Agricultural Policy

We know that the labor of South Asians who live by farming is not utilized efficiently. Everyday the agricultural population in the area increases and labor force will rise at an annual rate of 2 or 3 percent.

From a planning point of view, speeding up migration from rural areas to the city slums is anyhow not a desirable means of reducing the underutilization of the agricultural labor force.

There are elements that seem to lighten the attitude for the productive absorption of more labor in agriculture. The chief among these is the fact that yields in South Asian agriculture is really low. Without any innovations and even without any investment other longer and more efficient work, agricultural yields could be raised largely.

Also, applying modern scientific agricultural technology increases yields. But it must be remembered that this modern technology developed in the West and does not always fit to South Asian farming.

We must note certain habits in discussing agricultural policies practiced in all the South Asian countries. For one thing, the underutilization of labor use has never become a main theme in the planning of agricultural reforms. There has been just as much ignore of institutional and attitudinal problems. Instead, there has been an increasing stress on technological reforms.

Generally speaking, the increase recorded in South Asian agricultural production in recent decades has been due more to expansion of the cultivated area than to a rise in yields per acre. So it is generally accepted that increasing the yield per acre should be the most important support of any program aimed at rapid transformation of South Asian farming.

One of the cheapest and most promising ways to increase the area available for effective cultivation would be to lessen the number of farm animals. Uncontrolled pasturing is one of the factors responsible for the low quality and efficiency of South Asia’s domesticated animal population. A reduction in the total size of cattle population has also long been suggested. But such a rationalization of farm practices cannot be accomplished without changes in the institutional and attitudinal matrix.

Many planners on expanding South Asian farm production through irrigation have placed great hopes. A constant water supply could permit the growing of more than one crop a year, if the peasants were willing to work that hard. Broadl...

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... not for their own direct benefit.

A more tangible difficulty, for South Asia, is the lack of organizers. Occasionally the army is suggested as a final resort. But even if the military should be turned toward directing public works, they would face up to the same difficulty that all those concerned with rural uplift encounter.

In many discussions of the alternative patterns that might lift South Asian agriculture, land redistribution is ruled out at an early stage on the grounds that it would simply create small uneconomic holdings and sacrifice the efficiency of the present large units of cultivation. These fears are, in fact, exaggerated.

From the point of view of labor utilization, radical land redistribution has an impressive recommendation. Radical land redistribution might encourage those who acquired land in their own right to work more intensively and use slack periods in making output-raising improvements. But to be a permanent improvement, radical land redistribution would have to be supplemented by an equally radical elimination of past debts to moneylenders plus a prohibiting on any new borrowings from them, and legislation prohibiting the mortgaging and sale of land.