The unknown patagonian capacity to produce foods

Abstract

The unknown potential in terms of agricultural and food production in patagonia promotes the need to assume this knowledge by of the Republic, hidden under the (partly false) image of the great capacities of the pampas region, currently in clear degradation of its main resources as an consequence of the model of industrial agriculture of the present times. This document contains a complaint and, also, valuable information that puts this issue into discussion. In its first half it warns about the limitations of a socio-historical structure that has impeded the development of the different regions of the country, particularly of patagonia. In the second half it reports about what, perhaps, is a potentiality immersed in the ignorance of the resources and possibilities of argentina, within the limits of the aforementioned structure. This potential is given by the capacity of the lands to produce food or to be forested, calculated from a general analysis of the topographic and hydrologic conditions of a large cordilleran strip. The results reveal that a figure close to 2.000.000 hectares presents a real and potential aptitude for its systematization with pressurized irrigation systems and eventually gravitational ones. This number certainly obliges us to revise that vision of patagonia as a marginal space for development.