How location, natural resources, and different policies toward the elite's preemption of unused land shaped the historical development of different agrarian structures across Southeast Asia, conditioning agricultural growth performance until today.

How location, natural res ...

How location, natural resources, and different policies toward the elite's preemption of unused land shaped the historical development of different agrarian structures across Southeast Asia, conditioning agricultural growth performance until today.

Presents a reinvigorated agenda on agricultural and rural development in Asia both for research and policy discussions in the coming decades.

Despite the importance of Southeast Asia (SEA) region in the world for economy and agriculture, and despite reported evidence of the modernization of various aspects of the agricultural sector, the information has not been compiled in ways that provides more representative insights of the regions, as well as chronological, dynamic perspectives across different aspects of the overall agricultural developments. This report partly fills this knowledge gap by summarizing the key characteristics in SEA region of the agricultural development, as well as changes in related outcomes, such as nutrition, natural resource endowments, and the labor movement into non-farm economies. In doing so, the report gathers secondary cross-country data on key aspects of the agricultural modernization and diversification. Overall, the SEA region has seen a relatively fast movement of labor out of the agricultural sector into non-farm sectors including trade, restaurants and hotel industries in the last few decades, leading to higher labor productivity growth than land productivity growth. Despite the important roles of trade, the agricultural production within the region and in each country continues to account for important sources of food and nutrition. The modern production technologies and inputs have spread constantly within the region, but with considerable time lags across countries. The growth of vegetable oils and aquaculture production have been considerable, and contrast with South Asia (SA)where similar patterns have been observed for vegetables and milk production. The public sector has played important roles in agricultural research and development (R&D)on genetic improvements, and infrastructure development, while keeping the nominal assistance to the sector through market interventions to a relatively modest level, which has been accompanied by the significant growth of the private-sector participation in the provisions of inputs, services and agricultural finance. The agricultural modernization in SEA region has, however, been also associated with some negative outcomes, including continued degradation of natural resources like water and forest areas in which SEA has been relatively rich historically, and gradual increases in certain types of malnutrition including overweight and diabetes.

The process by which different ecological conditions and historical trajectories interacted to create different social and cultural systems resulted in major differences in economic development performance within Southeast Asia. In the late 19th century, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand commonly experienced vent-for-surplus development through exploitation of unused lands. Nevertheless, different agrarian structures were created. Indonesia's development was mainly based on the exploitation of tropical rain forest under Dutch colonialism. It resulted in the bifurcation of the rural sector between rice-farming peasant proprietors and large plantations for tropical export crops based on hired labor. In the Philippines, exploitation of the same resource base under Spanish rule resulted in pervasive landlessness among the rural population. Relatively homogeneous landowning peasants continued to dominate in Thailand, where delta plains that were suitable only for rice production formed the resource base for development. These different agrarian structures associated with different social value systems have accounted for differential development performance across the three economies in the recent three decades.

This book presents an extensive account of the green revolution's effect on the performance of Asian agriculture over the past two decades, as well as the second-generation problems that the green revolution is now experiencing.