Search

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper introduces convergent innovation (CI) as a form of meta-innovation-an innovation in the way we innovate. CI integrates human and economic development outcomes, through behavioral and ecosystem transformation at scale, for sustainable prosperity and affordable universal health care within a whole-of-society paradigm. To this end, CI combines technological and social innovation (including organizational, social process, financial, and institutional), with a special focus on the most underserved populations. CI takes a modular approach that convenes around roadmaps for real world change-a portfolio of loosely coupled complementary partners from the business community, civil society, and the public sector. Roadmaps serve as collaborative platforms for focused, achievable, and time-bound projects to provide scalable, sustainable, and resilient solutions to complex challenges, with benefits both to participating partners and to society. In this paper, we first briefly review the literature on technological innovation that sets the foundations of CI and motivates its feasibility. We then describe CI, its building blocks, and enabling conditions for deployment and scaling up, illustrating its operational forms through examples of existing CI-sensitive innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the food crisis cannot solely be equated with abrupt food price increases or seen as merely market induced. The unprecedented price increases of the first half of 2008, and the extremely low prices that followed, are expressions of a far wider and far more persistent underlying crisis, which has been germinating for more than a decade. It is the complex outcome of several combined processes, including the industrialization of agriculture, the liberalization of food and agricultural markets and the rise of food empires. The interaction of these processes has created a global agrarian crisis that has provoked the multifaceted food crisis. Both these crises are being accelerated through their interactions with the wider economic and financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture's role in development has traditionally been seen to be a provider of things to the modern industrial sector. In this paper it is argued that those countries which historically have succeeded as those which have, at least for some time period, nurtured agriculture. Bates has pointed out that this was the case for English agriculture and this paper argues that it was also the case for Japan during both the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. Japanese colonization of Korea and Taiwan assured that agriculture was also protected, at least prior to World War II, in these latter two countries. Finally, this paper argues that the key role of agriculture in industrialization is in terms of providing a growing market for manufactured goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses poverty and calorific undernourishment in the Indian state of Gujarat, where high and market-led industrial growth has resulted in rapid economic improvement. The study is carried out through a combination of secondary and survey-based data. We conclude that the neoliberal agenda of uncontrolled, outward-looking growth has not resulted in significant reduction of poverty or malnourishment in rural areas. Furthermore, while land ownership is officially used as a proxy for wealth distribution, class position appears a better predictor of poverty status in the rural areas than landownership per se. At the policy level, there is a need to revive the agrarian economy and create new non-agricultural assets, and the primary focus in the state must shift to the distribution of created assets rather than a single-minded focus on growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Analyses of sensitivity of Global Food Security (FS) score to a key set of supply or demand factors often suggest population and water supply as being the most critical and on which policies tend to focus. To explore other policy options, we characterized the nexus between GFS and a set of supply or demand factors including population, agricultural and industrial water uses, agricultural publications (as a surrogate for investment in agricultural research and development (R&D)) and corruption perception index (CPI), to reveal opportunities for attaining enduring GFS. RESULTS: We found that despite being the primary driver of demand for food, population showed no significant correlation with FS scores. Similarly, agricultural water use was poorly correlated with GFS scores, except in countries where evaporation exceeds precipitation and irrigation is significant. However, FS had a strong positive association with industrial water use as a surrogate for overall industrialization. Recent expansions in cultivated land area failed to yield concomitant improvements in FS score since such expansions have been mostly into marginal lands with low productivity and thus barely compensated for lands retired from cropping in several developed economies. However, FS was positively associated with agricultural R&D investments, as it was with the CPI scores. The apparent and relative strengths of these drivers on FS outcome amongst countries were in the order: industrial water‐use ≈ publication rate ≈ corruption perception ≫ agricultural water use > population. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that to enshrine enduring food security, policies should prioritize (1) increased R&D investments that address farmer needs and (2) governance mechanisms that promote accountability in both research and production value chains. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some beneficial effects of subsistence agriculture with emphasis on transition countries. Micro-economic models of subsistence agriculture are reviewed and a two-stage decision model, combining risk aversion and transaction costs explanations for subsistence is developed. The role of subsistence agriculture is addressed in a static comparison to a purely commercial agriculture. We argue that subsistence can play a stabilising role and have beneficial impacts on the agricultural sector when the resources it employs are unwanted by the commercial sector. The exact conditions under which the latter is true are analysed in a static general equilibrium framework. Employing the concept of the subsistence level of consumption, the paper demonstrates that these static effects can be valid in a dynamic perspective, provided additional conditions are met. Policy recommendations with regard to agricultural commercialisation are presented. These explicitly rely upon assumptions about the orientation of subsistence farmers. The lack of current research into this important behavioural feature of farmers in transition countries requires urgent action. There is urgent need for more research into the motivation, objectives and behaviour of subsistence farmers in rural economies of countries in transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid industrialization and recent accession to the WTO makes it difficult for the country to maintain self-sufficiency in agricultural products. Genetic modification technology could ease the situation, but is not without controversy. This paper focuses on the implication of GMO controversy for China. It explores the potential economic effects of China's not adopting versus adopting GMOs when some of its trading partners adopt that technology. The effects are shown to depend to a considerable extent on the trade policy stance taken in high-income countries that are opposed to GMOs, and/or on the liberalization of China's trade in textiles and apparel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With few exceptions industrial policy explanations of the industrial export successes in East Asia are notably silent on the role of agriculture in industrial development. Yet industrial growth can falter if agriculture fails to supply sufficient food at low stable prices, earn foreign exchange rather than use it, release labor to manufacturing, finance the growth of industry, and stimulate local demand for the products of industry. This positive role of agriculture in industrial development suggests that selective interventions in agriculture might well constitute an important part of ‘selective interventions explain growth’ stories in East Asia. This possibility is explored by empirically analyzing the role of selective interventions in rice agriculture on the growth of manufactures in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Along the way, consideration is also offered of the impact of agricultural growth more generally on the growth of manufactures. The argument is made in three steps. To begin with, the selective nature of interventions by governments in the rice economies of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand is outlined. This is followed by demonstrating that rice price stabilization and self-sufficiency objectives, rather than redistribution objectives, dominated rice price policies in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, at least through the early 1980s. Following this, a simple growth accounting framework is used to demonstrate that stabilization of rice prices and growth of agriculture more generally contributed to manufacturing growth in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The paper closes by considering the implications of these findings for industrial policy explanations of manufacturing growth and the growth of exports of manufactures in the second tier NIEs of Southeast Asia. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Bulgaria the share of secondary production in GDP remained constantly low between c. 1870–1910. To explain the country's exceptionally weak growth, we use endogenous and unified growth theory. Gerschenkron and Palairet blame a self‐sufficiency‐oriented peasant economy for rising labour and raw material costs in industry, which destroyed the competitiveness of Bulgarian manufacturing and prevented industrialisation. We refute the existence of any long‐lasting cost increases in industry after 1878. Quite the opposite was true: the expansion of Bulgaria's secondary sector was restricted by detrimental changes on the demand side, for which peasants were not responsible. Recent research claims that, around 1910, Bulgarian textile production was significantly lower than in 1870. Our study brings to light new data and information that clearly disproves this view. Until around 1910, a booming modern manufacturing sector more than replaced the country's proto‐industries' textile outputs, which had plummeted dramatically during the early years of the newly founded Bulgarian state. However, as the rise of modern manufacturing in textile production coincided with the decline of the entire large sector of traditional manufacturing, secondary production as a whole stagnated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some basic features of the long-run pattern of output change in British agriculture between the Restoration and the beginning of French wars. Although the chief concern of the article is simply to define the contours of long-run agricultural output change, the view of agriculture that is offered here obviously has the potential to alter people's perspective on a number of important issues concerning the role of agriculture in the early stages of England's industrialization. It is argued that between 1660 and 1740 the long-run trend in agricultural output was strongly upward. Total agricultural output was growing much more quickly than population and, accordingly, per capita levels of output and consumption of agricultural products increased. There was great short-run instability and on several occasions bad harvests brought subsistence crises and higher mortality. Year-to-year fluctuations in output are of the essence of agricultural activity and they make the identification of trend periods and changes in trend a hazardous business. The increase in agricultural output came to lag well behind the increase in population.

The article focuses on the preparations for economic growth in Japan. The author remarks that while the main outlines of Japanese economic development during the period since the Restoration are now rather firmly blocked out, current interest in comparative development during the pre-take-off period of the growth process makes it worthwhile to re-examine the previous era, the Japanese Tokugawa period. According to him the recognition of the preparatory role of Tokugawa is seldom perceived and certainly not stressed in previous studies. Some notion of the importance of Tokugawa glimmered in the literature for years. In this article the author seeks to move away from the ambivalent treatment of Tokugawa and to assemble some of the more important factors indicating the high economic levels attained by Japan in the Tokugawa period which prepared her for the take-off of 1868. He focuses on the covering materials on population, agriculture, production, institutional changes effecting savings and growth potentials, manufacturing and trade, both internal and external.

The Indian Government and public-private partnerships are developing and disseminating a dizzying number of innovative, networked solutions, broadly known as the Digital India initiative, to increase the efficiency of safety nets and worker productivity and to improve life. Yet, challenges to turn the power of information and other technologies into a farmer-friendly technological revolution for India's 156 million rural households are considerable, including: (1) reliable, up-to-date, location-specific message content for a diverse agriculture to help stratified households shift to productive, knowledge-intensive agriculture as a business-government, private sector, and civil society have big roles to play; (2) digital literacy, i.e., teaching farmers how to choose and use apps, even where the digital divide is absent; apps are, or soon to be, in regional languages; and (3) monitoring actual use and impacts on users' lives by understanding the adoption and adaptation processes. These challenges call for bottom-up, complementary investments in physical, human, and institutional capital, and farmer-friendly e-platforms, while forging ahead with many top-down policy and institutional reforms currently underway, in which progress is real and constraints holding back greater success are better understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of agriculture as an instrument for industrialization had been rigorously conceptualized in the 1960s and 1970s under the classical paradigm of development economics. After many implementation failures under import substitution industrialization policies and protracted neglect of agriculture under the policies of the Washington Consensus that followed the debt crisis, agriculture has gradually returned in the development agenda, especially with the food crisis. We argue in this article that a new paradigm has started to emerge as to how to use agriculture for development, pursuing a broadened development agenda. We explore the specifications of this paradigm and discuss conditions for successful implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrialization of agriculture in western societies has often led to either intensified use or abandonment of farmland and open pastures, but experimental evidence on how the dynamics of farmed ecosystems affect space use by large herbivores is limited. We experimentally manipulated farmland patches with cutting and (early summer) low- and high-intensity domestic sheep Ovis aries grazing according to traditional use in north Norway. After treatments, grazing reindeer Rangifer tarandus were exposed to the pastures the subsequent fall (2 months after treatments) and spring (11 months after treatments) as they typically do on their migratory route between summer and winter ranges. The experiment was conducted over 2 subsequent years. We predicted that sheep grazing on farmland during early summer may affect the critical fall and spring range conditions for reindeer either through negative (delayed competition) or positive (grazing facilitation) interactions. We found that the most marked effect of land use on the grazing pattern of reindeer was between no use (the control treatment) and all the other management options involving active land use. The grazing reindeer avoided the pastures no longer in use likely due to senescent plant material. There was a tendency that the lower intensity sheep grazing patches attracted more reindeer than the highest intensity use. These results highlight not only the general principle that large-scale agricultural changes may affect large herbivores in natural ecosystems, but they also increase our understanding of grazing facilitation as a mechanism in large herbivore assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we address the question of farm–nonfarm linkages at the household level in Senegal. We examine whether increasing off-farm employment opportunities for rural households—resulting from increased horticulture exports and associated agro-industrialization—has benefitted the smallholder farm sector through investment linkages. We use data from a household survey in the main horticulture export region in Senegal. We find that access to unskilled employment in the export agro-industry has contributed to the alleviation of farmers' liquidity constraints, resulting in increased smallholder agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical accounts of South Asian economic history often suggest that the principal effects of nineteenth century globalisation on the region were deindustrialisation and agrarian expansion, and that deindustrialisation contributed to an increase in poverty despite agricultural growth. Available wage datasets show that artisans did relatively well and rural workers relatively worse in the period in question, suggesting that poverty did increase but deindustrialisation was an unlikely cause. I discuss the wage statistics to show this, and propose that, in order to complete the globalisation story, we need to consider three local factors: limits to deindustrialisation, limits to labour mobility, and limits to agrarian expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the main theories about the prehistoric shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The transition, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, was ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth. The article provides a brief historical survey of the leading hypotheses concerning the rise of agriculture proposed in the archaeological and anthropological literature. It then turns to a more detailed review of the theories put forth in the economic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the incorporation of the Bush or rural Australia between 1813 and 1913. The introduction of advanced forms of technology and communication, the industrialization of agricultural production, resulted in the incorporation of rural Australia, its adoption of industrial capitalism, and its more complete inclusion in a national market economy. It also meant a society and economy in which success in agriculture or mining required a considerable capital investment. The incorporation of rural Australia held cultural as well as economic implications, because it opened the opportunity for more frequent interchange between city and Bush. The incorporation of the Bush involved not only the introduction of new forms of technology and communication, of industrialization, but also meant that country folk were more exposed to urban popular culture, both as a result of their own visits to the city, and the increasing penetration of rural Australia by urban cultural distinctiveness. There was a series of popular conceptions or images in Australia between 1813 and 1913 and these were constantly changing and reforming as a result of transformations in rural and urban Australia, and on the altered relationship between the city and the Bush.

The article discusses the origins and content of the proto-industrialization theory. Any examination of the theory must make an initial distinction between the version of economist Franklin Mendels and the neo-Marxist version. Although they have a number of common elements, there are significant differences in argument, language and purpose. The Mendels version started with his 1969 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, "Industrialization and Population Pressure in Eighteenth-Century Flanders". This was a study of the relatively rapid population growth experienced in an internal region of eighteenth century Flanders, where a peasant population combined agriculture with part-time linen manufacture, much of the output of which was sold on overseas markets. On this local base Mendels developed a general theory first adumbrated in his 1972 article. In the ensuing years the hypotheses there set out were variously amended, largely as a result of the discussions and publications which the article provoked.

The article looks at the economic and political conditions in Spain from 1890 to 1914, the period when European countries were industrialized and Great Britain was imbibed on building armaments. It discusses the controversy on the contract awarded by the Spanish government to a British company to construct several naval ships. The percentage of Spain's working population that is engaged in agriculture during the period. The article also discusses the Maura legislation, which involved the elimination of a program for the economic regeneration of Spain based on the improvement of agricultural yields, the development of communications, the extension of the market for consumer goods, and the creation and safeguarding of agricultural employment.

This article explores why Great Britain became an industrialized and urbanized economy long before France. On the eve of the Great War, agriculture, according to official censuses of population, continued to provide employment for up to 41 per cent of the workforce in France and generated around 35 per cent of the country's national income. In Britain only 8 per cent of the workforce could be officially classified as employed on the land, and agriculture accounted for a mere 5 per cent of gross domestic product. Around 1911, 35 per cent of the population of France resided in towns containing populations of 3,000 and above, while the comparable proportion for Britain was 78 per cent. Structural change in France was in large measure predetermined by a combination of geographical endowments and a system of property rights inherited from its feudal past. Both constraints, operating within the context of pre-chemical and pre-mechanical agricultural systems, so limited the scale and scope of French endeavours to follow the path taken by Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, became almost irrelevant to conditions in France.

The article discusses about export agriculture and development path as a concept of independent farming in comparative perspective. It cites the exemplary acts of adoption of a development path towards industrialization on the part of export oriented agrarian regions in Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Various agricultural developmental processes of these regions that lead to land tenure, class formation and political activities have been highlighted. It focuses on and analyzes the role of the independent export agriculture, which contributes immensely in growth and expansion, especially when class structure and path of capitalist development is represented by it, thereby displacing pure rent or tribute by capitalist profit as the main mechanisms of surplus accumulation. It forwards a detailed study of the export agricultural processes of the mentioned regions and presents results of the processes showing the rates of income, and profits and growth, and also the degree of industrialization and urbanization.

Disaggregation of farming regions, conditions, and production systems is necessary to unravel the current status of family labor farms in the U.S. and their future in competition with capitalist agriculture. The article draws on a number of themes in the literature on the U.S. agriculture, industrial structure, household economics, economic anthropology and agricultural economics to suggest that the family farm persists in many instances due to economic competitiveness. This competitiveness derives from the technical aspects of agricultural production and its compatibility with certain organizational and operational aspects of the family farm. Large scale production, whether organized as state farms in the Soviet Union, large communes in China or industrial capitalist farms in the United States, has experienced managerial diseconomies in many spheres of agriculture. The present analysis contrasts these features of agricultural production with features of industrial production as one seeks to understand, in essence, why agriculture has not gone the way of the automobile.

This article discusses on the topics commercialization of agriculture and commoditization of production. Writers in different schools' of sociology are often unfamiliar with one another's work even where the problematic is similar, a tendency encouraged by the diverse and conflict-ridden classical heritage of the discipline. This is also true for the case of the commercialization and commoditization literatures. At present, however, a dialogue has emerged between the neo-Marxist and an emergent neo-Weberian tradition in the discipline of the sociology. The dialogue is in part a response to the impasse created by the crisis in neo-Marxist sociology, a crisis that has been extended to neo-Marxist sociology of development. Modernization theorists tended to identify themselves with the state and its development efforts, without attention to the self-interested aspect of states or of the state as an organization of domination. Marxist approaches, by reducing everything to class or economics, took in the last analysis an instrumentalist view of the state, the major locus of intervention of the modernization literature.

The article attempts to identify and portray a few of the major social changes or trends at present under way in the rural portions of society in the U.S. The study refers to the time when rapid, deep-cutting, drastic social change is the order of the day throughout all parts of rural and urban areas of the most populous nation in the Western hemisphere. Drastic change in the size of the farms is one of the most striking of the current social trends in the agricultural districts of the U.S. Among the most important of the traditional types of farming in the U.S. are general farming, the con-hog-beef-cattle variety, dairy husbandry, cotton culture, wheat growing, the cultivation of tobacco, cattle ranching, the production of citrus fruits and the rice-beef-cattle combination of enterprises. In many respects the tremendous improvement in the ways of farming, or the system of agriculture, used by farmers in the U.S. in order to secure crop and live-stock products from the soil is the most spectacular of all the rural social trends in the now highly industrialized U.S. An abrupt decrease in the numbers and proportions of lower class and lower middle class farm families is perhaps the most momentous and consequential of the recent social trends.