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Agrarian reform and rural development strategies in Latin America and the Caribbean

RAFAEL PANIAGUA - RUIZ

THIS PAPER SETS OUT THE main issues dealt with in two documents drafted by a mission commissioned in July, 1995, by the FAO Rural Development and Agrarian Reform Division. The purpose of the mission was to propose a new institutional framework for the design of policies for rural development, agrarian reform and the fight against poverty. The mission was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, it analysed the latest literature on rural development in order to identify a set of conceptual elements around which to establish consensus regarding rural development in

Latin America and the Caribbean. Consensus was achieved around three major issues: the relationship between macroeconomic policy and sectoral policy, or in more general terms between the global development model and rural development, the assessment and reframing of the main sectoral policies relating to prices, credit, agrarian reform and fight against poverty, and the linkages to be promoted between government regulation procedures and the market, and in this context the problem of the reform of the state. For reasons of space, the consensus points are merely stated in the paper, without providing any of the underlying arguments in support of them.

In a second stage, discussions with rural development agents in a number of selected Latin American countries made it possible to spell out the components. The document takes stock of the present state of Latin American agriculture, and then identifies the scope and the limitations of the guidelines for action that are being implemented in Latin America and the Caribbean. Last, it addresses the agents in a new rural development strategy and relations between them.


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