Towards a Territorial Approach for Rural Development
The Latin American experience in rural development over the last forty years has been rather frustrating in terms of its impact on rural poverty. Until the mid-1970s, perceptions of the linkages between agriculture and development were dominated by what Johnston and Mellor defined as the role of agriculture in industrialisation. This was part of what may be considered the dominant economic development paradigm of the period, where the role of agriculture was to provide inputs, labour, finance and markets for urban and industrial development, since industry was seen as the engine of growth. Among the most conservative thinkers, the correlation of this in the rural sector was 'community development' and the structuralist view of land reform as a mechanism to break down the barriers that prevented agricultural development from fulfilling the expectations held out for it.
In the 1960s, the 'Green Revolution' seemed destined to overcome the limitations of agriculture in its role as a support for industrialisation and this so-called revolution, along with land redistribution, dominated rural strategy. In the 1970s, however, it became clear that – despite high growth in output – income distribution was not improving and poverty was not being reduced. In the rural sector, frustration with the effects of land reform on output and productivity gave rise to the 'Integrated Rural Development' proposals that dominated the region’s rural strategies until the early 1980s (and until much more recently in some countries), but produced meagre results and were increasingly abandoned by the agencies that had promoted them.
The paper proceeds as follows: the first section develops the rationale for a territorial approach to rural development in Latin America, highlighting not only the reasons for the need of a renewed approach but also the emerging demand from different actors for such a renewal. The second section is an attempt to examine the potential contribution of the social sciences for the development of a solidly grounded formulation of a rural development strategy. Finally, the third section is a preliminary attempt to present a model for the analysis of rural territorial development processes that is based on the contributions discussed in the preceding section.
Alexander Schejtman and Julio Berdegué (RIMISP), 2008
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Last modified: 31 March 2009