Development strategies and the rural poor

Abstract

With few exceptions, the process of economic growth in the developing economies in the post‐war period has been characterised by a persistence, and more recently probably an intensification, of rural poverty. The primacy accorded universally to accelerated industrialisation in third world development strategies cast the rural sector functionally in a resource‐providing supportive role. However, for most developing economies, industrialisation has been ‐ and is likely to remain ‐ unable to generate any significant Lewisian trickle‐down flows. Indeed, the relative failure of industrialisation in Africa has created structural conditions and fresh accumulating debt burdens which have generally prevented the retention and productive utilisation of the agricultural surplus within the rural sector. A reorientation of the growth process along ‘agriculture first’ lines is also unlikely to create trickle‐down effects which have a strong enough impact on rural poverty so long as it is based on emphasising export‐orientation and technological intensification within institutionally inequitable and ecologically fragile systems. Neither piece‐meal reactive policy interventions nor structural adjustment packages provide viable general solutions.

Notes

Professor of Rural Economics, Institute of Social Studies, PO Box 90733, 2509 LS The Hague, The Netherlands. An earlier version of this article was published as Working Paper WEP 10–6/WP97 by the Rural Employment Policies Branch of the ILO. For useful comments and suggestions the author is grateful, with the usual caveat, to Samir Radwan, Ajit Ghose, Kurt Martin, the editors, and to several colleagues in the Rural Development Studies Seminar of the ISS.