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).
Employment- and earnings-generating potential of the neo-liberal model.
This chapter examines two of the most frequent objections raised to the operation of the neo-liberal model in rural areas. They are, first, that despite some economic successes, the social costs in terms of stagnant employment and earnings are high: benefits would not ‘trickle down’ to the poor. The second criticism is that the most dynamic agricultural activities (such as fruit exports) are likely to lose most of their competitive edge in international markets, as labour scarcity during the harvest becomes increasingly more generalised. Whatever the actual merits — or lack of them — of each one of these arguments (something which is examined in the following pages), they are mutually incompatible. If no amount of agricultural expansion along neo-liberal lines is likely to increase rural employment or improve earnings prospects, then any fears or expectations of labour scarcity are totally unjustified. On the other hand, should labour scarcity ever develop, by definition rural unemployment would decline and possibly, but not inevitably, earnings would improve as a result.
Rural women and state policy: The Latin American agrarian reform experience
Abstract This review of 13 Latin American agrarian reforms shows that most have directly benefited only men. It is argued that this is largely because of the common designation of ‘households’ as the beneficiaries of an agrarian reform and the subsequent incorporation of only male household heads into the new agrarian reform structures. It is shown that a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for rural women to benefit on par with men is that they too be designated as beneficiaries. Women as well as men must be given access to land or the opportunity to participate within the agrarian cooperatives or state farms promoted by an agrarian reform. This comparative analysis of the Latin American agrarian reform demonstrates that this has happened only in countries where the incorporation of rural women to the reform is an explicit objective of state policy.