Land and labour in Latin American agriculture from the 1950s to the 1980s

Abstract

A considerable amount of statistical information on the evolution of the Latin American peasantry during the last 35 years is used to show that it has become a large refuge sector that symptomises the developmental failures of the rest of the economy. While economic growth has been rapid until the debt crisis of the early 1980s, neither access to land nor employment creation has been sufficient to reduce rural poverty. As a result, the bulk of the peasantry neither competes with commercial farming nor becomes dispossessed of access to a plot of land. Through migration, poverty gradually becomes displaced to the urban sector.