Agriculture

Latin America's variety of habitats—from polar to tropical climates, deserts to rain forests, highly fertile plains to shallow-soil high-altitude slopes and valleys—has given rise to diverse styles of agriculture. Highly developed at the time of the European invasions, they varied greatly in productivity, technology, and type of land tenure. Lack of easy transport kept long-distance trade limited to commodities of high value. Staple agricultural production thus needed to supply most required commodities within circumscribed regions of exchange.

PRE-COLUMBIAN FOUNDATIONS

Indigenous American civilizations accomplished the domestication of what would become major staple food and industrial crops relatively early: squash by 8000 bce, the common bean by 5500 bce, maize by c. 5000 bce, yam and manioc in the fifth millenium bce, quinoa—the protein-rich high-altitude Andean grain—by c. 3000 bce, potato and cotton by ca. 2000 bce, and cocoa no later than 200 ce. Contradicting older notions of an "agricultural revolution" in the Americas, recent scholarship has shown that the transition from foraging to sedentary farming proceeded gradually. Sedentary agricultural villages depending overwhelmingly on domesticated crops for their sustenance became widespread in highland Mesoamerica and the Andes, and along parts of the Gulf and Pacific coasts of Peru, only during the second millennium bce. They appeared towards the middle or end of the first millennium in the Greater Antilles, the Yucatan peninsula, and parts of the lower Amazon River Valley, around Santarem. In parts of the Southern Cone, Amazon and Orinoco basins, northern Mexico, lower Central America and coastal areas around the north and east of South America, people continued to rely primarily on foraging or fishing until the European invasions. Central Andean llamas and alpacas were the only large mammals in the Americas domesticated (around 1000 bce) before the European invasions, providing meat, wool, leather, and furs as well as serving as pack animals for transport.

Agricultural technologies changed with population densities, social complexity, and structures of rule; at times new crops and technologies (e.g., the introduction of irrigation on the Peruvian coast) preceded changes in social and political structures. Semitropical and tropical lowland agriculturalists used swidden, or slash-and-burn, methods to create fields for farming, for instance milpa-style production among lowland Maya: clearing of forests through extended family labor, planting of maize and complementary crops for three to five years, abandonment of the original clearing, and starting the process again with a new clearing, a production process with high productivity adequate for regions of low population density. With greater population densities, lowland cultures raised staple crop productivity through ridged fields (camellones), swamp drainage, and, in the Greater Antilles, mounds (conucos). With increasing population densities and state control of labor, highland cultures guarded against irregular seasonal rainfalls through a variety of irrigation and water control systems (dams, canals, ridged fields, terraces). Chinampas—fields along lakeshores built through drainage canals and continuous addition of lake sediments and decomposing algae as topsoil—were developed in the Valley of Mexico during the late pre-Columbian era (c. 1350 ce). The most productive agricultural complex in the Americas, it allowed continuous planting with three crops per year. Pre-Columbian tools for fieldwork and processing were mostly made from wood or stone, except in the Andean region, where digging sticks (chaki taqllas) had narrow blade tips made from copper alloys; iron tools were unknown.

Economic specialization, allowing increased regional and long-distance trade, grew in importance where socially stratified state structures became prominent, from around 200 bce, especially in Mesoamerica (Teotihuacan, the Maya city-states) and the central Andes (the Mochica and Tiwanaku) until reaching their highest level in the Aztec and Inca empires during the last century before the European invasions. Specialized craft production of agricultural, livestock, or fishery-derived goods included spinning and weaving, net-making, tanning, papermaking, charcoal production, alcohol production (Mexican pulque, made from the maguey plant; Andean chicha, a fermented maize beverage), and drying of fish, meat (Andean charki), and potatoes (Andean chuñu). The most elaborate craft production was carried out on an industrial scale in enclosed workshops controlled by lords and associated with objects central for ritual and prestige—the spinning of fine cloth in the Andes, feather-working in Mesoamerica.

Systems of distribution and redistribution ranged from reciprocal exchange to trade by specialists. Communities of farmers exchanged goods and labor with neighboring communities, with their lords, and at times with distant producers of special products they lacked themselves. Such networks of exchange served both to supply scarce goods and to reinforce longstanding hierarchical or horizontal relationships. Lords redistributed food and other surplus agricultural commodities from alcohol to cloth at ceremonial occasions or during periods of food shortages, both to buttress their claims to authority and as a measure of social control; the most celebrated case of such redistribution concerns the Inca polity that maintained massive supplies of staple foods and other commodities in thousands of small storage towers dispersed in regional administrative centers throughout its vast territories. In Mesoamerica markets (tianguis) and state-privileged merchants (pochteca) developed gradually from the beginning of the Common Era. Even staple goods may have been exchanged through such markets among people living in different climatic zones. It has long been thought that in the Andes exchange was largely carried out among producers of the same ethnic group connecting different vertically arranged production zones, from the coast to the frigid altiplano. Evidence is mounting, however, that in the northern regions of the Inca territories specialized autonomous traders also connected producers of different ethnic origins. Long-distance trade was everywhere limited to high-value items usually linked to ceremonial functions of lords. Such privileged high-value networks of exchange could stretch over hundreds and at times even thousands of kilometers. For example, the Buriticá chiefdom (in the Cauca-Patía depression of Colombia) traded gold, emeralds, fish, salt, textiles and slaves throughout northern South America and Central America. While much of the long-distance trade relied on human carriers (such as the hereditary tlamemes in the Aztec empire), large dugouts and coastal rafts (which became very elaborate along the South American Pacific coast by the late post-Classic period) introduced economies of scale to long-distance trade; canoes could carry forty times as much as a human porter, and the large ocean-going Inkaic rafts even more. Specialized drivers of llama caravans facilitated the integration of large-scale late post-classical political economies in the central Andes and provided an impetus for the 25,000-kilometer Inca road system, not matched until the twentieth century. In areas of high population density, barter or market exchange of agricultural commodities was thus growing during the last centuries before the European invasions.

Access to resources, from croplands and pastures to water, fisheries, salt deposits, and mines during the early phases of agriculture was mediated through kinship and local lords, and during the Classic and post-Classic eras increasingly through regional chiefs and paramount lords or states, depending on the complexity of social and political organization. In kin-based communities as the Andean ayllu and those of the Tupis along the coast of Brazil, access to resources depended on gender-stratified participation in common labor tasks, from clearing fields for planting, to maintaining drainage and irrigation canals, and keeping the tidal area mangrove forests well irrigated for the staple shellfish colonies. While the right to cultivate croplands may have passed within the same family from generation to generation, such lands would belong to the entire kin group, and be subject to redistribution. The community set aside specified land and labor resources for the lord, in exchange for his services to the community. In the Aztec realms some of the land belonged directly to lords and nobles, and they worked it directly, as their own private estates. Farming communities received usage rights to land from the lords. In the Inca empire land held quasi-privately close to the capital of Cuzco by lineages of the royal family were just beginning to appear at the moment of Pizarro's invasion. But the state held some of the most fertile lands—such as the Cochabamba valley (in present-day Bolivia)—for the production of staple crops through corvée labor (mitimaes) drawn from far-flung ethnic groups. Thus by the late post-Classical period land tenure regimes had become highly diversified in the Americas, although the great majority of farmers continued to work the land in kin-based communities. In regions with complex state structures, by the late Classic period farming communities had become accustomed to paying tribute to their paramount lords or kings, either in the form of commodities or of labor.

INVASION AND COLONIALISM, 1500–1750

The European invasions and colonization of the Americas after 1492 initially affected agriculture through five principal processes: (1) the devastating collapse of indigenous populations; (2) the introduction of new crops and types of livestock; (3) the introduction of new agricultural tools and technologies; (4) the opening of new markets for agricultural and livestock products; and (5) new legal and regulatory frameworks for land tenure and labor. While in some areas of Latin America the transformation of agriculture was swift, in many regions it occurred more gradually or only centuries after the initial European invasion.

The unprecedented demographic catastrophe that affected most areas in the Americas after coming into contact with Europeans—it is estimated that as much as 90 percent of indigenous populations were wiped out by disease or violence in core regions such as central Mexico, parts of the Andes, and coastal regions elsewhere within 100 years of invasion and conquest—necessarily had a massive impact on colonial agriculture. Production of food crops by indigenous farmers declined, and much land previously farmed was abandoned, focusing production on the most fertile plots. In some regions intensively farmed before 1492 this allowed recovery of soil fertility and regrowth of forest. A recent environmental history suggests that Latin America was more heavily forested in 1800 than in 1500, not unlike parts of Western Europe during the century after the onset of bubonic plague around 1350.

American landscapes were transformed by the Mediterranean biota the Iberians brought with them. One historian ascribes the success of the colonial enterprise to the ecological similarity of the early core regions of Iberian colonization to their Mediterranean homelands; these regions were thus well suited to produce the range of food crops and livestock species to which the Iberians were accustomed. The Spaniards flourished in the Mexican highlands and the central Andes because these regi-ons were perfect for planting wheat, olive trees, and vineyards, and offered virgin grasslands for cattle, horses and donkeys, and goats and sheep. The tropical coast of Brazil became a successful colony for the Portuguese because the region had the perfect climate and soils for planting sugar cane, which the Portuguese had previously brought to the Atlantic islands. The most drastic environmental changes resulted from European livestock species that multiplied exponentially in favorable American habitats. Horses and especially cattle counted in the millions a few decades after being introduced into virgin grasslands in northern Mexico, the llanos of the Orinoco River (Venezuela) and the fertile pampas of the River Plate (Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), and many herds turned feral. At a minimum intense grazing changed the configuration of grasses in these regions, and at worst overgrazing led to growing soil erosion and aridity. In the core settlement zones livestock seriously threatened the crop production of indigenous farmers; in Cuba and Hispaniola large herds of feral pigs dug up the Arawaks' root crops (like manioc), contributing to the deadly combination of malnutrition and epidemics that virtually wiped out the islands' native populations within fifty years after Columbus's arrival. In central Mexico sheep herds destroyed maize fields of indigenous farming communities. Nevertheless, indigenous farmers more readily adapted to the husbandry of European animals than to planting European food crops, especially wheat.

The introduction of iron tools, especially iron-tipped ploughs, hoes as well as machetes, increased per capita productivity of Latin American agriculture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So did the adoption of draft and transport animals. In the Andes llamas were replaced by mules as a major form of transport only after the mid-seventeenth century, and in southern Mesoamerica—especially Guatemala and Chiapas—porters continued to be used as cheap corvée labor for transporting agricultural and other commodities for much of the colonial period. But the increasing use of mules in most of Latin America lowered transport costs and allowed longer distance marketing for staple crops. European processing technologies such as water- or animal-driven mills for grains, presses for sugarcane, distilleries for alcohol, and large looms for weaving cotton and wool thread, began the industrialization of rural enterprises. But they required such large outlays of capital that only the wealthiest Spanish or Portuguese landholders could afford them, thus contributing to a widening stratification of farm incomes. While Iberians introduced some new irrigation technologies (such as the animal-driven noria, a kind of water pump), regions with complex pre-Columbian civilizations saw a deterioration of irrigation systems at least until the eighteenth century (in some areas until 1900). Overall the early effect of European colonization on agricultural productivity was mixed and regionally varied. The concentration on the most fertile croplands, the introduction of iron farm tools and draft and transport animals all tended to increase per capita productivity. However, per hectare productivity may have declined, especially in the production of food crops for local consumption in the regions most densely populated during the pre-Hispanic period, as European grains produced lower hectare yields than American staples such as maize and potatoes. Indigenous farmers also faced damages to crops from roaming livestock herds, and some highly productive fields were abandoned due to the decay of pre-Columbian irrigation systems.

The Iberians explored and settled the Americas with the hope of new trade routes and opportunities for commercializing high-value commodities. Due to exorbitant transatlantic transport costs, the range of American agricultural products that could be profitably marketed in Europe, Africa or, after 1700, Anglo-America remained limited until late in the colonial period. It included New World products such as timber (from the Caribbean coast of Central America and Brazil), dyestuffs (indigo and cochineal from southern Mexico and Central America), cocoa (from Central America and later Ecuador and Venezuela), tobacco (from Cuba, Mexico and Brazil), and some spices and herbs. But by far the most important agricultural product sold in Europe was sugar. Between the 1540s and 1690s, it was the driving force for the settlement of the coastal territories making up most of Brazil until that time. Brazil became the first modern plantation colony thriving on sugar exports and transforming colonial society through the massive and sustained importation of enslaved Africans, more than three million between the early sixteenth century and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1850s. The number of sugar mills in Brazil rose from sixty in 1570 to 350 in 1629, and production from 6,000 tons annually in 1580 to as much 22,000 tons during the 1620s, most of which was exported to Europe. Thereafter Brazilian production stagnated until the late eighteenth century, due to the twenty-five-year Dutch occupation of the northeastern captaincy of Pernambuco (1630–1654), and the establishment of more efficient sugar plantations in the Dutch, French, and British Caribbean during the second half of the seventeenth century. Before the late colonial era, the bulk of Spanish American sugar production—from Michoacán in Mexico, to the Cauca valley in Colo-mbia, the coast of Peru and Tucumán in Argentina—was marketed regionally within the Americas, unable to compete with Brazilian or non-Spanish Caribbean sugar in European markets because of lower productivity and higher labor and transportation costs.

Most food crops and livestock products produced in Latin America were marketed locally or regionally before the late colonial period. Due to declining transportation costs and high regional prices driven by the Mexican and Andean silver export complexes, the core regions of the Spanish empire sustained increasing long-distance trade even in staple foods. This fostered a degree of regional specialization in commercial crops and livestock products. In Spanish South America, an integrated regional "Andean space" grew around the skyrocketing demand for agricultural crafts and industrial goods in the central silver mining and processing city of Potosí (Bolivia), the largest city in the Western hemisphere for a few decades in the early seventeenth century (140,000 people during the 1620s, despite the 4000-meter altitude). Cór-doba (central Argentina) supplied mules, Chile's central valley and the Cochabamba Valley (Bolivia) wheat, Paraguay yerba mate (herbal tea), the valleys around Cuzco (Peru) maize and sugar, Arequipa (Peru) wine and brandy, Piura (northern Peruvian coast) tallow and goatskins, Quito (Ecuador) woolen cloth. Similar flows existed between central and western Mexico (the agricultural and craft production zones between Puebla and Guadalajara) and the northern mining centers of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. Major administrative and commercial cities, from the viceregal capitals of Lima and Mexico City on down, also provided markets that drew supplies at times from hundreds of kilometers away. But smaller provincial towns distant from commercial arteries had a smaller food supply area, and many staple commodities in more isolated regions were traded only locally. Most farmers—from squatter on a few hectares to plantation owners—sought to diminish monetary expenditures for inputs and household consumption by producing a broad range of crops and livestock products. But from the early colonial period most farmers also sought to produce a marketable surplus in at least one crop or livestock product for commercial profit or to defray unavoidable monetary expenses, including crown and church taxes and fees. This was true also for the majority of indigenous farmers. Part of their farm surpluses were extracted through colonial administrative fiat, mostly in the form of crops or labor; first through the encomienda system (in which payment to Spaniards was a duty of vassalage the Spanish king), later as tributo (the semiannual head tax levied on adult indigenous men) or for the reparto de bienes (the forced distribution of goods in a commercial scheme instituted in predominantly indigenous provinces by the corregidores, the highest provincial-level crown officers). The incorporation of indigenous farmers into self-regulating markets was a drawn-out process, not fully completed until the early 2000s, proceeding at different rates in different places depending on the social position of the farmers, on the region, and on the specific commodities. Indigenous farmers also maintained some of the pre-Hispanic long-distance barter networks between communities outside the control of Hispanicized traders.

As the supply of commodities and labor directly from indigenous communities diminished as a result of the population collapse, and colonists recognized the commercial opportunities for agriculture in the American colonies, Spanish and Portuguese settlers gradually developed their own farms based on royal land grants, de facto appropriations of indigenous lands, judicial settlements (composiciónes), and notarized sales contracts. By the late sixteenth century this gave rise to the hacienda (fazenda in Brazil), the Latin American manorial estate that would prove to be—through multiple transformations—one of the most durable rural institutions. In many parts of Latin America it reached its apex only during the early twentieth century and entered terminal crisis during the mid-twentieth century. The defining feature of the hacienda was that it had a resident labor force and a settlement nucleus, at times with its own chapel. More than a large farm, it was a social unit over whose workers the owner exercised considerable informal, at time quasi-legal power. Haciendas varied tremendously in size, type of labor force, product mix, capital investment, and commercialization of goods. The largest haciendas, such as some of the livestock ranches in northern Mexico, or the sertão (semi-arid grasslands) of northeastern Brazil, could encompass several hundred thousand hectares with more than 500 resident laborers and their families, while on the smallest estates of fifty to one hundred hectares the owner might work alongside two or three labor tenants (sharecroppers) or slaves, sowing and harvesting grains, tobacco, or tubers.

In lowland areas such as the coast of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Gulf coast of Mexico, the Caribbean coast of Colombia and Venezuela, and the Pacific coast of Peru and Ecuador, the majority of estates came to rely on African slave labor. Slaves often constituted their single largest capital investment. Focusing on commercial products as sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and wine, such haciendas—like the analogous Anglo-American plantations—were more highly capitalized than the average cereal- or livestock-producing hacienda in the Mesoamerican and Andean highlands. For their labor force these relied predominantly on labor tenants (called peones acasil-lados, colonos, yanaconas, or inquilinos in different areas), tenants, and day laborers from adjacent communities and villages of independent farmers, as well as corvée laborers drafted by local authorities. In the large haciendas of either type, complex social hierarchies developed, between skilled and unskilled, permanent and temporary workers, slave and free. Even most of the highly capitalized haciendas, such as sugar plantations, dedicated only a minor share of their land to their commercial crops, with the rest used for food production, livestock pastures, and woodlands. In contrast to Caribbean slave plantations, Brazil's sugar engenhos (fazendas with their own sugar mills) often provided provisioning grounds for their slaves, akin to the garden plots granted to labor tenants on highland haciendas.

Given cyclical harvest crises, most haciendas—except for the most efficiently managed slave plantations—generated relatively low long-term average revenues (perhaps about 5 percent of the value of movable and immovable property). Startup capital and cash to weather crises was transferred from family fortunes generated in mining or commerce, as members of Latin America's colonial creole elite sought to buttress their social power and standing by becoming large landholders. Various organizations of the Catholic Church provided long-term loans to the more powerful hacendado families. By the late colonial period the Church had become the largest landholder in many parts of Latin America.

The majority of Latin America's rural population during the colonial era lived and worked outside of manorial estates or plantations. Especially in areas with rapidly growing mestizo populations, there developed a fluid sector of independent small and middling farmers and ranchers, such as the wheat-growing rancheros of Mexico's bajío (around León), the grain farmers of Antioquia (Colombia), and Brazil's lavradores de cana (cane farmers without a sugar mill) and casave (cassava or manioc) farmers. Some of them aspired to become hacendados themselves while others only managed to eke out a poor livelihood for their family. Many small farmers depended on powerful hacendados or sugar planters to process their crops and on local traders for small cash advances before the harvest.

From the late sixteenth century both the Spanish and Portuguese crowns established protective policies for the indigenous populations of their American colonies, often honored in the breach. In order to sustain an indigenous labor force and base of taxation, the crown sought to protect communal lands from neighboring Iberian and mestizo landholders. Indigenous communities adopted some aspects of European farming, property relations, and cultural-political structures while insisting on their autonomy and their land, often through court battles and at times through rebellions. While regular land redistribution schemes continued in many highland communities from central Mexico to the Andes, internal social differentiation increased. More affluent indigenous farmers began to own their own land alongside their redistribution plots, and in some regions caciques (indigenous headmen) acquired large landholdings and operated them as haciendas. Communal farmers focused on producing such traditional foodstuffs as maize, cassava, potatoes, and livestock products, garnering lower prices in urban markets than European foodstuffs and transatlantic trade goods such as sugar. Where necessary for the production of transatlantic trade goods, such as cochineal in Oaxaca, local crown authorities administered prices and payment schedules.

THE TRANSITION PERIOD, 1750–1850

The late colonial and early post-independence eras of Latin America witnessed varying and at times countervailing trends in agriculture. Some regions that had been marginal during the earlier colonial era saw sustained growth of agricultural production and trade, while others could not sustain their growth through the era of Napoleonic wars. The period saw rapid shifts in access to overseas markets and transport costs due to foreign wars, revolutions and wars of independence, and changing regulatory frameworks. Government policies on property and labor shifted slowly for most of this transition century until undergoing massive liberal reforms during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Transatlantic trade with the Iberian peninsula more than doubled between the early 1770s and mid-1790s, and agricultural goods, especially from the east coast of Latin America (from the River Plate in the south to Cuba in the north), contributed with growing exports of leather, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, indigo, cochineal, and cotton. Decreasing transatlantic transport costs, thanks to larger and faster ships, heightened demand in Western Europe (e.g., for dyestuffs and cotton for the burgeoning textile industry). Direct legal access to more ports by foreign shipping (as in Buenos Aires) and increased supply of slave labor for sugar production (as in Cuba after the brief 1762 British occupation of Havana) all fueled this growth of exports.

Agricultural production for domestic consumption had also grown significantly in many areas of Spanish America for much of the eighteenth century, in tandem with sustained population increases, growing urban populations, and peak silver output in the last quarter of the century. In Mexico demand outpaced food production between the 1760s and 1780s, leading to hunger crises during the 1780s. Several regions saw Malthusian cycles: growing production allowing population growth until a ceiling was reached and mortality rates rose sharply through harvest failures and disease, which in turn lowered food prices and allowed populations to rise again. The growth of agricultural production during the eighteenth century was the result of increasing acreage under the plow (at times diminishing livestock herds or pushing them further from population centers, as in Chile), and some measures of internal colonization such as irrigation and swamp drainage were undertaken. But there is little evidence for widespread productivity increases in agriculture during this era. Spanish and Portuguese policies favored mineral production while increasing sales taxes for agricultural and crafts production. Insufficient improvements of roads may also have been a bottleneck for many agricultural regions. The establishment of a Spanish royal monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco products in various regions during the 1760s and 1770s significantly raised public revenues and at least in Mexico created an important factory sector, but at the same time inhibited the growth of tobacco production.

Prices for food crops and livestock products increased again during the era of the revolutions of independence (1810–1825) in many parts of Latin America, due to disruption of supplies and scarcity of transport animals. Unable to repay at times substantial mortgages on their land, contracted over decades with the Church, many hacendados were forced to sell their estates. In highland regions of Mesoamerica and the Andes small farmers, including those in indigenous communities, weathered these crises better, and entered a phase of relative stability—with diminished conflicts with neighboring haciendas—until about mid-century.

The independence of mainland Latin America by 1825 led to direct trading relationships with the major powers of Western Europe and the United States, but for the majority of the new republics did not lead to a transformation or growth of their agricultural sector. Commodity prices remained low from the mid-1820s through the late 1840s, and labor regimes and other agrarian institutions as well as farm productivity did not change substantially. Exceptions to this rule were Argentina and Uruguay, whose exports of livestock products, begun during the last decades of the eighteenth century, continued to grow: dried meat for slave populations in Brazil and the United States, and, after independence, sheep wool exports to the U.K. and the United States. This rapid growth transformed the landscape of the humid pampas around Buenos Aires, first with a change from grain fields to livestock pastures, and from 1831, the rapid expansion of livestock estancias into territory previously held by the autonomous groups of indigenous people. Another exception concerned the early exportation of coffee from Brazil, Venezuela, and Costa Rica during the decades after independence, produced on farms of widely different sizes and labor regimes: from slave-based large fazendas in Rio de Janeiro province to small farms controlled by highly capitalized coffee processors and traders in Costa Rica's central valley.

Beginning in the 1790s both Brazil and Cuba were rapidly expanding their sugar production and exports, benefiting economically from the Haitian revolution of 1791 that eliminated the largest sugar producer of the late eighteenth century. The spectacular growth of sugar production in Brazil faltered after mid-century, due to higher prices for slaves in the coffee-growing region than in the northeast sugar zone (a circumstance that led to the establishment of an internal slave trade) and the failure of engenho owners to invest in more productive processing technology, a trend reversed only in the last third of the nineteenth century. Cuba was able to sustain an even more spectacular increase of sugar production, based on massive slave imports during the first half of the nineteenth century, additional sources of imported regimented labor thereafter (Chinese "coolies"), and heavy investment in transport and cane processing technology first by Spanish, and after mid-century, U.S., capital. At the cost of environmental degradation (cutting the forests as fuel for the mills) and increasing social polarization, Cuba became the largest world producer of sugar by the 1840s.

Reforms of the property and labor regimes established during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeded haltingly before the mid-nineteenth century. Spain's Bourbon reformers began to weaken the protective policies for indigenous communities since about 1730. Aiming to achieve a more "rational" land tenure regime and under pressure from Hispanicized landholders to open fertile lands close to markets, colonial administrators no longer recognized the historical titles of indigenous communities in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Instead they calculated land requirements per family in the redistribution lands, and sold off "excess lands" to Hispanicized farmers (communal lands were legally considered crown lands held by indigenous farmers in usufruct). At least in the Andes, this was one of the contributing factors to a rising tide of rural rebellions between 1730 and 1780, and the policy was curtailed as politically destabilizing thereafter.

During the 1820s, the early years after independence, some Spanish American republics passed laws disestablishing communal landholdings. But such laws remained without major effect before the second half of the nineteenth century, because pressure on indigenous land was then low, and states in Mesoamerica and the Andes found ethnic communal organizations still indispensable for fiscal and administrative purposes. In contrast to some of the era's European liberal agrarian reform laws, the Latin American laws never touched the property and judicial structures of the manorial estate, and, with minor exceptions, began regulating private rural labor regimes only after mid-century. Colonial corvée labor systems (mita, repartimiento) were outlawed, but often kept functioning informally on the local level.

INDUSTRIALIZED AGRICULTURE AND THE EXPORT TRADE, 1850–1980

Latin American agriculture underwent more profound changes between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries than at any time since the European invasions. The motors of that change were growth and migration of populations, the transport "revolution," productivity gains and increasing capital investments, and rapidly shifting agrarian policies and regulatory frameworks regarding property, labor, and trade. The end result of these processes was the diminution of agriculture as a share of GNP and of the proportion of the economically active population devoted to it, and simultaneously a widening gap between capital-intensive and traditional farms and between income levels in the countryside and in the cities.

Latin America's population grew from around thirty million in 1850 to 469 million in 1995, the result of both natural population growth and immigration. Growth peaked in most countries during the 1960s, at over 2 percent annually for the entire region (in some countries, such as Costa Rica, as high as 3.5 percent). It declined to around 1.5 percent by 2000 (ranging from 0.4 percent in Cuba to 2.8 percent in Bolivia). Parallel to overall population growth, Latin Americans began to migrate at an accelerating clip, both between rural areas and from the countryside to the city (aside from several waves of emigration abroad). By the late twentieth century the ratio between Latin America's rural and urban population was just about reversed from a century earlier: from roughly 80:20 in the 1870s to 30:70 by the 1980s (and 25:75 in 2007). Yet the absolute number of people living in the countryside has continued to grow in the region as a whole, although there are now some rural districts and entire provinces whose population has begun to decline in absolute terms. While capital-intensive agriculture initially was overwhelmingly geared towards export markets, the growth of ever larger urban markets slowly broadened productivity gains and capital investment also in domestic-use agriculture (DUA).

The transport revolution—the introduction of steamships and railroads—of the second half of the nineteenth century allowed a growing range of Latin American crops and livestock products to be profitably marketed overseas. Freight rates between Latin America and the U.K. declined by roughly 50 percent between 1860 and 1900. As late as 1865, transporting wool by llama from a hacienda in the Peruvian altiplano for 300 kilometers to the Pacific port of Islay could take longer than the steamship voyage from Islay to Liverpool; after the completion of the railroad line from Mollendo to the northern altiplano in 1876, it took three days to convey the wool from hacienda to port. Specialized transportation technologies such as the United Fruit Company's steamers with cooled cargo compartments for bananas, and the steamers that took chilled beef from Buenos Aires to London, were vital for satisfying the increased demand for Latin American agricultural products in Europe and the United States. The growth of trucking and road construction since the 1920s further lowered transport costs for rural producers by extending the network of modern transport into many localities where the railroad had never reached; the truck also facilitated rural—urban travel for people and thus provided the means for rapidly rising rates of migration after 1950.

In aggregate quantitative terms, the growth of export volumes between the 1850s and World War I was impressive in Latin America. Yet growth varied greatly from country to country and region to region, and its impact on economic development has been highly controversial. Per capita export values grew fourfold for all of Latin America between 1850 and 1912, and, except for three Andean nations and Mexico (with strong mining sectors rivaling or surpassing agro-exports), this was mostly due to crops and livestock products. In Argentina per capita export earnings increased more than sixfold between 1850 and 1912, and export agriculture—principally cereals and meat—literally transformed the nation, by drawing more than three million immigrants, fostering the growth of major cities as commercial entrepots and processing points for agricultural products, building Latin America's largest railroad network, and bringing the land under intense cultivation or fencing it for improved livestock raising. For countries like Mexico and Honduras, growth of agricultural exports had less positive impacts. Links to other sectors of the economy were minimal in some export regions—such as the henequen (rope fiber) production in Yucatan or the coastal banana zone around San Pedro de Zulas. In many agricultural export complexes productivity increases were greatest in processing—e.g. Cuba's modern sugar centrales (refineries), or Costa Rica's beneficios (hulling and drying facilities) for coffee beans, and less impressive in field operations.

Many agro-export complexes were destructive to their environment: use of fertilizers remained low, soils eroded, and in some areas—as on São Paulo's coffee frontier—farms relocated after some years, clearing forested virgin lands for new coffee groves, and leaving the exhausted lands for less intensive uses, such as livestock pasture. This began to be reversed in some regions after 1930, when agricultural extension services proliferated, and fertilizers were used more widely. Still, some Latin American commercial agricultural complexes have remained highly destructive throughout the twentieth century, such as the cotton growing areas along the Pacific coast of Guatemala during the 1950s and 1960s through the use of dangerous herbicides and insecticides, or the expanding cattle ranching and soybean farming industries in the Amazon basin since the 1970s through the cutting down of the rainforest.

Capital for investment in agro-export complexes came from traditional national sources (trade and mining), from foreign export merchants and from a fledgling banking system that often favored short-term crop loans over long-term loans for industrial investment. From the 1860s, foreign capital flowed into some strategic agro-export sectors: U.S. corporate investment in Cuban sugar and most Caribbean banana complexes, European immigrants' investments in coffee fincas in Central America and Peru's large north coast sugar plantations. But in contrast to other primary resources, such as petroleum and minerals, the major part of modernizing crop and livestock production for export remained under the control of Latin American entrepreneurs.

Domestic-use agriculture experienced much less capital investment before 1930, and thus productivity grew minimally if at all in this sector. Increased production was achieved mostly through colonization projects, often involving violent expropriation of lands previously claimed by indigenous ethnic groups such as the Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico, or the Mapuche in southern Chile. Highland cereal and livestock haciendas in the old core regions of the Spanish Empire (central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, and the central Andes) also grew rapidly at the expense of indigenous communities. The indigenous peoples of Latin America probably lost more land to large landholders and individual ranchero family farmers between 1850 and 1950 than during the entire colonial period. In any case, the increase in production of staple crops through increased acreage was insufficient to guarantee adequate food supplies for Latin America's bourgeoning urban population after the 1880s; many countries became net importers of food crops.

The transition from peonage and slavery to wage labor in agriculture was slow in most areas, often not completed before the mid-twentieth century. It depended on the availability of ample pools of labor—achieved only after major increases in the population of land-poor or landless rural dwellers and growing migrant labor streams—or, in rare instances, on relatively flat rural social hierarchies. In the central valley of Costa Rica or the fertile pampas of Argentina, both without strong traditions of servile labor, wage labor became the norm as early as the mid-nineteenth century. After the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888), Cuba (1886), and Peru (1854), the expanding agro-export complexes turned to semi-servile forms of labor as Chinese indentured servants (coolies) and, in Brazil's coffee regions, the complex colono system, combining elements of wage labor, sharecropping, and peonage. In some regions with scarce labor supply the boom of agricultural exports before World War I prompted large landholders or merchants to employ coercive labor regimes: the slave-like conditions of Maya recruited for Yucatan's henequen plantations, or the brutal regime forcing members of indigenous groups to work as rubber tappers in the Amazon region of Peru. Migrant labor streams (organized by labor contractors) often mimicked older hierarchical power structures based on race or class: highland indigenous peoples brought to sugar haciendas in Peru (enganche) and coffee fincas in Guatemala (mandamiento), or the migrations of blacks from the West Indies to sugar and banana plantations in Cuba and Central America. In large landholdings focused on DUA, peonage and sharecropping expanded with the haciendas between 1860 and 1930, although such systems increasingly came to reflect labor market conditions. Except perhaps in the Southern Cone and in Costa Rica, Latin America's real agricultural wages improved only modestly before World War II, and even declined in a few regions.

In most of the countries for which data is available, productivity in the agricultural sector grew much faster between the 1930s or 1940s and the 1970s than during the height of the first agro-export boom. The major reasons for this were the declining rate of growth of the economically active population in agriculture (in Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela the rate was actually negative) and the extension of significant capital investments to DUA, which still employed more labor and occupied more land than the export sector. Many family and multifamily farms became mechanized during these decades, began to use fertilizers on a regular basis, and adopted more productive hybrid seeds (the "green revolution") and disease-resistant livestock strains (the cebu cattle in lowland Colombia and parts of the Amazon). Massive state-sponsored dam projects made irrigation available to arid or semi-arid agricultural zones, especially in northern Mexico, northeastern Brazil, the Oriente of Bolivia and Chaco of Paraguay, and some parts of the Andes. As a result of both productivity increases and the extension of acreage through colonization, agricultural production in Latin America doubled between 1930 and 1980.

The liberal reforms carried out in most Latin American nations between the 1850s and 1880s cleared away many of the colonial legacies of rural labor and property regimes. Laws sought to disestablish corporate landholding (primarily by indigenous communities and the Catholic Church) with the aim of creating a free land market and securely titled private property. The Church ceased to be a significant owner of rural property in most regions after the early twentieth century. Old and new large landholders benefited from the often fraudulent sales of Church or communal lands. But in many areas of the Andes and Mesoamerica indigenous traditions of working and administering lands communally adapted to the new legal frameworks and survived. Slavery was abolished in Peru and Venezuela during the 1850s and in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. The liberal laws also abolished the indigenous head tax (successor of colonial tribute), tithes on agricultural crops, and unpaid labor services. But forced labor drafts for public purposes (road building, cleaning irrigation ditches) continued locally in many regions through the early twentieth century. While new civil codes modeled on the Code Napoleon sought to guarantee property titles for all citizens, in fact they often furnished legal tools to swindle poor farmers out of their land. In spite of its declared universalist intentions, in fact much of the liberal legislation favored powerful large landholders.

Changing ideological currents, growing state capacities and resources, and the perceived threat of heightened social tensions, led most Latin American governments to implement increasingly interventionist policies for the agricultural sector during the first three quarters of the twentieth century, but especially between the 1930s and 1970s. They were principally aimed at making agricultural production more efficient and productive, incorporating small farmers and landless rural workers—viewed as the most backward members of society—into national development (through improved income levels, education, and public health measures in the countryside), and undermining the power of traditional large landholder elites. In some cases such policies constituted a wholesale reversal of liberal land policies of the later nineteenth century, once again guaranteeing the right of indigenous communities to collective property (as in the famous article 27 of Mexico's revolutionary constitution of 1917, and Peru's constitution of 1920). Agricultural extension services and credit banks were established in the 1930s and 1940s. Between the 1950s and 1970s, governments launched regional development plans for impoverished regions, most famously the Superintendência para o Desenvolvimento do Nordeste (Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast, or SUDENE) for northeastern Brazil, and created production, marketing, and service cooperatives that organized machine pooling and crop storage. State agricultural agencies became powerful bureaucracies. Latin American governments' expenditures for agriculture grew at 8 percent annually in real terms between 1950 and 1980 (in Bolivia it grew by more than 1000 percent during that period). At the same time, however, price controls for staple foods—aimed at demobilizing burgeoning urban populations—and preferential exchange rates favoring targeted industrial growth sectors at times discouraged investments in agriculture, as occurred in Peron's Argentina during the early 1950s.

The land reforms carried out in the majority of Latin American republics between the 1910s and 1980s, and especially between 1950 and 1975, were the most spectacular form of state intervention in the agrarian sector. While they shared the goals of making rural incomes less unequal and breaking the power of the large landholding elites, they varied in terms of specific measures, their radicalism, and their long-term effects. Mexico's land reform—perhaps the core issue for rank and file followers of the 1910 revolution—began in 1915 and reached its apex between 1935 and 1940. It distributed some sixty-five million acres of land from former haciendas and public lands to small farmers and farm workers. The distributed land was organized in ejidos (agrarian communities holding inalienable title to the land) in which the beneficiaries mostly worked their lands individually; during the 1930s some collective ejidos were created on large commercial farms. Between the 1930s and 1960s the reform improved the livelihoods of millions of Mexican farmers and served as a major prop for the political stability of the regime of the ruling party, the PRI, while not blocking the development of capital-intensive private farms.

The land reforms of Bolivia (1953), Guatemala (1952, reversed by the 1954 CIA coup), Ecuador (1964–76) and Chile (1964–73) also benefited individual smallholders. But the reforms in Cuba (1961), Peru (1969–75) and Nicaragua (1981–90) created state-controlled cooperatives or outright state farms. The percentage of farmers receiving land was as high as 75 percent in Bolivia and as low as 5 to 10 percent in Costa Rica and Ecuador. The successful reforms did make distribution of land somewhat less uneven and raised income standards, especially for relatively affluent small and middling farmers. Nearly everywhere there was a still growing strata of poor small farmers and landless rural people who benefited least. They had least access to capital and improved farming techniques, and demand for year-round farm labor declined sharply due to mechanization, while the need for seasonal laborers increased. The notion that land reforms reduced agricultural productivity only held for a few cases (as in Peru). In Chile productivity grew faster during the entire land reform period than it had in the preceding decades except for 1972 and 1973, refuting one of the major justifications of the Pinochet regime's reversal of the policy.

By 1980 Latin America's agriculture had been thoroughly transformed. Most large landholdings had become highly productive commercial farms producing an ever-growing range of goods both for the export and domestic markets. Mid-sized family farms, employing mostly seasonal labor, had also become highly productive. At the same time the number of impoverished farmers with too little land and no access to credit or technology had also grown. Many of them now had to supplement farm incomes through seasonal labor in the commercial farm sector or in cities.

GLOBALIZATION AND CHANGE SINCE 1980

During the past twenty-five years Latin American agriculture has become involved in another cycle of globalization that has exacerbated some of the trends already noticeable in the 1960s and 1970s. Globalization was enabled by cheaper and faster transport and communication technologies (widely accessible jet air travel and air freight, containerized ocean transport, electronic media and communications). But the shift by most Latin American governments away from interventionist economic and social policies towards neoliberalism—begun in Pinochet's Chile during the mid-1970s and adopted elsewhere in the region between 1985 and the early 1990s—has intensified the impact of global economic forces on the region's agricultural sector. The "Washington Consensus," as economists call neoliberalism since 1989 in reference to policy prescriptions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department, prescribes, among other measures, fiscal discipline, liberalized trade and investment policies, and privatization of state enterprises. The push by the U.S. government and Latin American exporters for free trade agreements in the Americas (NAFTA, covering Canada, the United States, and Mexico, 1994; CAFTA for several Central Ameri-can and Caribbean nations, 2005; bilateral treaties between the United States, and Chile, Colombia, and Peru between 2002 and 2007) followed from the neoliberal prescriptions. These agreements have created growing markets for agricultural ex-ports from Latin America, but have also hurt the poor farmers producing food crops by cheaper imports of grains, corn, rice, vegetable oils, and other foodstuffs from the United States.

Land reforms were rolled back in countries from Mexico to Chile through parcelization of ejidos and cooperatives, and the auction and sale of land in the reformed sector to private commercial farmers. This rollback also created more minifundistas, as some cooperative or collective farms were split up into parcelas on which poor parceleros eked out a living. While state credit agencies for small farmers were closed or curtailed in several nations, governments focused their rural expenditures on infrastructure and technology for the agricultural export sector. Prodded by the World Bank and other international agencies, Latin American governments undertook efforts to create secure property titles for farmland, usually benefiting owners of mid-sized and large farms.

During the crisis-ridden 1980s and early 1990s, even while prices and net barter terms of trade for most agricultural commodities declined, Latin American agro-exports grew, albeit at a slower pace than during the preceding three decades. Productivity gains in agriculture also leveled off, at least through the mid-1990s. Besides growing exports of traditional staples such as coffee, sugar, meat, and grain, globalized infrastructure and transportation technologies have now created international markets for a broad range of commodities from fruits and vegetables to wine, shrimp, salmon, timber, and processed coca leaves (cocaine). This trend has accelerated since 2000, as many agricultural commodity prices have risen due to rapidly growing demand, especially from Asia. By 2006, Brazil had become the largest exporter of soybeans and orange juice, and Chile led the world in salmon exports. Still, the share of the economically active population employed in agriculture, livestock raising, forestry and fisheries has continued to decline, along with growing urbanization. Yet the neoliberal emphasis on resource extraction as motor of the economy has reversed the long-term decline of agriculture's share of the GDP, which rose from 10.1 to 10.9 percent during the 1980s, with larger gains probable since 2000. The new export crops have also significantly contributed to a decrease in the commodity concentration of the leading two exports (including non-agricultural commodities) in each of the Latin American nations from an average of 57.5 percent in 1950 to 28.3 percent in 1995. At the same time, the new emphasis on agro-exports has made agricultural production and farm incomes more volatile once again.

While much of the new investments in export agriculture came from Latin American corporations and wealthy families in the cities, international corporations became prominent in the export of tropical fruits, seafood and wine. In 2004, wealthy farmers from Illinois invested in soybean production in cleared Amazon forest lands in the Brazilian state of Tocantins, where lower land and labor costs allowed them to produce more cheaply than at home. The world's largest pork producer, from Virginia, built a 50,000-head hog farm in the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, planning to export pork chops to China once the trans-Andean highway to the Peruvian Pacific port of Ilo is completed.

The new emphasis on agricultural exports has mostly benefited modern commercial farms. The minifundistas producing traditional staple crops as maize, beans, potatoes, and manioc, whose number is still growing, have seen their incomes stagnate or decline. By the mid-1990s, after more than a decade of rapid growth of new agro-exports, 55 percent of Chile's rural households lived in extreme poverty. Unemployment and underemployment increased throughout Latin America during the 1980s and early 1990s, and has only declined slightly since then. More than two-thirds of the extremely poor people in Latin America live in the countryside. The income gap between owners of highly productive commercial farms and the owners of unimproved minifundios has remained huge. Many small farmers are now semiproletarianized, increasingly relying on supplemental wage income. Environmental costs of agro-exports have grown through the depletion and pollution of water resources, uncontrolled logging, and soil erosion.

Unions of small farmers and farm workers have grown since the 1960s, and have gained in militancy (after a lull during the 1980s) since the 1990s. Some, as the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army) in Chiapas state, Mexico, have aimed their campaign against the effects on their livelihoods of globalization, which has decreased prices for their crops. Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Movement of Landless Rural Workers, MST) has become the largest social movement in Latin America, advancing its demand for farmland both through militant invasions of large landholdings and through well-organized protests, lobbying, and negotiations with the political authorities.

The rise of left-wing governments in Latin America since the late 1990s has its major cause in the broad public frustration about the social costs of the region's globalized economies and neoliberal policies, especially apparent in the rural sector. Brazil's President Lula da Silva implemented a program ("zero hunger") to guarantee minimum income to the poor; Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez has begun an agrarian reform project and made significant investments in public health and education, and Argentina's former president Nestor Kirchner reintroduced price controls. Yet most of these left-of-center governments have maintained fiscal austerity and relied heavily on commercial export agriculture to grow their economies. Whether any of their policies will result in diminishing the extreme inequality in Latin America's agricultural sector remained unclear in the early 2000s.

See alsoAgrarian Reform; Brazil, Economic Miracle (1968–1974); Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); Economic Development; Fazenda, Fazendeiro; Food and Cookery; Hacienda; Indigenous Peoples; International Monetary Fund (IMF); Livestock; Mita; Neoliberalism; Peons; Plantations; Repartimiento; Slavery: Brazil; Slavery: Indian Slavery and Forced Labor; Slavery: Spanish America; World Bank.

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                                  Nils Jacobsen