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Agricultural Export Booms and the Rural Poor in Chile, Guatemala, and Paraguay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Michael R. Carter ,
Bradford L. Barham  and
Dina Mesbah
Michael R. Carter
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Bradford L. Barham
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dina Mesbah
Affiliation:
Oxford University
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The economic crisis of the 1980s and the shift to outward-looking development strategies ignited interest in promoting agricultural exports throughout Latin America. In the 1990s, export strategies continue to dominate discussion on agricultural development in the region. Especially for smaller developing countries in Latin America, agricultural and natural-resource exports appear likely to lead efforts to stimulate export growth. Extraordinarily rapid agro-export growth has already been achieved in many countries. From the middle to late 1980s, nontraditional agricultural exports grew at rates of 222 percent in Chile, 78 percent in Guatemala, and 348 percent in Costa Rica. In Paraguay, the most agrarian country in Latin America, agricultural exports nearly tripled during the otherwise difficult decade of the 1980s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 33 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The research reported here has benefited from the efforts and wisdom of more people than we can acknowledge individually in the available space. Financial support from the following institutions is gratefully acknowledged: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociológicos, the Instituto de Nutrición para Centroamérica y Panama, USAID, the Land Tenure Center and the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Grupo de Investigaciones Agrarias, and the Corporación de Investigación Económica para Latin-américa.

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