Agricultural Marketing And Economic Development: An Annotated Bibliography With Special Reference To Latin America

This annotated bibliography on agricultural marketing and economic development has been compiled with two objectives in mind. First, to contribute to the understanding of the role that agricultural marketing can play in the process of developing countries. As the reader will see many authors agree that marketing is "the most backward of all areas of economic life". There are several explanations for this particular situation. Because of socio-political reasons, people in planning roles prefer to allocate resources to the production of physical goods and not of services, which is what marketing mainly provides. Others believe that an adequate marketing system will spring up automatically with the progress of the country in the road of development. In spite of this relative less attention devoted to marketing, most of the people in all countries have been engaged in trade activities more than once in their lives; some people even get so used to trade that they don't consider trade as one of their main activities. Marketing should have a greater role in development plans. The second objective has been to provide researchers and people with marketing responsibilities in the Latin American countries. With a list of some of the studies that have been written on agricultural marketing for that specific country. It is not unusual in developing countries, that an outstanding marketing study passes directly from the author's hand to a government office file, where it will remain forever without further analysis of its recommendations. One of the causes for such situations is the high rate of personnel turnover in the country, without adequate feedback information for the person taking over the job.