|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Settled Agriculture. This is what we usually have in mind when we think of agriculture. Settled agriculture is a type of farming system in which land is used continuously (subject to occasional years where fields are left fallow) in crop and/or livestock production. The range of crops and livestock produced in settled agriculture is vast. It includes annual crops like wheat, rice, other grains, roots, potatoes and other tubers, and pulses (beans, soybeans, peanuts, etc.). It also includes perennial crops like bananas, cocoa, coffee, and sugarcane. In terms of livestock, a distinction is often made between extensive and intensive production. Livestock in extensive production systems are left to graze for their food. On the other hand, livestock in intensive production consume feed such as grains, silage, and commercially processed livestock feed. Intensive livestock systems can involve some grazing, but much or most nutrients come from feed that's either produced on the farm or purchased. Leaving aside pastoral nomadism, settled agriculture currently accounts for about five-sixths of the world’s agricultural land area. It accounts for virtually all of the world’s agricultural production, even including pastoral nomadism. Settled agriculture varies greatly not only in the types of crops and livestock produced but also in its productivity. It's highly productive in many parts of the world such as the U.S. while it’s highly unproductive in many developing countries. Shifting Cultivation. Shifting cultivation involves shifting from one parcel of land to another when the fertility of the original parcel of land is exhausted or when weeds and pests become too great. The original parcel is in many cases cultivated again after it has been left alone for many years and its productivity has been naturally restored. Sometimes the natural restoration process can take as little as 15-20 years, and in some cases as long as 40 years. One important and common type of shifting cultivation is slash-and-burn agriculture. It's called slash-and-burn because that's literally what happens to the land. Trees and brush are cut down with machetes, knives, and other tools, and then they're burned to clear the land. Shifting cultivation can be found in many parts of Africa and Latin America. Leaving aside pastoral nomadism, shifting cultivation currently accounts for about one-sixth of the world's agricultural land area. However, that fraction is declining over time as lands that had been part of shifting cultivation are now being cropped continuously, making them part of settled agriculture. As a farming system, shifting cultivation can't support too large of a population per hectare of land because people must move on every so often to uncultivated land. It's sustainable as a farming system only as long as population pressures aren't too great. As populations increase, farming communities reach a point where there just isn't enough land for everyone to rotate from one parcel to another every 20 years or so. What typically then happens is that rotation periods become shorter and eventually break down altogether, at which point the lands are abandoned or become part of settled agriculture. Although the types of crops grown under shifting cultivation vary greatly, the productivity of shifting cultivation as a farming system is invariably quite low. Farmers who practice shifting cultivation are invariably poor, and often extremely poor. Pastoral Nomadism. Pastoral nomadism is a type of farming system in which farmers and farm families travel, more or less continuously, with herds of livestock. There are no more than 20 million pastoral nomads in the entire world, but they cover huge expanses of land area. They tend to be found in arid or semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia where the climate and soils won’t support settled agriculture or even shifting cultivation. Some pastoral nomads are on the move the whole year round. Others cultivate crops during the rainy season and then travel with their livestock during the dry season. Pastoral nomads tend to be among the poorest of all farmers. People sometimes think of developing country agriculture as large plantations growing crops for export. This is the exception. The vast majority of agricultural land and labor in developing countries is devoted to growing food for domestic consumption. People sometimes think that crop and livestock yields must be low in developing countries because they're poor while yields must be high in developed countries because they're rich. This is an oversimplification. Yields in many developing countries are indeed low, but yields of several key crops in many countries are quite high. For example, consider yields of rice, wheat, and corn in the ten largest developing countries in terms of population (China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam) and the three largest developed countries (U.S., Japan, Germany). These are good crops for comparison purposes because they are grown in most parts of the world.
Note that wheat yields in China and Mexico are significantly greater than in the U.S., and India is close to the U.S. In the case of rice, yields in China are about the same as Japan. Corn yields in China are more than double those in Japan. High yields are not synonymous with high incomes. Farmers in developing countries often achieve high yields because of small-scale, intensive production. However, these farmers generally do not cultivate enough acres per farm to provide high incomes. Farm sizes in the U.S., on the other hand, tend to be quite large compared to developing countries. A wheat farm in Kansas might have 3000 or 4000 acres compared to a wheat farm in India with 30 or 40 acres. That is why U.S. farmers can earn high incomes even when their yields are comparatively low. And the 4000 acre farm in Kansas has a lot more machinery, and much more powerful machinery, than the 40 acre farm in India. Low Labor Productivity. This is perhaps the most important and defining characteristic of developing country agriculture. Labor productivity (output per worker or output per hour of labor) is quite low in most developing countries. Total factor productivity (output divided by an index of all inputs into production) also tends to be low. When people think about productivity in agriculture they often think about yields per acre or hectare – land productivity in economic jargon. However, as we saw above, yields turn out to be a lousy predictor of differences across countries in the economic well-being of farmers and farm families. High yields don't ensure high incomes for farmers, and that the common characteristic of developing-country agriculture is low labor productivity. Of course, yields are still important, and they will have to continue rising to feed the world's growing population, which is projected by the United Nations to rise to 9.1 billion in 2050 from about 6.7 billion today. To feed these additional people will require higher yields on land already in agriculture or more agricultural land. There isn't enough land worldwide not currently being farmed that could be economically converted to agriculture, leaving higher yields as the only realistic option. Small Family Farms. The general tendency the world over, except where government policy has dramatically interfered (for example, in the former Soviet Union), is to organize most agricultural production in small-scale, family units. "Small" here means the amount of land that can be farmed by a family without relying much on hired labor – perhaps only 10 hectares in many areas of developing countries but over 1000 hectares in many parts of the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Of course, there are exceptions. Bananas, tea, sugarcane, rubber, and some other crops tend to be produced on large plantations. In addition, you can find many very large livestock farms in Latin America. However, these livestock farms often serve as tax shelters or hedges against inflation (historically a notorious problem in Latin America). Many of these farms wouldn't exist at all if governments hadn't given them free forest land plus generous tax breaks and credit subsidies for converting the forests into pasture. Limited Commercialization. Small farms in developing countries tend to produce subsistence crops (for home consumption) instead of cash crops (for sale on the market). They tend to be much less specialized in the crops and livestock products produced than their counterparts in developed countries. They also tend to supply the majority of the inputs into production themselves rather than relying on purchased inputs. In brief, small farmers in developing countries have comparatively limited involvement in markets. The differences in labor productivity are not explained by irrigation or fertilizer, inputs that do more to raise crop yields than raise labor productivity. China and Vietnam use about 3 times as much fertilizer per hectare as the United States! Tractors, which primarily raise labor productivity rather than crop yields, do show a difference between developed and developing countries. The number of tractors per square kilometer of arable land is a crude measure of mechanization because it counts all tractors equally no matter what the size or horsepower. But it is still larger in the three developed countries than in any of the ten developing countries.
Agricultural Growth Is Necessary for Economic Growth. Nearly every high-income country has a highly productive agricultural sector, and agricultural growth was in every case a critical component of the process of economic growth. Among other things, economic growth involves the production of more goods and services, and a much wider range of goods and services, than before. Productivity growth in agriculture permits workers to move out of agriculture and into the production of other goods and services without having too much of an impact on domestic agricultural production. A smaller number of farmers can produce as much food – or more – than before. If agricultural productivity growth is sufficiently rapid, agricultural output can actually increase significantly in spite of the fact that workers are moving out of agriculture in large numbers. Australia, Canada, the countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S. have all accomplished this. For example, U.S. agricultural output has increased five-fold in the last century, while the amount of labor in U.S. agriculture is only about one-eighth of what it was in 1900. Agriculture's Share of the Economy Declines with Economic Growth. In general, as per capita income increases, production agriculture's percentage of the labor force declines. Agriculture's share of gross domestic product (GDP) also declines. GDP is a widely used measure of national income. If you look across countries at a given point in time, or at a single country over time, you tend to see the following relationship between per capita income and agriculture's percentage of the labor force and GDP:
As the diagram shows, agriculture tends to decline more quickly as a percentage of GDP than as a percentage of the labor force. Rapid growth in industrial and service sector production causes agriculture's share of GDP to decline early in the growth process, but it takes longer for many people in rural areas to respond to this by making the move to urban areas. Food's Share of Household Expenditures Declines with Economic Growth. In general, as per capita income increases, the percentage of a household's income spent on food also declines. As households earn more income, they choose to spend most of that additional income on things other than food. If you look across countries at a given point in time, or at a single country over time, you tend to see the following relationship between per capita income and the percentage of income spent on food:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
