What follows is a list of scholarly sources that have informed my capstone research up until this point, and that I will continue to draw upon as I move forward. The subjects covered by these resources include land reform, neoliberal structural adjustment, food sovereignty, transnational agrarian movements, and the latin american debt crisis (to name a few). Broadly, these resources help to place Latin American development strategies and land reform policies in the context of global political-economic dynamics. This involves understanding the broader historical processes that have prompted specific development paradigms in Latin America, what impacts these paradigms have had on rural people and environments, and how land reform movements have developed in response to these changes.
The works of McMichael (2011), Peet & Hartwick (2009), and Harvey (2005) set the stage— historicizing the emergence of the import-substitution industrialization (ISI) paradigm, the 1980s debt crisis, and the structural adjustment policies that facilitated the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. Gwynne and Kay (2014) situate this process specifically within the history of Latin America, paying particular attention to the impacts that neoliberal development policies have had in rural environments (ie: a transition to large scale agro-exportation, depopulation/de-peasantization of the countryside, rapid urbanization, consolidation of land holdings, increased poverty and inequality, etc). The works of Borras, Edelman & Kay (2008) and Patel (2006) further expand upon this point, adding to it discussions of grassroots social movements that have challenged neoliberal development strategies by advocating redistributive land reform and food sovereignty.
Moving forward with my capstone research, I hope to compare the goals/precedents/outcomes of market-led land reform policies (as offered by the World Bank) vis-a-vis the radically redistributive land reform strategies called for by peasants movements, such as La Via Campesina.
References