Suchergebnisse

This book examines the role of agriculture in the economic transformation of developing low- and middle-income countries and explores means for accelerating agricultural growth and poverty reduction. In this volume, Mellor measures by household class the employment impact of alternative agricultural growth rates and land tenure systems, and impact on cereal consumption and food security. The book provides detailed analysis of each element of agricultural modernization, emphasizing the central role of government in accelerated growth in private sector dominated agriculture. The book differs from the bulk of current conventional wisdom in its placement of the non-poor small commercial farmer at the center of growth, and explains how growth translates into poverty reduction. This new book is a follow up to Mellor's classic, prize-winning text, The Economics of Agricultural Development

Poverty is still a major problem in Pakistan. Worse, the
excellent progress made in poverty reduction in the 1970s and 1980s has
been reversed in the 1990s. That is the bad news. The good news is that
Pakistan is unusually well placed to return to rapid reduction in
poverty. We have long known that agricultural growth is closely related
to poverty reduction. Recent studies by Peter Timmer and by Martin
Ravallion and their colleagues provide massive statistical evidence of
this relationship. Rural growth and agricultural growth have a major
effect on poverty reduction; urban growth and manufacturing growth do
not. At first glance that is strange because farmers are not the poorest
rural people, and the direct benefits from agricultural growth are
distributed roughly proportionately to size of landholding. The poor in
rural areas are heavily concentrated in the rural non-farm sector. They
produce non-tradable goods and services. That is, local demand is
essential to their growth. It is rising agricultural incomes that
provide that growth in local demand. Thus, agriculture's massive impact
on poverty is indirect, working through expenditures on the rural
non-farm sector. The bulk of those expenditures are for consumption
goods.

The right to the flow of income from water is vigorously
pursued, protected, and fought over in any arid part of the world.
Pakistan is of course no exception. Reform of irrigation institutions
necessarily changes the rights to water, whether it be those of farmers,
government, or government functionaries. Those perceived rights may be
explicit and broadly accepted, or simply takings that are not even
considered legitimate. Nevertheless they will be fought over. Pakistan
has a long history of proposals for irrigation reform, little or none
being implemented, except as isolated pilot projects. Thus, to propose
major changes in irrigation institutions must be clearly shown to have
major benefits to justify the hard battles that must be fought and the
goodwill of those who might win those battles for reform. Proponents of
irrigation institution reform have always argued the necessity of the
reforms and the large gains to be achieved. Perhaps, however, those
arguments have not been convincing. This paper will briefly outline the
failed attempts at irrigation reform to provide an element of reality to
the discussion. It will then proceed to make the case of the urgency of
reform in a somewhat different manner to the past. Finally, current
major reform proposals will be presented. This paper approaches
justification of irrigation reform by focusing on the agricultural
growth rate. It does so because that is the critical variable
influencing poverty rates and is a significant determinant of over-all
economic growth rates. The paper decomposes growth rates and suggests a
residual effect of deterioration of the irrigation system that is large
and calls for policy and institutional reform. The data are notional,
suggesting the usefulness of the approach and paves the way for more
detailed empirical analysis and enquiry for the future.

Credit is essential for agricultural development. The
circumstantial evidence is clear: where agriculture has grown rapidly,
there has been expansion of institutional credit. More directly,
although farmers as producers have a high preference to hold their
savings in physical productive assets on their own farms, they must also
rely on external funds at various points in time. This arises generally
from the lack of simultaneity between the realisation of income and the
act of expenditure. To cite a few illustrations: A field-crop farmer
harvests once or twice a year, while consumption is continuous. For a
dairy farmer, the interval between the realisation of income and
operating expenditure is shorter and income is more or less continuous,
provided there are two milk animals and ready access to marketing
facilities. But, there is a lumpy investment in the animals. For a
tree-crop farmer, there is a vast gap between the time when expenditure
is incurred and income is generated. There is also a problem of
indivisibility of fixed capital (e.g., construction of wells, pumpsets,
farm implements, bullocks, soil and moisture improvement works,
tractors, etc.). There is also'a life cycle-induced need for
finance.

Superb agricultural resources, substantial investment, and
relatively liberal macroeconomic policies have provided Pakistan with a
high agricultural growth rate and strong multipliers of that
agricultural growth to other sectors of the economy. Those growth rates
and the consequent multipliers could have been much greater. More
troubling, there are unsustainable elements to the past growth rates
that are already showing themselves. Thus, without attention to key
policy issues, Pakistan's agricultural and overall growth rates are
bound to decline significantly. Indeed, that decline is already
underway. Correct pricing, investment, and institutional development
policies can reverse that decline and accelerate growth rates well
beyond those of the past. Agricultural price policy is of central
importance in its own right and plays an important indirect role in each
of the other key policy areas. Thus, this paper, while concerned with
agricultural growth and its multipliers, wraps the discussion around
price policy issues.

Cette conférence, prononcée à Montpellier le 16 janvier 1991, présente une série de propositions d'orientation politique susceptibles d'engager les nations africaines sur la voie de la réussite générale qui caractérise aujourd'hui l'ensemble des pays asiatiques. Après un examen des différences essentielles entre l'Asie et l'Afrique et une brève définition d'une stratégie de développement adaptée aux besoins actuels de croissance, d'urbanisation, d'emploi et de réduction de pauvreté, l'auteur aborde le problème des relations entre agriculture et pauvreté, et entre agriculture et urbanisation, puis introduit le débat sur le rôle de la privatisation. Enfin, il traite du rôle des marchés et de la planification pour terminer sur les choix politiques qu'ils jugent prioritaire