CEPAL Review - Volume 1978, Issue 6, 1978

What has happened in rural development in recent years means that one must be very chary of the traditional view that agriculture lacks dynamism and is incapable of responding effectively to economic stimuli. On the contrary, output has grown steadily, export agriculture has expanded, the level of technology used has risen and the organization of production has been changing, and all this is closely linked to substantial changes in the make-up and outlook of the agents of production, and notably to the presence of a new rural entrepreneurial class.

Surplus and creativity are two fundamental components of development whose relationships are complex and interdependent. If any new surplus broadens the horizon of life and calls for creative and innovative re sponses, the latter in turn need the surplus as the essential material medium through which they can come into being. Every culture, however, sets limits on the development of creativity which are in keeping with the process of reproduction of the society to which that culture belongs. The limits of the creativity specific to the culture which stemmed from the bourgeois revolution are fixed by the predominance of instrumental rationality, by the progressive subordination of all forms of creativity, and particulary science and art, to the process of accumulation.

This article points out the apparent inevitability that any controversy will lead to a reductio ad absurdum, that is to say that the points of view under discussion will be carried to an extreme which distorts them and renders the discussion sterile. This seems to apply to a number of dilemmas which taken to their opposing extremes, become false dilemmas or disjunctive propositions which do not reflect the true nature of the options and causes at the heart of the real controversy.

Development in the Central American countries in the past quarter-century has shown positive features, which are brought out by the author: an annual average rate of economic growth of more than 5% , a near-doubling of real income per capita, expansion and diversification of exports, a surge forward in industrialization, the extension and improvement of communications and social services, and so on. Nevertheless, long-standing problems have remained, and new ones have arisen: external dependence, a tendency towards external disequilibrium, uneven distribution of the benefits of economic growth, with its consequences of poverty, unemployment, underemployment and marginal status, growing difficulties encountered by the political systems in coping with the divergent pressures of a rapidly diversifying society, and inconsistencies and conflicts between the public and private sectors. To this has been added, in recent years, the problems caused by the rise in the price of oil, inflation and growing external indebtedness.

CEPAL, the Director of the Review commissioned from Professor David Pollock an article analyzing the changing attitudes of the United States towards CEPAL since its establishment. Mr. Pollock is in an excellent position to write such an article, because of his knowledge of the subject and his long and important career in our organization. A Canadian, he joined CEPAL in the 1950s and has worked in Washington, Mexico City and Santiago, in addition to cooperating closely for some time with the Secretary-General of UNCTAD in Geneva.

The new protecionist policy of the centres is nothing more than the insertion of new instruments and forms of restriction into a longstanding structure of trade relations. In the course of this process tariffs have been losing effectiveness and have gradually been replaced by non-tariff measures. From an analysis of 1,051 tariff headings in the United States, 479 in the EEC and 421 in Japan, which together cover more than 10,000 million dollars of Latin American exports to those markets, the author is able to establish the adverse effect of that new policy on the developing economies, which is worsened by the recent tendency of the industrial countries to arrange international trade in the form of “organized free trade”.

In the present article the author continues and expands the critical analysis of peripheral capitalism which he began in another that was published in the first issue of this Review. His central contention is that in peripheral societies the development process — whereby the accumulation of capital in the form of goods and training of human resources makes it possible to step up the productivity of the labour force and thus to increase the total product— is not carried out with the necessary efficiency at the social and even, in many cases, at the economic level.