Population and Land Use in Developing Countries Report of a Workshop (1993) / Chapter Skim
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9 Population Growth, Environmental Change, and Innovation: Implications for Sustainable Growth in Agriculture
9 Population Growth, Environmental Change, and Innovation: Implications for Sustainable Growth in Agriculture
Pages 124-156
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From page 124... ...
The Three Waves of Concern The prst wave of concern, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, focused primarily on the quantitative relationships between resource availability and economic growth the adequacy of land, water, energy, and other natural resources to sustain growth. The reports of the President's Water Resources Policy Commission (1950)
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The result is that while the intensity of earlier concerns has receded, in part due to the induced technical and institutional changes, the concerns about the relationships between
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Population growth rates are expected to decline substantially in most countries during the first quarter of the next century. But the absolute increases in population size will be large and increases in per capita incomes will add substantially to food demand.
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CHANGES INDUCED BY POPULATION GROWTH1 In the theory of induced innovation, changes in relative resource endowments, such as shifts in the ratio of agricultural labor to land, are viewed as directing technical change along a path that permits the substitution of relatively more abundant factors for the relatively scarce factors of production. Institutional changes are also viewed as induced by changes in relative resource endowments, by changes in cultural endowments, and by changes in technology.
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The ability of a society to achieve rapid growth in agricultural productivity and output seems to hinge on its ability to make efficient choices among alternative paths. There is substantial evidence that the direction of technical changes has been responsive to relative resource endowments in both the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors, in both traditional and modern societies (Thirtle and Ruttan, 1987~.
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We agree with Boserup that in preindustrial societies, agricultural production often responded "far more generously to addi
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o.o. 0.1 0.e 1 ~e FERTILIZER-ARABLE LAND PRICE RATIO (LOGY FIGURE 1.B Relationship between fertilizer input per hectare of arable and the fertilizer-arable land price ratio, the United States and Japan: quinquennial observations for 1880-1980.
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In the long run, however, even with relatively slow growth in population or labor force, output per worker per year tends to stagnate or decline as the response of indigenous technical change to population growth declines. The higher rates of growth in agricultural production, and in output per hectare and per worker, that are consistent with modern population and income growth rates, have required institutionalization of capacity to supplement indigenous knowledge with science-based knowledge and craft-generated technology with industrial inputs that embody advances in scientific and technical knowledge.
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Collective action leading to changes in the supply of institutional innovations often involves severe stress among the interest groups and communities that stand to gain or lose from the changes. The rate and direction of institutional change depends critically on cultural traditions and ideology that influence the cost or acceptability of changes in institutional arrangements and on the power balance among interest groups.
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From page 133... ...
Our capacity to model and test the relationships between cultural endowments and either technical or institutional change is relatively weak. A second advantage of the model is that it is useful in identifying the components that enter into other attempts to account for secular 6In economics the concept of cultural endowments is usually subsumed under the concept of tastes, which are regarded as given, that is, not subject to economic analysis.
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North and Thomas (1970) , building on the Alchian-Demsetz paradigm, attempted to explain the economic growth of western Europe between 900 and 1700 primarily in terms of changes in property institutions.7 During the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the pressure of population against increasingly scarce land resources induced innovations in property rights that in turn created profitable opportunities for the generation and adoption of labor-intensive technical changes in agriculture (line C)
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Research conducted by Hayami and Kikuchi (Kikuchi and Hayami, 1978; Hayami and Kikuchi, 1981) in the Philippines in the late 1970s enables us to examine a contemporary example of the interrelated effects of technical change and population growth on the demand for institutional change in land tenure and labor relations.
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, and Feeny (1982) in which biases in political resources acted to prevent or delay the process of induced institutional innovation and in which substantial political and bureaucratic resources had to be mobilized to transform the latent demand into effective demand for institutional change.
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scientific and technical constraints and (b) the resource and environmental constraints that can be expected to impinge on sustainable growth in agricultural production as we move into the early decades of the next century.
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A1most all increases in agricultural production over the next several decades must continue to come from further intensification of agricultural production on land that is presently devoted to crop and livestock production. Until well into the second decade of the next century the necessary gains in crop and animal productivity will be generated by improvements from conventional plant and animal breeding and from more intensive and efficient use of technical inputs including chemical fertilizers, pesticides and more effective animal nutrition.
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From page 139... ...
Access to the conventional sources of productivity growth from advances in plant breeding, agronomy, and soil and water management will require the institutionalization of substantial agricultural research capacity for each crop or animal species of economic significance in each agroclimatic region. In a large number of developing countries this capacity is just beginning to be put in place.
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From page 140... ...
When such institutes are established they will need to be more closely linked with existing academic centers of research and training than the series of agricultural research institutes established by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Resource and Environmental Constraints on Sustainable Growth As we look even further into the next century, there is a growing concern about the impact of a series of resource and environmental constraints that may seriously impinge on the capacity to sustain growth in agricultural production.
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There will be strong incentive, by the early decades of the next century, to improve energy efficiency in agricultural production and utilization. Particular attention should be given to alternative and competing uses of land.
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In the absence of more efficient incentive compatible institutional design, the transaction costs involved in ad hoc approaches are likely to be enormous.
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SUSTAINABLE GROWTH In the discussion of the constraints on sustainable growth in agricultural production in the previous section no attempt was made to confront the full implications of the concept of sustainable growth. The concept has emerged as an umbrella under which movements with widely disparate reform agendas have been able to march while avoiding conflicts over their often inconsistent agendas.
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From page 144... ...
For this group, primarily mainstream agricultural and resource economists, the long-term decline in the real prices of agricultural commodities was evidence that the growth of agricultural production has been following a sustainable path. Douglass identified a second group that regards agricultural sustainability primarily as an ecological question "an agricultural system which needlessly depletes, pollutes, or disrupts the ecological balance of natural systems is unsustainable" (Douglass, 1984:2~.
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Where the transition to short fallow has been forced by rapid population growth, the consequence has often been soil degradation and declining productivity. A second example can be drawn from the agricultural history of East Asian wet rice cultivation (Hayami and Ruttan, 1985~.
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In the presently developed countries the capacity to sustain the necessary increases in agricultural production will depend largely on our capacity for institutional innovation. If our capacity to sustain growth in agricultural production is lost, it will be a result of political and economic failures.
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Obligations Toward the Future The second issue is one that has divided traditional resource economists and the sustainability community. That is the issue of how to deal analytically with the obligations of the present generation toward future generations.
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It is clear, at least to me, that in most countries efforts to achieve sustainable growth in agricultural production must involve some combination of (a) higher contemporary rates of saving-that is deferring present in favor of future consumption and (b)
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AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE In closing I would like to emphasize how far we are from being able to design either an adequate technological or institutional response to the issue of how to achieve sustainable growth in agricultural production or in the sustainable growth of both the sustenance and the amenity components of consumption. At present there is no package of technology available to transfer to producers that can assure the sustainability of growth in agricultural production at a rate that will enable agriculture, particularly in the developing countries, to meet the demands that are being placed on it by rapid growth of population and income.
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From page 150... ...
The capacity to achieve sustainable growth in agricultural production and income will also depend on the changes that occur in the economic environment in which farmers in developing countries find themselves. The most favorable economic environment for releasing the constraints on crop and animal productivity and for achieving sustainable adaptation to the resource and environmental constraints that will impinge on agriculture in developing countries is one characterized by slow growth of population and by rapid growth of income and employment in the nonagricultural sector.
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Buttel, F.H. 1988 Agricultural Research and Development and the Appropriation of Progressive Symbols: Some Observations on the Politics of Ecological Agriculture.
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Davis, L., and D.C. North 1971 Institutional Change and American Economic Growth.
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1991 Rapid population growth and technical and institutional change.
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Pray, C.E. 1983 Private agricultural research in Asia.
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Technical Advisory Committee/Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (TAC/ CGIAR) 1989 Sustainable Agricultural Production: Implications for International Research.
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New York: Oxford University Press for The Bruntland Commission.
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