Science, Politics, And The Agricultural Revolution In Asia

Robert S Anderson, Paul R Brass, Edwin Levy, Barrie Morrison

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367286736
• eBook ISBN: 9781000310870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Agriculture in southern Asia has undergone a radical transformation in recent years, one that continues to alter the political economy of the area. Beyond the familiar elements of the green revolution, there has been an increase in resource exploitation for food production, and a rise in the economic and political strength of food producers, as wel

Introduction

Robert S. Anderson, Barrie M. Morrison

The Agricultural Revolution during the 1950s

Nearly twenty years after the initial and rapid spread of the new high yielding varieties of rice in Asia, it is clear that this diffusion was not simply a "green revolution" involving technological changes in cultivation practices, but was part of a radical transformation of agriculture that continues to alter the political economy of Asia. For this reason we have entitled these studies Science, Politics and the Agricultural Revolution in Asia.

Some of the specific elements of this agricultural revolution are familiar--the new rice and wheat seeds, their associated inputs, the tighter binding of cultivators to external suppliers and markets, and the shift in class and regional incomes, in short, the Green Revolution and its consequences. Other elements are less familiar, or at least not commonly associated with the Green Revolution, such as the more extensive and intensive exploitation of resources for food grain production, the increase in economic and local political strength of producers, the partial displacement from the rural economy of the former noncultivating elites and subordinate service groups, and the emergence of political parties speaking for the cultivators. Associated with these changes are many others, such as land reform, tighter linkages to commercial markets and to government services, and class polarization. Whether this cluster of changes is sufficiently fundamental and widespread to warrant the label "an agricultural revolution" is open to question; however, these changes are clearly wider than those technological strategies usually called the Green Revolution and so justify the more inclusive term.

These profound changes are not fortuitous or simply coincidental events; rather they are related consequences of governmental policies for agriculture and for the rural areas. Across national boundaries in South Asia, and beyond into Southeast and East Asia, governments have followed broadly similar policies to meet perceived common problems. This result should not be attributed simply to neoimperialism or to the workings of the capitalist system, though specific measures may bear those imprints, but rather to the fact these nations face the same dilemmas.

First, since the time when countries of Asia gained their political independence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their populations have grown enormously. The populations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, in aggregate, almost doubled from 1950 to 1980--from 440 million to 875 million. Other countries in Asia matched this annual growth rate of 2.5%. The rapid rates of population increase did not begin until the 1950s, but coming as they did on top of the earlier concern of new national governments for impoverished and foodshort populations, the growing numbers reported in the national population censuses were alarming.¹ To feed these growing numbers, food supplies and production had to be increased.

Second, as a result of the Japanese military occupation of parts of China and all of Southeast Asia, the previous political authorities and structures were displaced and discredited. Revolutionary and nationalist movements gained strength and sought to mobilize support in rural areas by urging land reform, rent reduction, debt relief, and the refashioning of village life. Even in South Asia where British authority remained unbroken, Gandhians, Socialists, Gadars, and others spoke of the need for radical measures in the countryside. Explicit political appeals were made to the peasantry, whose hopes were aroused. When the Chinese Communist Party swept over China setting up a new government which encouraged local peasants' associations to seize land, cancel debts, and redistribute wealth, the new or reestablished political authorities in the rest of Asia feared that their own exploited peasantry would demand a similar redress. Indeed, radical and communist-encouraged rural guerrilla movements flared up in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India. In response, national leadership toned down patriotic appeals to the peasantry, intensified police and military repression, and undertook limited programs to improve the condition of the cultivators. These ameliorative programs ranged from large-scale redistribution of land ownership in Taiwan to limited tenant protection legislation in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Running through all these measures, whether major or minor in their effect, was the concern to stabilize the countryside politically. It was recognized internationally that the peasantry were incipient revolutionaries and if squeezed too hard could be rallied against the new bourgeois-dominated governments in Asia. This recognition led many of the new Asian governments to join the British-American-sponsored Colombo Plan in 1952 which explicitly set out to improve conditions in rural Asia as a means of defusing the communist appeal. Rural development assisted by foreign capital was prescribed as a means of stabilizing the countryside.

Third, the better organized new governments, such as India's, understood that if their aspirations to become a modern state were to be realized then massive investments in human health and education, in physical infrastructure, in industrial plants, and the like, were needed. However, the resources to pay for health, education, road building, and industrialization did not exist, and indigenously generated funds would have to be raised through tax revenues and private savings. As has been the case in many countries undergoing industrialization and modernization, one of the few sources of an investible surplus was agriculture. This meant that agriculture itself had to be encouraged so that greater tax revenue and accumulation of private savings could take place. In addition, the agricultural sector would have to supply industrial (or "cash") crops such as cotton, jute, or tea as well as provide a consumer market to sustain the fledgling industrial production. All of this would have to be done simultaneously with increasing the production of food for the growing population and with stabilizing the political situation, which would include defusing the most explosive grievances of the more important elements in the countryside.

With such considerations as these before them, the new leadership of Asia was forced to venture into the unknown terrain of rural development. Guidance for the new leadership was both scarce and unreliable. All of the leading South Asia political leaders were from the urban elite. Few, if any, had ever put a hand to a plough or attempted to manage an agricultural holding, so there was nothing in their own personal background to guide them in making policies for the rural areas. Economic advisors and planners were equally ill-prepared. In the 1940s, most capitalist economic theorists advocated fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, and balanced trade. The more venturesome advisors recommended state investment in physical infrastructure, such as railways or irrigation works, where sale of services would rapidly amortize the expenditure. Followers of Keynes argued the then radical position that the state could accept short-term deficits in order to stimulate new capital investment and to increase employment. In Asia agricultural economics was in its infancy and preoccupied with farm management, not national policy making. The noncapitalist economic advisors looked to the Soviet model with its first priority being the massive build-up of heavy industry through investment resources accumulated by the regulation of production and prices in the rest of the economy. The new South Asian governments, however, lacked the administrative capacity and political power in the countryside to emulate the Soviet model even if they had chosen to follow it.

By default the most experienced voices belonged to those close at hand, the old civil servants.² During the 1920s and 1930s, civil servants such as M.L. Darling in India, C.V. Brayne in Ceylon, and his brother in the Punjab, had gained much understanding of rural conditions and of the problems of the cultivators in South Asia, an understanding which was widely diffused in the government departments concerned with agriculture. These civil servants recommended reducing exploitation of the actual cultivator and encouraging community development programs, in short, regenerating the viability of traditional agriculture. They saw as "parasitic exploiters" the money lenders, grain traders, and absentee landlords who creamed off a large part of the surplus and contributed very little to production or to capital investment in agriculture. Consequently administrators implemented various measures to reduce claims on production, such as limiting land holdings; creating tenant protection legislation, cooperative credit organizations, and government grain purchasing agencies; and regulating the price and distribution of agricultural inputs.

Complementary to such measures to reduce the perceived power of these particular elements were policies to improve the quality of life in the villages. Characteristically, these were concerned with community development. The prevailing view was that if health, education, handicraft industries, and village-level self-help organizations could be improved, then the community would be launched on a progressive spiral of development. Christian missionaries such as the Wisers and A.T. Mosher, agricultural experts such as Wolf Ladejinsky, and even Asian revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong offered much the same prescription for the ills of the countryside.

The contribution of agricultural research to this earliest sustained concern for rural development was shaped by the conception of the research station's role in relation to the food grain cultivator. The prior development of agricultural research had been largely focused on crops that were important to the imperial powers--cotton, tea, rubber, jute, and the like. Since many of these crops were not widely cultivated by local small holders, there had been little historic development of indigenous cultivating practices. Consequently the research stations were both pioneers and technical leaders in the cultivation of these crops. Moreover, as these high-value cash crops were taxed to pay for the budget of the research stations some growers had come to have a voice in agricultural research policy.

In contrast, the food crops, such as rice, wheat, millet, which came to be so important by the 1950s, had all been cultivated for generations by villagers. Accumulated experience and the longstanding social relations of food grain production had become institutionalized. Furthermore, rice cultivators were not large estate owners but millions of petty producers who seldom placed more than 10% of their crop on the market. They had few spokesmen in the elite urban political circles which influenced colonial policy. By 1930 small research efforts on food crops had begun in almost all countries in Asia. However, the role of the research station in regard to food grains was different from its role in export crop cultivation. These stations were ultimately expected to contribute to a revival of traditional food production, which was not the case with export crops.

In the 1950s the contribution of agricultural research to this first sustained concern for rural development was seen as both supplementary and incremental. Agricultural research stations joined with seed farms to select the best of the locally available or readily adaptable foreign seed varieties. These varieties were compared, and the most productive, resistant, and reliable ones multiplied for distribution. This activity was under the supervision of a plant breeder, in turn advised by a soil chemist, plant pathologist, and entomologist. The goal was, in the words of the first director of research in the Sri Lanka Department of Agriculture, "to enable the 30 bushel man to become a 50 bushel man, and the 50 bushel man a 75 bushel man . . . ."³ The existing organization of agriculture and the principal agronomic practices were explicitly accepted. All that would be necessary, researchers believed, for agricultural research to improve rural development were good seeds widely distributed and recommendations for minor improvements in cultivating practices.

This position in the 1950s would give way, in the next decade, to one in which governments were obliged to take a more active role. Once revolutionary activity was controlled in the countryside, gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Book
• About the Series
• Contents
• About the Editors and Authors
• Preface
• Introduction