ABSTRACT
Roberts (1995) argues that there was evidence in Latin America of two important rural trends that influenced rural-urban migration. These two trends involve links between the cities to which migrants move and their rural origin locations. He argued that these trends were contradictory. The first is what he describes as the ‘peasantisation’ of the rural economy that retains the population on the land and creates strong rural-urban links. The second trend is of land consolidation and mechanisation, expelling the rural population to the cities where they have to seek employment. This is referred to as ‘proletarianisation’, as it creates proletarians (named after the lowest class of ancient Roman citizens) or low-income urban labouring classes of people who previously had survived on the land. Rural-urban links may well be affected if the local agrarian structure focuses on capital-intensive production which in developing countries is largely intended for export rather than for supplying the urban areas. Some systems may even retain rural labour, but the labour may be landless – rural proletarians – and, in some Latin American cases, may live in urban areas, migrating to rural areas when labour is in demand. By contrast, the peasant and subsistence form of agrarian structure retains relatively large numbers of people on relatively small amounts of land through intensive labour use. When the type of farming becomes more highly commercial, reducing labour input in favour of mechanisation, the Latin American evidence suggests that this results in high rates of out-migration to cities and often also abroad.
