Agricultural Geography of Latin America

Agricultural Geography of Latin America
Author: United States. Foreign Agricultural Service
Publisher:
Total Pages: 102
Release: 1958
Genre: Agricultural geography
ISBN:

This agricultural geography is intended to fulfill a long-time demand for a graphic report on factors underlying Latin America's agriculture. It has been prepared with the mutual trade interests of Latin America and the United States uppermost in mind, and is designed especially for use by the agricultural producer and trader, the business and government administrator, the professional man, the instructor, and the student.

Latin America

Latin America
Author: Robert B. Kent
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2016-02-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1462525520

Popular among students for its engaging, accessible style, this text provides an authoritative overview of Latin America's human geography as well as its regional complexity. Extensively revised to reflect the region's ongoing evolution in the first decades of the 21st century, the second edition's alternating thematic and regional chapters trace Latin America's historical development while revealing the diversity of its people and places. Coverage encompasses cultural history, environment and physical geography, urban development, agriculture and land use, social and economic processes, and the contemporary patterns of the Latin American diaspora. Pedagogical features include vivid topical vignettes, end-of-chapter recommended readings and other resources, and 217 photographs, maps, and figures. New to This Edition *Discussions of climate change and its impacts, the demise of the Monroe doctrine, neoliberal agriculture, the growing influence of Chinese investment, and other new topics. *13 new vignettes highlighting current issues such as the thaw in United States-Cuba relations, drug violence in Mexico, aerial gondolas in the Andes, and the first Latin pope. *Annotated website and film recommendations for most chapters. *The latest development trends, population and economic data, and current events of local and global significance. *26 new photographs, maps, and figures.

The Economics of Contemporary Latin America

The Economics of Contemporary Latin America
Author: Beatriz Armendariz
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262337878

Analysis of Latin America's economy focusing on development, covering the colonial roots of inequality, boom and bust cycles, labor markets, and fiscal and monetary policy. Latin America is richly endowed with natural resources, fertile land, and vibrant cultures. Yet the region remains much poorer than its neighbors to the north. Most Latin American countries have not achieved standards of living and stable institutions comparable to those found in developed countries, have experienced repeated boom-bust cycles, and remain heavily reliant on primary commodities. This book studies the historical roots of Latin America's contemporary economic and social development, focusing on poverty and income inequality dating back to colonial times. It addresses today's legacies of the market-friendly reforms that took hold in the 1980s and 1990s by examining successful stabilizations and homemade monetary and fiscal institutional reforms. It offers a detailed analysis of trade and financial liberalization, twenty–first century-growth, and the decline in poverty and income inequality. Finally, the book offers an overall analysis of inclusive growth policies for development—including gender issues and the informal sector—and the challenges that lie ahead for the region, with special attention to pressing demands by the vibrant and vocal middle class, youth unemployment, and indigenous populations.

The Physical Geography of South America

The Physical Geography of South America
Author: Thomas T. Veblen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0190286059

The Physical Geography of South America, the eighth volume in the Oxford Regional Environments series, presents an enduring statement on the physical and biogeographic conditions of this remarkable continent and their relationships to human activity. It fills a void in recent environmental literature by assembling a team of specialists from within and beyond South America in order to provide an integrated, cross-disciplinary body of knowledge about this mostly tropical continent, together with its high mountains and temperate southern cone. The authors systematically cover the main components of the South American environment - tectonism, climate, glaciation, natural landscape changes, rivers, vegetation, animals, and soils. The book then presents more specific treatments of regions with special attributes from the tropical forests of the Amazon basin to the Atacama Desert and Patagonian steppe, and from the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific coasts to the high Andes. Additionally, the continents environments are given a human face by evaluating the roles played by people over time, from pre-European and European colonial impacts to the effects of modern agriculture and urbanization, and from interactions with El Niño events to prognoses for the future environments of the continent.

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America
Author: Ben M. McKay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2021-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000390527

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

New Directions for Smallholder Agriculture

New Directions for Smallholder Agriculture
Author: Peter B. R. Hazell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199689342

At the same time, many other smallholders are successfully intensifying and succeeding as farm businesses, often in combination with diversification into off-farm sources of income.

Agrobiodiversity

Agrobiodiversity
Author: Karl S. Zimmerer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262549697

Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science. Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food policies, dietary preferences, and market forces to affect agriculture and food production systems on local, national, and global scales. The increasing simplification of food systems, the continuing decline of plant species, and the ongoing spread of pests and disease threaten biodiversity in agriculture as well as the sustainability of food resources. Complicating the situation further, the multiple systems involved—cultural, economic, environmental, institutional, and technological—are driven by human decision making, which is inevitably informed by diverse knowledge systems. The interactions and linkages that emerge necessitate an integrated assessment if we are to make progress toward sustainable agriculture and food systems. This volume in the Strüngmann Forum Reports series offers insights into the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and sustainability and proposes an integrative framework to guide future research, scholarship, policy, and practice. The contributors offer perspectives from a range of disciplines, including plant and biological sciences, food systems and nutrition, ecology, economics, plant and animal breeding, anthropology, political science, geography, law, and sociology. Topics covered include evolutionary ecology, food and human health, the governance of agrobiodiversity, and the interactions between agrobiodiversity and climate and demographic change.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Political Economy

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Political Economy
Author: Javier Santiso
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 633
Release: 2012-05-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199747504

Understanding Latin America's recent economic performance calls for a multidisciplinary analysis. This handbook looks at the interaction of economics and politics in the region and includes a number of contributions from top academic experts who have also served as key policy makers (a former president, ministers of finance, a central bank governor), reflecting upon the challenges of reform.

Open Veins of Latin America

Open Veins of Latin America
Author: Eduardo Galeano
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0853459916

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.