Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
elites who saw foreign capital and markets as means by which to accu-
mulate wealth and modernize their societies. Government ocials and
intellectuals frequently referred to regions where export agriculture ex-
panded as ''frontiers,'' ''wastelands,'' or ''deserts,'' terms that tell us much
more about the worldviews of the writers than about the actual places
where production occurred. Educated elites' views of forests and grass-
lands were tightly bound to their perceptions of the people who inhab-
ited these landscapes: indigenous groups, escaped slaves, and poor mes-
tizo settlers were considered to be ''backwards'' at best and ''savage'' at
worst.
46
State legal codes and institutions seldom recognized—and often
sought to undermine—the territorial rights of social groups whose ideas
about livelihoods, family structures, and ownership were at odds with
urban-based elites whose gaze was fixed on London and Paris as models
of modernity. Latin Americans' own fables of abundance or ''vastness,''
then,resultedfromlong-termenvironmentalprocessesandtheexerciseof
power by states seeking to create ''neo-European'' societies. Throughout
much of the Americas, elite fantasies would outlive the forests.
47
More research is needed to qualify this rather sweeping statement
about the relationship between the Columbian Exchange, expanding for-
ests, and the rise of agroexport economies in the Caribbean and Latin
America. In some regions, including many Caribbean islands and parts of
Mexico and Peru, colonial-era agriculture, mining, and ranching opera-
tions consumed forests and altered preexisting environmental processes
long before the nineteenth-centuryagroexport boom. Elsewhere (e.g., the
pampas of Argentina and the Central Valley of California) arid climates
limited the formation of forest cover. As many historians of California
have noted, large-scale state-subsidized irrigation projects were crucial
to transforming the Central Valley into a center of export agriculture.
Finally, the forests themselves varied considerably in terms of soil condi-
tions, species composition, and degree of human modification, meaning
that not all forest soils were equal in theircapacity to generate short-term
rents. The expansive forests and grasslands found in the Americas, then,
didnotguaranteeorpredisposeregionstoexportagriculture;rather,they
provided many farmers with a temporary comparative advantage.
Paradoxically, the universalizing tendencies of both mass markets
and liberal state institutions did not result in homogeneous production
systems. Scholars of Latin American coffee societies have argued that
single commodity production gave rise to ''radicallydistinct experiences''
across time and space.
48
Although the coffee industry's very limited de-
gree of integration during the boom years was unique, recent research on
