SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA — CRIST 517 



respects a museum piece, an anachronism. The future of agriculture 

 certainly belongs to the large-scale operator, whether an individual, a 

 corporation, or the state, but for today and for the immediate future 

 the subsistence farmer is forced to survive by following his time- 

 honored regime on the land or to become a completely uprooted slum- 

 dweller. 



More and more, young people obstinately refuse to follow in the 

 footsteps of their elders, to lead lives of drudgery, penury, and isola- 

 tion. The psychological factors that have already been so effective 

 everywhere in achieving the rural exodus are operative even among 

 the remotest subsistence farmers. These factors will continue to exert 

 their powerful influence until that day when the life of the subsistence 

 farmer will be transformed, when his home will be provided with 

 those amenities that make for at least a semblance of ease and well- 

 being, when his village will have become a genuine social and cultural 

 center, full of life and gaiety, no longer isolated, backward, and 

 wretched. 



And that day will come only when there is widespread education 

 in farming methods and techniques, when agriculture will be as as- 

 siduously served by educational institutions as are modern industry 

 and the liberal professions, when soils scientists, agricultural engineers, 

 and county agents will have no more feelings of inferiority than do 

 biochemists or nuclear physicists. To achieve this transformation is a 

 tremendous task for the leaders of nations with vast undeveloped 

 tropical regions. These leaders already have the means and the ability 

 to carry forward this great campaign ; they should now show the de- 

 termination to effect this revolution, peacefully. Their survival de- 

 pends on it. 



The subsistence farmer lacks a formal education, but is by no means 

 unintelligent; he is a cautious operator whose activities conform to 

 age-old practices on land that does not belong to him. He is where 

 he is, geographically and from the point of view of development, for 

 various reasons : his own tradition and the power position of the elite 

 favor the status quo. He often suffers from malnutrition as well as 

 intestinal and blood parasites, so that he has just enough energy to 

 cope with his life as it is. He is either too far from market to think 

 in terms of sizable marketable surpluses, or, if he does chance to do so, 

 some one turns up with a document proving himself to be the "owner 

 of all this land," and from experience the squatter knows that it is 

 "healthier" for him to move farther into the forest without a struggle. 

 He has no capital, few tools, and only those skills that have enabled 

 him to survive with the most primitive of farming techniques. Armed 

 only with a cutting tool — apparently the Mayans used the blunt stone 

 axe — millions of subsistence farmers over the millennia have cut over 

 billions of hectares of tropical forest. He has done what the Scottish 



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