AGRICULTURE

1. •
Himachal Pradesh Technical University
Hamirpur
A
AGRICULTURE
and
DEVELOPMENT
SUBMITTED BY : -
VIKRAM SINGH :- (17MBA0337) SUBMITTED TO :- SUNEET KUMAR

2. The neglect of Agriculture in
Development Economics
and Policy
• Urban bias
• Cultural bias
• Gender bias

3. Structural Characteristics of Agriculture
in Developing Economies:
Dependency of Agricultural Development on
Governmental Infrastructure Investments
Neglect of agriculture → Inadequate investment in:
• Infrastructure: roads, dams, irrigation canals,
crop storage facilities, far
• Social overhead capital: schools, health
clinics, farm extension services, agricultural
research and development; farm credit
programs

4. Structural Characteristics of Agriculture
in Developing Economies:
Primary Product Mono-exporters

5. Structural Characteristics of Agriculture
in Developing Economies:
Agrarian Dualism
• Agrarian Dualism: large versus small
cultivators
One study in six LA countries found that an
average of 52% of all farmland was controlled by
the largest landholders although they constituted
less than 1% of all agrarian households in these
nations.

6. Agrarian Dualism:
Peasant agriculture and small-scale cultivators
How to characterize them?
• Traditional and modern techniques combined
• Modest marketing of cash crops combined with self-
consumption of production
• Organized around family labor
• Little capital, labor-intensive, low productivity, low value-
added
• Risk averse yet willing to undertake technical change
demonstrated to be worth the risk involved
Are peasants efficient cultivators? Three approaches
• Peasant agriculture has a hidden potential
• Peasants are in fact true maximizers in the neoclassical
sense
• Peasants are inefficient by neoclassical standards yet
they endure due a special logic in peasant cultivation

7. Agrarian Dualism:
Mid-size Farmers: Cash Crop Producers

8. Agrarian Dualism:
Large landholders and Sharecropping
• In the less-developed countries, large tracts of
land owned by domestic owners rarely used to
produce agricultural output in a purely
capitalistic manner.
• Large owners divide their land into smaller plots
to rent out or for sharecropping.
• Debate over efficiency of sharecropping versus
own land cultivation.

9. Agrarian Dualism:
Transnational Agribusiness
• Intensive use of modern agricultural technology
dependent upon R&D of herbicides, fungicides,
insecticides, synthetic fertilizers conducted by TNCs.
• Strategies developed for their imposition in developing
country agriculture.
• Monopolization of land through practices such as vertical
integration in increasingly concentrated restaurant
business (e.g. McDonald’s using land for exported beef);
or for exotic crops production for export to high-income
industrialized nations (“strawberry imperialism”).
• Transnational agribusiness makes little commitment to
high fixed cost assets (land, docks, railroads) in the
countries where production is derived.

10. The Green Revolution
• Research on new wheat seeds, Mexico 1940-50
• Trials on rice, corn, millet and sorghum
• Wide-spread application of these new plant varieties,
1960s
• Green revolution, 1968
• Enrichment of large farmers at the expense of small
farmers, early 1970s
• Small farmers adopt the high-yield varieties with some
time lag and raise yields, late 1970s
• Increase in productivity yet coupled with environmental
degradation reaching the limits of the GR, 1980s
onwards

11. Government in Agricultural Development
Free market versus government intervention?
• Appropriate policy is one which recognizes both the
potential for market failures as well as government
failures
• Hence policy intervention is necessary to prevent market
failures; yet use markets and private marketing sector as
the vehicle for those policy interventions.
• Policy interventions need to be two pronged:
1. technology development, diffusion and extension
coupled with investments in infrastructure;
2. human side policies encouraging dialogue with the
farming communities and their active participation in
decision making, planning, implementation and
evaluation.

12. THANK YOU