Introduction

Abstract

The present volume is devoted to analysing the ways in which economic and social changes in the Chilean countryside in recent decades — and in particular during the 1970s and 1980s, under the authoritarian rule of General Augusto Pinochet — are likely to affect the future course and nature of agricultural development, economic growth, and the political transition to democratic rule in the 1990s. We are also interested in the ways in which agrarian policies in the 1990s are likely to reflect previous developments, and to differ from the policies of previous decades, and on how this will affect present and future patterns of agricultural development. This volume does not, as its central concern, look at the Pinochet neo-liberal policies in the countryside, and their results, because this has already been attempted elsewhere (Hojman, 1990). What we intend to examine here are rather the promises and dangers of democratic agricultural development in the 1990s. This obviously requires that attention should be paid to the inheritance from the authoritarian period, but it also implies going far beyond it. The Introduction presents the principal arguments and conclusions of individual chapters, and aims to suggest some links between these chapters.