AGRARIAN CHANGE TRENDS IN LATIN AMERICA.

This article presents information on the trends in agriculture in Latin America. In this article change is looked at as the process whereby different kinds of local social systems or communities adapt themselves to novel elements of endogenous or exogenous origin. The three community types are those which accompany plantations and traditional "haciendas" and are frequently coterminous with them, and communities of smallholder neighborhoods grouped around trade and service centers. The extraordinary growth of the cities and the stagnation of the country is causing demand for food products and industrial staples which is not being met effectively by the agricultural sector. In the rural sector, under the impact of the expansion of the modern industrial urban core of the nation, there is a breakdown of structures, a turning away from traditional values, a failure of social control, and the incompatible grafting of new elements on the archaic fabric. The deepest problem of rural change is the transformation of the "estate-like" relation patron-laborer and all that it implies.