Population, territory and sustainable development

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A recent study entitled Inserción de la agricultura familiar en los modelos de gobernanza de las
cadenas agroindustriales: Casos en Uruguay y Paraguay (FAO, 2011) found that the development of
agricultural value chains offers opportunities for small farmers, although there are also major challenges
in terms of the marketing mechanisms by which their involvement is facilitated.
The agricultural trends in the region are also set within a historical context, since two types of
farming have traditionally been present in rural Latin America: latifundios, or large estates, and
minifundios or small farms, which date back to the colonial system of land concession. Latifundios were
associated with the farming of large tracts of land, while minifundios were smallholdings farmed usually
by peasants. This duality has, to some extent, continued with Latin American agricultural modernization
in which technology favours large farms and thereby creates a social phenomenon: a rise in the rural
population of landless agricultural workers. Both types of farming are becoming a structural feature in
rural Latin America (Graciano, Gómez and Castañeda, 2009).
Both recent studies (ECLAC/FAO/IICA, 2009; Graciano, Gómez and Castañeda, 2009) and the
preceding paragraphs have pointed to the existence of a fast-changing agriculture structured around
modern technologies and driven by increasing financial efficiency and productivity. Yet this modern
sector of agriculture is surrounded by rural areas —quite significant in most of the region’s countries— in
which family farming continues and a landless rural population grows. As will be seen later, these are the
rural areas with the highest levels of poverty and social inequality.
Both agriculture as a sector of the economy and rural areas in a broader sense have undergone
deep-reaching changes in recent times. It therefore comes as no surprise that a number of researchers are
proposing to reinterpret rural issues in the light of the social, political and economic processes which are
transforming them. One of these changes is that the term “rural” is gradually moving away from meaning
something exclusively agricultural, and this is leading to forays into economic and social processes in
rural areas which often bear no direct relation to farming per se. Mostly, such activities involve rural
tourism and non-farming activities linked to the service sector, whether public or private.
The agrarian question has taken on a new identity in the past few decades in the region, in the
framework of globalization and structural adjustments. Many of the phenomena seen in rural Latin
America today may be traced to these processes and their consequences. Teubal (2001) argues that many
of the aspects that have worsened in these few decades reflect farming’s increasing domination by capital
in what is part of a globalized trend. Some of the phenomena that have worsened, states Teubal, are the
growing dispersal of wage work, increasingly precarious conditions in rural employment and people
working in multiple jobs; the crowding out of small and middle-sized farmers; continuous rural-urban and
cross-border migration; the growing market orientation of agricultural production; the absorption of small
farmers into agro-industrial complexes in which decisions are made mainly at power centres associated
with large transnational or transnationalized corporations; and the formation of seed pools in some
countries. In parallel with these processes, agro-industrial complexes run by transnational or
transnationalized corporations are becoming increasingly significant. They are associated with global
trade in agricultural products, the supply of agricultural inputs and technology, industrial processing and
final distribution of food stuffs. They are involved, too, in the spread of seed pools and other financial
mechanisms which affect the agricultural sector. Processes of globalization are thus associated with the
increase in land concentration, the consolidation of a new sort of latifundio in the rural milieu associated
with financial and agro-industrial capital, and greater concentration of capital in the sectors making up
agrifood systems in Latin America (Teubal, 2001).