Rural vulnerability in Mendoza: social gaps, development model and oases transformation

Abstract

This chapter analyzes rural vulnerability in an arid, water-snow regime basin located in the Andes Mountains in west central Argentina. Agriculture is only possible through artificial irrigation and drought is one of the main climate-change associated risks. The approach conceives vulnerability as a process, that is, as equally determined both by the characteristics of the market constraints and the absence of institutional support and by high water variability threat. The study has identified five sources of vulnerability: knowledge and information management; an excessive reliance on technological solutions and water efficiency as the only and best ways to adapt to climate change; a fragmented institutional policy framework; the lack of profitability of agricultural production; and impacts of climate change and of extreme events on the regional agricultural sector. In view of the foreseen scenarios, these critical nodes allow for the identification of a trend toward the transformation of the fruit and wine landscape of the basin. This reconfiguration of the oasis is strongly marked by a double process, that of urbanization advances on cultivated lands by taking advantage of the benevolent features of the environment together with that of the agricultural frontier shifts to higher areas of the basin, beyond the oasis, where irrigation is only possible by means of groundwater. The counterpart of this double process is an empowerment of the most advantageous, productive actors to the detriment of the increasing vulnerability of smaller, less capitalized producers. This widening gap between the most and least vulnerable actors is increasingly evident. Given the apparent hydric variability in water provision, this chapter stresses the need for major changes in water management, and, more broadly, in regional development policies.