Specialization and Diversification in Agricultural Transformation: The Case of Rural Punjab, c.1900-1995
نویسنده
چکیده
In this paper, the role of crop specialization and diversification in the process of agricultural transformation is empirically investigated for the case of Punjab. The analytical innovation of this paper is that changes in aggregate land productivity are structurally associated with inter-crop, inter-district, and inter-household reallocation of land use. This structural association enables us to characterize the nature of market development and agricultural transformation in a specific region. The empirical part is based on newlycompiled production data of Punjab’s agriculture for the period c.1900-1995, where a rapid growth of agricultural production has been observed. Quantitative results show that, first, the diversity of a traditional and subsistence agriculture went down at the macro (national), semi-macro (district), and household levels, but at a lower pace at the macro level. This change was associated with crop shifts reflecting comparative advantages. Second, even in a region with the oldest history of commercialization of agriculture in developing countries, two phases were clearly distinguished in the specialization process—the first phase in which local transactions such as intra-village sales enable each farm to specialize in crops and the second phase in which inter-regional trading becomes more efficient, inducing a rapid specialization at that level.
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