Rethinking public policy in agriculture: lessons from history, distant and recent

Abstract

This article reviews the histories of agricultural policy in 11 of today's developed countries between the late-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century and in 10 developing and transition economies since the mid-twentieth century. After discussing the theoretical limitations of the prevailing orthodoxy, the article discusses the history of a wide range of agricultural policies concerning issues like land, knowledge (e.g., research, extension), credit, physical inputs (e.g., irrigation, transport, fertilizers, seeds), farm income stability (e.g., price stabilisation measures, insurances, trade protection), marketing, and processing. The article ends by discussing the policy lessons that may be learned from these historical experiences.

Keywords:

• history of agricultural policy
• critique of orthodox agricultural policy
• lessons from history

Notes

This article is a shortened and edited version of the synthesis report of the same title for the project, ‘Applying Historical Precedent to New Conventional Wisdom on Public Sector Roles in Agriculture and Rural Development’, organised and supported by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). I would like to thank Neela Gangadharan and Carlos Santana of the FAO for their guidance and help in formulating the project and developing it. I would like to thank Dirk Bezemer, Arabella Fraser, Duncan Green, Claire Melamed, and James Putzel for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the report. Deborah Johnston, Niek Koning, and Carlos Oya have provided particularly detailed and enlightening comments. I have also benefited greatly from the comments made by the participants at the project workshop held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 23 October 2008. Rebecca Buchholz provided excellent research assistance at the early stage of the project. I also thank Luba Fakhrutdinova and Francesca Reinhardt for their able research assistance. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her useful comments.

¹See FAO 2003, ch. 2, for further discussion of food security at different levels.

²It should also be added that the Dutch and the Danish strategies worked only because there were strong public interventions to promote agricultural productivity, as we shall discuss in detail below.

³Of course, these are only the broadest indicators of the role of agriculture in an economy. For proper comparisons, many more indicators (e.g., the share of commercialised agriculture in total agricultural output and employment, the share of agriculture in export, the share of high value-added products in total agricultural output, land tenure structure), including some unquantifiable ones (e.g., the dominant relations of production in agriculture), need to be looked at. However, such detailed comparison is beyond the scope of this article, not least because the required information is difficult to acquire, especially for historical cases.

⁴See Gras (1925) and Ingersent and Rayner (1999) for further details.

⁵0.22 percent of agricultural GDP in 1980–1985 and 0.33 percent in 2002, in contrast to 0.49 percent for China or 1.3 percent for Ethiopia in 2002–2003, although there is a question mark on the sustainability of the latter case, given its heavy reliance on donor financing.

⁶In 1870, Germany had lower land productivity (production per hectare, in wheat units) and lower labour productivity (production per head, in wheat units) than both France and Britain. In 1910, its land productivity was higher than that in both countries and its labour productivity was higher than that of France (although not that of Britain). In 1870, Denmark had lower land productivity than both France and Britain, while having higher labour productivity than that of both countries (although only marginally higher than that of Britain). In 1910, it had both higher land and labour productivities than France or Britain. See van Zanden (1991) for further information.

⁷See Ingersent and Rayner (1999, 43) for Germany; Micheletti (1990, 40) for Sweden; Knibbe (1993, 163) for the Netherlands; Colman (1965, 43) for New York state in the USA.

⁸See Cox (2008) for the details on the Chilean programme.