4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST problems of Latin America assume therefore a truly transnational importance. Of great relevance is the fact that in Mexico, foreign capital and technology have penetrated into so many sectors and control them so effectively, that their impact is visible on all fronts. Hence, an understanding of the Mexican model ("made in USA") is essential in order to enlighten ourselves about the fate of other underdeveloped agricultures and about the insoluble problems generated by foreign agribusiness corporations which are now active in Latin America and which are planning to expand their overseas business ventures. Secondly, Latin America's resources—land, water, forests, and above all the rural labour force —have always been and continue to be underutilized or ineffectively used 3 and often they are not used at all.3 The poor utilization of human and physical resources is, on the one hand the consequence of a land tenure system whose mainstay is the private ownership of, and control over land, water, labour and other inputs which, in the systematic absence of public regulation, leads by necessity to a steadily rising concentration of ownership, production and income. And it is due, on the other hand, to the operation of the capitalisfmarket system" which is manipulated, as far as the distribution of agricultural inputs is concerned, to favour large landowners and producers at the expense of the small holders, as well as to favour the output of commodities ^which generate large profits for large producers and handlers regardless of domestic or world food and fibre requirements.'4 An obvious corollary of this phenomenon of inadequate resource use is the abundance, and in many cases the overabundance, of available resources in relation to requirements, at the average level of technology available for production and distribution. We can state simply that the unfulfilled satisfaction of basic needs exists patently in the midst of plenty. Mexico is an exemplary case. Quite apart from the fact that a great deal of farm land is not accounted for in the available statistics—some estimate it as high as 30 percent—and although the opinion is widespread that Mexico suffers from incorrigible ecological obstacles to greater production, he who travels extensively through the country cannot but be impressed with the extent of unutilized potential—an unutilized potential which not only make^ the ecological inhospitality of Mexico something of a myth, but also makes the present-day need to import large and growing quantities of staple foods an absurdity precipitated by the existing economic, social and political system.5 Another corollary to these phenomena is that the level and quality of physical resource use