Cotton -- The cotton boom and Its primary causes -- Demand for cotton by Central American manufacturing -- World demand for cotton after World War II -- The insecticide revolution -- Chemical fertilizers -- Tractors -- Modern technology and cotton yields -- Government road-building programs -- Cotton and credit -- Government promotion of cotton finance -- The cotton boom and Its primary beneficiaries -- The cotton growers -- The cotton landlords -- Cotton gins -- The cotton-export houses -- The suppliers of the cotton boom -- Banks and the cotton boom -- Vegetable-oil factories and textile mills -- Cotton and the cotton elite -- Ecological consequences of cotton -- Cotton and the common man -- The cotton boom and the opening of fresh cropland -- Cornfields to cotton -- Cotton and peasant access to land -- Cotton and the creation of a wage-labor force -- The irreversibility of cotton -- Cotton to cattle -- Cotton to sugar -- Cotton to basic grains -- Cotton and the social fabric -- Cattle -- The beef-export boom and Its primary causes -- Practices before the export boom -- The demand for beef in the U.S. market -- The vital supply link: the modern packing plant -- Refrigerator transport -- Roads and the beef trade -- State promotion of the beef business -- Road finance -- Direct promotional finance to the beef sector -- The beef-export boom and technology on the ranch -- The beneficiaries of beef -- The source of the beef bonanza -- The packing plants' share of the beef bonanza
Summary
Before social unrest shook the region in the 1970s, Central America experienced more than a decade of rapid export growth by adding cotton and beef to the traditional coffee and bananas. This book shows how the rapid growth contributed to the present social and political crisis, examines the causes of the export boom and who benefited from it, and shows the impact of the boom on land use, the ecology, and the conditions of life in the rural areas
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-248) and index
Notes
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
