MEDIA COLUMNA (english version) domingo 8 diciembre 2019

Andean communities make the 

strength of property their own

Jorge Morelli

@jorgemorelli1

jorgemorelli.blogspot.com

At San Cristobal National University in Huamanga, Ayacucho, Peru, where Shining Path was born, people shape today a new paradigm of thought and have made a definitive turn. Huamanga discusses the idea of property today. 

"From beggars to owners" is the name the University staff assigned to the conference to which Hernando de Soto and Miguel Vega Alvear -former president of Confiep, the largest peruvian corporate association- were invited by the Huamanga university proffessors last Saturday, december 7, 2019.

Property is the core of the matter. The rest of the debate –local and global- is just about who should own the natural resources. 

The peruvian Constitution settled the matter long ago. Natural resources are a “heritage of the nation”, meaning the strategic resources for the 21st  century – copper, lithium, glod, even water– belong to all peruvians. 

Naturally, the Govenrment –the State, as latin law prefers- grants these resources

to private companies with capital and know how to extract them.

However, systematic blocking of these resources by the andean communities of Peru, who  

have control of the surface land on top of them, shows that the system is flawed.  And dialogue is just not enough to mend it. 

Faced with the impasse, the position of the communities of Ayacucho

and the university intellectuals who finally read today their political language and back them, is that the ownership of those natural resources of the subsoil must belong to 

them, the communities who have the land on top of the resources. 

Like all Peruvians, the “comuneros” have every right to submit a constitutional 

amendment to propose to the country such a change. But it must be noted that it is an uncertain road. 

If the subsoil was only owned by those who control the land on top on them, the natural resources would no longer belong to all Peruvians, but only to

some Peruvians.  The road would be highly uncertain because it would be largely perceived

as unfair to all the resto of Peruvians, including among them even the communities who do not have natural resources under their land, and who, not withsatnding, do have exactly the same rights to participate in the profits of the strategic resources. It is likely that they will not agree and neither will Peruvians at large.

In order to be fair to the andean communities with natural resources beneath their land, however, there is no need whatsoever to change the Peruvian Constitution. 

Their equitable share of resources may be achieved without any constitutional amendment 

of an uncertain outcome. It may be achieved in a much simpler way through giving the land on top of all natural resources their fair market value. 

Not the price the company estimates, however, nor the price the Government dims appropriate, neither the one the community would like. None of them is actually know. Only the market –supply and demand- can determine impartially what the value of that land may be. Only the market is able to do so in a way that may be acceptable to all. 

Not the small local market, however, where the land is worthless. Only the global market

can actually do the job. Just as it is the global market the mechanism to   determine in an impartial way what the value of the natural resources below may be. 

A constitutional reform, like the one the communities would like, is of course a possible

road as well and it should be proposed today. It has been, after all, since long ago the rule in the United State, for instance, and perhaps in time it will become the constitutional rule in Peru as well. But this undoubtedly will take a very long time.

But why choose an uncertain path if there is another road, fair for all Peruvians, that may provide even short term results for all andean communities in Peru and South America with natural resources under their land? 

Property is the main road -the force of change-. This is what Hernando de Soto and Miguel Vega Alvear shared with a full auditorium at the aula magna of the old university that was the symbol of an era that lies finally in the past.

Andean communities have waited long enough. They should not have to wait any longer.