Title:	The Effect of Modern Agriculture on Rural Development
Authors:	Gyorgy Enyedi Ivan Volgyes
Keywords:	Rural development Case studies
Issue Date:	1982
Publisher:	Pergamon Press
Description:	The problems of rural development are increasingly of interest to regional planners and regional policymakers. Rural development projects in the developed countries, and often in the developing countries as well, put more emphasis on rural industry, tourism, or services than on the modernization of agriculture. But the latter still remains the basic rural function, at least in terms of resource utilization. Agriculture is not generally treated as a dynamic element of regional development. The reason is simple: the rapid development of agriculture, contrary to the rapid growth of industry or the tertiary sector, has generally been accompanied by a substantial decline of employment. Consequently, at least according to the experiences of the developed nations, modern agriculture cannot fulfill the basic function of a developed region, because depopulation undermines the functioning of services. These effects are of a certain type of technical-economic modernization. On a global scale, however, we must suppose the existence of different types, aspects, and, consequently, different effects of agricultural modernization. For what we call "modern agriculture" today, North America has served as the innovation center. This type of modern agriculture has been characterized by high capital intensity, a high technical level, massive utilization of machinery, clear profit-orientation, very low manpower use, owneroperated private farms, and a great abundance of land. We can add that agriculture has played a secondary role as compared to the dominant industry, and that the density of agricultural population was already low at the beginning of modernization. This North American type of technical modernization was introduced, with modifications, to Western Europe. The western part of the European continent has a long tradition in certain agricultural innovations, such as animal breeding and crop rotations, but the highly mechanized agricultural technology was transplanted there from North America. Modifications were justified by the smaller scale of farms and by certain peasant traditions surviving in Western Europe. A special innovation center for modern agriculture was formed in Japan, suitable for the microfundia and high density of agricultural population.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/48507
ISBN:	0-08-027179-0
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

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