Monumental. No other word quite fills the bill for this 3½ pound bundle of information, laid out on nearly 500 pages measuring 8½ by 11 inches. For those in search of facts about Latin America’s natural resource sector, there is simply no better source available.
The book is laid out in two parts. Part One surveys Latin America’s primary sector as a whole—the role of natural resources in the regional economy from the colonial period to the present, the major issues now confronting that sector, and a statistical summary of its production, trades consumption, prices, exports, and major resource-using industries, together with a section on the outlook for natural resources and an appendix presenting statistical summaries by country. Part two focuses on sixteen key mineral and agricultural commodities and comprises the bulk of the book, no pun intended. These include copper, iron and steel, lead, zinc, tin, petroleum, coal, coffee, cocoa, sugar, bananas, wheat, beef, cotton, forest products, and fishery products. As the authors put it, “This list includes at least the first or second ranking export of every Latin American country, and nearly all the important exports of the region as a whole.” Each commodity is the subject of a chapter of its own (except lead and zinc, which are grouped together), some of the more important ones being treated at considerable length. Each chapter is typically followed by ten to eleven pages of tables covering world production and consumption of the commodity, Latin America’s position in the world, prices, exports, resource reserves, and in some cases, estimates of import substitution by selected countries.
Joseph L. Fisher, President of Resources for the Future, for whom the work was published, describes the study as “an ambitious effort.” It certainly is all of that, and Latin Americanists everywhere owe Grunwald and Musgrove a vote of deep thanks for sifting through reams of statistics, organizing them in meaningful fashion, and offering their interpretations of what the data tell. Indeed, although the authors disclaim any intention of resolving major economic issues, their modest suggestions here and there may be among the most valuable contributions of the study. For example, we find that “it . . . seems that import substitution has been more important to industrial output in countries which already possessed a sizeable industrial sector in 1929 than to those which industrialized later,” that while “the main issues of natural resource development have been conceived by Latin Americans principally in terms of foreign demand problems, . . . the available evidence assembled here and elsewhere suggests that, with a few notable exceptions in tropical agriculture, supply problems have been more important in holding back the natural resource sector’s contribution toward economic development,” and that “at present, Latin America in relation to the rest of the world appears to be a low-cost producer only of copper, iron, sugar, bananas, wheat and beef” among the surveyed commodities. These are interesting observations, to put it mildly; there are many more.
This is not a textbook nor is it for light evening reading with a tinkling glass in hand. It is a reference work par excellence, well worth its, only seemingly, exalted price.
