The Legal Production of Non-Observance: Private Property, Environmental Assessment and the Conversion of Prime Agricultural Soil in Chile’s Energy Transition

This article exposes how Chile permits photovoltaic plants on its land of highest agricultural capability, withdrawing the material basis of long-term food security for at least a generation, in full legality. Linking environmental-assessment records, fiscal cadastral microdata and the CIREN capability survey, I document 135 approved plants sited dominantly on Class I–III soil, 5836 declared hectares; elite soil covers 18.2% of the farmed landscape yet hosts 42.8% of the approved plants, 2.35 times its share. That the system processes this tension without friction reveals the socio-legal infrastructure of property, whose dephysicalisation erases the land’s food-producing capability from every register of decision. The regime fuses three securities (legal certainty, juridical security and land-tenure security), serving as the foundation of the energy transition. The fusion shields the proprietor and confines all protection to the voluntary, visible in the compensations proponents offer when the Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) objects. A documentary census of the permitting files supplies the new evidence. The SAG objects in writing to the loss of productive agricultural land in 64 of 136 approved files, and no objection prevents approval; in 21 a favourable qualification is issued with the objection still standing. The Service refutes, with measurements of its own, proponents who declare their soil poor, up to Class I, and the projects are approved nonetheless. If rural land is to be protected as a public good, voluntariness must yield to obligation.