Farm size, productivity, and public policy in the Argentine interior

Journal of Developing Areas

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 121-150

  Sawers, Larry ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FARM SIZE; PRODUCTIVITY; RURAL ECONOMY;

ARGENTINA;

EID: 0032718057     PISSN: 0022037X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (190)

1. Inderjit Singh, The Great Ascent: The Rural Poor in South Asia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 102-7;
2. Surjit S. Bhalla, "Farm Size, Productivity, and Technical Change in Indian Agriculture," Appendix A, in Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries, ed. Albert R. Berry and William R. Cline (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979);
3. Michael Carter, "Identification of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity: An Empirical Analysis of Peasant Agricultural Production," Oxford Economic Papers 36 (March 1984): 144;
4. Berry and Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries, pp. 194-203;
5. Robert D. Stevens, "The Transformation of Traditional Agriculture: Theory and Empirical Findings," in Tradition and Dynamics in Small-Farm Agriculture: Economic Studies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ed. Robert D. Stevens (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1977), pp. 17-18;
6. Lyn Squire, Employment Policy in Developing Countries: A Survey of Issues and Evidence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 155-65;
7. Giovanni Andrea Cornia, "Farm Size, Land Yields, and the Agricultural Production Function: An Analysis for Fifteen Developing Countries," World Development 13 (April 1985): 514;
8. Kenneth Bachman and Raymond P. Christensen, "The Economics of Farm Size," in Agricultural Development and Economic Growth, eds. Herman M. Southworth and Bruce F. Johnston (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 244-47;
9. Celso Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America: Historical Background and Contemporary Problems (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 78-79;
10. Hans P. Binswanger and Miranda Elgin, "Reflections on Land Reform and Farm Size," in Agricultural Development in the Third World, ed. Carl K. Eicher and John M. Staatz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 342-54;
11. Hans P. Binswanger and Miranda Elgin, "What Are the Prospects for Land Reform?" in Agriculture and Governments in an Interdependent World: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Agricultural Economics, 1988, ed. Allen Maunder and Alberto Valdes (Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1989), pp. 739-52;
12. Hans P. Binswanger and Klaus Deininger, "South African Land Policy: The Legacy of History and Current Options," World Development 21 (September 1993): 1451-75;
13. Hans P. Binswanger, Klaus Deininger, and Gershon Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform in Agricultural Land Relations," in Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 3B, ed. Jere Behrman and T. N. Srinivassan (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1995);
14. Hans P. Binswanger, Klaus Deininger, and Gershon Feder, "Agricultural Land Relations in the Developing World," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 75 (December 1993): 1242-48;
15. Klaus Deininger and Hans P. Binswanger, "Rent Seeking and the Development of Large-Scale Agriculture in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe," Economic Development and Cultural Change 43 (April 1995): 493-521;
16. Michael Carter and Bradford Barham, "Level Playing Fields and Laissez Faire: Postliberal Development Strategy in Inegalitarin Agrarian Economies," World Development 24 (July 1996): 1133-49;
17. Michael Carter and Dina Mesbah, "Can Land Market Reform Mitigate the Exclusionary Aspects of Rapid Agro-Export Growth?" World Development 21 (July 1993): 1085-1100;
18. Jane L. Collins, "Farm Size and Nontraditional Exports: Determinants of Participation in World Markets," World Development 23 (July 1995): 1103-14;
19. Gershon Feder, "The Relation between Farm Size and Farm Productivity: The Role of Family Labor, Supervision, and Credit Constraints," Journal of Development Economics 18 (August 1985): 297-315;
20. Nancy Johnson and Vernon Ruttan, "Why Are Farms So Small?" World Development 22 (May 1994): 691-706;
21. Gary Kutcher and Pasquale L. Scandizzo, The Agricultural Economy of Northeast Brazil (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1981);
22. Michael Lipton, "Land Reform as Commenced Business: The Evidence against Stopping," World Development 21 (April 1993): 641-57;
23. Michael Lipton, New Seeds and Poor People (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989), p. 134;
24. Amartya Sen, Employment, Technology, and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
25. Other studies have not supported the notion that small farms are more productive or efficient. See M. Z. Moussa and T. T. Jones, "Efficiency and Farm Size in Egypt: A Unit Output Price Profit Function Approach," Applied Economics 23 (January 1991): 29;
26. Belton Fleisher and Yunhua Lui, "Economies of Scale, Plot Size, Human Capital, and Productivity in Chinese Agriculture," Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 32 (Autumn 1992): 120-21;
27. Michael Carter and Keith Wiebe, "Access to Capital and Its Impact on Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Kenya," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 72 (December 1990): 1146-47;
28. Carter, "Identification of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity," p. 144.
29. There is an extensive literature on the efficiency of agriculture on the Argentine pampa. See my "La agricultura y estancamiento economico en Ia Argentina en el siglo XX," Ciclos en la historia, la economía y la sociedad 4, no. 7 (1994), for a review of some of this literature.
30. The use of machinery has little effect on yield and may even reduce it.
31. Kutcher and Scandizzo, Agricultural Economy of Northeast Brazil.
32. This is frequently described as scale diseconomies (for example, Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform," pp. 2694-2706), but the use of the term in this context is fraught with difficulties. Narrowly defined, scale economies exist when a production function is characterized by a more than proportional increase in outputs (of a given composition) for a given increase in inputs (of a given composition). In the present context, land productivity does not capture pure scale effects since the composition of outputs changes systematically with farm size and it is this change that explains, in part, the differential in land productivity among farms of different sizes. Yields per cultivated acre do not measure pure scale effects either since, although the composition of output is held constant, the composition of inputs is not. Accordingly, I shall use the less ambiguous concepts of land productivity and yield in this paper instead of scale diseconomies.
33. Deininger and Binswanger, "Rent Seeking and the Development of Large-Scale Agriculture," p. 495.
34. Measuring profit rates (or total factor productivity) on small farms is difficult since it requires imputing the wage rate on the small farms that use unpaid family labor. Traditional methods of imputing wage rates (using the market wage) overstate the shadow wage (since family labor includes children and older relatives with low productivity) and thus understate the true profit rate (Sen, Employment, Technology, and Development, p. 147).
35. Given the difficulties in measuring profit rates, since their computation requires records that small farmers do not typically keep, there is a fairly weak empirical basis for any assertion about how profitability varies by farm size. Singh (Great Ascent, pp. 104-5) surveyed 12 studies of efficiency on small Indian farms; his evidence indicates that there is no consistent relation between efficiency and farm size.
36. Studies of efficiency by farm size in other countries have produced similar conclusions (Moussa and Jones, "Efficiency and Farm Size in Egypt," p. 29;
37. Squire, Employment Policy in Developing Countries, p. 157).
38. A study by Carter and Wiebe ("Access to Capital and Its Impact on Agrarian Structure," p. 1146) finds that small farms are less profitable.
39. Johnson and Ruttan, "Why Are Farms So small?" p. 692.
40. Sen, Employment, Technology, and Development, p. 147;
41. Berry and Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries, pp. 16-17;
42. Kutcher and Scandizzo, Agricultural Economy of Northeast Brazil, p. 100.
43. Berry and Cline could have, but did not, push their reasoning one step further by taking account of social diseconomies of rural to urban migration such as urban congestion, pollution, and crime. On the other hand, since Sen's and Berry and Cline's pioneering work on this issue, the perception of the urban informal economy held by many development economists has changed. Hernando de Soto in The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), for example, has emphasized the productivity and dynamism of the urban informal sector in which many recent migrants to the city work. If de Soto is right, Sen and company may have underestimated the social marginal product of recent migrants to the city from the countryside and thus overestimated the efficiency of small-farm agriculture.
44. This study involved several years of searching through libraries in Buenos Aires and Córdoba between 1991 and 1993. The most useful libraries were at the Instituto de Geografía of the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella - where the author was investigador visitante, the Comisión Económica para América Latina, and the Fundación Mediterránea. Several libraries in the United States were also used. Furthermore, the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture supplied much useful data and information. I obtained background information through visits to every interior province. I also interviewed economists, politicians, and business leaders in many parts of the interior as well as experts based in Buenos Aires.
45. See Sen, Employment, Technology, and Development, p. 148;
46. and Moussa and Jones, "Efficiency and Farm Size in Egypt," p. 21, for discussions of common errors in econometric studies of this issue.
47. The interior would contain close to half of the country's population except that the poverty of the region has forced millions to migrate from the interior to the pampa (Larry Sawers, The Other Argentina: The Interior and National Development (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), p. 4, ftn. 2.
48. Larry Sawers, "Income Distribution and Environmental Degradation in the Argentine Interior," Latin American Research Review 35, no. 1 (2000, forthcoming).
49. Sawers, The Other Argentina, chaps. 4-7.
50. The most comprehensive discussion of subsidies to agriculture in the Argentine interior is Sawers, The Other Argentina, chaps. 4-7.
51. World Bank, World Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 268.
52. In the 1970s, the interior's annual population growth rate was 2.4 percent, but it would have been 3.3 percent without net emigration (not counting the children that the emigrants had after leaving the interior), placing it among the countries with the highest natural population growth rates in the world. In contrast, the population growth rate on the pampa was 1.6 percent annually, but it would have been less than 1.2 percent without immigration from the interior. In the 1980s, the comparable figures for the interior are 2.0 and 2.3 percent and for the pampa, 1.1 and 1.0 percent (derived from Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos [INDEC], Censo nacional de población y vivienda 1991: Resultos provisionales (Buenos Aires: INDEC, 1991), p. 19;
53. Indicadores económico-sociales 10 (September 1992): 150.
54. Sawers, The Other Argentina, appendix.
55. Derived from Francisco Gatto, "Caracteristicas de las economías provinciales y la disparidades regionales," in El desarrollo regional argentino: Los espacios susceptibles de tratamiento especializado, ed. Felipe González Arzac and Alfredo Eric Calcagno (Buenos Aires: Consejo Federal de Inversiones, 1982), p. 26.
56. Mabel Manzanal and Alejandro B. Rofman, Las ecoriomías regionales de la Argentina: Crisis y políticas de desarrollo (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales/Bibliotecas Universitarias/Centro Editor de América Latina, 1989), pp. 116-17.
57. Also see Eduardo Farber Truccone and Néstor S. Lizarraga, "La economía agropecuaria de Tucumán en los últimos veinte años, 1966-1986," Revista argentina de economía agraria 4 (1990): 88,90. The only plantations in Argentina grow sugar. In Jujuy and Salta, there are virtually no small sugar growers, but in Tucumán large sugar estates coexist with thousands of minifundios cultivating sugar. The existence of plantations is conventionally explained by the economies of scale in the off-farm processing of outputs. The prominence of the minifundistas in Tucumán suggests that the existence of large estates has little to do with scale economies in the off-farm processing of sugar and has more to do with the substantial subsidies that the government gave the sugar plantations.
58. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, p. 194.
59. Carlos León, Nora Prudkin, and Carlos Reboratti, "El conflicto entre producción, sociedad y medio ambiente: La expansión agrícola en el sur de Salta," Desarrollo económico 25 (October-December 1985): 411-12.
60. See Alejandro Rofman, Aída Quintar, Nora Margués, and Mabel Manzanal, eds., Políticas estatales y desarrollo regional: La experiencia del Gobierno Militar en la region del NEA (1976-1981) (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales del CEUR, 1987), p. 43;
61. and Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, p. 215.
62. Also see Victor Brodersohn and Daniel Slutzky, "Dependencia interna y desarrollo: El caso del Chaco," Desarrollo económico 18 (July-September 1978): 217-29, esp. 221. Yerba maté is a bitter tea that is the national beverage.
63. Alberto Amigo, "El sobrepastoreo de la region patagonia, causas que lo originan y soluciones que se proponen," Proyectos especiales (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo, 1965), p. 33.
64. Also in Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 141-42.
65. Alejandro B. Rofman, "Políticas alternativas de transformación en el medio rural minifundista. La acción de las ONG en el área del nordeste," Revista paraguaya de sociología 23 (May-August 1986): 39-61, 51.
66. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 116-17;
67. Truccone et al., "La economía agropencuaria," p. 88;
68. Eduardo Archetti and Kristi Anne Stolen, Explolacián familiar y acumulación de capital en el campo argentine (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975), pp. 32-33;
69. Marcos Gallacher, "Agricultura de 'subsistencia': Un caso misionero," Revista argentina de economía agraria 4 (1990): 33-51, 40;
70. Carlos Reboratti, "Frontera agraria y políticas públicas en América Latina," Working Paper (Instituto de Geografía, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1992), p. 10.
71. The boll weevil, which has just begun to threaten cotton production in Argentina, will be a greater burden for the minifundios than for the larger farms (Argentine Cotton Chamber, "Boll Weevil Threatens Cotton Business," Buenos Aires Herald, 4 January 1992, p. 14). In Matto Grosso state in Brazil, where the pest arrived in 1983, the small minifundios have virtually disappeared. The weevil has spread into neighboring Paraguay, which is doing virtually nothing to stop the plague, and is now moving southward into Argentina. Eradicating the pest requires repeated (up to 40 applications) and precisely timed doses of a powerful poison. The intensive use of pesticides raises the cost of growing cotton by 30 percent. The minifundios, already at the margin of survival, cannot afford the pesticide and the machinery needed for its application.
72. In the Puna, the western highlands of Salta and Jujuy, the Indian cultivators typically have plots of one-half to three hectares. Most of them do not use a plow or even a hoe, but a digging stick (Selva Santillán de Andrés and Teodoro R. Ricci, "La región del Noroeste argentino: Paisajes heterogéneos con economía mixta," in La Argentina: Geografía general y los marcos regionales, ed. Juan A. Roccatagliata [Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta, 1988], p. 581).
73. Amigo, "El sobrepastore de la región patagonia," p. 33;
74. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 141-42.
75. Sawers, "Income Distribution and Environmental Degradation."
76. Jorge Baldrich, "Promoción a la vitivinicultura," in Regulación de actividades económicas y financieras, ed. Alberto Porto (Buenos Aires: Instituto Di Tella, 1991), p. 153;
77. Richard Hansis, "Land Tenure, Hazards, and the Economy: Viticulture in the Mendoza Oasis, Argentina," Economic Geography (October 1977): 371;
78. Raúl Fiorentino, "Apuntes para una estrategia de desarrollo de la agricultura de riego en la Argentina," Desarrollo economico 27 (January-March 1988): 543;
79. Miguel Angel Miquel, "La produccion argentina de peras y manzanas," Octavas jornadas de perspectives agropecuarias (1991-1992), p. 59.
80. Manazal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 128-29.
81. Eileen Stillwaggon, Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economy: Poverty, Disease, and Underdevelopment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 16.
82. Stillwaggon, Stunted Lives, chap. 8.
83. Stillwaggon, Stunted Lives, chap. 12.
84. Hebe Vessuri, "Tenencia de la tierra y estructura ocupacional en Santiago del Estero," Desarrollo económico 40 (July-September 1972): 376.
85. Vessuri, "La actividad socioeconómica," p. 46.
86. INTA (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuario, Secretaría de Estado de Agricultura, Ganadería, y Pesca), Diagnóstico regional (Neuquén: Estación Experimental Regional Agropecuaria Alto Valle, 1986), p. 102.
87. Mabel Manzanal, Pobreza y marginalidad en el agro argentino: La producción agrícola y su comercialización en Cachi, Salta (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudio Urbanos y Regionales, Cuadernos del CEUR, No. 20, 1987), pp. 320-21;
88. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 67-70;
89. Archetti and Stolen, Explotación familiar, p. 211;
90. Roberto Benencia and Floreal H. Forni, "El proceso de descampesinización en el área de riego de Santiago del Estero," Justicia social 2 (May-August 1986), p. 15;
91. José Vargas Gil, "Recursos naturales: agricultura sub-tropical: Región NOA," in Juicio a nuestra agricultura: Hacia el desarrollo de una agricultural sostenible, ed. INTA (Buenos Aires: Hemisferio Sur, 1991), p. 124;
92. Rofman, "Políticas alternativas," pp. 44-45;
93. Vessuri, "Tenencia de la tierra," p. 370.
94. Juan Quant Bermúdez et al., "Rotación con leguminosas y el monocultivo en chacras algodoneras de la región chaquen̄a" (Resistencia, Chaco: Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, 1965), p. 2.
95. Sawers, "Income Distribution and Environmental Degradation."
96. Michael Lipton has pointed out that the inverse relation does not hold in some semiarid, grain-producing areas where there are few available techniques that would allow a small farmer to use more family labor in order to raise land productivity (Michael Lipton, New Seeds and Poor People [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989], p. 134).
97. His observation is based on studies by Berry and Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries, p. 46, table 4-1, Zone C;
98. and Barbara Harriss, Transitional Trade and Rural Development (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, c. 1981), pp. 29, 42. This reason for the lack of the inverse relation is unrelated to the mechanism that produces higher land productivity on the large farms of the Argentine interior.
99. Manzanal, Pobreza y marginalidad en el agro argentino, pp. 25, 41.
100. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 85-86;
101. Brodersohn and Slutzky, "Dependencia interna," p. 224.
102. Vessuri, La activadad socioeconomica, pp. 13, 17.
103. Santiago Lacorte, "Agricultura subtropical: Región NEA," in Juicio a nuestra agricultura: Hacia el desarrollo de una agricultura sostenible, ed. INTA, p. 139.
104. INTA, Diagnóstico regional, p. 21;
105. Sociedad Rural Argentina, Indicadores (July-September 1991): 103.
106. Arthur S. Morris, "The Development of the Irrigation Economy of Mendoza, Argentina," Annals of the American Association of Geographers 59 (March 1969): 110-12;
107. Guillermo Flichman, La renta del suelo y el desarrollo agrario argentino (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982), p. 124.
108. Truccone and Lizarraga, "La economía agropecuaria," p. 90.
109. Norman R. Stewart, "Tea - a New Agricultural Industry for Argentina," Economic Geography 36 (July 1960): 270-72.
110. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 116-17;
111. Truccone and Lizarraga, "La economía agropecuaria," p. 88.
112. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, p. 216.
113. INTA, Diagnostico regional, p. 109.
114. Léon et al., "El conflicto entre produccion."
115. Alejandro B. Rofman, "Crisis estructural de las economias extrapampeanas y su reciente evolución,"Desarollo economico 25 (April-June 1985): 116.
116. Indicadores économico-sociales 9 (July 1992): 7;
117. Indicadores économico-sociales 10 (September 1992): 7-8;
118. and Indicadores économico-sociales 14 (August 1993): 10-11;
119. Luis A. Yanes and Marcos Gerber, "El Noroeste argentino: Heterogeneidad productiva y crecimiento regional," in Apartes para el estudio del espacio socio-economico, ed. Luis A. Vanes and Ana Maria Liberali (Buenos Aires: Editorial el Coloquio, 1989), p. 42;
120. Flichman, La renta del suelo, p. 138.
121. Cristina Sabalain and Carlos E. Reboratti, "Vendimia, zafra y alzada: Migraciones estacionales en Ia Argentina," in Migration y desarrollo, ed. AIfredo E. Lattes (Buenos Aires: Informe de Investigacion, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 1982), p. 167.
122. INTA, Diagnóstico regional, p. 118;
123. Yanes and Gerber, "El Noreste argentine," p. 42.
124. Rofman, "Crisis estructural de las economias," p. 120.
125. Vessuri, La actividad socioeconomica, pp. 28-29.
126. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 95, 218, 470-73;
127. Cristina M. Sonzogni, "Evolución de la actividad tabacalera en Corrientes y en Misiones (1870-1940)," Cuadernos de geohistoria regional 8 (1983): 99;
128. Alfredo S. C. Bolsi, "Apuntes para la geografía del Nordeste argentino (un ejemplo de regresión regional)," Cuadernos de geohisloria regional 11 (1985): 18;
129. Archetti and Stolen, Explotación familiar, pp. 214-15.
130. Graciela Landriscini, "Comentario sobre 'Política nacional y diagnóstico de la región Coahue,' por Mabel Manzanal y Javier Lindenboim," in Las crisis regionales, ed. Mabel Manzanal, Alejandro Rofman, and Javier Lindenboim (Buenos Aires: Centre de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Cuadernos del CEUR, No. 15, 1985), p. 97;
131. INTA, Diagnostico regional, pp. 117, 119.
132. Landriscini, "Comentario," p. 97.
133. Manzanal, Pobreia y marginalidad en el agro argentino, p. 43.
134. Sawers, The Other Argentina, p. 159.
135. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, pp. 470-73.
136. As an example of disputed claims to land in Cuyo (where most pastoralists are squatters), ranchers' claims to land in one valley in San Juan exceeded the amount of land in the valley by 30 percent (Antonio Heredia et al., Acuerdo federal para el desarrollo rural del Chaco arido [Buenos Aires: Consejo Federal de Inversiones, 1992], Anexo V, 44).
137. Morris, "Development of the Irrigation Economy," p. 110;
138. Bolsi, "Apuntes para la geografia," p. 64;
139. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economias regionales, p. 85.
140. Most observers presently argue that under conditions of certainty and costless enforceability of contracts, the form of the rental contract has no effect on efficiency. Nevertheless, uncertainty is pervasive, risk markets are highly imperfect, there are substantial agency costs in monitoring tenant performance, and reputational effects in a multiperiod context can partially enforce contracts. Under these circumstances, share tenancy may be the second-best optimum. See Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform," p. 2713.
141. Vessuri, La actividad socioecońomica, pp. 28-29;
142. Mabel Manzanal, "El deterioro regional: Una manifestación en la producción tabacalera correntina, 1976-1981," Desarrollo económico 26 (October-December 1986): 465-76.
143. Manzanal, "El deterioro regional," p. 467.
144. Vessun, La actividad socioeconómica, pp.25-26;
145. Rofman, "Políticas alternatives," pp. 50-52.
146. Carmen Pignotti, "Misiones Rainforest Dwindling," Buenos Aires Herald, 6 November 1994, p. 4.
147. Landriscini, "Comentario," p. 98;
148. Hugo Méndez Casariego, "Hacia una produccion ovina sostenible en Patagonia," in Juicio a nuestra agricultura: Hacia el desarrollo de una agricullura sostenible, ed. INTA, p. 105;
149. Amigo, "El sobrepastoreo de la region patagonia," p. 46.
150. There are two barriers to entry prominently mentioned in the literature on informal credit markets. The first arises because information about prospective borrowers is very costly for lenders to obtain. Prospective new lenders must suffer an extended learning period after entry into the credit market while they learn who is and who is not creditworthy. This period of low or negative profits is a barrier to entry. Moreover, informal lenders are frequently landlords or merchants. It is the interlinking of credit markets with land or product markets that makes at least some lending in informal credit markets profitable. In this case, prospective entrants must enter not just the credit market, but some other market as well. This barrier to entry also gives the landlord or merchant market power.
151. Daniel J. Santamaria, "Acceso tradicional a la fuerza de trabajo rural, polilica de tierras y desarrollo capitalista. El caso de la Argentina de cana de azucar en el noroeste argentino," Revista paraguayade sociologia 21 (May-August 1984): 126.
152. Ian Rutledge, Cambio agrario e integración: El desarrollo del capitalismo en Jujuy, 1550-1960 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1987), pp. 177-78.
153. Vessuri, La actividad socioeconomica, p. 214;
154. Horacio Boneo, Desarrollo regional, incentives fiscales y localization industrial (Buenos Aires: CEDES, 1985), pp. 23-36.
155. Santamaria, "Acceso tradicional a la fuerza de trabajo rural," pp. 82-84;
156. Daniel Joseph Greenberg, "Sugar, Depression, and Agrarian Revolt: The Argentine Radical Party and the Tucumán Can̄eros' Strike of 1927," Hispanic American History Review 67 (May 1987): 321-27;
157. Miguel Murmis and Carlos Waisman, "Monoproducción agroindustrial, crisis y clase obrera: La industria azucarera tucumana," Revista latinoamericana de sociologia 5 (June 1969): 349-50.
158. Yanes and Gerber, "El noroeste argentino," p. 49.
159. Jorge Chambouleyron, "Agricultura de riego: Juicio a nuestra agricultura regadía," in Juicio a nuestra agricultura: Hacia el desarrollo de una agricultura sostenible, cd. INTA, p. 156;
160. Baldrich, "Promoción a la vitivinicultura," pp. 148-49.
161. Carlos Díaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 291, 298;
162. Manzanal and Rofman, Las economías regionales, p. 122;
163. Monica Catania and Carlos Carballo, La actividad tabacalera en Argentina a partir de la décoda de 1970 (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Laborales, 1985), pp. 28-32;
164. FIEL (Fundación de Investigaciones Económicas Latinoamericanas), Los costos del estado regulador (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Manantial, 1989), pp. 131-45.
165. Reboratti, "Frontera agraria y políticas," p. 39.
166. Isidoro Soloaga, "Promoción a la forestacion," in Regulación de aclividades economicas y finantieras, ed. Alberto Porto (Buenos Aires: Instituto Di Tella, 1991), p. 215.
167. Rofman et al., Políticas estatales, pp. 239-42.
168. Mario Salinardi, "Desgravación para la Patagónia," in Regulación de actividades económicas y financieras, ed. Porto, p. 142;
169. INTA, Diagnóstico regional, p. 18. 88.
170. Berry and Cline, Agrarian Structure, chap. 8.
171. Binswanger and Elgin, "What Are the Prospects for Land Reform?" p. 750.
172. Carter and Barham, "Level Playing Fields and Laissez Faire," pp. 1146-56.
173. Lipton, "Land Reform as Commenced Business," p. 654.
174. Even if land reform were a political possibility, land reform in Argentina would be difficult. Using Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder's typology, landlord estates - easy to break into small farms since they are already cultivated by tenants with their own plots - have never been numerous in Argentina (Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform," pp. 2685-87;
175. Binswanger and Deininger, "South African Land Policy," p. 1457). Instead, large farms in Argentina are either haciendas or "Junker estates," that is, large farms operated by their owners with wage labor, often with extensive mechanization subsidized by cheap credit. The latter two types of large farms are more difficult to break into small farms since they are integrated farming operations. Neither the infrastructure nor the physical capital is appropriate to small farms, and the potential beneficiaries of land reform do not have experience operating independent farms.
176. Sawers, The Other Argentina, chaps. 4-7. The only exception is in the Umbral al Chaco, where capital-intensive, land-extensive techniques have been used in bringing marginal land under cultivation to grow various kinds of beans and grains. Small farmers who used to grow these crops in the region went bankrupt long ago. At any rate, the expansion of the agricultural frontier in this region is permitted by a change in the microclimate that brought more rain; this climate change will undoubtedly be reversed. Thus, the Umbral al Chaco is not an appropriate place to begin land reform.
177. Sawers, The Other Argentina, chaps. 4-7.
178. Carter and Barham, "Level Playing Fields and Laissez Faire," p. 1145.
179. Marguerite S. Berger, "Microfinance: An Emerging Market within the Emerging Markets," in Emerging Financial Markets in the Global Economy, ed. Larry Sawers et al. (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 1999).
180. Sawers, The Other Argentina, p. 169.
181. Collins, "Farm Size and Nontraditional Exports," p. 1105.
182. Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform," pp. 2719-22.
183. Karla Hoff, "Designing Land Policies: An Overview," in The Economics of Rural Organization: Theory, Practice, and Policy, ed. Karla Hoff, Avishay Braverman, and Joseph Stiglitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 235.
184. Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, "Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform," p. 2723.
185. Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder, Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform Ibid., p. 2722.
186. Robert C. Eidt, Pioneer Settlement in Northeast Argentina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), p. 211.
187. Pignotti, "Misiones Rainforest Dwindling," p. 4.
188. Recent rioting over the deteriorating economic situation in Santiago del Estero led to the destruction of the government building that housed most of the land deeds for the province. The precariousness of their titles just increased substantially. This may bring enormous hardship to the small farmers of the province if they cannot defend their land from hostile claims.
189. Carter and Mesbah, "Can Land Market Reform Mitigate the Exclusionary Aspects," p. 1088;
190. Binswanger and Deininger, "South African Land Policy," p. 1454.