Economic concentration and family agriculture: hypothesis about their evolution in the Buenos Aires agriculture from a regional analysis perspective

Abstract

In the most recent decades there have been noticeable transformations in the Pampean agrarian production. Those changes, which especially deepened during the ‘90s, should be understood fundamentally through two essential processes, resulting from the development of capitalism: economic concentration and crisis in family production, the latter being expressed by the disappearance of an important number of units. In this article we will try to detect the origins and evolution of the above mentioned processes, analyzing the history of an agrarian structure which shows, since its beginning, distinct rates of concentration of its main resources (especially land), signaling in which way this initial concentration has not been linked, as in the previously mentioned case, to capital development, but has been the result of a previous mode of production. Likewise, we will analyze how the modern porcesses of economic concentration and crisis do not start with Menem’s economic policy, even when, as  a consequence of this policy, those processes will extraordinarily accelerate and deepen, leading to one of the most acute agrarian social crises of the 20th century.