Capitalism, ecology and agrarian expansion in the pampean region (1890–1950)

ZARRILLI ADRIAN GUSTAVO

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

, Duke University Press

Lugar: Durham; Año: 2002 vol. 6 p. 560 - 583

1084-5453

Argentine agrarian development is a complex and heterogeneous process for which numerous causes can be found. A specific environmental problem is present at each stage, partly a product of the way in which resources were used as well as eventually for the project of Nation-building intended to be carried out. During the last fourth of the 19th century the project had at its core the region traditionally protagonist in the history of the country: the pampas. A sustained growth occurred in the period of 1880-1930 –when Argentina inserts in the international market as supplier of farming raw materials. This growth was unusually fast and covered a time-span the country had never experienced. The productive use of the ecosystems in the pampas was the axis around which this expansion came about, when ruling sectors oriented the use of natural resources with a specific criterion of specialization and profitability but without foresight. This political-economic decision marks the starting point of a rapid change of the "Pampean" landscape to satisfy the need to improve the quality of meat and hasten the fattening up generated by meat-packing depots at the turn of the 19th century: creole races crossbred with English ones, the land was divided into plots by means of wire, and native grazing ecosystems of hard grass were replaced by other sweet grass and alfalfa fields of high output and more suitable for the new breeds. This also marked the starting point of an important grain expansion. Overpasturing resulted in soil deterioration and facilitated the expansion of weeds, it accelerated erosive processes and worsened pool silting as well as distorting waterways. The ecological imbalance the beginning of production in the wet pampas produced during this period was of such magnitude that the rationality of future use of natural resources was endangered.             In this sense, the use of certain natural resources was not only a consequence of the knowledge of their existence or the proper technology to use them. Each form of social organization establishes a peculiar relationship with nature and said relation generated a particular geographic shape for the period and the space under study. The factors conditioning the established society-nature relationship were largely the causal agents for the regional structure of the country, the building of the national space and the relations of regions among themselves, which present differences at each stage of development.