Editor’s Letter

From agribusiness to climate change to new alternative crops, agriculture faces an evolving panorama in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Winter 2024 issue of ReVista, “Agriculture and the Rural Environment,” looks at challenges and accomplishments throughout the region.

As Gabriela Soto Laveaga, professor of the History of Science here at Harvard, so aptly explains, there’s been an industrialized revolution in agriculture in the last fifty years, prioritizing technology that includes fertilizer, insecticide, hybrid seeds and irrigation. Agribusiness has taken precedence over the small farmer; many peasants or small farmers began to move to cities or the periphery of cities, as Karl Zimmerer, the 2016 DRCLAS Visiting Scholar, tells us.

But this issue—which includes agronomists, anthropologists, engineers, political scientists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists and others—is not one of doom and gloom. Instead, many of the authors here offer glimpses of hope, ranging from efforts to promote small farmers, the creative use of specialty export crops, agrotourism, devices to predict weather, campaigns to clean up pesticide contamination. It’s a mixture of realism and hope, as Latin America and the Caribbean face a crossroads in its agriculture production and the nature of the rural environment.

From Honduras to Mexico to Brazil, from Chile to Argentina to Peru to Bolivia, authors look at their own countries and beyond.  Climate change, pesticide contamination, the demise of family farms, questions about the advantages and disadvantages of new monocrops emerge as common themes.

And what also emerges very clearly is that although there are no easy solutions, scholars, activists and farmers are exploring positive ways of transforming agriculture and the urban environment to provide crops for the region and beyond, and to provide a just and equitable life for those who farm.