Introduction

Summary

One point emerges very clearly from the diversity of experience of the developing countries: rapid growth in agriculture and in GDP go together. Where the pursuit of industrialization — the favored targets of planners in the 1950s and 1960s — has been successful, agricultural progress has not been sacrificed. Success in agriculture strengthens and helps sustain the momentum of the whole economy.

… there are no basic reasons why the agricultural sector of any country cannot contribute substantially to economic growth. True, agriculture using only traditional factors cannot do it, but modernized agriculture is capable of making a large contribution.… Once there are investment opportunities and efficient incentives, farmers will turn sand to gold.

In their seminal article of 1961, Johnson and Mellor outlined five areas where agriculture could contribute to economic development, namely by increasing food supply in pace with domestic demand, obtaining foreign exchange through exports, transferring labour to ‘manufacturing’ and ‘other expanding sectors of the economy’, making a net contribution to the capital required for overhead and industrial investment and finally, providing a market for consumer goods for the emerging industrial sector. With Kuznets, the development process is viewed as one of structural transformation, where agriculture's share of GDP and of the active labour force declines.