Agricultural Development in Latin America

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EVEN in the jet and rocket age, agricultural development in Latin America is a large topic for a fifteen-minute discussion. A Boeing 707 might be expected to take at least twelve hours for the 6,000 mile trip from Tiajuana, Mexico, to Cape Horn. The passengers would see little en route but a haze of desert and jungle with no time for more than the roughest outlines of land and water features below. Human influences upon the natural terrain would be obscured and political boundaries totally insignificant. Fortunately there is a substantial body of knowledge about this land mass, the collection and analysis of which has been greatly accelerated during the last twenty years. The search for this information has been stimulated by the pressures of war and the clamoring problems which are emphasized by explosive population growth and shrinking frontiers. The miracles of modern transportation and communication both multiply the need for knowledge about the countries of Latin America and facilitate the processes of research. Statistical analysis of the agricultural situation is still based on fragmentary information, much of it the result of not very precise guessing on the part of experts and, occasionally, biased politicians. Nevertheless, the broad outlines are reliable and the dynamics of change are everywhere unmistakable. Of great significance is the fact that statistics and their interpretation have now become a concern of responsible leaders in each of the countries and not solely a concern of the technical assistance agencies of the United States, the Organization of American States, or the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The total area of the twenty Latin American republics, plus the Guianas and Surinam, is about two and two-thirds the size of the United States. Recent studies conclude that less than 5 per cent is cultivated. Another 20 per cent is in pasture lands; 45 to 50 per cent is estimated to be in forests; and one-fourth to one-third of the total is economically unproductive. Climatic and soil conditions are extremely varied, ranging from temperate to tropical. The tropics in particular have been favorable to the specialty crops in the past, with plantation sugar, coffee, cacao and rubber playing significant roles in the rise and fall of colonial empires. Food crops have been grown on a primitive and subsistence basis which still prevails in parts of most of the countries, as typified by the fire agriculture of the Amazon or the crazy-quilt pattern of minifundia grain and potatoes in the high Andes. 1358