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Rural Development
- The 1960s IRD approach aimed to revive community development and infuse it with the new ideas of small farm efficiency, promoting “balanced” development strategies instead of just relying on urban and industrial economic sectors for growth. IT also followed free market ideals, based on perceived successes in China. World Bank support for IRD was based largely on the idea of integrating projects, rather than segregating them in a piecemeal fashion. IRD tended to be large-scale projects that had large budgets that become almost prize-like, inciting political manipulation and making target locations a very political act, selection of which would serve to reinforce existing political power structures, and inequalities. The projects tended to be top-down, excessively reliant on technical assistance, and non-sustainable management structures. [p. 347]
- Earlier ideas of rural transformation assumed the primacy of technology in agricultural change, and they assumed that progress was equated with energy sources (animals, machines, fossil fuels) that would replace labour, dooming smallholders. Boserup challenged this. She suggested that there was no inevitable progressive evolutionary trajectory and that technologies and agricultural change would be context specific, responding to independent variables (for example, population density). Specifically, she argued that population dense areas would adapt with more labour intensive technologies, such as spreading animal manure to improve soil fertility, and that new technologies would be developed in the face of scarcity from population pressures. This approach assumes that resistance to certain agricultural technologies is not an innate “conservatism” but is in fact a rational choice that determines so-called “enlightened” technologies to not be in the best interests of particular farmers. [p. 344]
- The rural–urban divide is becoming increasingly blurred. In multi-locational households, members reside in or move between various communities, economic sectors, and even states, blurring rural–urban identities. This makes remittances increasingly important in rural development. In fact, remittances have even surpassed national investment and ODA for many developing countries. It has policy implications, prioritizing migration policies and financial systems to facilitate transfers. The blurred rural–urban divide also means that policies assuming agricultural productivity will drive increased consumption of non-agricultural goods needs to be re-evaluated. “Rural” may be a useful special designation, but the range of livelihood strategies now pursued in rural areas challenges simplistic rural and urban designations based on economic activities. [pp. 351-2]
- In the 1950s, the “two-sector” theory of development assumed the small-farm subsistence sector had to be replaced by “modern” activities. This view was exemplified by Sir Arthur Lewis (1954), who postulated that low productivity subsistence agriculture offers a potentially “unlimited supply” of surplus labour that could be attracted to higher-wage activities. The “traditional” sector would therefore eventually vanish as it supplied labour and land resources to “modern” sectors in towns or in industrial agriculture, commercial plantations, or ranches. [p. 345]
- Worldwide, rural contexts can be distinguished on the basis of the relative importance of agriculture in GDP growth and the relative levels of rural poverty. In many countries, rising national incomes are associated with agriculture’s declining share of GDP and labour, although these patterns clearly vary according to local contexts and histories. This association has inspired theories of structural transformation that rely on strong causal links between rural transformations (e.g., increased agricultural productivity and rural economic diversification) and wider structural transformations (e.g., the growth of non-agricultural and non-rural manufacturing and service economies). While critics would note numerous examples that suggest the processes can also lead to persistent rural poverty, agricultural stagnation, and environmental degradation, they remain central to current, mainstream thinking about the nature of the “rural” economy, such as the categorization of three different “rural worlds” found in the 2008 World Development Report: Agriculture for Development. [p. 342]
- While critics would note numerous examples that suggest the processes can also lead to persistent rural poverty, agricultural stagnation, and environmental degradation, they remain central to current, mainstream thinking about the nature of the “rural” economy, such as the categorization of three different “rural worlds” found in the 2008 World Development Report: Agriculture for Development (World Bank 2007): Agriculture-based countries, where the contribution of agriculture to overall GDP growth is greater than 20 per cent and where rural poverty accounts for at least 60 per cent of all the people living on less than $1.08 per day. Most countries in this category are in sub-Saharan Africa but include some Latin American and Caribbean states like Guatemala and Haiti. Transforming countries, where agriculture is no longer a major contributor to economic growth (less than 25 per cent of overall GDP growth) but rural poverty remains widespread (at least 60 per cent of total poverty). At the time of the 2008 World Development Report, this category included most of East and South Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa, and these countries were also home to the majority of the world’s rural poor (2.2 billion people). A decade later, less than 100 million of the world’s rural poor lived in such countries, mostly in India and Bangladesh. Urbanized countries, where rural poverty accounts for less than 60 per cent of overall poverty and agriculture contributes to less than 20 per cent of overall GDP growth. This category includes most countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, eastern Europe, and Central Asia, regions where the past decade has also seen considerable progress in lifting people out of rural poverty, although environmental degradation, precarious employment, and food insecurity remain as significant challenges. [pp. 342-3]
- The 2008 World Development Report presented these categories as part of an evolutionary, modernization-style model of structural change, tracking the progress of countries such as China and India from “agriculture-based” to “transforming” or Indonesia from “transforming” to “urbanized” over the 1993–2005 study period. The report argued that commercial agriculture and off-farm or urban employment would drive growth across all three “rural worlds” and rather optimistically dismissed the many deviations from this model simply as “idiosyncrasies.” In the years since, the three categories have lost some of their descriptive and predictive utility. For example, “transforming” countries (especially China but also India) have dramatically reduced the proportion of their populations living in rural poverty, but in many cases (especially across Southeast Asia), rural smallholder agriculture has persisted as an important livelihood strategy in the absence of other social safety nets. Meanwhile, despite many of the “agricultural” countries of sub-Saharan Africa sustaining nearly two decades of solid economic growth, the impacts on rural poverty have been far less than what the report had predicted. While the proportion of the population living in rural poverty has declined modestly (from 37 to 31 per cent between the 1990s and the 2010s), the overall numbers have increased to a record high of 312 million. [pp. 343-4]
- To understand the full range of experiences of rural transformation, it is illuminating to consider local patterns of rural technological change. The work of the Danish economist Ester Boserup (1981) is one of the most comprehensive and useful frameworks for understanding smallholder adaptations cross-culturally. Before Boserup, models of rural transformation assumed that technology was the primary (if not the only) engine of agricultural change. Progress was the ability to command larger sources of energy, and the smallholder in such scenarios was inevitably doomed to obsolescence because human labour would eventually be replaced by draught animals, mechanical power, and fossil fuels. Boserup’s emphasis on relationships among population density, technological change, agricultural intensification, and markets is of particular value, since these relationships are not presented as part of an evolutionary model of stages or “progressive” change. As such, she breaks with the more rigid formulations suggested by Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx. Boserup’s hypothesis is that an increase in population density is an independent variable sufficient to trigger agricultural intensification and the technical innovations needed to support it. More labour-intensive technologies—such as replacing natural fallows with the spreading of animal manure as a means of improving soil fertility or replacing digging sticks with hand hoes, ox ploughs, or tractors for cultivation and planting—are only sensibly developed and adopted in the face of the scarcity induced by population pressure. This “pressure” may be due to a population’s natural increase, the influx of migrants, or land degradation that reduces the amount of usable land. This relationship between rural population density and agricultural intensification helps to explain why it is not some innate “conservatism” on the part of rural dwellers but rather an entirely rational choice that would keep farmers from adopting the ploughs or purchasing pesticides used by their neighbours in more densely settled landscapes or promoted by an “enlightened” extension agent. It also explains why a context of out-migration or other population decreases could rationally lead smallholders to abandon labour-intensive soil conservation methods or to return to “older” methods of land clearance such as burning, even if farmers are aware of more “modern” techniques. [p. 344]
- The catalyst for the first paradigm shift came with the publication of Transforming Traditional Agriculture (Schultz 1964), which drew lessons from emerging experience in Asia where agriculture took a lead role in economic growth. T.W. Schultz’s central proposition was that “traditional” small farmers in fact allocated their limited resources rationally and more efficiently than large-scale farmers and therefore could lead rural development if given additional resources. This new perspective suggested that an emerging industrial sector would be supported by the agricultural contributions of labour, capital, food, foreign exchange (from export crops), and markets for consumer goods. In effect, if it could be shown that the “rural poor” were also “small farmers,” growth and equity concerns could be addressed in a single, pro-smallholder, pro-agriculture strategy of rural development—an apparent “win-win” situation. Such ideas have been incredibly powerful, motivating practitioners of “integrated” rural development (IRD) and the Green Revolution’s pioneers (as well as their successive generations of critics) to see their work as focused on improving the efficiency of smallholders with technologies “appropriate” to their conditions. Schultz’s ideas continue to hold sway, in part because evidence affirms that under many conditions, but especially low-income ones, “small” farms do have higher agricultural productivity than “large” farms. The greater productivity of smallholders is attributed to more intensive use of labour and land, particularly in growing higher-value mixes of crops, intercropping, and leaving less land fallow. [p. 345]
- Frequently, the most important divisions within households are gendered, although age differences may also intersect powerfully with gender in decision-making and power over household resources such as land and income. The livelihoods framework allows us to look inside the household and its multiple activities to see, for example, who has the power to make (or block) decisions about cropping patterns and labour allocation. In processes of rural development, which involve the introduction of new resources or knowledge alongside the introduction of new labour demands or adaptations, decisions about allocating these benefits and burdens within the household can involve significant internal negotiation. For example, even if household incomes are rising, the welfare of women and children can worsen. Consider that in many societies, women have the primary responsibility for food preparation, child care, and other domestic tasks such as cleaning and fetching water and fuel. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, women are the main agricultural workers and suppliers of food for the household. If the labour demands of new crops or agricultural activities fall mainly on women, as is the case with many input-intensive, Green Revolution technologies, they will either have to work much harder than they already do, reduce the time spent caring for children, or both. While some crops may be known culturally as “women’s” crops, we do not know in advance whether a new activity also will be considered the responsibility or privilege of women. Very often, cash crops that produce revenue (such as tea, coffee, or sugar cane) are considered to belong to men. However, even staple crops, such as maize, rice, and vegetables, also might become controlled by men if they are commercialized. Household decisions to switch land from staple crops to marketed ones, therefore, may be hotly contested, affecting women’s rights over land and its produce, which could have implications for food consumption and allocation within the household. [pp. 350-1]