The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution

284 Pages·1979·24.64 MB·English

by  Keith Griffin (auth.)

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change
By the same author
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E.A. G. Robinson)
*Land Concentration and Rural Poverty
*International Inequality and National Poverty
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*Also published by Palgrave Macmillan
THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF
AGRARIAN
CHANGE
AN ESSAY ON THE GREEN REVOLUTION
Keith Griffin
Second Edz"tz"on
M
MACMILLAN
©Keith Griffin 1974, 1979
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place,
London WC1E 7DP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
First editon 1974
Second edition 1979
Reprinted 1990
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos
Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo
Typeset by
CAMBRIAN TYPESETTERS
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Griffin, Keith
The political economy of agrarian change -
2nd. ed.
1. Rice 2. Wheat 3. Underdeveloped
areas -Agricultural innovations
338.1 6 HD9066.A2
ISBN 978-0-333-24578-1 ISBN 978-1-349-16176-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16176-8
To Mother
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition Xl
Preface to the First Edition XlX
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
A. Rhetoric and Reality 2
B. Where is the 'Green Revolution'? 3
Growth of food and agriculture 4
Growth of wheat and rice 6
Big gains in small areas 10
PART ONE Economic Aspects of Technical Change in
the Rural Areas of Asia and Latin America 15
Chapter 2 Factor Prices and Methods of Cultivation 17
A. Factor Prices 1 7
Land ownership 18
The implicit price of land 22
The landlord-tenant relationship 22
The rural capital market 26
Wage rates 30
Control of the labour supply 32
B. Techniques of Cultivation 34
The most profitable technique 35
The evidence from Sri Lanka 40
The case of Thailand 41
An example from Indonesia 43
Chapter 3 Technical Change and Income Distribution 46
A. The Nature of Technical Change 46
Biased innovation 48
The bias of the 'green revolution' 51
Innovating landowners 55
The argument summarized 60
Vll
B. Technical Change, Rural Impoverishment
and Class Structure 61
Risk 63
Economies of scale 66
Employment 69
Mechanization and employment 73
in Bangladesh
From peasantry to proletariat 7 5
C. Policy Strategies 80
Biological engineering 81
Institutional transformation 82
Appendix: Sharecropping and
Technical Change 85
Chapter 4 Resource Allocation and Size of Farm in
Mexico and Colombia 95
The experience of post-revolutionary
Mexico 96
Inequality and technology in
Colombia 98
Factor prices and techniques of
production 101
PART TWO The Disposal of Production 105
Chapter 5 The Marketable Surplus: Origin and
Destination 10 7
A. Introduction 107
B. Transfer Mechanisms 108
Free market transfers 109
The Latin American case 118
Controlled market transfers 122
Walking on two legs: Taiwan 125
C. Conclusions 131
Appendix: The Mechanics of
Processing and Marketing
Rice 135
Chapter 6 International Implications of the 'Green
Revolution' 143
A. Introduction 143
The price of wheat and rice I 49
B. Projections of Production 153
Contents
IX
Demand elasticities 153
Supply projections 156
c.
Foodgrain Dependency 159
D. Trade Policies 163
Policies in developed countries 164
Policies in underdeveloped countries 168
PART THREE Political Objectives and Policy
Instruments 173
Chapter 7 Agrarian Policy: The Political and
Economic Context 175
A. Government Objectives and Political
Constraints 175
B. Agricultural Stagnation 179
Trends in output and investment 181
Innovation and technical change 186
On the interpretation of S-curves 190
c. Is Technical Change Desirable? 194
Cumulative movements and social
differences 195
Organized and unorganized interest
groups 198
Chapter 8 Policy Options 202
A. Styles of Rural Development 202
B. Salient Features of the 'Green
Revolution' 207
Innovation and inequality 214
c. Lines of Policy 224
The ownership and use of land 225
Factor prices 233
Agricultural surpluses and non-
agricultural growth 238
Output prices and marketing 243
Government expenditure 246
Science policy 247
D. Conclusions 252
Index 261
Preface to the Second Edition
The story of the green revolution is a story of a revolution
that failed. The underdeveloped world as a whole has not
experienced an acceleration in the trend rate of growth of
food or agricultural production; even wheat has experienced
a marked atceleration only in Asia, while the trend in rice, if
anything, has declined since the new varieties were developed
in the mid-1960s. Numerous technical innovations have of
course been introduced - this is what one should expect in
an ever-changing economy - and in many instances these
technical changes have aggravated inequality and accom
panied further impoverishment of the lowest income groups.
This is the theme of this book: the new technology has
not revolutionized production but it has often helped to
worsen the distribution of income. When the first edition of
this book was published several commentators believed these
propositions to be contradictory, one and possibly both
being false. Today, however, it is quite widely recognized that
they are not only logically consistent possibilities but also
factually correct ones. The days of euphoria have vanished
and with them, almost, the vocabulary used to discuss the
consequences of technical change. The terminology em
ployed by the most knowledgeable observers has become
markedly more sober and realistic: 'miracle seeds' have given
way, first, to 'high yielding varieties' (HYVs) and then, more
recently, to 'modern varieties'; the 'green revolution' has
become simply the 'new rice and wheat technology'.
Numerous studies in the last few years, particularly in the
rice growing regions, confirm our original assessment of the
impact of the new technology. For example, William Collier
reports that 'In our studies in Java, we only rarely found that
the HYVs had significantly (at the 5 per cent level) higher
yields than the local varieties.'1 Similarly, referring to Tamil
1 William Collier, 'Technology and Peasant Production: A Comment',
Development and Change, july 1977, p. 354.