Water Justice and Food Sovereignty in Cotopaxi,Ecuador

Introduction

Ecuador is one of the world's largest exporters of broccoli, with an industry that has transformed agricultural practice and land use in the central highlands over recent years. ¹ Most of the broccoli produced in Ecuador has been grown in Cotopaxi province, with an estimated 68% of national exports originating there since production began. ² Although neighboring Pichincha now rivals Cotopaxi as the top-producing province, the vast majority of broccoli grown in Cotopaxi (97%) still goes for export. ³ Cotopaxi itself covers almost 2500 square miles of Ecuador's central highlands, high-altitude foothills, and agricultural land on the inter-Andean plain. Broccoli is a water-intensive crop that, for large-scale planting and harvesting, requires expansive areas of relatively flat, high-yielding land and steady irrigation. As such, large plantations occupy most of the prime land within valleys, surrounded by greater number of small-scale and subsistence farms on less accessible, typically less fertile plots—a situation that reflects long regional histories of inequality. This article examines the contrasting experiences of two indigenous communities located beside one of the region's largest broccoli plantations, focusing in particular on unequal access to water for irrigation. It documents these inequalities, highlights successful steps taken to address them through collective action, and links these environmental justice issues to action and analysis around “food sovereignty” as articulated in Ecuador's Constitution.

Locations: The Alpamalag Valley, Cinco de Junio, San Isidro

Three agroindustrial companies lead broccoli production in Ecuador, and one of the main operators is based in Cotopaxi's Alpamalag Valley. The scale of their operations has attracted the interest of leading politicians who acknowledge the broccoli market as a key source of revenue for Ecuador and, in recent coverage, the operators state that 100% of their production is for export. ⁴ In the Alpamalag Valley, broccoli production started in earnest in 2008 when the company bought, converted, and expanded the main hacienda estate (called Selva Alegre). This was land that had previously been used as pasture for dairy cattle. ⁵

Located on the opposite side of the road to Selva Alegre is the community of Cinco de Junio, where just less than 30 households practice semisubsistence, family-scale agriculture on small plots of land, and the population fluctuates due to widespread labor migration. The vast majority of community land has no irrigation. Consequently, farmers here face issues of soil loss due to the combination of geographical and climatic conditions, including a semiarid climate and increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. Close by is the slightly larger indigenous community of San Isidro (429 residents in 92 households at the time of fieldwork)—a community that has, since 2010, had access to its own irrigation water supply. I focus on these two places because they offer illustrative comparative cases. The research under discussion is based on 15 months' ethnographic fieldwork (2010–2011), investigating community organizing, water justice, and the ongoing history of indigenous political action in the region, with a focus on commons-based infrastructure systems.

San Isidro is set back from the main road and adjoins a second estate that is still a dairy farm. Although San Isidro and Cinco de Junio differ in proximity to the main broccoli plantation at Selva Alegre, the key agricultural difference between these two communities concerns water. In 2009, San Isidro was part of an alliance of communities who secured funding from the National Institute for Irrigation (INAR) for the construction of a pipeline that sourced water in the páramo moorland that the community owned, located 20 km uphill from the village. The pipeline, completed in 2010, provides a constant flow of 25 liters per second (Lps)—more than six times the amount received previously (Fig. 1). The water is distributed among 85 households who participate in this collective project. Access to irrigation has counteracted a steady “desertification” of agricultural land—something fields in Cinco de Junio still suffer from—and has enabled farmers to increase production from their family plots. ⁶

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FIG. 1.

Graph showing differential access to irrigation water in locations within the Alpamalag Valley (water-flow rates measured in litres per second). Data available for four haciendas and six communities within the “Zona de Alpamalag” area, plus figures for San Isidro included for reference. “Hda” stands for “Hacienda.” Source: Cinco de Junio Community Archives; data compiled by Esmeralda Yasig. ³¹

Discussion: Access to Water

Figure 1 documents differences in access to water between communities, and between communities and broccoli plantations. Having installed two large reservoirs at different heights in the surrounding hills to maximize water capture and flow rates, Selva Alegre has access to a water supply of 55.4 Lps, in stark contrast to Cinco de Junio at just 4 Lps. ⁷ This small amount of water for the community is further divided among those fewer residents who have land that can be irrigated (land that is situated close enough to the one irrigation channel, which most of the time runs dry). Census figures also underscore the unequal distribution of water resources across Cotopaxi as a whole: one of the largest fruit-export farms in the province acquires 200 Lps, whereas, at the provincial level, an estimated 76% of indigenous and campesino (peasant farmer) households are without irrigation, and the remainder are usually able to irrigate only part of their comparatively small plots of land. ⁸

These inequalities are rooted in ongoing histories of dispossession and a series of policies that favor large landowners and their enterprises. In the case of water rights, many agreements and concessions were established, and subsequently traded in the preland reform era—when large estates governed virtually every aspect of life in the region. ⁹ As such, today's plantations have often acquired or inherited water concessions that were granted when indigenous communities were systematically denied land and water rights, and government pledges to reverse these deals have had limited effect. ¹⁰ The lack of access to irrigation in places like Cinco de Junio also reflects difficulty in accessing resources—to construct pipelines or canals, to purchase land through which these would pass, or to sign agreements for sourcing water in the páramo hills (unlike San Isidro, Cinco de Junio has no community-owned páramo land). Although located only 1.5 miles from San Isidro, Cinco de Junio falls within the purview of another administrative block and this was one reason they could not join the INAR-funded pipeline project that San Isidro benefits from today.

The lack of access to water in Cinco de Junio is compounded by threats to water quality (a problem that San Isidro faces less, since its irrigation water is sourced in moorland the community maintains). Located downstream of the broccoli plantations, residents have complained that their water has occasionally been tainted by agrochemicals runoff—from both pesticides and fertilizers. The broccoli operators make two claims in response (i) that use of agrochemicals at Selva Alegre has been reduced and, by late 2011, 30% of production at the site had been certified organic and (ii) that the company's own organic certification is under threat since some of the water they use has been tainted by agrochemicals used by highland communities located upstream. Not all of the plantation water arrives from upstream sources, however. In efforts to fuel expansion, the managers at Selva Alegre have begun “mining” water. Costing hundreds of dollars per meter of depth, they have completed a 300-m deep water well with plans to bring a second into service. ¹¹ Some Cinco de Junio residents were concerned that this could have adverse effects on their already limited water supplies.

Such tensions between farmers working at different scales and with differential access to land and water have been documented elsewhere in the region, ¹² at times exacerbated by another export-oriented industry in Cotopaxi, namely floriculture. Water concessions for flower plantations have tripled since 1990, ¹³ and production in Cotopaxi has grown to meet global demand, growing 6% annually over the past 5 years. ¹⁴ By 2011, producers in Cotopaxi were responsible for 20% of Ecuador's annual floriculture exports. ¹⁵ In San Isidro and Cinco de Junio, however, the presence and practices of the broccoli plantation at Selva Alegre are more of a concern than the floriculture sites—both in relation to water and land.

Land, In/stability and Food Sovereignty

As reflected in political support for the industry, the story often told of broccoli in Ecuador is one of success, with growth in exports between 2005 and 2013 of 13% annually, and figures for 2012 showing estimated revenue of U.S. $69 million. ¹⁶ Other sources, however, present a trajectory of instability and fluctuation: (i) when calculated from 2000, the overall growth rate has been much less significant (3.65%); (ii) national exports have declined relative to other producing countries (Italy moving up to the position of the world's sixth largest exporter, previously occupied by Ecuador); (iii) growing demand and inclement weather conditions elsewhere in the world boosted 2014 production in Ecuador by an unexpected 59%, further complicating the overall picture ¹⁷ ; and (iv) production in Cotopaxi was hit in 2008 because of falling demand, the global financial crisis, and U.S. trade sanctions, and has recovered only in the past couple of years. ¹⁸ Amidst this instability in markets, however, there has been a contrasting form of “stability”—in the persistence of rural underdevelopment. Public health officials have acknowledged that living conditions did not substantially improve for the agricultural labor force in Cotopaxi, even at the time of significant growth in the broccoli export market. ¹⁹

Such forms of persistent inequality reflect the picture at the national level. Many rural groups across Ecuador, and indigenous populations in particular, suffer from high levels of poverty, malnutrition, and inequitable development. For example, nationally, around 70% of the indigenous population is counted as living in poverty. ²⁰ Although income and employment opportunities for some rural residents have risen with overall increases in agroexport activities, development indicators show that Cotopaxi itself has some of the country's highest rates of poverty (80%) and child malnutrition (60%). ²¹ The political organization “Indigenous and Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi Province” (MICC) has argued that more equitable and effective land use is both necessary and feasible—since large areas of cultivable land are being used to grow crops exclusively for export while most children in the province are undernourished. ²² A number of communities in the Alpamalag Valley, including those focused on here, have consequently mobilized protests and launched campaigns (with legal support from MICC) to limit the expansion of local hacienda estates. ²³

Other groups and analysts also note that highly concentrated land tenure arrangements and the unequal distribution of agricultural resources have remained largely unaltered for decades, if not centuries, despite successive agrarian reform measures particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. ²⁴ There are 200 hacienda estates registered as farmsteads in Cotopaxi, and although they cover 47% of total agrarian land, properties of over 50 ha. (i.e., most haciendas) represent just 2% of the total number of farms across the province. ²⁵ The geographical divisions within these inequalities are clear: subsistence agriculture takes place mainly on vulnerable land—on low-value lands historically granted to indigenous communities through land reform—and commercial agriculture occupies the best arable land (that can be readily irrigated) previously reserved for colonial hacienda estates. ²⁶ This situation not only favors large-scale operations who have the capital and historic rights to create export-oriented enterprises, but it also sees a supply of peasant labor displaced from more precarious (and increasingly land-scarce) highland settings moving to seek work on the hacienda plantation estates. ²⁷

Communities in Cotopaxi have been differentially able to meet these challenges. Here, an alliance of communities—those with sufficient and suitable resources including páramo land rights, technical skills, and, ultimately, significant government grant funding from INAR—was able to reverse their position of water scarcity, as witnessed in San Isidro. Others including Cinco de Junio, however, have been unable to implement such initiatives or access this level of governmental support. The ongoing inequalities they face present major policy challenges and—in the case of Ecuador—challenges to government policies that have been explicitly designed to reduce or remove such inequalities. ²⁸ This is because the Ecuadorian Constitution (ratified in 2008) includes State obligations that should limit or reverse processes of rural impoverishment, particularly by instituting the concept of food sovereignty.

Article 281 of the 2008 Constitution details a number of ways in which food sovereignty “constitutes an objective and strategic obligation from the State”—these include: (i) Promote redistributive politics to permit access to farmers to soil, water, and other productive resources; (ii) Promote agro biodiversity linked to ancestral knowledge; likewise its use, conservation, and free seed exchange; (iii) Strengthen networks of producers and consumers to promote equity; (iv) Generate just and solidarity systems of distribution and commercialization of food; and (v) Impede monopolistic practices. ²⁹ The emphasis here on access to productive resources, equity, and more just food systems is evidently at odds with the lived realities of many communities in Cotopaxi province, particularly those living in the shadow of Selva Alegre. In addition, the vast majority of seeds used in tomato and broccoli agriculture for export are imported, further undermining the intent of the Constitution's food sovereignty content. ³⁰

Conclusion

Ongoing governmental support for the broccoli industry—which has grown often at the direct cost of the productivity and well-being of neighboring communities—not only exacerbates environmental injustice by deepening inequalities in access to water in the area, but it also works against the constitutional principles of food sovereignty. However, those same constitutional principles contain many of the ways in which the situations of struggle in places like Cinco de Junio might be relieved. Along with concerted collective action to realize them and governmental support for ongoing community initiatives, these principles offer a basis for how a more equitable distribution of land and water could be achieved for the benefit of all those who face entrenched relations of domination and intersecting inequalities, in places such as the Alpamalag Valley.