“Amplifying Our Land’s Fertility”: Food, Hunger, and Agrarian Reform in Postrevolutionary Bolivia

After April 1952, the land came to figure prominently in discussions about the success of the Bolivian National Revolution. The Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) took power in the 1952 revolution and began to address the country’s most pressing political, economic, and social problems. In this paper, I am not concerned with the land in terms of its physical landscape, or the minerals below its surface that had been the motor of Bolivia’s economy since the colonial period, or even the redistribution of land fought for by advocates of agrarian reform. Rather, I document MNR officials’ anxieties about the ability of the land to produce enough nutritious food to sustain Bolivia’s population. This paper examines nutrition programs in the aftermath of Bolivia’s 1953 Agrarian Reform Law to show that anxieties about food, nutrition, and mortality put health concerns on par with Bolivia’s most pressing political and economic issues. During the 1950s and 1960s, the political significance of food, land, and agricultural production highlighted national concerns about the 1953 Agrarian Reform law’s effects and, in particular, anxiety about Bolivia’s potential inability to feed itself. Against the backdrop of food shortages and agricultural disruption, I show that debates about the causes of and solutions to malnutrition were really thinly veiled discussions about agrarian reform’s successes and failures.