Latin church finds document timely as it
fights to defend landless poor
By MICHAEL J. GILLGANNON
Land and life. Their absolute interdependence is calling into
question many an economic and/or development theory that came out of other
times. The Catholic church and the whole Judeo-Christian biblical tradition is
also beginning to recover the best of its own social ethics on the theme.
A notable but little-noticed commentary on the new world
priorities of wedding economics, ecology and ethics to land and life is the
fine teaching instrument For a Better Distribution of Land: The Challenge
of Agrarian Reform, published Nov. 23, 1997, by the Vaticans
Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace under the leadership of Cardinal
Roger Etchegaray.
This commission has been a beacon of light on contemporary ethical
problems, such as the plight of poor indebted nations and the inadequate
solutions offered by banks and international lending institutions.
Unfortunately, the excellent analysis and suggested changes given in the
commissions occasional documents have not filtered down to the faithful
in parishes and schools.
The irony is that world financial and business leaders take these
documents quite seriously, as a number of major international conferences and
meetings sponsored by the commission attest.
For Latin America and all the Americas the recent document is
urgently necessary. It treats land and land reforms throughout the world. But
it is a most timely résumé of Catholic social teaching for a
Latin American church desperately defending the poor and landless whose story
is not being told in northern latitudes -- latitudes whose food supply and
distribution converge directly with decisions about land and food in the
South.
North Americans are led by advertising and ignorance of other
cultures to think the world revolves around them. Their appetites and needs
ought to have instant gratification, and they have a right to be at the top of
the food chain. They may fear the caricature of Montezumas
Revenge (dont eat the salads or unpeeled vegetable while
traveling in Mexico), but the reality is that most U.S. winter vegetables
come from Mexico, grown on Mexican land usually owned by North American or
transnational food conglomerates.
Transnational food production, land ownership, the huge energy
costs of food transportation and the acquisitive companies now dictating the
rules of the game about human food supply all come under the serious and
balanced judgment of the Vaticans ethical commentary.
Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nestles, ConAgra -- the list of
familiar and unfamiliar brand names is a long one, but the production and
distribution of food by these mega-companies is little understood. In fact, a
small number of people and companies determine the food supply for the people
of the United States. Supplying sufficient nutrition and energy for human work
and play is now a complicated process. We have come a long way from being
hunters and gatherers. Living off the land has a far different meaning today
than it did even a hundred years ago.
Who owns the earth?
Thus the ethical concern of the Catholic church about the supply
of food and water for human and planetary life. Who owns the earth and its
lands? Who determines its use? What is the human responsibility for planetary
survival and its inseparable and mutual correlative of human survival? Earth is
us. And we are the earth, as Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry, among many
other recent authors, Christian and non-Christian, have told us.
The Vatican document picks up on all of these threads and tries to
make ethical and scientific sense out of whats happening.
Humankind is embarked on a great new project of the globalization
of human communication and contact. The mythical symbol of the Tower of Babel
must be replaced by the Pentecostal paradigm of global mutual understanding and
interdependence.
Bluntly, a universal ethics of survival now in motion forces us to
see that all of us survive, or none of us survive.
Ownership of land and production of human food supplies developed
slowly over centuries of human experience. And much of humanitys ethical
concern about that development can be found in the communal practices of the
Old and New Testaments, as well as the codes of most of the worlds
religions, including the naturalism and animism of Native American indigenous
peoples, North and South.
It is from the best of the tradition that the Vatican Council for
Justice and Peace wishes to focus our attention for solving the complex
problems of the earth and its people and their future.
The Industrial Revolution, just now arriving in developing
countries, brought demographic change to the United States and Europe. Cities
grew around factories, and peasant farmers left the land. In the United States
a century ago, half the population owned and cultivated the land for private
use and the commercial food and forestry needs of the city. Now barely 5
percent of the population is rural. Land and food are increasingly owned and
produced by an ever-reduced group of mega-suppliers (often through
mega-distribution outlets). Some of these are heavily subsidized by national
and local taxes or land and water rights to keep the system going.
The same system works in Europe, although the Common Market coming
on stream next year is straining the rules for the subsidy and protection of
national production.
In Latin America, new production methods were not allowed to
evolve over centuries, as they evolved in the North. Instead, they were
force-fed over the past 40 years. Millions of peasants were forced off lands
they had worked for centuries but to which they held no legal titles. They had
nowhere to go but to the new megalopolises of Mexico City; Caracas, Venezuela;
Bogotá, Colombia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; São Paulo, Brazil;
Lima, Peru; Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina, and counting ...
Army of unemployed
Bolivia, one of the latest countries to experience this shift, had
a model Agrarian Reform in 1952. It sought to redistribute the land in an
underpopulated country (8 people per square kilometer), giving native people
land titles and the right to vote. At that time almost 80 percent of the
population was rural. Now 40 percent is rural, and the cities of La Paz,
Cochabamba and Santa Cruz have doubled their populations without commensurate
urban industrial development -- thus creating an army of unemployed and
uneducated urban dwellers.
Santiago, Chile, is home to half of the countrys 11 million
people. Lima is the urban pole for a third of Perus 22 million people.
Rural migrations are tied directly to land use and economic survival.
Stable democracies are impossible with massive cities of the
unemployed. Nor can urban populations be sustained without direct attention to
land use and food production. History, it seems, and human socialization have
already decided in favor of urban living from Bangladesh and Bombay to
Bogotá and Buenos Aires. There seems to be no turning back.
But how to make this new globalized reality humanly valuable and
viable? That is the ever-deeper concern of the church, which is in direct
contact around the world with the poorest of the poor through its pastoral
agents and missionaries doing hands-on social analysis.
The interesting presumption of the Justice and Peace document is
to address these problems of the poor by presenting them especially to
those with the political and economic responsibility for making the appropriate
reforms to initiate a new season of agrarian growth and development. The
church seeks once again to be the voice of those who have no voice.
Its pushing their case, and humanitys case, before the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, and in the
executive suites and board rooms of a reduced number of transnational,
globalizing food and forestry owners and producers.
Special French fries
An anecdotal but typical illustration of the problem:
McDonalds recently opened a new restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia. Fast food
-- fast anything -- is not a requisite of Bolivian culture or its economy.
Bolivia has 800 varieties of potatoes. Latin America gave the potato plant to
the world in Spanish colonial times. McDonalds imports Canadian potatoes
for its special French fries. The question is not customer tastes or quality
control, of which McDonalds is a master. The question is, is this
sustainable development?
McDonalds pays the minimum wage in the United States and in
Bolivia. But the Bolivian minimum wage is about $50 a month. Still,
McDonalds charges stateside prices for all its products. Its chain
stores, non-variable in golden-arch architecture and culture, target middle-
and upper-class neighborhoods, as do Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken (now
KFC), Pizza-Hut and so on all over Latin America. Is fast-food culture really a
viable U.S. export for a sustainable planetary future? It sustains Wall Street,
highly pleased by all of the above chains, not to mention Coca-Cola and
Pepsi-Cola and their other suppliers, but do the local people benefit?
And what is to be said for all the American tobacco companies, now
happily seducing the young of the planet without revealing that their product
is addictive? And without telling host governments what their future social
costs will be to care for the addicted after the powerful advertising campaigns
are over?
The ethical analysis from the Vatican of these realities puts
serious questions before the governments and businesses of our globalized
economy. Land and food are basic to human life and development. Their
administration and use cannot be left to the vagaries of an unregulated free
market. Private property always carries an ethical social mortgage,
says the present pope, echoing the Catholic tradition. All of creation is for
all of Gods creatures, and we humans are stewards, not final owners.
A partial failure
Land reform? Its been partially tried and has partially
failed in many countries. It is a very complex problem. But it now has to be an
immediate priority for all democracies and all national development programs.
This is especially the case in Latin America, where weak democracies have
recently been shaken by massive campesino marches and protests, often violent,
in almost every country from Mexico on south. They constantly reclaim their
right to land and to life.
The Council for Justice and Peace offers some recommendations:
* adequate assistance of appropriate technologies and
rural infrastructures;
* easier access to credit, especially micro-credit
programs;
* social investment in roads, schools and rural
infrastructure;
* legal and cultural attention to the social roles and
economic contributions of women;
* respect for and legal protection for indigenous
peoples, their land rights and cultures;
* national legislation to safeguard development and to
end corruption in land sale and use;
* reduction of (or ending) national indebtedness and
promotion of viable development programs.
The Catholic church does not pretend to have concrete economic and
political solutions to these challenges. But it prophetically voices its
concerns about globalization, which now seems irreversible. It forces the
fundamental questioning of a free market for food through regional or global
reorganization of land use for food, water and forestry. Is such a free market
possible or will it necessarily be manipulated unless the regulatory power of
the state intervenes?
The documentation of the Vaticans proposal is impeccable.
Over 50 years of church teachings on social ethics are cited ranging from the
teachings of church councils to the teachings of regional and local
bishops conferences. Data and development theories are cited from such
sources as United Nations scientific studies and World Bank reports. Almost all
international institutions concur with the social analysis of the Vatican.
The problems are enormous and the human learning curve is way
behind the actual realities of human evolution and demographic development.
Scientific analysis of and public ethical debate on possible human futures for
land use and food supplies is long overdue.
Getting in on the debate
The highest authorities in the church, then, propose to
bishops conferences, Catholic educators and local church pastors and
pastoral agents that they get in on the debate. That, in this age of
information, they inform themselves about the worldwide interrelation of
economic and political realities on land and food and then responsibly and
systematically explain the social ethics of the church.
The church proclaims itself as Catholic (that is, universal) with
a worldwide mission and message. The Good News is our story of human solidarity
because, we say, our God loves the world and all its created materiality. The
world is destined from its creation to generate each human person in the image
and likeness of God. If Catholics sought to put this prophetic vision into
practice, our church would be what it is, and should be, the Sacrament of
Globalization.
Fr. Michael J. Gillgannon is a priest of the diocese of Kansas
City-St. Joseph serving as the director of campus ministry in the La Paz,
Bolivia, archdiocese.
National Catholic Reporter, April 3,
1998
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