REGENERATION AND DEGENERATION OF THE PEASANTS 5 are two of the major determinants of the existence and creation of employment opportunities in agriculture—the other major determinants being the amout and type of modern technologies used; in other words, they determine directly the fate of the rural proletariat, the small holders and the landless workers. Besides, it must be realized that the traditional failure of the latifundistas of Latin America, including Mexico, who monopolize the bulk of the agricultural resources, to exploit these resources in a more satisfactory manner, has proved to be a direct invitation to foreign capitalists-individual investors and the foreign agribusiness corporations—to expand their overseas agricultural ventures once they had decided that this was economically and politically profitable. This decision was taken somewhere around the mid-1960's for a variety of reasons 6 except for Mexico where US capital and technology began to invade the country on a large scale in the 1950's itself.7 The characteristic feature of these enormous new foreign transfers is that they involve all agricultural sectors, starting from those producing common staple foods and livestock or livestock products through the traditionally foreign controlled tropical and subtropical crops. We shall examine later how the employment situation is affected by the operations of transnational agribusiness corporations through their capital and technology transfers. Thirdly, a brief clarification of the meaning of campesinos, The rural proletariat is composed of two major groups which are at times difficult to separate neatly because of the polivalency of labour. This implies that many rural workers may belong to both categories simultaneously in view of the supreme need to earn a subsistence income which a single job cannot provide. The two groups are the small holders {minifundistas) 8 and the rural landless wage workers—the latter being referred to by some social scientists as the rural proletariat properly speaking.9 The small holders, the campesinos in the narrow sense, may be small owners, small tenants or other producers on small plots of land producing for family subsistence and for the market. In Mexico, all ejidatarios other than those who are entitled to but have not yet received land, and the few belonging to true ejidos colectivos, belong to this group. These small holders are obviously not comparable to the European Bauer or pays an' or the US or Australian "farmer55. One should beware of the imprecise language used in the literature emanating from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) the Harvard Business School, OEGD and the like whose authors' experience and outlook are derived from (or geared to) the agricultures of the industrial nations and who, when spea-