Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
diversifying tendencies of environmental processes. These tensions ma-
terialized in the forms of the crop plants themselves and thework of culti-
vation. Investors, corporate managers, and planters went to great lengths
to manage both human and non-human components of agroecosystems.
Over the course of the twentieth century, all of these industries turned
to university-trained scientists and other experts for help with classify-
ing, controlling, and manipulating environmental processes. ''Fresh'' fruit
trades,whichwerestructuredaroundhighlyperishablecommoditiessold
in markets that placed a high value on visual aesthetics, tended to use
greater quantities of insecticides, fungicides, and nematicides than the
coffee and sugar industries, whose products were highly processed prior
to reaching retail markets. Significantly, all of these industries turned to
fertilizers and plant breeding in the twentieth century in order to boost
yields and/or reduce losses caused by environmental forces.
Finally, although the export booms of the mid- and late-nineteenth
centuries provided opportunities for small-scale farmers throughout
much of Latin America to forge respectable livelihoods, capital consoli-
dations and environmental transformations during the twentieth century
imposed constraints that have made the lives of smallholders and farm-
workers increasingly tenuous. Indeed, the historical record provides little
reason to believe that increasing the volume of agroexports will dimin-
ish poverty. This can be explained in part by the tendency of power and
capital to consolidate in the places that lay in between production and
consumption and where much value was added: processors, distributors,
and marketers were key players in shaping prices and creating quality
standards that became increasingly important as per capita consumption
rates leveled off and markets began to segment. Determining the extent
to which prices and quality standards were imposed on consumers by
middlemen requires more research, but the key point is that ideas about
quality emerge and change in specific historical contexts conditioned by
culture, politics, and social power.
Agriculturalproductiontendedtobecomemoregeographicallystable
overthecourseofthetwentiethcentury,butthepeople,plants,andpatho-
gens that inhabited the fields continued to circulate. Indeed, determining
just who or what was ''local'' or ''national'' in export zones has been, and
continues to be, far from straightforward. The significance of all of this
motion in the system is not limited to understanding how ''global'' forces
shape ''local'' places; the movements themselves have conditioned pro-
duction/consumption dynamics. This is a compelling argument for not
limiting studies of commodities to nationalist frameworks.
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