This agricultural geography is intended to fulfill a long-time demand for a graphic report on factors underlying Latin America's agriculture. It has been prepared with the mutual trade interests of Latin America and the United States uppermost in mind, and is designed especially for use by the agricultural producer and trader, the business and government administrator, the professional man, the instructor, and the student.

Popular among students for its engaging, accessible style, this text provides an authoritative overview of Latin America's human geography as well as its regional complexity. Extensively revised to reflect the region's ongoing evolution in the first decades of the 21st century, the second edition's alternating thematic and regional chapters trace Latin America's historical development while revealing the diversity of its people and places. Coverage encompasses cultural history, environment and physical geography, urban development, agriculture and land use, social and economic processes, and the contemporary patterns of the Latin American diaspora. Pedagogical features include vivid topical vignettes, end-of-chapter recommended readings and other resources, and 217 photographs, maps, and figures. New to This Edition *Discussions of climate change and its impacts, the demise of the Monroe doctrine, neoliberal agriculture, the growing influence of Chinese investment, and other new topics. *13 new vignettes highlighting current issues such as the thaw in United States-Cuba relations, drug violence in Mexico, aerial gondolas in the Andes, and the first Latin pope. *Annotated website and film recommendations for most chapters. *The latest development trends, population and economic data, and current events of local and global significance. *26 new photographs, maps, and figures.

Analysis of Latin America's economy focusing on development, covering the colonial roots of inequality, boom and bust cycles, labor markets, and fiscal and monetary policy. Latin America is richly endowed with natural resources, fertile land, and vibrant cultures. Yet the region remains much poorer than its neighbors to the north. Most Latin American countries have not achieved standards of living and stable institutions comparable to those found in developed countries, have experienced repeated boom-bust cycles, and remain heavily reliant on primary commodities. This book studies the historical roots of Latin America's contemporary economic and social development, focusing on poverty and income inequality dating back to colonial times. It addresses today's legacies of the market-friendly reforms that took hold in the 1980s and 1990s by examining successful stabilizations and homemade monetary and fiscal institutional reforms. It offers a detailed analysis of trade and financial liberalization, twenty–first century-growth, and the decline in poverty and income inequality. Finally, the book offers an overall analysis of inclusive growth policies for development—including gender issues and the informal sector—and the challenges that lie ahead for the region, with special attention to pressing demands by the vibrant and vocal middle class, youth unemployment, and indigenous populations.

The Physical Geography of South America, the eighth volume in the Oxford Regional Environments series, presents an enduring statement on the physical and biogeographic conditions of this remarkable continent and their relationships to human activity. It fills a void in recent environmental literature by assembling a team of specialists from within and beyond South America in order to provide an integrated, cross-disciplinary body of knowledge about this mostly tropical continent, together with its high mountains and temperate southern cone. The authors systematically cover the main components of the South American environment - tectonism, climate, glaciation, natural landscape changes, rivers, vegetation, animals, and soils. The book then presents more specific treatments of regions with special attributes from the tropical forests of the Amazon basin to the Atacama Desert and Patagonian steppe, and from the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific coasts to the high Andes. Additionally, the continents environments are given a human face by evaluating the roles played by people over time, from pre-European and European colonial impacts to the effects of modern agriculture and urbanization, and from interactions with El Niño events to prognoses for the future environments of the continent.

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

Understanding Latin America's recent economic performance calls for a multidisciplinary analysis. This handbook looks at the interaction of economics and politics in the region and includes a number of contributions from top academic experts who have also served as key policy makers (a former president, ministers of finance, a central bank governor), reflecting upon the challenges of reform.