Technological change in agrarian production in Argentina: some disputed theories

Abstract

The question about technological change and its impact on the agricultural structure has been approached from different theoretical perspectives. It involves various efforts to describe and explain transformations of great relevance for local and regional agricultural production. These are an interesting object of study, which seems to hide some keys to strengthen our knowledge of Argentine society and, at the same time, they form a very interesting basis for complex theoretical approaches. Among other edges of debate, the question of the origin, the depth and the character of the process of concentration and centralization of agrarian capital are involved. Also, the role played by different actors in the agricultural productive chain and the weight of each of them in production; the emergence of new actors or the redistribution of roles played by pre-existing actors -for example, transnational corporations and seed companies at the macro level, but also key figures for production, such as advisers, at the micro level -, the role played by technology and science in general in these changes, and the territorial and health impacts and environmental sustainability of the new production model. In this article we will try to describe which are for us the central aspects of the Neo-Schumpeterian approach applied to the mentioned transformations, and to expose what we understand are the main theoretical limitations that the approach presents when trying to explain different aspects of the process in question. We will propose a different approach and a series of research lines that we believe have not yet been addressed.