In the last ten years several volumes of scholarly papers on Latin American rural history have been assembled and published. El sector agrario has in common with the Rome Americanists (1975) and the Cambridge Landlord and Peasant (1977) collections an essay by the indefatigable Magnus Mörner, who has provided a global view of historical setting and process for an entire generation of rural studies, but little else, as the present volume concentrates almost entirely on contemporary issues.
Cristóbal Kay has another version of his well-known thesis on the development of the hacienda in which he draws the useful distinction between Grundherrschaft and Gutswirtschaft systems. Kay’s work, which derives in part from the original insights of Rafael Baraona, has encouraged students to think in new ways about the evolution of the Latin American countryside, and especially the various paths followed to what passes today for agrarian capitalism. Two other essays in the same section by Ivan Ribeiro and Lasse Krantz call attention to the importance of the peasant both as unit of production and as analytical concept. Ribeiro’s brief discussion, with its empirical base in present-day Brazil, parallels recent research on Spanish America that has uncovered neglected clusters of rancheros and other family farmers in the interstices of a landscape previously thought to be dominated by hacienda and community.
The second section of the book takes up specific cases. Tom Alberts has a brief and rather sketchy account of “The Agrarian Reform in Peru, 1969—75”; Eduardo Archetti writes on “The Process of Capitalization among Argentinian Peasants”; and Juárez Brandão Lopes discusses Capitalist Development and Agrarian Structure in Brazil.” Three essays are devoted to Chile where the heady years of the Popular Unity and the subsequent onset of General Pinochet’s cold-eyed “capitalist revolution” continue to attract attention. Jean Carrière has a precise and illuminating analysis of the National Society of Agriculture and its conflicts with industry and commerce from the 1930s to 1964; and Beatriz de Albuquerque makes the point that postcoup policy is not a return to the status quo ante Frei, but rather a coherent attempt to establish a modern and efficient agriculture in which the traditional hacienda is given up for dead. Alongside these two excellent academic analyses of policy and conflict is the reflective and sober essay by Jacques Chonchol, once the architect of the Christian Democrat reform of the 1960s and later minister of agriculture under Allende, who patiently explains just how difficult agrarian reform is if you are actually in the business of doing it. Finally, two concluding essays by Erich Jacoby and Bo Bengtsson discuss the role of transnational corporations in world agriculture and the tasks ahead for research.
