Agriculture in Asia

Summary

Colin Clark’s pamphlet, reproduced from the Autumn 1970 issue of Pacific Community and re-published by the Forum of Free Enterprise on 10 March 1971, argues that Asian agriculture is widely misdescribed by Western economists, international agencies, and central planners. He traces a continuum from ‘cut and burn’ cultivation through ox-plough subsistence to mechanised mixed farming, using De Vries’s grain-equivalent classification to locate India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma uncomfortably close to the subsistence line while Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand are pulling ahead. He insists that ‘subsistence’ has a precise calorific meaning and attacks Lord Boyd-Orr’s and the F.A.O.’s repeated claims that one-half to two-thirds of humanity is malnourished as statistical confusions that an Australian anthropologist and a Stanford researcher have already exposed.

The second movement of the essay is a sustained critique of planning orthodoxy. Clark dismantles the idea that Asian farming suffers from ‘disguised unemployment’ or rural over-population — the doctrine, he notes, that Mao acted on in the Great Leap Forward ‘and the resulting chaos in Chinese agriculture has not yet been fully repaired.’ He revisits the Law of Diminishing Returns using Ishikawa’s productivity comparisons and shows that, country by country, intensification of labour on land continues to yield more output, with Taiwan supporting up to 64 persons per hectare at subsistence. Population growth, he contends, has historically driven productivity gains in Holland, England, Japan, and now India, rather than producing the disasters predicted by ‘population explosion’ theorists.

Clark then turns to land reform and trade. He concedes that concentrated ownership creates ‘unbearable social and political tensions’ but warns that legislated rent controls are easily evaded and that the world’s record on land reform — from Mexico in 1910 through Eastern Europe in the 1920s to Diem’s South Vietnam — is uneven; the Irish 1904, Japanese 1945, and Taiwanese 1950s reforms are the rare successes. He rejects the Marxian preconception that export agriculture is intrinsically exploitative, points out that Russia and Spain are the only modern non-communist economies to have tried autarky and suffered for it, and argues that the wealthier countries can help developing Asia most by cutting their own subsidised farm exports and granting market preferences for manufactures — measures Australia, he notes with approval, has begun to legislate.

Key points

• Asian agriculture spans a technical ladder from ‘cut and burn’ through ox-plough to mechanised mixed farming; most of Asia sits at the ox-plough stage that European agriculture left only in the eighteenth century.

• Clark redefines ‘subsistence’ in calorific terms (roughly 1,600–2,000 kcal per head per day, 250 kg of grain-equivalent per year) and rejects the F.A.O.’s 2,300-calorie universal standard as statistically and biologically unfounded.

• Using De Vries’s grain-equivalent classification, India (382 kg/head) and Pakistan (432 kg/head) sit close to subsistence while Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand show output growth markedly outpacing population.

• The doctrine of ‘disguised unemployment’ or rural surplus labour — believed by Mao and embedded in much planning — is shown to be empirically wrong; seasonal labour shortages, not surpluses, characterise monsoonal Asia.

• The Law of Diminishing Returns holds only when technique and social organisation are fixed; Ishikawa’s data show productivity rising sharply with labour input in Japan, China, Korea, and especially Taiwan (10,000 man-hours per hectare, 16 tons of milled rice).

• Population growth historically facilitates industrialisation and saving — demonstrated by the Dutch, English, Japanese, and now Indians — contradicting ‘population explosion’ alarmism.

• Land reform has a mixed historical record; Clark cites Ireland 1904, Mexico 1910, Japan 1945, and Taiwan in the 1950s as outcomes ranging from successful to destructive, and warns that rent-control legislation is easily evaded.

• Soviet collectivisation (1933), Maoist agriculture (1961), and autarkic policies under Stalin and Franco are presented as cautionary failures; export-oriented producers like Malaysia and Taiwan fare better than countries that retreat from trade.