Suchergebnisse

In consonance with her commitment to the enhanced welfare of
the masses, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, shortly after assuming the
office, set up a "Task Force on Agriculture" to look into the problems
of agriculture in general and issues of agricultural taxation including
Ushr in particular and to submit a report in six weeks. The task force
worked day and night to comply with the Prime Minister's directive and
submitted its report within the stipulated time. As must be clear from
the terms of reference, the task force was to define the major problems
of agriculture and to recommend solutions that are practical and
acceptable to all concerned. Before going into the specific problems and
justifiable recommendations, the report presents an overview of the
state of the art in agriculture and pinpoints the facts that agriculture
is still the major sector of the Pakistani economy in many ways, and
that its growth performance, though laudable, has progressively fallen
in the Eighties with signs of stagnating agricultural production in the
Nineties. These trends, coupled with the rapid growth of population,
have resulted in mounting import bills of basic foods against scarce
foreign exchange earnings.

The paper studies the intertemporal trend of land distribution
with a view to checking the legitimacy of the thesis that land
distribution deteriorated under the Green Revolution in Pakistan by
examining the arguments given in support of this thesis. The empirical
evidence cited in this study indicates that land distribution in
Pakistan either improved (as from 1960 to 1972) or remained unchanged
(as between 1972 and 1980). This trend in land distribution serves to
show that technological changes were accompanied by significant
improvements in land distribution between 1960 and 1980. Large increases
in the ownership area of small farmers between 1972 and 1980 vis-a-vis
the decreases in the ownership area of large farmers during the same
period render untenable the view that Green Revolution led to a
worsening of land distribution because of land purchases by large
farmers. Substantial gains in the operational area of large farmers, due
either to large areas of land rented in or to increased
self-cultivation, appear to be unlikely in view of the continued and
rising dependence of those farmers on tenants. Favourable changes in the
distribution of ownership and operational holdings seem to be the result
of the widespread impact of Green Revolution on the profitability of
agriculture, growing labour'scarcities, land reforms, inheritance laws,
and the general trends in the economic development of
Pakistan.

The book under review is a comparative study of agricultural
development in the Indian (East) and Pakistani (West) Punjab. Although
the growth of agricultural output and productivity in the two Punjabs
was about the same between 1950 and 1965, it became significantly higher
in East Punjab than West Punjab in the period that followed, with the
result that the Indian Punjab enjoyed productivity levels in 1985 which
were double those of the Pakistani Punjab. As the two Punjabs offer a
sort of laboratory to gauge the agro-ecological conditions as well as
the language and cultural traditions, any differences in their
development experience must be explained by reference to the divergent
economic policies towards agriculture followed there. Sims thinks that
development experiences of the two Punjabs can be attributed to a
political dichotomy and the consequent role of the political leadership
in the formulation of economic policies. In the case of Pakistan, the
Muslim League lacked mass support in the rural areas. Its middle class
forces and political institutions were weak, with a predominance of
landed aristocracy and bureaucrats. As a consequence, there was hardly
any zest for democratic rule. By contrast, the Congress Party, under the
charismatic leadership of Nehru, enjoyed full support of the rural
masses. At the national level, it was devoid oflanded interests and
created a new administrative class to run government affairs.

Recent experience of a number of countries has amply shown
that there is a positive relationship between technology and output. A
technological change refers to use of either a new input or an
improvement in a traditional factor of production [22]. The changes in
technology may be biological, chemical, or mechanical. The former two
types of technologies, commonly known as "seed-fertilizer revolution",
have been thoroughly discussed in the literature on Pakistan, with or
without reference to mechanical innovations [2; 3; 5; 7; 10; 11; 13; 15;
18; 19; 20; 25]. The objective of the present paper is to highlight the
effects of mechanized cultivation on agricultural development in
Pakistan.

Without going into details which have been discussed elsewhere
[5, pp.1- 4], we would like to emphasize the importance of self
sufficiency in food in terms of its direct contribution to more
judicious use of domestic resources and economic development, reduction
of risks associated with dependence on world food market, enhanced
welfare of consumers and producers, and, above all, saving of foreign
ex• change (7, p. 263). The present paper examines Pakistan's prospects
of attaining this goal. Since Pakistan's programme of self sufficiency
in food has been synonymous with wheat self-sufficiency [25, p. 1 J,
this paper focuses on wheat alone. In line with its objective, the
present paper is divided into four sections. Section II reviews
Pakistan's achievements in self sufficiency in wheat, beginning with the
early Fifties. In Section III, the emphasis is on Pakistan's prospects
of maintaining self• sufficiency in wheat. Section IV summarises the
conclusions and recommends policies for the future course of action.

The paper investigates the legitimacy of the popular view that
the Green Revolution has led to a magnification of income inequality in
rural Pakistan. The empirical evidence produced in this paper is
sufficiently conclusive to show that the Green Revolution has actually
been responsible for reduction of income disparity between small and
large farms, between farm and non-farm rural classes and between
well-to-do and poorer agricultural regions in Pakistan. The paper
suggests that Green Revolution technologies should be encouraged in the
interest of economic development.

Relatively higher income disparities are regarded as the
characteristic phenomenon of the less developed countries and as a rule,
the income concen¬tration increases with economic growth during early
stages of development [ll,p.25]. In general, the more rapid the growth
during early stages, the more intense the development of income
inequality. The underlying reasons for this development are two. First,
the development-conscious governments of the less developed countries,
in order to raise investment, allow income dis¬parities to widen.
Second, the resource mobilization policies often lag behind and fail to
cope with the continuing growth process and the resources tend to
concentrate among resource owners. Since spectacular growth in Pakistan
has been experienced under the green revolution, it was thought that the
green revolution might lead to magnification of income inequalities in
rural West Pakistan. Falcon [5,Pp, 698-710] remarks that the green
revolution might generate unprecedented income inequalities among the
rural classes. Gotsch [6, p. 28] argues that since the green revolution
technologies (e.g., tractors, tubewells, seed and fertilizer) were
concentrated in the hands of a few well-to-do farmers, there was a
strong tendency for the income inequality to increase. Nigar Ahmad [1,
pp.3-4] Rafiq Ahmad [2, pp.5-6] and Dilawar Ali Khan [9, pp.62-83]
also hold that the impact of the green revolution technology has been
biased in favour of the large land owners.

In Pakistan the problem of resource mobilization has become
acute in recent years. The Fourth Five Year Plan [34, pp.11-18], for
instance, reported that the central government could finance only 72.5
per cent of its planned investment during the Third Five Year Plan. The
provincial situation was described to be even worse. According to the
estimates of the Planning and Development Board [47, p. 7] during the
first four years of the Third Plan, the implementation of the public
sector programme for West Pakistan was only 52.4 per cent. The
fundamental reason of the shortfall of resources is that Govern¬ments
have failed to tap all possible domestic sources of revenue. Taxation is
[11, p. 29] by far the most important source of development finance both
in its direct contribution to revenue and in its indirect effects on
control, incentives and in reducing income inequalities. Taxation is
necessary for the stable and sustainable growth of developing
economies.

"Science and Agricultural Production" provides a comprehensive
cover¬age of the factors of production underlying the Green Revolution,
and discusses in detail the constraints that inhibit their use and the
specific implications of such constraints for a social, economic and
ecological analysis for less developed countries. Ingrid Palmer
considers fertilizer usage to be the principal factor under¬lying the
Green Revolution. On the basis of a fitted rank correlation between
fertilizer usage and the yields of rice and wheat for various countries,
the author concludes that, given adequate soil moisture, agricultural
productivity can be greatly increased with improvements in the level of
fertilizer application alone, irrespective of the varieties grown. The
significance of the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) begins to appear only
when the fertilizer application is about 10 times the present actual
dosage. Three characteristics of the HYVs, the leaf erectness, the high
tillering rate, and the leaf area, have been discussed as the chief
activators of nutrient uptake associated with a high conversion rate of
fertilizer to grain formation, through the process of
photosynthesis.

The current debate on policy issues for enhancing agricultural
productivity in Pakistan revolves around one issue and that is the
substantial misallocation of resources in Pakistan's agriculture. As a
result, it is believed, resources are drawn away from commodities in
which Pakistan has a strong comparative advantage and towards
commodities in which it is a relatively inefficient producer. Cotton is
cited in the former and sugarcane in the latter case. It is suggested
that if prices of these commodities are corrected and all distortions
are removed, then increased specialisation, strictly in accordance with
the comparative advantage principle, would ensure maximum gains from
improved farm efficiency and enhance the welfare of the farm population.
It is also argued that even if international prices of agricultural
commo'dities decline due to the increase in production, Pakistani
farmers should not suffer great losses since they currently receive
prices which are far below the international prices [Chaudhry and Kayani
(1991)].

Like many other South Asian countries the advent of the green
revolution has led to increased productivity of many cash and food crops
in Pakistan and a noticeable movement towards food-sufficiency,
especially in case of wheat. One unintended outcome of these
achievements has been the neglect of the oilseed and edible oil sector
at all levels of research and government. With a widening in the edible
oil deficit, Pakistan has become increasingly dependent on imported
edible oils. At an annual average growth rate of9.6 percent, Pakistan's
edible oil imports have risen from 466.94 million kg. in 1980-81 to
1045.95 million kg. in 1991-92. By contrast the import costs during this
period have risen from Rs 2.62 billion to Rs 10.2 billion showing an
annual growth rate of nearly 13 percent. This unhappy state of affairs
has been the result of not only of the rapidly accelerating pace of
edible oil demand but also of deceleration in the growth rate of
domestic production [Government of Pakistan (1992)].

The stagnant agriculture sector of the Fifties was transformed
into a dynamic one in Pakistan by the technological breakthroughs made
in the early Sixties. The installation of private tube wells,
introduction of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) for various crops, the
rising use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides and the
mechanization of tillage operations have ensured growth rates of
agricultural output unknown in the Indo- Pakistan subcontinent. Although
the desirability of these technological changes in terms of growth
cannot be doubted, it was argued in many studies that the technology
would likely lead to increasing rural income disparities in Pakistan
thus thwarting the desired impact of growth on economic development
(AlaVi (1976); Falcon (1970); Gotsch (1976); Gotsch (1976a): Griffin
(1974); and Hamid (i974))