As 70% to 80% of many LDC populations still reside in rural areas, how can agriculture and rural development?

Question

-->best be promoted? Are higher agriculture prices sufficient to stimulate food production, or are rural institutional changes (land redistribution, roads, transport, education, credit, etc.) also needed?

Answer 1

Your question contains an internal contradiction.

In every instance that I know of, an important factor in agricultural development was increasing the scale of the individual farm. This, in turn, meant a large surplus rural population, which then migrated to the cities in search of work, usually at great social pain.

To make an agricultural worker productive requires the sort of capital investment that allows one worker to do more. But this, in turn means that you need fewer workers. So you need a plan to deal with the displaced workers.

(Most economies doing this have not had plans for this or jobs for all the displaced workers, so you hear horror stories about the "enclosure acts" in Great Britain, the plight of American blacks when Southern rural agriculture was industrialized, etc. From what little I know, Japan was one of the more successful.)

Transporting jobs to the rural areas doesn't work very well. Creating jobs in the cities is much easier. But that, of course, implies that most of the population becomes urban, so it is not at all clear you are promoting rural development.

It is certainly the case that rural institutional changes can ameliorate the situation, but unless the rural worker is as productive as the city worker, the entire economy is going to be held back, with the obvious consequences for all (except the very rich).

For a very nice introduction to the importance of cities to economies, I suggest you look at some of Jane Jacobs' work, especially Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

As for some of your specific suggestions:

- education encourages people to leave subsistence farming and find jobs where they can use their skills.

- land redistribution in terms of splitting up large farms into subsistence farms generally makes agriculture less productive.

- better transport and the availability of credit make it easier to run a farm as a business (rather than farming for subsistence) so it certainly promotes agriculture, but also speeds up cutting farm jobs.

Answer 2

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