Comparison of the impact of agricultural technology on crop yields, labour productivity and rural employment in 21 major agricultural countries - examines agricultural development, population growth and technological changes; uses cross-section and time series data (1960- 1977) to investigate the impact of irrigation, agricultural mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, cropping patterns, labour force participation, etc.; discusses a recursive system of agricultural production. Graphs and references.

The authors view economic development as an extended process, and their model is formulated in terms of a dualistic structure, which they see as characterizing developing economies: the traditional coexisting with the modern. Their analysis attempts to quantify this structure, and to examine how changes in the balance between tradition and modernity affect technological diffusion, factor prices, the labor market, and the sequence of events in economic growth.

Wracked by poverty, famine, and drought, Africa is typically represented as agriculturally stagnant, backward, and crisis-prone. Living Under Contract, however, highlights the dynamic, changing character of sub-Saharan agrarian systems by focusing on contract farming. A relatively new and increasingly widespread way of organizing peasant agriculture, contract farming promotes production of a wide variety of crops--from flowers to cocoa, from fresh vegetables to rice--under contract to agribusinesses, exporters, and processers. The proliferation of African growers producing under contract is in fact part of broader changes in the global agro-food system. In this examination of agricultural restructuring and its effect upon various African societies, editors Peter Little and Michael Watts bring together anthropologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists to explore the origins, forms, and consequences of contract production in several African countries, particularly Kenya, the Gambia, Zimbabwe, and the Ivory Coast. Documenting how contract production links farmers, agribusiness, and the state, the contributors examine problematic aspects of this method of agrarian reform. Their case studies, based on long-term field work and analysis on the village and household level, chart the complex effects of contract production on the organization of work and the labor process, rural inequality, gender relations, labor markets, local accumulation strategies, and regional development. Living Under Contract reveals that contract farming represents a distinctive form in which African growers are incorporated into national and world markets. Contract production, which has been a central feature of the agricultural landscape in the advanced capitalist states, is an emerging strategy for "capturing peasants" and for confronting the agrarian question in the late twentieth century.

ILO pub-WEP pub-JASPA pub. Report on agricultural employment, labour utilization, labour productivity and use of agricultural technology on small farms in English speaking Africa - describes cropping patterns, land tenure, labour market, etc.; reports on family size, division of labour, underemployment, agricultural incomes, household consumption and time budget allocation; summarises the effects of animal traction, tractorisation, use of fertilizers, etc.; discusses agricultural policies. Bibliography, statistical tables.

Study of Kerakat Block, Jaunpur District, Uttar Pradesh.