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Latin American agriculture faces fundamentally new economic, cultural, political and social conditions. Most countries in the region are liberalising their economies in order to increase export earnings and improve integration with international markets. This new scenario means that the viability of Latin America's agricultural sector rests on its ability to compete with price and quality standards set by the international markets. This is true not only for the export sector, but is increasingly becoming valid for peasant farms oriented towards internal markets where competition with the open market is becoming a reality. The authors argue that these fundamentally new conditions raise many challenges for the systems approach to agriculture and rural development