Contents Productivity Growth in World Agriculture: Sources and Constraints
Agriculture in Development Thought
Transition to Sustainability
Perspective
References
Productivity Growth in World Agriculture: Sources and Constraints Prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all increases in crop and animal production occurred as a result of increases in the area cultivated. By the end of the century, almost all increases were coming from increases in land productivity — in output per acre or per hectare. This was an exceedingly short period in which to make a transition from a natural resource-based to a science-based system of agricultural production. In the presently developed countries, the beginning of tills transition began in the latter hall of the nineteenth century. In most developing countries, the transition did not begin until well into the second half of the twentieth century. For some of the poorest countries in the world, the transition has not yet begun.
During the second half of the twentieth century, world population more than doubled — from approximately 2. 5 billion in 1950 to 6. 0 billion in 2000. The demands placed on global agricultural production arising out of population and income growth almost tripled. By 2050, world population is projected to grow to between 9 and 10 billion people. Most of the growth is expected to occur in poor countries, when the income elasticity of demand for food remains high. Even moderately high income growth, combined with projected population growth, could result in close to doubling the demands plated on the world’s farmer’s by 2050 (Johnson, 2000; United Nations, 2001).
The most difficult challenges will occur during the next two or three decades as both population and income in many of the world's poorest countries continue to grow rapidly. But rapid decline in the rate of population growth in such populous countries as India and China lends credence to the United Nations projections that by midcentury, the global rate of population growth will slow substantially. The demand for food ansing out of income growth is also expected to slow as incomes rise and the income elaslicity of demand for food declines. In the interim, very substantial increase in scientific and technical effort will be required, particularly in the world's poorest countries, if growth in food production is to keep pace with growth in demand.
Agriculture in Development Thought
Economic understanding of the process of agricultural development has made substantial advances over the last half-century. In the early post-World War II literature, agriculture, along with other natural resource-based industries, was viewed as a sector from which resources could be extracted to fund development in the industrial sector (Lewis, 1954, p. 139; Rostow, 1956; Ranis and Fei, 1961).
Growth in agricultural production was viewed as an essential condition, or even a precondition, for growth in the rest of the economy. But the process by which agricultural growth was generated remained outside the concern of most development economists.
By the early 1960s, a new perspective, more fully informed by both agricultural science and economics, was beginning to emerge. It had become increasingly clear that much of agricultural technology was "location specific. " Techniques developed in advanced countries were not generally directly transferable to less developed countries with different climates and resource endowments. Evidence had also accumulated that only limited productivity gains were to be had by the reallocation of resources within traditional peasant agriculture.
In an iconoclastic book, Transforming Traditional Agriculture, Theodore W. Schultz (1964) insisted that peasants in traditional agrarian societies are rational allocators of available resources and that they remained poor because most poor countries provided them with only limited technical and economic opportunities to which they could respond — that is, they were "poor but efficient. " Schultz (1964, pp. 145-147) wrote:
The principle sources of high productivity in modern agriculture are reproducible sources. They consist of particular material inputs and of skills and other capabilities required to use such inputs successfully.... But these modern inputs are seldom ready made.... In general what is available is a body of knowledge, which has made it possible for the advanced countries to produce for their own use factors that are technically superior to those employed elsewhere. Tins body of knowledge can be used to develop similar, and as a rule superior, new factors appropriate to the biological and other conditions that are specific to the agriculture of poor countries.
This thesis implies three types of relatively high payoff investments for agricultural development: 1) the capacity of agricultural research institutions to generate new location-specific technical knowledge; 2) the capacity of the technology supply industries to develop, produce and market new technical inputs; and 3) the schooling and nonformal (extension) education of rural people to enable them to use me new knowledge and technology effectively. The enthusiasm with which this high-payoff input model was accepted and transformed into doctrine was due at least as much to the success of plant breeders and agronomists in developing fertilizer and management responsive "green revolution" crop varieties for the tropics as to the power of Schultz's ideas.
To my opinion, the Schultz "high-payoff input model" remained incomplete, however, even as a model of technical change in agriculture. ............
