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Agricultural change, environment and economy
Book reviews would be to look for widely appropriate system interventions, such as deep tillage methods for moisture conservation, a new fodder crop to overcome fodder constraints and a cash crop suited to local conditions.
Reservations The soundness of the farming systems research described, and hence of the book, can hardly be doubted. However, no comprehensive policy can ever be made without a complete understanding of the issues involved. As remarked in the foreword, the book does not provide a comprehensive analysis of Pakistan’s complex and diverse farming systems, and deficiencies remain. The following discussion may be helpful in putting them on record. First, diagnostic surveys have served as the basis of analysis of the book, but the level of accuracy of the collected information is unclear. If we compare survey data reported in various chapters of the book, especially those for yields, with official district data, it turns out that the survey reported yields of wheat, rice and maize at least double those of the corresponding official estimates. In spite of the warning in the book that survey data may not be representative of the districts concerned, the question remains: can these large differences be explained by the unrepresentativeness of the survey data? On the basis of information in Chapter 5, tremendous increases in Basmati rice yields can be predicted, yet official data reflect stagnating, if not falling, yields of Basmati rice in the Punjab since 1987. Second, although regression analysis is applied to explain the variability of yields throughout the book, there seems to be little agreement on a standard set of variables explaining the yields. While the contributions of labour, relative profitability of crops and irrigation water to cropping intensities and yields are well known, there is no corresponding emphasis on their inclusion as independent variables. While there is always a long list of included variables, their number and definitions vary from chapter to chapter. There is extensive use of dummies
FOOD POLICY
October
1993
for various real variables. Despite all this, the explanatory power of the fitted regressions rarely exceeds 50% and is usually in the neighbourhood of 20%. Many of the estimated equations, especially those with unexpected signs and values, are stated without appropriate explanations. Given this situation, a lot more than the expectations of both the authors and the editors seems to be at stake. Finally, the book maintains that future productivity increases in Pakistan must come exclusively from increased input efficiencies, and that the sole means of stepping up input efficiencies is through location-specific crop management research and breeding of short-duration varieties. This seems to exaggerate the contribution of breeding research and underestimate the role of other factors. I do not think that short-duration varieties in Pakistan could be evolved as frequently as the book seems to assume. By contrast, other factors could be readily tapped. For example, commodity prices in Pakistan have been only 50% of world prices. Many studies in Pakistan have argued that a simple elimination of price distortions could lead to a 3@40% increase in agricultural output. Although rising input use may be hampered by the elimination of input
subsidies, it remains a potential future source of productivity gains in Pakistan’s agriculture, especially as the current subsidy levels on major inputs do not exceed 510%. Given the low levels of fertilizer use in Pakistan relative to other countries, there is considerable scope for expansion in its use. Against worldwide evidence of a positive response of grain yields to phosphorus, the conclusion that wheat yields are unresponsive to this nutrient seems to be the result of data errors and faulty manipulation of yield functions. If labour has become increasingly scarce, as is maintained in the book, greatly expanded use of tractors and tractor-related equipment seems to be inevitable for the timely planting of crops. Turnaround problems can also be overcome by adoption of sunflower and spring maize instead of late-sown wheat, or with little more hard work, provided prices are remunerative. Given this situation, it should be abundantly clear that a multifaceted approach, rather than relying on breeding alone, is the way to achieve future productivity increases.
Pakistan
M. Ghaffar Chauchy lnstitute of Development Economics lslamabad
Useful synopsis of European research AGRICULTURAL CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMY Essays in Honour of W.B. Morgan edited by Keith Hoggart Global Development and Environment Series, Mansell, London, 1992 The Global Development and Environment Series aims to link two themes - globalization and environmental change -to illuminate ‘ways in which differing social, cultural, economic, political, ecological and natural resource systems condition responses to global processes of change’ (p vii).
Agricultural Change, Environment and Economy admirably contributes to the series. The volume is essentially a Festschrift for W.B. Morgan, one of the UK’s leading agricultural geographers, recently retired from Kings College, London. The papers reflect his span of research, from village studies in West Africa to country-level analyses of agricultural economies and assessments of European rural land use. A short appreciation and a list of Morgan’s publications are included. The contributors are Morgan’s colleagues - most are UK geographers, eminent in their own right. The papers follow a progression from the global to the local, from
449
Book reviews industrialized to developing countries, from economy and pollution to sustainable development and environment. In the first paper Keith Hoggart documents the broad sweep of a world economy in flux and evaluates global economic structures and their linkages to agricultural change. Richard J.C. Munton surveys global restructuring of the food system in response to technological change, new corporate structures and liberalization of agricultural trade. Richard Wiltshire explores the rural space economy of Japan, where agriculture is heavily subsidized. Henry J. Buller reviews European agriculture, contrasting UK and French attitudes, growing environmental concerns and their relationships to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). John I. Pitman’s extensive chapter on crop productivity and water quality in the UK documents a century of agricultural change and its environmental impacts, complete with maps of annual maximum nitrogen leaching rates to meet European Community directives. Marek Klodzinski summarizes agricultural transformation in Poland, conspicuously without making any reference to the environment. M. Barrie Gleave updates almost two decades of argument over the urban bias with country comparisons in West Africa: the hypothesis is useful as a comment, but problems of developing agriculture are too complex for explanation by simple paradigms. Ken Swindell’s description of The Gambia’s peanut basin and rice bowls of 184%1933 provides a stimulating analogue of current agricultural and ecological issues. Seven villages in The Gambia are the focus of Kathleen M. Baker’s detailed evaluation of agricultural change, encompassing the roles of drought, labour, capital and traditional farming practices. Walther Manshard summarizes the causes, rates and consequences of deforestation in tropical Africa, anticipating recommendations from the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Finally, Rowland P. Moss reviews a wide spectrum of methods of land evaluation in the only methodological chapter. Each chapter is
450
accompanied by references, and an index to the volume is included. This wide review is stimulating, although the final syntheses of globallocal, industrialized-developing and agricultural-environmental dichotomies are left to the reader, or to a different kind of book. The aim is essentially the present: the CAP is featured strongly; sustainable development and desertification are confined to one short chapter; global change is not mentioned.
Agricultural Change, Environment and Economy should appeal to a wide audience. It presents a synopsis of research by European geographers that should be of interest to scientists concerned with agriculture and the environment. It is well written and would be suitable as supplementary reading for advanced students as well. Thomas E. Downing Environmental Change Unit University of Oxford, UK
Material for a short course THE WORLD FOOD PROBLEM Tackling the Causes of UnderNutrition in the Third World by Phillips Foster Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 367 pp, $45 hb, $22 pb
CO, 1992,
What are the contours of the world food problem? Even definitions and numbers are widely contested. Those offered by John Mellor (in the Foreword to this study) are reasonable and likely: Well over 1 billion persons are certainly hungry and malnourished; another billion or two are ‘at risk of falling into the ranks of the hungry’, or have only recently emerged therefrom (p xv). Foster estimates, quoting a World Bank source, that about twothirds of the ‘undernourished’ live in South Asia and another one-fifth in sub-Saharan Africa (p 97), and unsurprisingly, ‘most of the undernourished live in countries with very low average incomes’ (p 99). However, it is morally incumbent, I believe, for all of us to recognize that even OECD countries have their hungry and undernourished. In a systematic, perceptive and often convincing manner, Phillips Foster (a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland) tackles the question of why we have this world food ‘problem’, and then analyses what can be done about it. He is convinced that ‘nutrition intervention programs’ (eg
international and national food aid programmes, and many Third World food policies) are ‘more concerned with the symptoms than the causes of hunger’ (p 7). To analyse the causes of hunger and prescribe for their alleviation, Foster has divided this study into three parts, about equal in length: Part I, Malnutrition - What are the Parts?; Part II, Causes of Undernutrition; and Part III, Policy Approaches to Undernutrition. I learned a good deal from Part I, although to those who are involved in the science of nutrition his presentation would probably be viewed as somewhat elementary. But there are four types of malnutrition: overnutrition, dietary deficiency, secondary malnutrition and undernutrition. His principal concern is with undernutrition, ‘technically called protein-calorie malnutrition, or PCN’, and it is ‘the leading form of malnutrition in the world today’ (p 61). More than incidentally, his Chapter 4, ‘The Protein-Calorie Debate’, is an enlightening survey of that controversy. Part II emphasizes the scientific (should we say quasi-scientific?) disciplines of nutrition, demographics and economics, plus the synergisms which prevail between nutrition and health. This is well done, too. His discussion of elasticities in their various forms is instructive, as is his presentation of the concept of demographic transition. However, like so many economists, he seems to assume that equity can be presented as a self-defined concept. Foster is proud, and rightly
FOOD POLICY
October 1993
Reservations The soundness of the farming systems research described, and hence of the book, can hardly be doubted. However, no comprehensive policy can ever be made without a complete understanding of the issues involved. As remarked in the foreword, the book does not provide a comprehensive analysis of Pakistan’s complex and diverse farming systems, and deficiencies remain. The following discussion may be helpful in putting them on record. First, diagnostic surveys have served as the basis of analysis of the book, but the level of accuracy of the collected information is unclear. If we compare survey data reported in various chapters of the book, especially those for yields, with official district data, it turns out that the survey reported yields of wheat, rice and maize at least double those of the corresponding official estimates. In spite of the warning in the book that survey data may not be representative of the districts concerned, the question remains: can these large differences be explained by the unrepresentativeness of the survey data? On the basis of information in Chapter 5, tremendous increases in Basmati rice yields can be predicted, yet official data reflect stagnating, if not falling, yields of Basmati rice in the Punjab since 1987. Second, although regression analysis is applied to explain the variability of yields throughout the book, there seems to be little agreement on a standard set of variables explaining the yields. While the contributions of labour, relative profitability of crops and irrigation water to cropping intensities and yields are well known, there is no corresponding emphasis on their inclusion as independent variables. While there is always a long list of included variables, their number and definitions vary from chapter to chapter. There is extensive use of dummies
FOOD POLICY
October
1993
for various real variables. Despite all this, the explanatory power of the fitted regressions rarely exceeds 50% and is usually in the neighbourhood of 20%. Many of the estimated equations, especially those with unexpected signs and values, are stated without appropriate explanations. Given this situation, a lot more than the expectations of both the authors and the editors seems to be at stake. Finally, the book maintains that future productivity increases in Pakistan must come exclusively from increased input efficiencies, and that the sole means of stepping up input efficiencies is through location-specific crop management research and breeding of short-duration varieties. This seems to exaggerate the contribution of breeding research and underestimate the role of other factors. I do not think that short-duration varieties in Pakistan could be evolved as frequently as the book seems to assume. By contrast, other factors could be readily tapped. For example, commodity prices in Pakistan have been only 50% of world prices. Many studies in Pakistan have argued that a simple elimination of price distortions could lead to a 3@40% increase in agricultural output. Although rising input use may be hampered by the elimination of input
subsidies, it remains a potential future source of productivity gains in Pakistan’s agriculture, especially as the current subsidy levels on major inputs do not exceed 510%. Given the low levels of fertilizer use in Pakistan relative to other countries, there is considerable scope for expansion in its use. Against worldwide evidence of a positive response of grain yields to phosphorus, the conclusion that wheat yields are unresponsive to this nutrient seems to be the result of data errors and faulty manipulation of yield functions. If labour has become increasingly scarce, as is maintained in the book, greatly expanded use of tractors and tractor-related equipment seems to be inevitable for the timely planting of crops. Turnaround problems can also be overcome by adoption of sunflower and spring maize instead of late-sown wheat, or with little more hard work, provided prices are remunerative. Given this situation, it should be abundantly clear that a multifaceted approach, rather than relying on breeding alone, is the way to achieve future productivity increases.
Pakistan
M. Ghaffar Chauchy lnstitute of Development Economics lslamabad
Useful synopsis of European research AGRICULTURAL CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMY Essays in Honour of W.B. Morgan edited by Keith Hoggart Global Development and Environment Series, Mansell, London, 1992 The Global Development and Environment Series aims to link two themes - globalization and environmental change -to illuminate ‘ways in which differing social, cultural, economic, political, ecological and natural resource systems condition responses to global processes of change’ (p vii).
Agricultural Change, Environment and Economy admirably contributes to the series. The volume is essentially a Festschrift for W.B. Morgan, one of the UK’s leading agricultural geographers, recently retired from Kings College, London. The papers reflect his span of research, from village studies in West Africa to country-level analyses of agricultural economies and assessments of European rural land use. A short appreciation and a list of Morgan’s publications are included. The contributors are Morgan’s colleagues - most are UK geographers, eminent in their own right. The papers follow a progression from the global to the local, from
449
Book reviews industrialized to developing countries, from economy and pollution to sustainable development and environment. In the first paper Keith Hoggart documents the broad sweep of a world economy in flux and evaluates global economic structures and their linkages to agricultural change. Richard J.C. Munton surveys global restructuring of the food system in response to technological change, new corporate structures and liberalization of agricultural trade. Richard Wiltshire explores the rural space economy of Japan, where agriculture is heavily subsidized. Henry J. Buller reviews European agriculture, contrasting UK and French attitudes, growing environmental concerns and their relationships to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). John I. Pitman’s extensive chapter on crop productivity and water quality in the UK documents a century of agricultural change and its environmental impacts, complete with maps of annual maximum nitrogen leaching rates to meet European Community directives. Marek Klodzinski summarizes agricultural transformation in Poland, conspicuously without making any reference to the environment. M. Barrie Gleave updates almost two decades of argument over the urban bias with country comparisons in West Africa: the hypothesis is useful as a comment, but problems of developing agriculture are too complex for explanation by simple paradigms. Ken Swindell’s description of The Gambia’s peanut basin and rice bowls of 184%1933 provides a stimulating analogue of current agricultural and ecological issues. Seven villages in The Gambia are the focus of Kathleen M. Baker’s detailed evaluation of agricultural change, encompassing the roles of drought, labour, capital and traditional farming practices. Walther Manshard summarizes the causes, rates and consequences of deforestation in tropical Africa, anticipating recommendations from the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Finally, Rowland P. Moss reviews a wide spectrum of methods of land evaluation in the only methodological chapter. Each chapter is
450
accompanied by references, and an index to the volume is included. This wide review is stimulating, although the final syntheses of globallocal, industrialized-developing and agricultural-environmental dichotomies are left to the reader, or to a different kind of book. The aim is essentially the present: the CAP is featured strongly; sustainable development and desertification are confined to one short chapter; global change is not mentioned.
Agricultural Change, Environment and Economy should appeal to a wide audience. It presents a synopsis of research by European geographers that should be of interest to scientists concerned with agriculture and the environment. It is well written and would be suitable as supplementary reading for advanced students as well. Thomas E. Downing Environmental Change Unit University of Oxford, UK
Material for a short course THE WORLD FOOD PROBLEM Tackling the Causes of UnderNutrition in the Third World by Phillips Foster Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 367 pp, $45 hb, $22 pb
CO, 1992,
What are the contours of the world food problem? Even definitions and numbers are widely contested. Those offered by John Mellor (in the Foreword to this study) are reasonable and likely: Well over 1 billion persons are certainly hungry and malnourished; another billion or two are ‘at risk of falling into the ranks of the hungry’, or have only recently emerged therefrom (p xv). Foster estimates, quoting a World Bank source, that about twothirds of the ‘undernourished’ live in South Asia and another one-fifth in sub-Saharan Africa (p 97), and unsurprisingly, ‘most of the undernourished live in countries with very low average incomes’ (p 99). However, it is morally incumbent, I believe, for all of us to recognize that even OECD countries have their hungry and undernourished. In a systematic, perceptive and often convincing manner, Phillips Foster (a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland) tackles the question of why we have this world food ‘problem’, and then analyses what can be done about it. He is convinced that ‘nutrition intervention programs’ (eg
international and national food aid programmes, and many Third World food policies) are ‘more concerned with the symptoms than the causes of hunger’ (p 7). To analyse the causes of hunger and prescribe for their alleviation, Foster has divided this study into three parts, about equal in length: Part I, Malnutrition - What are the Parts?; Part II, Causes of Undernutrition; and Part III, Policy Approaches to Undernutrition. I learned a good deal from Part I, although to those who are involved in the science of nutrition his presentation would probably be viewed as somewhat elementary. But there are four types of malnutrition: overnutrition, dietary deficiency, secondary malnutrition and undernutrition. His principal concern is with undernutrition, ‘technically called protein-calorie malnutrition, or PCN’, and it is ‘the leading form of malnutrition in the world today’ (p 61). More than incidentally, his Chapter 4, ‘The Protein-Calorie Debate’, is an enlightening survey of that controversy. Part II emphasizes the scientific (should we say quasi-scientific?) disciplines of nutrition, demographics and economics, plus the synergisms which prevail between nutrition and health. This is well done, too. His discussion of elasticities in their various forms is instructive, as is his presentation of the concept of demographic transition. However, like so many economists, he seems to assume that equity can be presented as a self-defined concept. Foster is proud, and rightly
FOOD POLICY
October 1993