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Agri-transformation and rural development
By Darshan Maheshwari
Over two-thirds of the world's poorest people are located in rural areas and engaged primarily in subsistence agriculture. It is estimated that more than 800 million people do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. In developing countries like Pakistan, if development is to take place and become self-sustaining, it will have to include the rural areas in general and agricultural sector in particular. The core problems of widespread poverty, growing inequality, rapid population growth, and rising unemployment all find their origins in the stagnation and too often retrogression of economic life in rural areas.
Today, development economists are less sanguine about placing heavy emphasis on rapid industrialisation. An agriculture and employment-based strategy of economic development requires three basic contemporary elements. The first is the accelerated output growth through technological, institutional and price incentive changes designed to raise the productivity of small farmers. The second is by rising domestic demand for agricultural output derived from an employment-oriented urban development strategy and the third is having diversified, non agricultural, labor-intensive rural development activities that directly and indirectly support and are supported by the farming community.
Agricultural and rural development that benefits the masses of people can succeed only through a joint effort by the government and all farmers, not just the large farmers. A first step in any such effort is the provision of secured tenure rights to the individual farmer. In developing countries, higher agricultural output and the simultaneous achievement of both greater efficiency and more equity can be through the process of land reformation. 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. However, the full benefits of small-scale agricultural development cannot be realised 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.
The Rural development, though dependent on small farmer agricultural process, implies much more. It encompasses: (a) efforts to raise both farm and non farm rural real incomes through job creation, rural industrialisation, and the increased provision of education, health and nutrition, housing and 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; and (c) the capacity of the rural sector to sustain and accelerate the pace of these improvements overtime.
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