What Makes Chilean Agriculture Tick? Estimation and Interpretation of Elasticities in Representative Markets
The Chilean countryside has experienced dramatic change in the last 20 years. From the mid-1960s onwards successive governments implemented increasingly radical land reforms. This process was stopped by the 1973 military coup, after which some land was returned to the original owners and most of it distributed in individual parcels. Later on some concentration occurred, resulting mainly from small farmers being forced to sell by lack of credit and technical support. But the age-old traditional large estates (described by some authors as pre-capitalist latifundia or haciendas) were not reestablished; instead new family-sized and modern capitalist farms developed. At the same time, the post-1973 macroeconomic policies liberalised external trade and domestic prices, and agricultural exports and imports rose. The traditional patterns of land exploitation, labour use and rural-urban migration all experienced substantive change (Rivera and Cruz, 1984; Kay, 1985).
The Agrarian Policy of the Aylwin Government: Continuity or Change?
The key issue which I shall pursue in this chapter is the extent to which the agrarian policy being implemented during the current process of democratic transition in Chile represents a continuity or a change from the agrarian policy followed by the former authoritarian regime. Has there been a break with the neo-liberal economic model? It is well known that during the years of the dictatorship rural poverty has substantially increased and that agrarian development was highly uneven.2 This leads me to explore the question of the extent to which the Aylwin government is willing and able to tackle the problems of rural poverty and unequal development in the countryside.
The development of biological systematics : Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, nature, and the natural system
A reevaluation of the history of biological systematics that discusses the formative years of the so-called natural system of classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shows how classifications came to be treated as conventions; systematic practice was not linked to clearly articulated theory; there was general confusion over the "shape" of nature; botany, elements of natural history, and systematics were conflated; and systematics took a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of sciences.