ABSTRACT

Introduction The idea of rural Latin America conjures up a host of different images. Quechua and Aymara people growing native crops on the steep slopes of the Andes; the Amazonian forest occupied by .indigenous hunters, gatherers and shifting cultivators, but being destroyed by large and small colonist farmers; semi-arid lands in the interior of Chile, the source of increasingly popular wines in Northern supermarkets; livestock in Central America caught up in the famous 'hamburger connection'; plantations and large rural estates. The list goes on. These are images of the rich and the poor, the indigenous and the modern, the sustainable and the destructive. The geography of rural Latin America is characterized by diversity and difference.