The Chilean case can be considered as paradigmatic insofar as it exhibits key characteristics of the classical capitalist transformation of agriculture: the emergence of a new class of dynamic agricultural entrepreneurs, renewed proletarianization and land concentration, and intensification of social differentiation.Ĭontrary to the predictions of classical economists, capitalism has not destroyed the peasant class. In particular, it presents the policy debate on the future of the peasantry: capitalization or proletarianization? The dilemma that policy makers face over maintaining high rates of NTAE growth while at the same time attempting to reduce poverty and income inequalities are also highlighted. This article examines the elements of continuity and change in agrarian policy since the transition to democracy in 1990. Underpinning this rapid growth of NTAEs is the exploitation of cheap peasant labour, especially seasonal female wage workers. However, many analysts fail to discuss the problematic nature of Chile's integration into the global market. In the mid-1970s, following the early shift to neoliberalism, the Chilean rural sector was restructured dramatically, becoming one of the most successful cases of non-traditional agricultural export (NTAE) growth. Nonetheless, there has been a general rise in self-generated income earnings from farming and accumulation of assets, as well as signs of a broad process of income redistribution. Many more producers are involved in producing diverse exports than before 2000 and these realise the greatest access to farming inputs.
Outputs began to rise slowly and selectively from 2006, with a wider range of producers cultivating much more land, mainly for food, despite low land productivity due to limited access to farm input markets and subsidies. Overall, agricultural outputs had declined, immediately after the land transfers and as the policies failed to mobilise adequate agrarian finance, when capital had retreated. Agrarian labour relations are now dominated by self employment in diverse farming and non-farm activities, with part-time wage labour being more common, while prevailing agricultural wages and incomes remain repressed by low productivity, exploitative commodity markets and slow recovery of production in other economic sectors. Large-scale farm holdings and plantations persist with disproportionately more land than is warranted, while agro-industrial estates were marginally restructured, by introducing more small-scale outgrowers and through the expansion of public estate production, increasingly in partnership with foreign capital. Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform has reconstituted the structure and orientation of agricultural (and non-agricultural) production, mainly through expanding the numbers of small and middle-scale agricultural producers and reconfiguring rural labour relations.
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