A couple of comments on Daniel's excellent post. Traditional farmers tend to grow multiple crops -- polyculture -- like the native American squash, beans, corn system. Yield indices don't pick that up.
Long ago, Theodore Schultz made the case that peasant farmers are pretty efficient in using what they have -- but they don't have adequate inputs.
Capitalism tends to impose choices on poor farmers, such as in the US South, where farmers could not get credit unless they grew cotton, even though corn would have been a better choice. Cotton is storeable, better collateral.
Ag economics today is not nearly as inclusive as it once was. I would not recomment ag. departments unless they work closely with rural sociologists.
On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 09:32:47AM +0100, Daniel Davies wrote:
> just a few comments on this:
>
> >More productive in the sense that the same cultivated acreage now
> >feeds more people than it used to. India's pop is up 145% since 1960.
>
> but this isn't really the constraint is it? If there's one thing India's not
> short of, it's acreage. Also, you can't live on rice alone without getting
> pretty bad malnutrition; increases in grain crop yield alone don't change the
> number of people that can be fed by given acreage unless there is some reason
> to believe that supplies of milk, cooking fats, vegetables etc can be increased
> proportionately, either through increasing the marketable surplus or in some
> other way. I think it's one of the big muddles of the GM food debate that
> they've brought this kind of monovariable crop-yield talk back into
> agricultural economics, from whence it was expelled in the 1970s. Agricultural
> production is a programming problem and unless the rice crop yield was a
> constraining factor, changes in it don't change the solution. My guess would
> be that for sensible values of all the other variables, the rice crop yield
> would quite likely be a slack factor rather than a constraint.
>
> >But could any humane regime ever dump modern
> >techniques and go back to the old ways without
> >forcing scores of millions to go hungry?
>
> Surprisingly, potentially yes because once more it's a difficult programming
> problem and the bundle of food goods produced changes with the technology. In
> particular (and there are plenty of examples of this happening, back and forth,
> in Africa due to the old aid agency trick of providing unmaintainable
> agricultural equipment), if you give people a technology which improves the
> crop yield of grain, typically you will find that they end up at an equilibrium
> in which they eat more meat. So when you end up dumping modern techniques
> (because your tractor breaks) you grow less grain but eat more grain because
> you get rid of your beef cattle. Obviously, there has to be some high level
> sense in which technological progress in agriculture is good (so long as it
> doesn't poison us all), but the actual business of working out the impact of
> particular technologies is somewhere between tricky and impossible. Agri
> economics is everything that normal economics ought to be and it's no
> coincidence that some of the very best economists (Galbraith, Quiggin) started
> out in agri colleges.
>
> best
> dd
>
> btw I would be very careful about comparing urban/rural population statistics
> between India and China. Because of the way the Chinese data is compiled (I
> had the occasion to look this up the other day:
> http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/argu/dataqua/dq_32.htm ), lots of
> the "urban" Chinese population are living in rural areas which are
> administratively part of the same province as neighbouring cities. The
> proportion of the population which is employed in agriculture is greater than
> the "rural" population figures often quoted and the whole statistical apparatus
> is a bit of a nightmare by BEA standards.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu