Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2001 by Welch, Cliff

Edelman, Marc. Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Photographs, map, tables, figures, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, 308 pp.; hardcover $59.50, paperback $23.95.

As a work of anthropology, this book might be expected to report on the author's experiences living among peasants in a single village or province during Costa Rica's recent transformation from a social welfare state to a neoliberal one. This is far from a traditional work of cultural anthropology, however. It reflects instead the best of the discipline's recent soul-searching revisionism. Sandwiched between an insightful review of the literature on peasants and a touch of self-reflection on the ethics of being an active participant observer is a detailed account of several local and national peasant organizations and their struggles with the globalization process in Costa Rica from about 1985 to 1995.

The empirical heart of this seven-chapter book is the 90 pages of chapters 2 through 5. These treat the "lost decade" of the 1980s, when inflation, debt, and war racked much of Latin America, especially Central America, followed by the construction of a market-oriented peace in the wake of the Cold War. Chapter 1 places these events in the context of Costa Rican history, while a lengthy introduction and efficient conclusion locate the case study in debates relevant to anthropology, social movements theory, and peasant studies.

Costa Rica in the 1980s was, as Edelman writes, a country with strong democratic roots and a unique antimilitary tradition, which found itself drawn into the civil wars and turmoil of neighboring Nicaragua and Panama. As part of Washington's anti-Sandinista strategy, Costa Rica became the unwilling recipient of massive U.S. aid and trade deals. Starting in 1982, a U.S. "Food for Peace" program dumped tons of cheap corn, wheat, and rice on Costa Rican markets. Intended to demonstrate U.S. beneficence, the program wiped out thousands of local producers and ended Costa Rican food self-sufficiency. For policymakers in Washington and San Jose, the elimination of many small-scale Costa Rican grain producers created an opportunity to apply structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to reduce the government's role in the economy and erode more than three decades of state support for everything from commodity prices to education.

Edelman summarizes these complex events succinctly and concretely while focusing most of his study on peasants' responses to this process of change. Chapters 3 and 4 introduce us to local and national peasant leaders, such as Carlos Campos of the small farmers' union UPAGRA and Marcos Ramirez of ASPPAS, another provincial farmers' association. Edelman details the formation of these organizations, explaining their regional, structural, ideological, and individual origins and orientations. He turns a postmodernist eye on language, noting how, when, and why different organizations and their members identified themselves with terms like peasant, farmer, producer, and agriculturalist. The story climaxes in chapter 4 with an account of an occupation of government buildings in June 1988 by "several dozen angry peasants" (p. 134). The action earned the peasants both repression and concession, as the state arrested leaders like Ramirez yet agreed to such goals as access to cheap credit. Edelman argues that peasant collective action succeeded in softening the impact of globalization in Costa Rica while failing to stop the process. As a consequence, several peasant organizations shifted their practices "from protest to proposal"-oriented action (p. 154).

Various studies have dealt with the origins and rise of social movements, but few have analyzed their aftermath, as Edelman's does. By carrying the story into the 1990s, Edelman must report on the demise of ASPPAS and UPAGRA and the degradation of both Ramirez and Campos. Edelman seems to have grown close to Ramirez during his research, which lends poignancy to the story of Ramirez's downfall. The author enters the picture as an actor when he discusses his role in revealing to a funding agency the empty shell ASPPAS had become by 1990. This revelation hastened but did not cause the association's official end, Edelman claims, though it did cause him to see the value of adding a theme of self-reflection to the book. (Wisely, Edelman does not overplay this hand, though his sporadic appearance in the story from time to time does leave one wondering where he was and what he was doing at other times).

Edelman blames the end of these rural social movements on a variety of factors, from the personalities of leaders to the policies of the government to international commodity markets. He argues, "organizations are born and die" while "movements evolve," a seemingly indisputable truism (p. 156). As with all truisms, however, a disturbing residue of inadequacy remains. While the book examines peasant political action, it does so from an anthropologist's social and cultural perspective. A political scientist would have noted that when organizations die, political parties are the traditional vehicle in which movements and their leaders continue to evolve. Edelman discusses the influence of some parties, but this theme is generally neglected and entirely absent from the conclusion. This is disappointing, because the depolitization of popular movements, largely through selective funding by international nongovernmental organizations, is a crucial facet of the very globalization process Edelman's book examines.