Classes of capital
Following CLaSP’s end-of-year panel, Rebecca Bricchi discusses Carla Gras and Grettel Navas’ interventions on agrarian and socio-ecological change in Argentina and Chile.
How are agrarian capitalists adapting to mounting economic and ecological pressures? And how are these transformations reshaping labour conditions and health on production sites? These questions framed the CLaSP end-of-year panel on classes of capital, co-hosted with the Journal of Agrarian Change on the 17th of June 2026. The event welcomed Carla Gras, Senior Researcher for the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina (CONICET), and Grettel Navas, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Chile. Although the two presentations focused on different national contexts, they shared a concern with how changing forms of capitalist accumulation are driving socio-ecological change in Latin America. While Gras examined these dynamics primarily among agrarian capitals in the region of Pampas, Argentina, Navas highlighted their implications for labour regimes and environmental risks in Chilean cherry production.
Gras kicked off the discussion by exploring the implications of economic, financial and environmental constraints for individual capitalists in Pampas, the most fertile region of Argentina, and how they seek to sustain and diversify their accumulation strategies and relations. Her talk relied on ongoing research with Tomás Palmisano, from CONICET, University of Buenos Aires. The Pampas region is particularly known for its soybean, maize and wheat cultivation, though in the last ten years it has seen stagnation and decline due to increased competition for land and loss of soil fertility, leading to production costs being higher than the average yields for all commodities. In these conditions, agrarian capitalists started employing a strategy of ‘associated harvests’, bringing together different classes of capital occupying diverse roles along the value chain, such as landowners, people wanting to invest in agricultural production, farm managers, and input suppliers. Small and medium scale enterprises, seeking to cope with financial and market risks, joined forces with these larger actors, with the latter playing a coordinating role, in productive, commercial, and financial relations. Indeed, in this model, agribusiness companies and large-scale firms, who have enough liquidity and easier access to services, gained more control over the production process by providing inputs, technological assistance, labour outsourcing, storage, transport, and final dispatch to exporters, hence deploying different value capture mechanisms.
Gras noticed three emerging patterns among agrarian capitalists in the Pampas region, making clear that, contrary to populist views of countryside, it is ever-changing and requires careful analysis. Firstly, she pointed to the strategy of medium and large-scale producers of expanding land area for increased crop diversification and the reintroduction of livestock farming, motivated by the decrease in profitability and the volatility of crop prices. Yet such expansion is surely not possible for every producer, as it requires good access to the market and technical knowledge. Secondly, Gras noted how larger firms, which were previously investing solely in agricultural production, are now intensifying their investments upstream and downstream in the value chain, especially in the building and acquiring of processing plants, and are increasingly focusing on diversification into non-agricultural commercial activities, such as in the IT sector. Thirdly she highlighted the rising numbers of food companies and leading companies in other economic activities (such as banking and communication) also diversifying their activities and becoming involved in agriculture by buying land and processing facilities, for example for animal feed and meat production.
Concluding her intervention, Gras pointed to some emerging questions that need addressing, such as the nature of the links between bigger agrarian capitalists and financial institutions, including banks, food industries, and commodity exporters; the key role of inter-capitalist relations between small, medium, and larger enterprises in developing new accumulation strategies; and the impact of these processes on smaller farmers, who might be pushed into a new wave of indebtedness and exclusion.
Some of the implications of these wider shifts and inter-class dynamics further upstream – in terms of labour – were picked up by Grettel Navas, who examined how the ‘cherry boom’ is transforming labour regimes in the Maule region of Chile. Her analysis paid particular attention to the unevenness of pesticide exposure across dimensions of class, gender, and migratory status. Chile is a global agri-export powerhouse, with neoliberal state interventions consolidating agroindustry as a central feature of the national economy, particularly through processes of privatisation of land and water rights. Chile accounts for 97% of cherry exports from the Southern Hemisphere, with export values increasing around 7,000% and production volumes by more than 1,300% over the past 20 years, and with around 75,000 hectares now planted with cherries across the Maule and O’Higgins regions. Navas stressed how an important market has been created around the culture of cherry consumption in China, which buys 95% of all Chile’s cherry exports during its Chinese New Year celebrations. The Chilean government has played a key role in enabling trade access to China by ending tariffs on agricultural products and supporting international promotion of its cherries.
Navas explained how labour conditions in Chilean cherry production do not differ much from other types of monocultures: more than half of the workforce is temporary, especially during the harvesting season, and of all female agricultural workers, 90% are seasonal. Many workers migrate from neighbouring countries and face precarious conditions, irregular status, piece-rate payment systems and limited access to social protection and formal collective organisation. Navas also pointed to a deepening public health challenge in the Maule region, due to the increase of pesticide use under limited regulatory oversight. Cherries are indeed a pesticide-intensive cultivation, as a single production cycle involves the usage of 28 distinct chemical products at different stages.
Navas concluded by outlining future research that will examine the political ecology of pesticides, and the ways they transform material and ecological conditions of agricultural work in the Maule region. Knowing that pesticides’ risks are unevenly distributed along labour regimes and that power relations shape exposure, Navas aims to look at the difference between export-oriented and local production systems, especially in the regulation of labour organisation, with a clear focus on women through a multi-scalar mixed-methods approach.
The two contributions were followed by a lively and productive discussion with the audience, which gave the scholars the chance to further elaborate on different points. An interesting debate arose regarding resistance: in Chile, while resistance is present in the wider agricultural sector and not specifically in cherry production, it is still less widespread than in the mining and green hydrogen sectors in the South of Chile. This is due to the high concentration of elites in central Chile, who invest in agriculture and give people work, and to the fact that agriculture is perceived as ‘cleaner’ compared to mining. In Argentina, Gras explained that the main political demand from farmers regards the lowering of export taxes and of government’s involvement in regulation of the sector. Gras was also asked about the processes of financialisation taking place in Argentina: in response, she highlighted on the one hand how the use of derivatives in crop commercialisation and the financial management of Value Added Tax settlements applied to all invoiced transactions, and decisions about when to trade and when to liquidate foreign currency have become more important for offsetting or even profiting within the commercial circuit; on the other, she also pointed to how investments by international funds (equity and pension funds) combined in some cases with the launching of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) among the biggest grain producers, as well as local trust funds, particularly for livestock farming.
The conversation further linked the work of Gras and Navas, highlighting similar patterns between commercial cash crop cultivation in Argentina and cherry production in Chile, especially on the ecological consequences of pesticide-intensive production on people and landscapes. Indeed, in both cases, small famers find it harder and harder to make ends meet, while facing processes of displacement to different regions and a shift towards monocropping. Together, the presentations suggested that agrarian change in Latin America cannot be solely understood through production or markets, but also through changing relations between capital, labour, and ecology.
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Rebecca Bricchi is a PhD researcher at CLaSP, Queen Mary University of London. Her work explores gendered labour regimes in tea production, with a focus on Darjeeling’s tea plantations in North-East India.