CEPAL Review - Volume 1982, Issue 16, 1982

This paper analyses the chief trends and recent changes in the agriculture and food situation of the Latin American countries and seeks to give a brief overall picture, despite limitations arising from the insufficient and sometimes partial data.

Only a sustained and prolonged increase in the output of food and agricultural products can lead to a solution of the problem of food security, which looms increasingly as one of the main economic challenges at the world level.

On the basis of a body of empirical research, the authors explore the relationship between agrarian structure and population.

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the changes that have been taking place in the rural environment, particularly those relating to the peasantry of Latin America.

The great problems of the Latin American countries, which are manifested most clearly in the poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and underemployment of a considerable part of the population, have made it necessary to rethink the role of agriculture in the process of development.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the role of peasant forms of production in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America and to assess its future prospects.

The author’s main purpose in this study is to demonstrate that the peasantry, while also a category of agricultural producers, may be best understood if analysed as a social class.

The principle of conditionality has always been at the centre of the controversy over the influence the International Monetary Fund should wield over national policies in connexion with its loans, to such a point that there were animated arguments on the matter during the negotiations to establish the IMF, not only between the European countries and the United States, but also between various institutions within the latter country.