Abstract
Rapid agricultural growth with all its benefits is possible because of the potential for the small commercial farmer to change from low-productivity underutilization of resources in traditional agriculture to high-productivity greater use of resources in a modernizing agriculture. The conditions of traditional agriculture provide the base for modernization, influencing how it proceeds, and its impact. Of particular importance are the labor/leisure choices of the small commercial farmer, how they differ considerably and among farms, and how that provides the basis for quite different outcomes in a variety of situations. Discussion of policies for increasing production in traditional agriculture explains why continuous rapid growth does not occur in traditional agriculture.
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Notes
- 1.
I make these and later observations on the basis of decades of observing rural areas in various stages of development and from perusing a wide literature, particularly including: the field surveys at IFPRI while I was the Director; and J. Lossing Buck’s (1937) massive China field studies. The latter was of a traditional agriculture and is an unusually detailed source. It shows a high degree of variability throughout the country, with greatest variability in the higher productivity areas; Mellor (1963, 1966; Mellor and Stevens 1956) provides that detail for one area in India, representative of the Indo-Gangetic Plain; Jayne and his colleagues at Michigan State University have published numerous papers that describe a similar agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa with great variability within similar areas; the large rural household surveys published in numerous World Bank papers for many countries in Asia and Africa and include areas still dominated by traditional agriculture and showing similar variability.
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Mellor, J.W. (2017). The Farm, the Farmer, and Labor Supply. In: Agricultural Development and Economic Transformation. Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65259-7_6
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