Regulative Shifts Paving the Way for Agrarian Change

Abstract

The mainstream narrative on recent agrarian change in Latin America tends to ignore the role of preceding shifts in national regulatory frameworks and policies of the 1980s and 90s in paving the way for dramatic agrarian change. Neoliberal policies, with their emphasis on a smaller less interventionist state, in combination with export promotion in line with comparative advantage created the necessary preconditions for the agribusiness-led export “booms” of the twenty-first century. This chapter explores agrarian change and regulative shifts in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay since re-democratization and until the fall of neoliberalism and the rise of a turn to the left—the “Pink Tide”—in the early twenty-first century. The chapter also addresses how national regulations interact with world market conditions, new technologies, historical legacies, and local geographies in co-shaping different pathways of agrarian change.