América Latina ha desempeñado, y sigue desempeñando, un papel clave en el suministro global de recursos naturales. La mayoría de sus economías son exportadoras netas de productos primarios con poco valor añadido mientras que importan bienes manufacturados a precios más elevados. Existe un consenso generalizado entre investigadores de diferentes disciplinas en que este patrón de especialización comercial tiene implicaciones muy negativas para el desarrollo económico, el medio ambiente y, en general, para el bienestar de los habitantes de la región. Sin embargo, no contamos con ningún trabajo empírico sobre la contribución total de América Latina al resto de regiones del mundo. Siguiendo la metodología de la Contabilidad del Flujo de Materiales estimamos el comercio físico y el comercio monetario en 16 economías latinoamericanas entre 1900 y 2016.
This article aims to situate a national case study of the global periphery at the core of the debate on the socio-ecological transition by drawing on new data of biomass flows in twentieth-century Colombia. We draw up a century-long annual series converting a wide set of indicators from Net Primary Production (NPP) into the final socioeconomic uses of biomass, distinguishing around 200 different categories of crops, forests, and pastures. Our calculations draw on FAOSTAT and several corpuses of national statistics. The results show a fall of 10% in total NPP related to land-use changes involving forest conversion. Throughout the twentieth century, pasture was the most relevant among domestic extraction. Allocations of cash crops to industrial processing rose while the figure for staple crops for primary food consumption stagnated. The critical role of cattle throughout all periods and the higher yields of the industrial cash crops are behind this profile. This might also mean the start of a new trend of using pasture land for more profitable export crops, which establishes a new inner frontier of land-use intensification. Lastly, the article points out the phases of the socio-metabolic transition of biomass, explores the changes in biomass flows by looking at the history of the main drivers, and identifies the socio-ecological impacts of deforestation and industrial agribusiness.
Socioeconomic and historical approaches can contribute to the understanding of the relationship between food security, agricultural trade, and armed conflicts in developing countries. While the market-based perspective advocates that trade is a useful way to maintain food security nationally, other works suggest that trade liberalization and agro-export specialization have threatened food security since the 1980s, especially the self-sufficiency capacity. In Colombia, this agrarian change to agro-export specialization and food dependence has also been linked to the surge of the second wave of violence (c. 1980). Is there a dichotomy between trade and self-sufficiency during the Colombian twentieth century? Did armed conflict contribute to the specialization in agro-exports during the Second Globalization? This work contributes to the dichotomic debate between food security and agricultural trade with a more nuanced view along throughout the twentieth century and confirms a long-term relationship going from violence and international prices towards tropical specialization.
The long term institutional approach has created a static view of Cuba as a slave society throughout the entire Colonial per iod. This ossification of institutional change in Cuba has been criticized by the historiog raphy on slaver y, which has still to define the characteristics and timing of changes in slave ownership. The aim of this article is to understand the rise of a slave society in Cuba, to analyse temporal aspects of the transformation towards a plantation economy in the last decades of the eighteenth centur y, and to describe its main features. For this purpose, the institutional changes and resulting economic g rowth are analysed using the social orders framework proposed by Nor th, Wallis and Weingast (2009). The slave market is studied with empirical data from the church records of the San Carlos cathedral in Matanzas, Cuba, and span the 1755-1810 timeframe. The data indicate that the 1780s were a time of increasing black workforce availability and growing numbers of slave owners; while the 1790s involved the establishment of the plantation system, along with a massive influx of male labourers and the expanding size of plantations. This lends support to the use of the slave labour market for institutional change analysis and the genesis of a slave society.
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