For the last several decades the feeling among most Latin Americans has been that the “wave of the future” is in the cities. The net result has been a rural-urban movement of unprecedented proportions and the development of economically precarious and politically dangerous cinturones de miseria surrounding the major cities. In fact, the obvious inability of Latin American cities to absorb rural migrants after the style of highly industrialized countries has now compelled several nations which formerly gave top priority to industrial progress to undertake far-reaching agrarian reform programs.
These programs have resulted in two important currents of development: 1) long-term projects involving various types of land settlement, either spontaneous or planned, on new or old lands; and 2) short-term efforts to speed the transfer of new technologies to existing farms. Both currents are represented in the two books here reviewed.
Craig L. Dozier ably presents the case for long-term development by examining five projects in western Peru, eastern Bolivia, and highland Mexico. Use of a common outline to analyze each project makes it possible for the author as well as the reader to compare physical land conditions, accessibility, selection of colonists, infrastructure, agricultural planning, urban centers, markets, project costs, and social factors. The investigation concludes with a highly useful chapter in which the author argues convincingly that perhaps too much significance has been attached to highlanders’ reluctance to settle in tropical lowlands. Homogeneity of settlers can be decisive, he believes; and the use of colonists’ labor is economically feasible only if it is not overdone. When projects are to some degree the outgrowth of previous development, chances for success increase. Large-scale irrigation projects tend to offer better infrastructure and less flexible administrative policies, especially with regard to colonist selection and farm practices, so that standards and hence outputs remain higher. Service and urban centers are essential to success; so are able administrators, but they are too few in number.
The reviewer can find little fault with this informative and practical handbook of land settlement other than insufficient emphasis on one essential ingredient of modern colonization—individual lot size and shape and hence the form of overall settlement. This is reflected by the lack of reference in the general bibliography to important European publications which deal with settlement form, such as H. Wilhelmy’s Siedlung im südamerikanischen Urwald (Hamburg, 1949) and F. Monheim’s Junge Indianer Kolonisation im Tiefland Boliviens (Braunschweig, 1965).
Arthur J. Coutu and Richard A. King have produced quite another kind of book. The authors stress improvement of existing farm yields by discussing present status and development potential, recent changes, and alternative strategies for bettering Peruvian agriculture. Their approach is, however, largely a statistical analysis of traditional regions (coast, sierra, and selva) and sweeping conclusions drawn from these statistics.
At the outset the reader expects the authors to solve difficult problems by careful field investigation. It soon becomes apparent, however, that they have attempted too much, so that they can give only superficial consideration to some major factors. In a brief section on the fertilizer problem, for example, the Peruvian fishmeal industry and its possible effects are not mentioned. When they declare that “another important source of water . . . is an increase in the use of ground water resources” (p. 68), they offer little specific help. It is also difficult to sympathize with their proposals to open new lands as a stop-gap solution to Peru’s urban problems. The approval of spontaneous colonization without massive infrastructure is confusing and may well be endorsement of a simple transfer of slums from urban to rural areas. In fact, in the light of Dozier’s thoughtful field conclusions, one is left with the notion that such a policy might well be disastrous.
Coutu and King have demonstrated that the present status of a country’s agriculture can be assessed from census data, but they also remind one that medicine applied from purely statistical analyses may kill the patient. The real value of this book is less in the solutions offered than in the clear presentation of agricultural statistics. These data will serve as a handy reference for those concerned with the truly frightening facts about Peruvian food problems.
