Macroeconomic Conditions for Sustainable Agriculture in Central America

Agrarian policy discussions have traditionally centred on how policy can be formulated so as to galvanise agricultural production (the ‘reversing of the terms of trade bias against agriculture’ being one obvious facet) or to reduce rural inequalities (as epitomised by the various land redistribution laws passed in the sixties and seventies). In terms of agricultural policy objectives, sustainability of the resource base has generally trailed in last. This chapter redresses the balance, integrating the environmental issue in theoretic terms in Section 2, notwithstanding the difficulties of introducing further policy goals into an already complex policy framework, see Section 3. Section 4 then considers how the macro-economic environment may have facilitated environmental degradation through the extensification of agriculture and Section 5 through intensification and Section 6 discusses the externalities such farming developments have generated.