Nouveau contexte, encadrement et évolution de la petite exploitation paysanne en Amérique centrale et dans les pays andins

Abstract

New Context, Organization and Tendencies in Small Farming in Central America and the Andes. A growing destabilization of peasant economies has been taking place for the last ten years, as a result of the capitalist transformation of Latin American agriculture. This process operates thanks to the liberalization of markets and farming policies. It is expressed through an increasing regional specialization, and changes in the old fields of specialization. Capitalist firms are at the heart of this process. At present, the greater part of the rural population working on small farms has two chief characteristics : they actually sell, or seek to sell their labour force, and they have to sell their goods at a low price. This sale of surplus working force, on the level of the minifundio, is the central point of the crisis and it particularly underlines the fact that smaller farms help to absorb the shock of the rural unemployment resulting from the modernization of capitalist concerns. The deterioration of the minifundio is a consequence of the demographic growth and the reduction in the economic surplus available to the rural population, because of the open market small producers are less and less able to compete with capitalist firms. The accumulation of capital by fanners remains very rare. The question of the development of peasant population cannot be seen as a straightforward sector-based problem : it cannot be solved by a mere search for better forms of administrative and technical support.