The Transition from Peasant Subsistence to Specialized Commercial Farming

Three broad stages in the evolution of agricultural production:

✔ first is the pure, low-productivity, mostly subsistence-level peasant farm
✔ second stage is what might be called diversified or mixed family agriculture, where a
small part of the produce is grown for consumption and a significant part for sale to the
commercial sector
✔ third stage represents the modern farm, exclusively engaged in high-productivity
specialized agriculture geared to the commercial market
Transforming traditional agriculture often requires, in addition to adapting the farm structure
to meet the demand for increased production, profound changes affecting the entire social,
political, and institutional structure of rural societies.
Banes of the peasant's existence in subsistence farming:
 failure of the rains
 appropriation of his land
 the appearance of the moneylender to collect outstanding debts
Fact remains that given the nature of the peasants' environment, the uncertainties that
surround them, the need to meet minimum survival levels of output, and the rigid social
institutions into which many peasants, but particularly women, are locked, most farmers do
behave in an economically rational manner when confronted with alternative opportunities.
* Subsistence agriculture is highly risky and uncertain venture wherein human lives are at
stake, and the main motivating force in the peasant's life may be the maximization not of
income but of the family's chances of survival
Remember: When sheer survival is at stake, it is more important to avoid a bad year (total
crop failure) than to maximize the output in better years
Risk-avoiding peasant farmers are likely to prefer a technology of food production that
combines a low mean per-hectare yield with low variance (fluctuations around the average) to
alternative technologies and crops that may promise a higher mean yield but also present the
risk of a greater variance
Reason why peasant farmers have apparently not responded to an "obvious" economic
opportunity:
✔ the landlord secured much if not all of the gain
✔ the money- lender captured the profits
✔ the government's "guaranteed" price was never paid
✔ complementary inputs were never made available

Conditions for Rural Development

1. Land Reform
"Farm structures and land tenure patterns must be adapted to the dual objectives of increasing
food production and promoting a wider distribution of the benefits of agrarian progress,
allowing further progress against poverty."
Agricultural and rural development that benefits the poor can succeed only through a joint
effort by the government and all farmers, not just the large farmers.
According to this, we in order for us to achieve the rural development, the government
should initiate and cooperate with all the farmers, not just the landowners even to the small
farmers that doesn't have their own land but they're farming for a long time. To have a
discussion regarding to the rules and regulations including the individual rights of each
farmer.
b. When land is very unevenly distributed, in quality as well as in quantity, rural peasants can
have little hope for economic advancement through agriculture.
It means that if it continues, the small farmers will have a tiny chance on having a progress
on their lives. Just like in most countries, there is inequitable distribution of rural income and
wealth because of the unfairness when it comes to the rights of ownership of the land.

2. SUPPORTIVE POLICIES
"The full benefits of small-scale agricultural development cannot be realized unless
government support systems are created that provide the necessary incentives, economic
opportunities, and access to needed credit and inputs to enable small cultivators to expand
their output and raise their productivity."
In this conclusion, it states that without these policies, land reform will be ineffective. These
policies promote changes in rural institution that control production (bank, moneylenders and
fertilizer distributors), in supporting government aid services, and in government pricing
policies on inputs and outputs for farmers. If you will combine those policies or changes with
the land reform, it can sustain agricultural progress.
3. INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES
"Rural development, though dependent primarily on small-farmer agricultural progress,
implies much more. It encompasses (a) effort to raise both farm and nonfarm rural incomes
through job creation, rural industrialization, and other nonfarm opportunities and the
increased provision of education, health and nutrition, housing and a variety of related social
and welfare services; (b) a decreasing inequality in the distribution of rural incomes and a
lessening of urban rural imbalances in incomes and economic opportunities; (c) successful
attention to need for environmental sustainability -limiting the extension of farmland into
remaining forests and other fragile areas, promoting conservation, and preventing the harmful
misuse of agrochemicals and other inputs; and (d) the capacity of the rural sector to sustain
and accelerate the pace of these improvements over time."