OCR Text |
Show 119 it was perhaps justifiable to overstate the case for land reform to overcome inertia. Today the need is for dispassionate appraisal of the evidence and as complete and up to date a presentation as possible. Interdisciplinary awareness of the dimensions of the land reform topic has been largely achieved. The need is urgent for interdisciplinary exchange and the UN world conference on land reform announced for 1966 is a praiseworthy step in this direction. Would it not be advisable to hold regional meetings beforehand to reduce the world meeting to manageable proportions and to allow it to concentrate on levels of comparability where communication might result in effective testing and posing of new hypotheses? The Wisconsin Land Tenure Center has led a fruitful existence and fulfilled an important role in furthering interdisciplinary communication on Latin American land reform, but much more needs to be done. At least seven separate disciplines are busily at work investigating their own areas of competence with relation to centrally defined problems in land reform. The rapid diffusion of the results of these studies and the necessary summation of the ever increasing number of case studies, censuses and statistical documentation require regular and frequent gatherings of land reform scholars with interdisciplinary interests. 1968 Huizer, Gerrit. "Community development and conflicting rural interests," America Indigena, XXVIII, (July, 1968), pp. 619-630. Summary in Spanish, article in English. One of the important contributions of this program to the international theory and practice of community development is the fact that the I.U.I., in its ideology as well as its activities, did not hesitate to defend the economic and social interests of the indigenous communities if these were threatened by vested interests from within or outside. Rural communities all over Latin America are generally involved in such conflicts of interests, a situation which often hampers community development efforts. Marroquin, Alejandro D. "Economia indigena y desarrollo," America Indigena, XXVII, (October, 1968), pp. 929-940. English Summary: In his discussion as to whether Indian economy constitutes a relatively autonomous economic system the author reaches the conclusion that it really is insofar as it consists of an orderly group of economic and social elements that constitute a dynamic unit with capacity for autonomous self-regulation. Said system enters in relation with other more developed systems which all together originate interchange processes of integration, |