MODELS OF AGRICULTURAL

DEVELOPMENT
Increase in food production was obtained by

• Bringing new land into production.

• From higher yields.
• In most of the world transition from a resource based to a science
based system of agriculture.
• Nowadays poor countries design and implement more effective
agricultural development strategies than in the past.
 Frontier Model
• Expansion of the area cultivated or grazed has represented
the dominant source of increase in agricultural production.
• With the advent of cheap transport during the latter half of
the nineteenth century, the countries of the new continents
became increasingly important sources of food and
agricultural raw materials.
• Intensification of land use in existing villages was followed
by pioneer settlement, the establishment of new villages, and
the opening up of forest or jungle land to civilization.
• In western Europe there was a series of successive changes
from neolithic forest fallow to systems of shifting cultivation
of bush and grass land.
• Where soil conditions are favorable, the new villages gradually
intensified their system of cultivation. Where resources were
poor, new areas were opened up to shifting cultivation or
nomadic grazing.
 Limitations

• Model was a failure under conditions of rapid population

growth.
• Crop yields were typically low- measured in terms of output
per unit of seed rather than per unit of crop area.
• In many areas the result was increasing immiseration of the
peasantry.
• In1960’s saw the closing of the frontier in areas of southeast
asia.
 Conservation Model

• This model evolved from the advances in crop and livestock

husbandry.
• This model emphasized the evolution of a sequence of
increasingly complex land and labor intensive cropping
systems, the production and use of organic manures, and labor-
intensive capital formation in the form of drainage, irrigation,
and other physical facilities to more effectively utilize land and
water resources.
• This involved the introduction and more intensive use of new
forage and green manure crops and an increase in the
availability and use of animal manures. It permitted the
intensification of crop-livestock production through the
recycling of plant nutrients to maintain soil fertility.
• The inputs used in this conservation system of farming were
largely produced or supplied by the agricultural sector itself.
• This model was capable in many parts of the world sustaining
the rates of growth in agricultural production in the range of
1% per year.
• This model remains an important source of productivity growth
in most poor countries and an inspiration to agrarian
fundamentalists & the organic farming movement in developed
countries.
 Urban-Industrial Impact Model

• This model was formulated to explain geographic variations in

the intensity of farming systems and the productivity of labor in
an industrializing society.
• The rationale for this model was developed in terms of more
effective input and product markets in areas of rapid urban-
industrial development.
• Industrial development stimulated agricultural development by
expanding the demand for farm products, supplying the
industrial inputs needed to improve agricultural productivity,
and drawing away surplus labor from agriculture.

• The empirical tests of the urban-industrial impact model have

repeatedly confirmed that a strong nonfarm labor market is an
essential prerequisite for labor productivity in agriculture and
improved incomes for rural people.
• Agricultural development policies based on this model appear
to be inappropriate in those countries where the growth of
urban centers is a result of population pressures in rural areas
running ahead of employment growth in urban areas.
 Diffusion Model
• The diffusion of crops and animals from the new world to the
old-potatoes, maize, cassava, rubber and from the old world
to the new-sugar, wheat, and domestic livestock was an
important byproduct of the voyages of discovery.

• Route to agricultural development in this view, is through

more effective dissemination of technical knowledge and
narrowing of the productivity differences among farmers and
among regions.
• This model provided the major intellectual foundation of much
of the research and extension effort in farm management &
production economics.
• Models were developed emphasizing the relationship between
diffusion rates and the personality characteristics & educational
attainments of farm operators.
• During 1960’s technical assistance and rural development
programs, based explicitly or implicitly on this model, failed to
generate rapid modernization of traditional farms/ rapid growth
in agricultural output.
 High-Pay Off Input Model

• The key to transfer traditional agricultural sector into a

productive source of economic growth was investment to make
modern, high payoff inputs available to farmers in poor countries.

• Peasants in traditional agricultural systems were viewed as

rational, efficient resource allocators.

• T. W. Schultz insisted that peasants in traditional societies

remained poor because, in most poor countries, there were only
limited technical & economic opportunities to which they could
respond.
 High payoff inputs were classified according to three
categories

• The capacity of public & private sector research institutions

to produce new technical knowledge.
• The capacity of the industrial sector to develop, produce,
and market new technical inputs.
• The capacity of farmers to acquire new knowledge & use
new inputs effectively.
 Limitations
• Model remains incomplete as a theory of agricultural
development.
• The mechanism by which resources are allocated among
education, research and other public & private sector economic
activities was not fully incorporated in the model.
• It does not explains how economic conditions induce the
development and adoption of an efficient set of technologies
for a particular society.
 Induced innovation model

• Technical change is treated as endogenous factor to the

development process. This perspective was stimulated by
historical evidence that different countries had followed
alternative paths of technical change in the process of
agricultural development.