Gold, Oil and Avocados

June 28, 2021
La Vanguardia reporter Robinson makes his English-language debut with an incisive look at how an overreliance on the extraction and export of raw materials has fueled Latin America’s recent political, social, and economic turmoils. Drawing inspiration from Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Robinson sketches the rise and fall of progressive governments across the region over the past two decades, as efforts to “accelerate growth in order to eliminate poverty and extreme inequality” were undermined by the 2008 financial crisis; tensions between extractivist industries and environmental activists; and U.S. meddling, among other factors. In Venezuela, the collapse of international oil prices, coupled with “erratic management” of the state-owned oil company and harsh U.S. sanctions, contributed to an economic crisis in 2019. In the Michoacán region of Mexico, Americans’ growing taste for avocados has “annihilated” crop diversity and led to the takeover of local farms by criminal cartels. Other commodities that come under Robinson’s microscope include lithium, soy, beef, diamonds, and peyote. It’s a sobering and well-documented picture, shot through with Robinson’s caustic wit (avocados, he writes, are a “tasteless alternative to butter spread on trillions of slices of students’ toast”). This sweeping survey packs a punch.

July 1, 2021
Spanish-British journalist Robinson surveys contemporary South America and finds that its political, economic, social, and environmental state of affairs arises from its production of commodities that the rest of the world covets. Extractive industries like mining for gold, iron, and now rare-earth minerals have disrupted the lives of the rain forest's Indigenous peoples. International corporations exploit such resources with little regard for the humans whose lives they compromise, and their drive for profit has corrupted many nations' political institutions as well. Agriculture has also suffered. Worldwide demand for beef, potatoes, and avocados has created monocultures and concomitant ecological depredations. Even the revenues from quinoa's rise to superfood status have destabilized Bolivia. Robinson introduces many South Americans whose lives have been upended in the current economy, which now faces domination not only by its historic big brother, the U.S., but also by China, whose burgeoning tech industry demands access to those same scarce metals. Robinson writes passionately and expects that his readers have more than a little knowledge of the subject.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021
Sharp portraits of the predatory resource extraction practices that continue to plague Latin America. In trying to combat poverty and inequity, Latin America has returned to unsustainable systems of extracting precious resources, as Robinson clearly demonstrates in this deeply troubling expos�. The author often refers back to Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America (1971), which chronicled the continent's dictator-driven history of plunder of natural resources for the economic benefit of the oligarchy. Despite the so-called "pink tide" in the early years of the 20th century--a trend that included such progressive leaders as Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia--the urgent need to raise economic growth rates as a means to combat poverty and generate development has allowed the ruinous old model to return. In a work of excellent on-the-ground reportage, Robinson delineates how the demand for natural resources, "from soy to niobium, beef to gold, and oil to avocado," is creating dangerous extraction cycles. Readers see the devastation firsthand as the author leads us to obscure, hard-to-reach mines and farming backwaters in countries from Brazil to Ecuador, Venezuela to Chile. Soy harvested from the ill Amazon rainforest supplies industrial chicken plants in Europe with some of the raw material to turn out billions of Chicken McNuggets. The potato, essential to the pre-Columbian civilizations in the Andean highlands, has been converted into the addictive, ubiquitous potato chip. In the Mexican region of Michoac�n, the avocado has fallen victim to a monoculture run by organized crime. Even if the destructive mining of oil decreases in coming years, the increased use of battery-powered technology will require further extraction of rare minerals like copper, cobalt, silver, and lithium. Despite mass protests over the past few years in Colombia, Chile, and Ecuador, Robinson is not optimistic about the future, but she lays out the situation in stark, penetrating detail. An urgent eyewitness account of how culture and land are being destroyed by "a remorseless process of commodification."

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