AGRICULTURE AND INFLATION UNDER CAPITALISM

Abstract

This paper approaches the relationship between agriculture and inflation within a point of view which is not exclusively economic. It identifies a secular inflatiogenic basis called "social and economic dissonance" (SED), characterized by a lack of adaptation of the social structure to the ongoing logic of the capitalist system. There is, within it, a generation of specific patterns of investiments (over-investiments in land) associated with cronical sub-consumption. Even recognizing the modernizing presence of the state, its domination by a small elite, the process of raising of the internal market for consumption beings and production beings, as well as the development of the financial market, occur as ultimate expression of the SED and reinforce the inflationary process. Under these complex conditions of the economy, the agricultural sector is found to be with specific influence of the SED, such as the hypertrophy of the exportation sector; special pattern of rent of land generation; marketing wihout availability of stocks; and technological heterogeneity, which generate a "rental component" for the more efficient business.