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The Problem of Transforming Traditional Agriculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Lorand Dabasi-Schweng
Affiliation:
Palatine Joseph University
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Extract

For some time it has been common knowledge that it is in traditional agriculture that most of the world's agricultural producers are engaged. It has also been known since FAO began publishing its annual reports on the world agricultural situation, if not before, that the rate of progress of agriculture in the advanced countries of the world differs from that in the less-developed countries. In the advanced countries, where agriculture is a minor industry in terms of the number of people engaged or in its contribution to the GNP, it has been making progress and has been producing more per person or per unit of land. In the less-developed countries, where it is a major industry, it has been registering little, if any, advance. People with experience in less-developed countries know that such increase as there has been has occurred principally in the more or less commercialized large-farm sector; and that the traditional sector, composed chiefly of small farms, has had little share in it. Considering all this, and the fact that the development of the poor countries has become of international concern, it is rather surprising that so many years have had to pass before a leading agricultural economist published a book dealing with one of the major problems of these countries: the transformation of traditional agriculture.

Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1965

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References

1 Estimates are available of the distribution of the world's lands by quality. Cf. Stamp, L. Dudley, Our Developing World (London 1960), 3764Google Scholar. Carrying the classification one step farther to show the quality of land farmed by traditional methods should not be an insurmountable task.

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6 Since this review article was written, another important book about subsistence agriculture has been published: Clark, Colin and Haswell, M. R., The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (London 1964)Google Scholar. The findings of this study, whose approach is different from that of Professor Schultz, could not be taken into consideration here and would, indeed, merit separate discussion.

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