Land, Energy, and Agricultural Production in Costa Rica

Publisher Summary The basic fact about agriculture almost everywhere in the world is that the vast majority of increasing yields that are occurring are attributable to the industrialization of agriculture, that is, to the processes of accelerating and focusing the photosynthesis of cultivars through the application of fossil-fueled technologies. This chapter focuses on agricultural technology because Costa Rica traditionally had an agricultural-based economy. The ability of agriculture to sustain humans depends on many things. Among the most important are the quantity of good agricultural land available, the ratio of the area of that land to the number of people, and the productivity of that land. The relation of energy and its products to agricultural yield, as well as the relation between imports for agriculture and the generation of foreign exchange, is of fundamental importance to understanding the future potential of the Costa Rican economy. This chapter uses simulation model called “Fancy plot” that contains about 2000 lines of commented FORTRAN code linked with dynamic color displays and synthetic tabular output. The model calculates agricultural production as a function of land area, land quality, and fertilizer input. Land area in each use is modeled as a function of total area dedicated to each crop type and a sophisticated function that assigns land uses to the land available as a function of land quality. This analysis could be used to justify increasing reliance on export crops.