508 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



he will lose in any fight with them, for he and his kind have always 

 lost when confronted with those representing urban power — asi es 

 la vida. 



Millions of human beings, poorly qualified and equipped to cope 

 with modern agricultural problems, are relegated by cultural controls 

 precisely to those areas where the problems of soil management are 

 most difficult. Often those with wealth and training have control 

 over large land tracts physically good and within easy reach of mar- 

 kets. Such people can apply the techniques of modern scientific 

 management to produce crops for the market, domestic or foreign, and 

 thus achieve a high profit per hectare. Further, they are powerful 

 enough to acquire control of still larger expanses of good land to 

 hold for speculative purposes, that is, to hold it at prices which the 

 land would have if it were already settled and being farmed ; in other 

 words the cost would be so high as to price the land out of the market 

 for any small farmer. When access roads are built into sparsely 

 settled areas, politicians and speculators often control the very land 

 that the road was to make accessible, with the result that what was 

 meant to be an access road may even drain out of the territory the few 

 subsistence farmers already living there ! Western Canada, the Mid- 

 dle West of the United States, New Zealand, and Australia were 

 opened up by an influx of people who followed the new transportation 

 lines and were able to acquire lands near them. This has all too often 

 not been possible for potential settlers in the less-developed tropical 

 areas today. These divers cultural and economic roadblocks spin 

 around each individual subsistence farmer a cocoon of individual 

 autarchy ; and the national economy, unable to go forward dynamically, 

 either stays on a dead center or retrogresses. 



OTHER FACTORS FAVORING THE STATUS QUO 



As the outsider looks at Latin America he is aware of the fact that 

 there is a lack of continuity in many spheres. Political groups shoot 

 their way into and are shot out of office with sickening regularity. A 

 man may be a newspaper editor one day, a college professor another, 

 only to be a salesman for a large importing firm the next day, or his 

 country's representative abroad, traveling for his health. And so on. 

 But the institution of the subsistence farmer is one that is centuries 

 old, and shows very little chance of losing continuity ; it may bend, to 

 be sure, but the possibility of a complete break with the past seems 

 remote. Where the price or market mechanism is practically inoper- 

 ative, change of any kind seems most difficult indeed. 



But other peoples in other times have experienced population ex- 

 plosions and a rural exodus. How did France manage to feed its 

 population that grew from some 18 million to 25 or 26 millions during 

 the century lefore the French Eevolution ? A large part of this ex- 



