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Agrarian Change Trends in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Andrew Pearse
Andrew Pearse*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Capacitación en Reforma Agraria, Santiago, Chile
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The theme of the first world congress of rural sociology pointed to the importance of technological change in agricultural production throughout the world and the social changes that accompany or follow it.

Examples can indeed be found in Latin America of rural technological change being succeeded by social change, but that proposition alone does not provide a good characterization of the present rural scene. Great social changes are being incubated, there is much latent and some open conflict, but little technological change leading to development.

Type
Topical Review
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , Summer 1966 , pp. 45 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. This is a revised version of a “background paper” prepared at the request of the organizer of the First World Congress of Rural Sociology held in Dijon, France, in 1964. It deals essentially with traditional Latin America and does not attempt to do justice to the agrarian structure that developed through post-colonial settlement, nor does it analyse the impact of the Mexican, Bolivian, and Cuban agrarian revolutions.

A variety of studies promoted by the Interamerican Committee for Agricultural Development was carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru on problems connected with land tenure. On the basis of these, country reports have been prepared and those on Argentina, Guatemala, and Ecuador have just appeared. My own participation in the programme, and the studies and country reports prior to publication have contributed to this paper. My thanks are due especially to Solon Barraclough who directed the programme.

2. “El Desarrollo Social de América Latina en la Postguerra.” (CEPAL) (Santiago, 1963).

3. Ibid.

4. For the seven countries reported on by ICAD, data showing change in productivity per worker between 1950 and 1960 were compiled for four—Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Their indices had risen from 100 to 131.7, 107.7, 133.3, and 124.6 respectively. Colombia showed a decline between 1950 and 1959 from 100 to 94.4.

5. This table compiles selected data from the report: “The State of Food and Agriculture 1965” (Rome, 1965).

6. This guess is confirmed by data from the ICAD countries, which show that in the ten-year period the rate of increase in production of tropical export crops was twice that of other crops.

7. Liévano describes a first wave of “demolition” of resguardos in New Granada from 1777 which he ascribes to the new policy of the Ministers of Carlos III. See: Los Grandes Conflictos Sociales y Económicos de Nuestra Historia (Bogotá, 1962).

8. Capan gas is a word used in Brazil for the armed men maintained by a large landowner for defensive and terroristic purposes within and outside the lands of his dominion.

9. “Corporal ransom” is used to describe the common method of forcing natives to give up their wealth in the early days of the conquest. It implies “Your money or your life.”

10. See Edgard Thompson—“The Plantation as a Social System.” This article appearel in Plantation Systems of the New World (Washington, 1959), along with the articles referred to in note 11.

11. Sidney Mintz cites the Nineteenth Century author L. C. Gray on the plantation; see his paper “The Plantation as a Socio-cultural Type.” See also Richard Adams, “On the Relations between Plantations and Creole Culture.”

12. Thompson, op. cit.

13. O Abolicionismo by Joaquim Nabuco was reprinted in São Paulo, 1938.

14. Mintz, op. cit.

15. “La Hacienda Campana” was the name of a mimeographed report made a few years ago, but undated, by Héctor Martinez, and published by the Ministry of Agriculture in Lima.

16. ICAD reports.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Helio Varela Carmona, “Estratificación social de la población trabajadora en Chile” (graduate thesis, University of Chile, 1958).

21. The estate in question was one of those used as case-studies in ICAD Ecuador report. I chose this one for analysis since the service-tenure system had recently been eliminated, and the larger part of wages and salaries were paid in cash and kind, thus simplifying calculations.

22. Baraona describes cases of disintegration of estates in Ecuador. I have visited similar cases in Colombia and Chile.

23. Ramiro Cardona, working at FLACSO, Santiago, attempted to apply the idea of a Traditional-Modern continuum to Chilean estates in a mimeographed paper entitled “Dinámica de Cambio.”

24. ICAD, op. cit.

25. Ibid.

26. Study in progress by the author in Navidad on the coast of Central Chile.

27. Mintz., op. cit.

28. The use of the word “estate-like” is suggested by Beate Salz in The Human Element in Industrialization (Chicago, 1955), with reference to the situation of the Ecuadorian Indians. That is to say, the society of “estates” (estamentos), differentiated legally, disappeared with colonial status; but people go on behaving as if it continued to exist.

29. The new Land Reform law in Ecuador makes provisions for the legal transfer of huasipungos (service-tenure lands) to huasipungeros (service-tenants) and the process of legalization is now going on.

30. The Brazilian Labour Code dating from the Vargas regime was a measure disciplining relations between patrons and workers rather in the spirit of the Corporate State of Mussolini. The initial policy adopted by the Leagues was to build a movement in which the share-tenant or cash-tenant appeared not as a worker seeking his legal rights but as party to a contract concerned with renting of lands, according to the Civil Code. The League was not a syndicate. Attention was drawn to this by Clodomir Santos de Morais, former lawyer to the Peasant League and now a political exile in Santiago.

31. In this case, the seringueiro had been persuaded to believe that the plane which made periodic flights over the zone where he worked contained the seringalista, who used this method to supervise his collectors.

32. In Table No. 6, two points require comment: 1) While most of those given as landless work in the estates, a small proportion are to be found living in the smallholders' communities.2) The Argentine smallholders include the modernized grain and cattle farmers of the Pampa, and are not covered in the discussion of traditional smallholders' communities.

33. Studies made by the author.

34. Ibid.

35. Lecture given by George Foster at the National University, Colombia (1963).

36. See explanation in note 28 above.