synchronic view that allow us to understand the deep implications of food regimes as ways of organizing the ecological and political relations of human societies.To that end, I first select and review key features of the interrelation between subject, community, and territory with food as the core in the context of non-capitalist societal formations. With contributions from the anthropological field, this mapping compares past experiences of habitability production via communal mechanisms and cultivation of socio-bio-diversity vis-à-vis narratives that present the human species as a generic eco-socio-destructive agent. I carry out a complex, non-linear reading of the modes of social organization and its corresponding ways of food provision, taking stock of the contingencies, bifurcations, jumps and cycles in the evolutionary-adaptative processes of lineage. Likewise, the paper identifies, from an anthropological-political perspective, the relations of cooperation existing within hu-man communities and with the non-human webs of life toward food production and understands them as primary forms of the political.Second, through a socio-historical lens that draws from colonial studies, environmental history, the anthropology of food, among others, I describe the main features of the Plantation regime as an eco-logical-political technology that erodes and destroys habitability based in communal metabolisms. I provide a brief overview —from the Madeira Island in Northeast Brazil to the Antilles—, to illustrate the spatio-temporal specificity of this inter- and intra- species mode of relation as a great civilizational rift. With data on the flows and exploitation of enslaved labor, the politics surrounding bodies and food territories, the financial rationality, the monoculture logic and environmental degradation, I stress the immediate and unprecedented impacts of colonial sugar plantations as platforms for the development of capital’s food regimes.Drawing from contributions from anthropology, sociology and political ecology, the next section address-es the Plantationocene notion as a critique of the Anthropocene. A profound colonial critique sheds light on the long-term implications of the Plantation regime as a fundamental basis for the serious onto-politi-cal impacts that have led to the dismemberment of the subject-community-territory webs at the basis of the reproduction of life. As these frameworks pose, the Great Plantation has configured on an expanded scale a representative mode of disaffiliation of humanity with respect to the Earth, leaving effective, long-term traces and marks at the intersubjective level. Reflections around the Plantationocene are meant to open a more complex—and at the same time specific—interpretation of the origins, agencies and responsibilities, socio-economic relations and ontological registers situated at the basic structures of the ecological crisis affecting the Earth and the human and non-human communities that inhabit it. This is followed by a section connecting these colonial roots in the Great Plantation with the contem-porary effects of capital’s agrifood regime. Using scientific studies and reports on global food, sanitary, environmental and socio-economic balances by international bodies, I describe the current situation of territories and bodies affected by the modes of production, distribution, and consumption of food prod-ucts. Stressing the decisive significance of a system of food supply organized for profit, and not for the reproduction of life, I cover the themes of deforestation, water consumption and contamination; large-scale use of pesticides; unhealthy diet, and hunger; labor exploitation and mega-accumulation of profit to draw a general picture of this system. I briefly underscore the central role of the capitalist agrifood regime well into the 21 st century as a primary axis of climate, ecological and collective health disrup-tions of extreme nature.Lastly, the above journey allows us to weave a series of reflections on the centrality of incorporating the Plantationocene as a category of critique both for approaching the planetary ecological crisis and for imagining and producing realistic alternatives. On that basis, this work provides theoretical-analytical grounds to grasp the major implications of food alienation understood as a great ecological-political disruption and seeks to enhance the relevance given to agrifood webs as essential political nuclei in the urgencies faced by our species. It concludes that, amid the erosion, destruction and subordination of the political forms of the commons, new ways to underpin the re-communalization of food as a way to rejoin the flows and rhythms between humanity and the Earth need to be found, both at the micro and macro level. In re-weaving a new planetary habitability, the central role of food in human politicity —learned from time immemorial to cultivate and reproduce life—can no longer be overlooked
