¡España se prepara! La ayuda americana en la modernización y colonización agraria en los años cincuenta

The opening of Spain to international political relations in the 1950s and the economic growth that began at end of that decade was linked to the agricultural sector and aid from the United States. American tender was needed to break the technological bottleneck, modernise Spanish agriculture and end the secular backwardness of a key sector for economic development. The aim of this article is to analyse the transcendental importance of US aid in Spanish agrarian development, through the INC colonization policy, machinery import programmes and knowledge transfer. This study is based on the INC documentary collection in the Central Archive of the Agriculture and Food Area of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment. In the introduction, we describe the situation of the Spanish agrarian sector in the 1950s, followed by an analysis of US aid to Spain in Section 2. In the third and fourth sections, we explain the application of the McCarran Amendment and Public Law 480 in the INC, and in the fifth section we look at the overall effects and impacts of US aid in Spanish agricultural development. The article ends with some conclusions that demonstrate the importance of this aid.