Exit from agriculture: a step forward or a step backward for the rural poor?

Abstract

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welfare’ as a safety net when urban workers are ejected back to countryside at times of ‘urban shock’. My essay contrasts the Report's narrative about felicitous trajectories away from and back to the farm with the historical and contemporary experience of Asia's rural poor.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• development
• labour migration
• social protection
• Asia

Notes

Thanks for stimulating discussions on these topics with participants in the University of Toronto development seminar, and with co-researchers in the Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia research program funded by Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council, http://catsea1.caac.umontreal.ca/ChATSEA/. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.

¹For critiques of this linear narrative from different perspectives, see Kiely (2009), Araghi (2009), and Watts (2009).

²See Migration News (2008, 2009).

³From a personal communication.

⁴See Antara (2008), Vietnam Business Finance (2008).