The failure of agricultural production to match population growth is one of the recognized tragedies afflicting underdeveloped nations in Africa and Asia. Unfortunately, this failure is shared by several Latin American nations where a great surge in industrialization is supposedly producing a significant rise in per capita income. Yet an increasing amount of this vital economic growth is going to pay for the importation of food products that ought to be grown at home. The apparent paradox of great industrial growth and rapid urbanization as in São Paulo in Brazil, and agricultural stagnation and even retrogression as in the Northeast, has led the Ford Foundation to undertake a series of agricultural “bench mark” studies. Based on the results of such a study in Uruguay, Russell H. Brannon of the University of Kentucky has now published his findings. This is the first volume of a Praeger series on the agricultural problems of several Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.
Brannon’s analytical study is divided into thirteen chapters and most of these are further divided into a number of subsections. His introductory chapter sets up a number of “theoretical considerations” based on the assumption that Uruguay is an underdeveloped nation, and that agriculture has not received adequate governmental attention in the last few decades. He points out that self-sufficiency is out of the question, and that a revival of the sagging agricultural export market for wheat, meat, and wool under strict governmental supervision is perhaps the only real way to control Uruguay’s rampant inflation, now threatening to destroy her complex system of social services. He concludes that “a strong commitment on the part of the state to income distribution and welfare schemes with too little attention to the creation of an economy that can provide the income streams required to finance these programs is evident in Uruguay” (p. 19). In other words, the country has simply been living beyond its means.
After a brief survey of geography, climate, history, and government, Brannon begins a detailed study of various economic factors affecting Uruguay’s present agricultural ills. He questions the advantages of heavy export and land taxes and censures the general evasion of the relatively new income tax. He finds that there has been no uniform effort at price control of food products and points out that government subsidies are often needed to maintain low consumer prices for such items as milk. The blame for a failure to invest in technological improvements he lays upon the latifundistas who, as in other Latin American countries, are reluctant to invest sufficient funds in fertilizers, new types of seed, pesticides, etc., as they see no immediate economic advantage in so doing. He seems to feel that the future may brighten if the recommendations of CIDE (National Planning Commission) are adopted, and if the country can avoid a military dictatorship which might attack Uruguay’s economic ills with coercive tactics. But he is not very sure of this.
Included in the book are no fewer than forty-nine tables, sixteen figures, and six maps, a list of abbreviations, a useful bibliography, and a large number of extensive footnotes, some of which could well have been included within the text. The lack of an index makes it difficult to find specific items in the book. The text is written in a clear style, easy even for those who have no general background in agricultural economics.