rural dwellers and the remaining 4% are indigenous groups and others. Of the small-scale producers, at least 40% are farmers with little if any access to loans, technical assistance, or agricultural support services and little capacity to purchase land.
     The financial sector plays a role in activities related to rural employment, favoring non-agricultural activities, which vary from country to country and depend on the ties between non-agricultural rural employment and other sectors of economic activity. In an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) document on rural financing strategies cited by Da Silva (2004), it was recognized that the nonagricultural rural sector is an increasingly important part of the rural economy and accounts for a growing part of rural income and rural employment. Most of the document posed the need to develop financial services other than short-term loans so as to specifically increase productivity and the possibilities of expanding non-agricultural services and manufacturing and processing plants. The main conclusion of the document was that rural financial markets do not operate properly in Latin America and the Caribbean and that the underdevelopment of these financial markets has a negative impact on those investments that aim to bolster productivity, expand incomes and spur sectoral growth (Da Silva, 2004).

Technological resources. Agriculture today is experiencing major changes, leading to the rise of new scientific and technological paradigms, these are transforming the dynamics of agricultural production. These can be grouped in three major areas: the new biotechnologies, sustainable development models and the new information and communication technologies. The new biotechnologies are constituted by a set of techniques that operate at the subcellular level and make it possible to directly manipulate the genetic characteristics and process of reproduction of living beings. The main ones are: in vitro tissue cultures; molecular markers; genetic engineering, by which transgenic crops are produced (mixing genetic matter of different species); monoclonal antibodies; and bioprocesses.
     These recent technological developments, especially in the field of the new biotechnologies, have created conditions that favor the private appropriation of knowledge, given their complexity, requirements for multiplication and high relative cost. This new situation has led to massive private investments in activities associated with the conservation, improvement and industrial production of biological resources and agricultural technologies, especially by transnational companies involved in the production of agricultural inputs. This is leading to a radical change in the balance between the public and private sectors. For example, 85% of current global investment in agricultural biotechnology comes from private interests. Two key controversial issues have arisen in this new context, involving intellectual property and access
to genetic resources. The models of rural development in LAC have emphasized technological resources, which are capital intensive. Historically this has been one of the problems that has plagued the Green Revolution. Nonetheless, not all technological resources have to be capital intensive (Chaparro, 2000).

     The second scientific and technological area includes alternative forms of agriculture, with proposals for ecological agriculture, or agroecological agriculture, as an integrated approach focusing on the sustainable management of the natural resource base (water, soil, biodiversity) and distinguished from the agriculture of the Green Revolution by its scientific, socioeconomic, political and cultural approach (León, 2007). Agroecology emphasizes technology that is knowledge-intensive, low cost and easily adaptable by small-scale producers.
     Information and communication technologies constitute the third scientific and technological area that is profoundly transforming agriculture and giving rise to multiple applications with a direct impact on agricultural production and the management of natural resources. These are a set of technologies related to the processing and dissemination of information and knowledge, using Internet tools, which are important in education and for the broad and swift dissemination of the processes of globalization and its effects (Chaparro, 2000; Farah, 2004a; Farah and Pérez, 2004).

Labor. Worldwide, it is estimated that the urban population is on the way to increasing from one-third of the world population in 1975 to two-thirds in 2020. These high rates of urbanization are changing the structure of demand for food towards the consumption of processed foods with some type of value added, which fosters greater demand for non-agricultural labor (Chaparro, 2000). As a result, agricultural employment dropped in almost half of the Latin American countries, while non-agricultural rural employment continued to increase in all of them. According to data taken by CEPAL from Latin American censuses, non-agricultural rural employment climbed during the 1970s and 1980s at an average of 4.3% annually, while the economically active population in agriculture rose only 0.03% per year. In the 1990s, non-agricultural rural employment once again increased appreciably (Dirven, 2004).

      The main type of non-agricultural rural employment varies across different income strata. Middle income households work mainly in non-agricultural endeavors, high-income households are mainly self-employed in nonagricultural rural activities or have small and medium enterprises that perform the same type of work, while most poor families perform agricultural wage labor that does not enable them to emerge from poverty and obtain some additional non-agricultural income from crafts or small-scale commerce (Dirven, 2004).

     Working conditions (whether formal or informal; reproductive, productive, or community; remunerated or nonremunerated) have changed visibly with globalization and clearly reflect the inequalities and widening gap between rich and poor. In the processes of internationalization, work is valued on a purely mercantile basis, using the criterion that value is to be found in those things that can be bought and sold, which can be assigned a monetary value. For women, especially rural women, a considerable part of their work is not seen as economically productive, as it does not fit within the logic of the market, i.e., it takes place in the context of
an economy without wages or prices and its objective is to