13/12/2024
Reimagining Agriculture
UT of Jammu and Kashmir is dependent on Agri ecomomy as we don’t have substantial number of industrial units which can create employment avenues for the population and British economist Arthur Lewis formula can never hold water in AgriTech waters of UT of J and K.
There are many actions in play which can play Lewis theory by converting Agriculture lands into roadways,townships and railway tracks but people of the state are not ready to concretise the hilly terrains because our soil and it’s produce sustains them .
Let us deliberate as what British economist,s literature during 1954 had predicted with the thesis that industrialization will take over Agriculture activities.
The literature on the role of agriculture in development concludes that structural transformation of economy is marked by decline in share of agriculture in economy’s output and employment as an economy grows from low-income towards middle and higher-income. Based on this, policy emphasis for growth and development tilted towards non-agricultural sectors, specially manufacturing.
The root of this line of thinking is traced to the work of British Economist Arthur Lewis (1954), who described economic development as a growth process of relocating resources from agriculture, characterized by low productivity and traditional technology, to modern industrial sector with higher productivity. This theory assigns very passive role to agriculture in economic development but it has been widely used by many developing countries to support industrialization. In the post-Green Revolution period, some assumptions of Lewis model of development have been refuted. First, the green revolution shows that technology can play a significant role in modernizing agriculture and in generation of surplus as visualized for the Industry. Two, the assumption of unlimited supply of labour in agriculture holds no more. These changes have implications for model of economic transformation from agrarian economy to industrialized economy.
Experience of last three-four decades in case of developing as well as fast-developing economies shows that the process of shifting workforce out of agriculture is very slow and not smooth. Share of agriculture in gross domestic product (GDP) is found to follow much faster decline while employment share falls at a much smaller rate. This is demonstrated by the experience of large number of countries at different stages of economic transition and development. For instance, during the three decades between 1991 and 2021, per capita GDP (measured in 2015 in US$) increased by more than 10 times in China, 4.8 times in Vietnam, 3.4 times in India, and 2.4 times in Indonesia. However, this did not lead towards convergence in labour productivity (gross value-added per worker) in agriculture and non-agriculture sectors.
In the set of these four emerging economies, highest disparity in per worker productivity or income between agriculture and non-agriculture is witnessed in China, which experienced very high growth in PCI (per capita income) and output of manufacturing in the last three decades. An agriculture worker in China generates merely one-fourth of the income generated by a non-agricultural worker. India and Vietnam are close to China while Indonesia shows lower disparity. It emerges from these experiences that faster growth in non agriculture and so-called modern industrial sector did not lead to commensurate shift in workforce from agriculture. As a result, share of agriculture in employment remained stubbornly higher than its share in output or income of the economy — three times in China, two-and-half times in India and Vietnam, and more than two times in Indonesia.
Some other contradictions with conventional model of structural transformation are: One, South Africa, at much higher level of per capita income and development, shows the highest disparity in per worker income in the list of major countries studied by the author. An agriculture worker there earns less than one-tenth of non-agriculture worker; and two, share of agriculture in total GDP shows increase in the recent period in some countries like Brazil and South Africa, and for the world as a whole, after the global financial crisis that began around 2007.
It is evident that structural transformation of economy towards manufacturing and other non-agricultural activities does not adequately address wide gaps in productivity across sectors and low income in agriculture. This is in sharp contrast to the Lewis model and theories of economic development based on this model. The underlying reason being inability of manufacturing sector to create jobs at faster rate.
ICAR - Central Institute of Temperate Horticulture Farmer Life PMFME - Ministry of Food Processing Industries Sahyadri Farms Farmers Farmers' Way ICAR-IGFRI, Regional Research Station Srinagar-190005 J&K Horticulture Planning & Marketing Department Kashmir Horticulture Area Marketing Office Mumbai Department of Horticulture P&M J&K Farmers Market Innovative Farmers Farming baba On-line trading of fruits and vegetables Valley Top Foods
