Bulmer-Thomas V., Coatsworth J., Cortes-Conde R. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century

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342 Otto T. Solbrig

mountain areas, areas covered by ice, extreme deserts, and ﬂooded areas.

Yet these are capable of being affected by humans when used as dumping

grounds, for military exercises, or for indiscriminate harvesting of natural

vegetation. We do not consider ocean and coastal waters that also have seen

enormous alterations in this century because of human activity.

Compared with other parts of the world, Latin America, particularly

South America, still has a large area in forests. Cropland is about 50 per-

cent below the worldwide average; pastures are slightly higher. The relative

importance of each of these land-use categories varies from country to

country and in each of the four major ecosystem types. Yet, the average

environmental impact should be slightly less than in other parts of the

world.

The colonial and early independence period in Latin America created

its share of environmental alteration (see Volume I) and landscape mod-

iﬁcation. However, technologies used in agriculture and mining during

the colonial period utilized limited exterior power and were of low impact

compared with the technologies that were introduced in the twentieth cen-

tury. Geographically, they were concentrated in coastal regions or around

mining enclaves.

The Industrial Revolution produced a more specialized world economy

than its eighteenth-century predecessor. As the countries of Europe, partic-

ularly England, began to specialize in manufactures for export, they came

to require large imports of foodstuffs and industrial raw materials. Latin

America became an important supplier of these needs. The rise in income

of the European population also greatly expanded the demand for a number

of tropical agricultural products, such as sugar, coffee, and cocoa, which

had previously been high-priced luxuries.

At the end of the nineteenth century, most Latin American countries

were emerging from a long period of civil wars and internal conﬂict. In

each country, the victorious landed elite, in order to insert their country’s

economy into those of Europe and the United States, adopted a policy

of export-oriented development based on the sale of natural products.

period of economic growth based on the adoption of modern technologies

in mining and agriculture began around 1880.Itwould last, with many ups

and downs, until the world depression of the 1930s.

Because there was virtually no other source of income and employment

than agriculture and mining throughout the colonial period and the ﬁrst

B. Albert, South America and the First World War (1988); Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic

History of Latin America since Independence, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2003).

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 343

century of independence – the small industrial and commercial sector

being incapable of absorbing much labor – growth could occur only by

an increase in the primary export sector. There were, however, signiﬁcant

regional differences. These activities increased land use and had a direct

impact on the natural environment.

With the end of the civil wars, political and economic power in the

new countries passed ﬁrmly into the hands of the primary producers,

the landowning and mining classes. Mining and agriculture accounted

for nearly all of the region’s exports. Landowners beneﬁted from free trade

by acquiring wider markets for raw materials and also by being able to

satisfy their consumption needs through imports. As demand for Latin

American products increased, production costs were reduced for many pri-

mary products through shifts in the location of production or through

technical advances.

The decision to adopt a development model based on exports had the

effect ofcreating two economic sectors:an expanding sector oriented toward

exports, based on the exploitation of natural resources, mainly minerals

and agricultural products (both foodstuffs and nonfood items), and a sec-

tor oriented toward the internal market, which was primarily a producer

of foodstuffs and some traditional manufactures. Capital and know-how

ﬂowed to the export sector, whereas the labor-intensive domestic sector

grew only slowly. There were, however, signiﬁcant differences in these two

sectors from country to country (see the chapter on agriculture).

The insertion of Latin America into the Atlantic economy brought with

it an increase in trade. Between 1700 and 1820, the volume of total trade

increased about threefold, or at less than 1 percent a year. Between 1820 and

1870, trade expanded ﬁvefold, and ﬁvefold again between 1870 and the First

World War, or at a rate of 3 percent annually.

During the nineteenth cen-

tury, nearly all the expansion took place in agricultural products. Industrial

metals and petroleum did not become important exports until the 1920s

or later, and the precious metals had lost most of their signiﬁcance by the

late eighteenth century.

The landed elite was able to appropriate the best and most produc-

tive land, where it established large estates known with different names –

haciendas, hatos, fundos, estancias – where semifeudal labor relations often

existed.

This contrasted with the sector that produced for the local market.

J. Grunwald and P. Musgrove, Natural Resources in Latin American Development (Baltimore, 1970);

D. Goodman and M. Redclift, Environment and Development in Latin America (Manchester,

1991).

Arnold Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975), 265.

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344 Otto T. Solbrig

Here, small parcels – minifundia –prevailed, capital investments were very

low, technologies traditional, and labor investments high. Because the best

lands were taken over by the export sector, either by purchase or by coer-

cion, the small producers were pushed into increasingly marginal areas.

In general the level of productivity in the primary export sector, whether

agricultural or mineral, was much higher than in subsistence agriculture.

A question that has been asked repeatedly but which we do not discuss

here is why the growth of the export sector was not followed by industrial-

ization. In some cases – such as the state of S

ao Paulo in Brazil – such was

the case, but in most cases it was not.

THREE EARLY TYPES OFLANDUSE

Land use is the best indicator of environmental impact. Space does not

permit a detailed analysis of land use in Latin America (but see the chapter

on agriculture in this volume for further uses), so I discuss some selected

land uses, their evolution and their environmental impact during the long

twentieth century. I divide the presentation into two parts. First I discuss

three early economic land uses representative of the export sector: henequen

in Mexico, coffee in tropical South America, and cattle raising in Mexico

and Argentina. These activities had different environmental impacts. In

the second part of my exposition, I discuss some of the major types of land

use prevalent in the last ﬁfty years. It will be seen that, contrary to what

some authors have afﬁrmed, intensiﬁed land use does not necessarily have

agreater environmental impact.

early expansion of tropical perennial crops:

henequen

Mexico is probably the paradigmatic case of the early growth of the

export sector. After a long period of instability following independence,

Mexico’s landed elite united behind the dictatorial government of Porﬁrio

ıaz (1876–1911). His government pursued internal stability and economic

growth. This was accomplished through an alliance between the govern-

ment and the landed elite and through important concessions to foreign

entrepreneurs, especially in mining and ranching. The landed elite took

advantage of the political climate to appropriate the best agricultural and

grazing land, through coercion and semilegal means. The expansion of

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 345

production was especially notable at the two opposite ends of the country:

the henequen plantations in the Yucat

an peninsula and the cattle ranches

in northern Mexico.

Henequen (Agave fourcroydes) was domesticated by the ancient Maya and

used by them and the Aztecs for making cordage and rough garments. It is

a cactus-like plant that grows best in dry and rocky environments such as

the dry northeastern area of the Yucat

an peninsula. Until the middle of the

nineteenth century, the growing of henequen was a cottage industry. Two

technological developments, one external and the other internal, brought

henequen growing to prominence.

In 1840,Cyrus McCormick brought to market in the United States a

mechanical wheat reaper that soon evolved into an automatic reaper-binder.

To tie the sheaves, this machine used twine that originally came from the

Philippines (Manila hemp) or Europe (Russian hemp). The invention of a

mechanical knotting device in 1878 by John Appleby for the McCormick

binder increased the demand for twine exponentially. Henequen at the

beginning was not competitive because of the high costs of production

(the ﬁbers were extracted from the leaves by hand) and the low quality of

the product. The invention in Mexico of a machine to extract the ﬁbers (the

Molina wheel) and an effort by Mexican producers to improve the quality of

their product led henequen to become, by the end of the nineteenth century,

the preferred ﬁber for the elaboration of twine. This totally changed land

use and labor relations in Yucat

an.

The Yucat

an haciendas in the nineteenth century were primarily cattle

and corn haciendas, with some garden planting of henequen for the local

market. Sugar was the principal crop during most of the century, grown

in the deeper soils and more humid climate along the southeastern fron-

tier of the state. The development of sugar haciendas brought with it an

encroachment by the landowners into communal lands held for centuries

in usufruct by Mayan communities. To ensure a source of cheap labor, debt

peonage proliferated, institutionalized by a series of government decrees.

This set a precedent for the growth of the henequen hacienda.

When an international market developed for henequen, buoyed by initial

high prices, it displaced sugar, tobacco, and forest products, and the Yucat

region quickly became a monocrop economy with all the ecological and

social drawbacks that this entails.

Whereas in 1845 henequen production

Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucat

an, Mexico and the United States 1880–1924 (Cambridge,

1982).

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346 Otto T. Solbrig

in Yucat

an occupied only some 600 hectares and accounted for only 6 per-

cent of total agricultural production, by 1890, some 100 thousand hectares

produced 45 thousand tons of ﬁbers. The peak of production was reached

in 1914 with 150 thousand tons. Remaining communal lands were taken

over by henequen haciendas and the local Indian population was forced to

work there through a system of debt peonage and physical coercion.

The virtual monopoly that Yucat

an interests had on henequen produc-

tion shaped the business interests of the United States users, who wished

to assure a dependable supply at a low price. Because land was entirely

in the hands of local hacendados, it was almost impossible to establish

a competing production in Mexico. Attempts to grow Russian hemp in

the United States or abroad did not prosper because of high production

costs. In the end, the local need for capital and the lack of a native capital

market allowed U.S. interests to indirectly control the Mexican henequen

production. Through a series of arrangements between New York cordage

interests and local export brokers, the Americans were able to reduce the

price. The best known of these deals is the one between the International

Harvester Corporation (the successor ﬁrm to the McCormick Company)

and Olegario Molina y Compa

nia. International Harvester, which con-

trolled the henequen market in the United States, agreed to buy exclusively

from the Molina Company at a ﬁxed price. This created a three-tier social

structure in Yucat

an. At the top, some thirty families controlled the export

market. Below them were the local hacendados or henequeros, perennially

in debt and forced to sell their ﬁbers at low prices to the exporters who

controlled the credit market. These market manipulations lowered the

price of henequen and squeezed the proﬁts of the hacienda owners. They

reacted by reducing the wages and working conditions of their workers,

who became little more than slaves, and by increasing production, which

only contributed to further reduce prices.

It is difﬁcult to assess the environmental impact of henequen production

at the turn of the century. The increased acreage clearly affected the native

vegetation and fauna. Yet henequen is a perennial plant growing on rocky

soils in an area of low rainfall. The technology employed involved little

input. The impact on the physical environment probably was limited. The

principal effect was on the social fabric of the region. Another impact was

the growth of transport infrastructure, both roads and railroads.

A. Wells, Yucat

an’s Gilded Age. Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860–1915

(Albuquerque, NM, 1985).

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 347

After the Mexican revolution, the government took over the commercial-

ization of henequen and tried to control its price by limiting sales (a scheme

known as valorization). It also eliminated debt patronage, though it did not

return communal lands until the government of L

azaro Cardenas in the

1930s. The increase in price made other ﬁbers more competitive. Principal

among them was another species of Mexican Agave, sisal (A. sisilana). This

spineless species, grown in Kenya and Brazil, has more tensil strength than

henequen but requires better soil and more humidity. But it was the inven-

tion of the harvester combine and its diffusion in the 1920s and 1930s and

the corresponding reduction in the demand for hard ﬁbers that destroyed

the henequen industry. The ﬁnal blow was the appearance of synthetic

ﬁbers such as nylon and dacron for the construction of ropes. Henequen

serves today a very limited market and production. The area dedicated to

henequen in Yucat

an in 2000 was 10 thousand hectares,

down from its

peak of 630 thousand hectares in 1915.

early expansion of tropical perennial crops: coffee

Coffee was introduced into Haiti from France in 1723.

From there, it

slowly diffused to other Latin American countries. Aided by the spread of

coffee leaf blight in Indonesia and Ceylon, by the middle of the nineteenth

century Latin America had become the principal producer of coffee in the

world, a distinction it still holds. Brazil was and is the principal producer.

The coffee story is similar to that of henequen, with some variations. How-

ever, the environmental impact of coffee production has been much greater

than that of henequen plantations.

Coffee is a tropical shrub that grows as an understory plant in the

montane forests of Kenya and Ethiopia. The French introduced coffee

on an experimental basis into Haiti and Martinique, while the Dutch sub-

sequently introduced it into Suriname.

From here it diffused gradually

into Brazil and Venezuela. It spread from there to the mountain slopes

of Mexico, Central America, the Antilles, and the Andes, from Venezuela

and Colombia to Ecuador and Peru. Coffee can be grown as an under-

story shrub in the forest, in which case we call it shade-coffee, or in open

ﬁelds, so-called sun-coffee. When grown in open ﬁelds, its yields are higher

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), FAOSTAT Database, Rome.

Otto Solbrig and D. J. Solbrig, So Shall You Reap (Washington, DC, 1996).

Ibid.

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348 Otto T. Solbrig

but the quality is lower. Coffee is very demanding in nutrients, which

shade-coffee receives from the litter of shade trees. Sun-coffee must be

fertilized heavily or it exhausts soil resources quickly.

Coffee growing started in Brazil in the second half of the eighteenth

century in the states of Espiritu Santo and Rio do Janeiro. From its very

beginning it was grown in open ﬁelds. It became an important export staple

only after independence. It spread ﬁrst to the Paraiba Valley

and later to

the highlands of central and western S

ao Paulo state, which became the

biggest coffee-producing area of the world early in the twentieth century.

The spread of coffee had the effect of signiﬁcantly reducing the extent of

the rich coastal forests of Brazil and creating serious problems of erosion.

Coffee, especially in the Paraiba Valley, was grown on mountain slopes that

were denuded of trees, and then planted in rows at right angles to contour

lines. This form of agriculture soon exhausted the soil (much of which

was washed down the slopes). Farmers then moved on and repeated the

process in a new virgin plot. The environmental impact was manifold: loss

of forests and their biodiversity, soil erosion, and silting of watercourses.

In Central America, coffee growing started in Costa Rica in the 1830s,

soon occupying the central plateau of the country. From there, coffee grow-

ing spread north to El Salvador and Guatemala and, eventually, Nicaragua.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, coffee was the major export prod-

uct of Central America. By the end of the century, railroads were built that

joined the central plateau of Costa Rica and Guatemala with the Atlantic

coast in order to expedite the export of coffee. The railroads in turn served

as ways of penetration into the interior.

In Colombia, the coffee at the beginning was also an itinerant crop,

as it was in Brazil, moving from C

ucuta to Santander to Cundinamarca.

From 1870 on, coffee expanded along both slopes of the valley of the river

Cauca, south of Medell

ın. By the end of the nineteenth century, coffee

production in Colombia reached 270 thousand metric tons. In Colombia,

coffee was grown as an understory plant, its environmental impact being

less pronounced than in Brazil.

As with the case of henequen, we ﬁnd that coffee production in Colombia

also involved a three-tier system. At the top were large commission houses

mostly owned by foreigners, although there were also some Colombian

Stanley Stein, Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County 1850–1890 (New York, 1976).

C. F. S. Cardoso, “La formaci

on de la hacienda cafetalera costarricense en el Siglo XIX,” in Enrique

Florescano, ed., Haciendas, latifundios y plantaciones en am

erica latina, 2nd ed. (Mexico City, 1978),

635–67;H.P

erez Brignoli, Breve historia de Centroam

erica, 3rd ed. (Madrid, 1988), 205.

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 349

interests involved. Large coffee producers, which were price takers, shipped

directly abroad to these commission houses and often were in debt to them

for monetary advances on the crop. Small producers sold to agents of the

foreign houses or to local exporters. In turn, owners put pressure on labor.

Independent laborers were given a plot of land on which to plant coffee.

For this they had to deposit a sum of money that was returned with interest

after the bushes began to bear (some three to ﬁve years). Landowners could

thereby obtain the services of labor as well as the use of capital, and see

their land turned into productive coffee haciendas.

From there on, the

arrangement was usually one of “half and half.” The sharecropper was

in charge of the shrubs, their harvest, and the labor-consuming task of

drying the coffee, and paying all expenses, for which he got to keep half

the production.

cattle raising in temperate regions: the southern

cone and mexico

The pampas region of Argentina and Uruguay were used during the nine-

teenth century to raise cattle and sheep for export of salted meat and wool.

The cattle were of low quality, raised on open ranges. With the invention of

refrigerated transport, a lucrative fresh-meat market opened up in Europe,

especially England, that was one of the linchpins in the rapid development

of Argentina and Uruguay.

The English market demanded good-quality beef. Argentine ranchers

imported bulls of English breeds, especially Shorthorn (Durhams) and

Hereford (white face) to improve the herds. The mild climate of the pampas

and their natural grasses allowed raising cattle without stabulation. The

simultaneous spread of agriculture created an opportunity for a dual land

use that the local estancieros (ranchers) were quick to exploit. Part of the

ranch was rented to immigrant farmers, mostly Italians, for periods of three

to ﬁve years, with the proviso that the land had to be left planted in alfalfa at

the end of the lease period. Cattle were fattened on these ﬁelds, and when,

after a period of years, the alfalfa declined, the cycle was repeated. The

alfalfa and the cattle manure increased the fertility of the soil, a very good

solution from the point of view of the soil. This was a technology that was

economically proﬁtable and environmentally advantageous. It prevailed

Charles Berquist, Coffee and Conﬂict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (Durham, NC, 1978).

M. Palacios, Coffee in Colombia, 1850–1970 (Cambridge, 1980).

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350 Otto T. Solbrig

with few changes until the middle of the twentieth century and in a much-

diminished way until today.

Tw o types of ranches developed: breeders, found in the more marginal

areas of the pampa, and fatteners, who occupied a more central geographical

area and were intimately connected with the exporters. These were highly

concentrated in the hands of one U.S. and two British ﬁrms. Because chilled

beef could be kept only for four weeks and ships took approximately three

to reach British ports, processing plants were situated next to harbors. It

took only twenty-four hours to process beef and load a ship.

On account of their oligopolistic position, exporters controlled the price

of beef, which they tried to keep down. In turn, fatteners who sold to the

meatpacking companies passed price changes down to breeders. They, in

turn, lowered the salaries of ranch hands, whose working conditions were

very precarious. Breeders also supplied the national market, where the price

indirectly was set by how much fatteners were willing to pay for a steer.

Because that price was low by international standards, the Argentine public

got access to meat at a low price, which explains in part the addiction to a

high meat diet in the country. Fatteners controlled the Cattlemen’s Associ-

ation (Sociedad Rural Argentina), a very inﬂuential lobby. The situation was

basically not dissimilar to that in the henequen industry: a concentrated

market where foreign buyers keep prices down by negotiating with a local

elite, which, in turn, takes advantage of a dispersed set of producers who

carry the brunt of the costs of such a system. And, as in Mexico, working

conditions and pay of ranch hands were substandard but not nearly as bad

as in Mexico because in the pampas there tended to be a labor shortage.

In northern Mexico at the beginning of the long twentieth century, the

picture was different from that in the southern henequen-growing region.

It was also different from the pampas. In Mexico, huge cattle ranches were

developed to produce heifers to be fattened in the United States. Some of

these ranches – the best known is Babicora of the Hearst family – were

owned and operated by U.S. citizens, whereas others were in the hands of

the local landed elite, such as the Terraza and the Madero families. Yet the

labor relations did not differ very much from those in the Yucat

an peninsula.

Tw o factors triggered the growth of ranching in northern Mexico: the

paciﬁcation of the frontier and the end of Apache Indian raids, and the

Otto Solbrig, Una soluci

on argentina al problema de la erosi

on de los suelos (Buenos Aires, 1995); Otto

T. S olbrig and E. Viglizzo, Sustainable Farming in the Argentine Pampas: History, Society, Economy and

Ecology (The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, Working

Papers on Latin America No. 99/00-1, 1999).

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 351

building of a network of railroads. In the 1880s, a railroad was built with

U.S. capital in northern Mexico, linking Brownsville, Laredo, and El Paso

with Torre

on and points farther south. Cattle raising north of the border

was becoming expensive as more and more land was used to cultivate

crops. Raising cattle in northern Mexico was relatively inexpensive. After

two years, animals were shipped north to be fattened for the U.S. market.

Proﬁts were sizable for both the U.S. and Mexican ranchers.

It is difﬁcult to assess the environmental impact of the Mexican ranching

operations at the turn of the century. Cattle were raised on the open range.

There are indications that there was overgrazing that would be detrimental

to the vegetation and lead to erosion. As in Yucat

an, the rights of many

communities were not respected and this led to several uprisings, best

known of which are the Yaqui wars and the uprisings in Chihuahua that

led to the Tomochi massacre.

These three examples illustrate the pattern of land use that developed

early in the century: a market controlled by concentrated foreign interests,

such as International Harvester, which controlled the market for henequen

ﬁbers, or the Anglo, Swift, and Armour meatpacking plants that controlled

the English meat market. These interacted with a small local elite to keep

commodity prices down. The local elite, in turn, was capable of passing

the cost of the lower prices down to producers, whose proﬁts were severely

affected and who harshly squeezed labor. Similar systems existed in relation

to other export commodities such as bananas, sugar, salitre, and rubber,

although each case has its own unique characteristics. Because the systems of

resource extraction were extensive, the effect on the physical and biological

environment was moderate, but the effect on the native social fabric was

high.

The world depression of the 1930s severely disrupted this pattern of

production. Some countries, such as Argentina, tried to maintain market

share by making special concessions; others, such as Brazil, defaulted on

their debts. Mexico nationalized its oil industry and embarked on a strategy

of import substitution, as happened also in most of the other countries.

THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE SECOND HALF

OF THE CENTURY

Landscape transformation in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century was con-

ﬁned mostly to areas near the coast where the population was concentrated.