In the 1950s and the 1960s, excessive interest in industry worked against agriculture in developing countries. Even though agriculture was often their mainstay, accounted for the major share of their national product, and employed the bulk of their population, rural areas were considered to be little more than sources of labor and primary products or markets for industrial goods. Was underdevelopment not a temporary and primarily material problem to be solved by increasing investment in capital goods to promote industrial development? And so, the few government funds earmarked for agriculture went primarily to parastatal enterprises; foreign currency earnings from the export of agricultural products served to finance industrial investment in and around towns; excessive duties on exports of agricultural products made reinvestment in agriculture unattractive; and overvalued exchange rates made the import of agricultural products financially attractive. Having once exported food, many developing countries became net importers. By the mid-1960s, famine loomed in India and Pakistan.
Toward the end of the 1960s, development planners thought that they had found the Holy Grail: they began to encourage cultivation of higher-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. Yet, two key components of came to be known as the Green Revolution reflected the industrial model favored earlier. They were the priority given to increasing production and a belief in the neutrality of technology. The dominant assumption underlying the first component was that increases in production are the best way to solve the problems of hunger. The dominant assumption underlying the second was that the high-yielding varieties developed were economically, socially, and politically neutral. For these reasons, the Green Revolution embodied technocracy and its proponents never intended to modify the economic, social, and political structures that maintain inequality of incomes and access to resources.
The impact of the Green Revolution is well documented. Agriculture became increasingly productive in many developing countries, with crop yields increasing as much as three-fold. These increases were attained through the use of large amounts of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. However, they were often accompanied by environmental degradation (soil erosion, pollution by pesticides, salinization), social problems (elimination of the family farm, concentration of land, resources and production, growth of agribusiness and its domination over farm production, change in rural/urban migration patterns) and by excessive use of natural resources. They also led to a shrinking farm population, much larger farms and fields, and the production of a very restricted number of crops, often grown in monoculture or biculture. Moreover, the transfer-of-technology approach embodied in the Green Revolution did not work well outside irrigated areas: it was confined to about one fifth of all farmland in the Asian and Pacific region. The remaining areas are mainly rainfed, undulating areas found in hinterlands, mountains, hills, wetlands and the semi-arid, sub-humid, and humid tropics. In these areas, there has been a deepening crisis, with populations rising, land holdings becoming smaller, environments degrading, and per capita food production remaining static or declining. In the Asian and Pacific region, about 1 billion people depend on such agriculture.
To a large extent, rural life was also rearranged to suit the new technology. While the Green Revolution was underway, every aspect of agriculture and rural life was reassessed. Social institutions in rural areas were assessed in terms of their presumed contribution to agricultural productivity. At best, agricultural development occurred in spite of these social institutions; at worst, agricultural development required changes in these institutions since they were commonly considered to hold back development. Also, a panoply of modern rural institutions was created to provide technological packages; these institutions were chiefly concerned with marketing, credit, the supply of agricultural inputs (seed and fertilizer), and extension advice. And the small farmers who failed to take advantage of these institutions were characterized as resistant to agricultural change.
Hopefully, it is now finally realized that one of the most important areas of difference between agriculture and the industrial model lies in the great contextual variability of agriculture (where climate, weather, soil, topography, resources, cultural, social, and institutional variations all profoundly affect its viability) as opposed to industry (where the universalism and rationalism of modern science and technology encourage blueprint approaches whereby local variation can be fitted, although not easily, to the design). It is, belatedly, accepted that the contemporary challenges of agriculture in developing countries are not technical since development projects emphasizing capital-intensive, high-input technologies (mechanization, agrochemicals, imported seeds) are in many instances proving ecologically unsound and socially inequitable by mostly benefiting a small portion of the local populations. The challenges are, increasingly, socioeconomic and environmental. And so, in the new century, rural development includes two new but crucial dimensions: the ecological management of agricultural resources and the empowerment of rural communities into actors of their own development. (December 1996)
Copyright ©2002 Olivier Serrat |
