What Changing Technology Implies for Agrarian Reformt
探讨了人口增长对拉丁美洲农业产出的压力，分析了四种提高农业产出的方式及其环境后果，对关注农业政策与可持续发展的学者有参考价值。
Need for Increased Agricultural Output. The need to produce more is painfully obvious when one contemplates recent and widely publicized demographic data.2 If the population of, say, Latin America continues to grow at its present rate, there will be more than twice as many people in the region by the year 2000. While there are great differences between countries, this means that Latin America's total agricultural production will have to at least double during that time-just to keep everyone where he is today. The United States could take more than twice as long to accomplish this awesome task. How Can Agriculture Adjust? Without importing, there are four ways in which agriculture in any one country might gear up to meet demands for more food; in practice, a country uses them in various combinations: (1) An effort may be made to press forests or natural pasture in already settled areas into cropping land. (2) Land that is under the plow may be more intensively cultivated using traditional inputs, e.g., more laborers might be put to work on each cultivated acre. (3) An attempt may be made to develop the know-how that will make it possible to farm frontier land. (4) There may be an all-out effort to utilize new technology to produce more from every acre now being worked. Alternative (1), even if combined in s me way with (2) or (4), could have very undesirable consequences. But if the other alternatives are closed, hilly woodlands will be deforested, humid jungles will be denuded, and prairies will be plowed. Hence, gullies will be cut, soils leached, and dust bowls formed. In the longer run, the hydrologic cycle will likely be seriously interrupted and soils now usable for range and forest will be left in ruin.