Agricultural country - Final Word

I would like to transcend the topic of Agriculture, but before I do, I would like to answer the points raised by one Avelin in response to my original post. There he(?) claims that productivity is just a “numeric measure” that has no relation to reality and that we should move to a more “human centred production mode”. I can’t really do justice to the comment. So I ask you to read it.

Well let me explain the concept of productivity and its relation to reality.

The numerator of the equation tells us that the more food we produce, the better it is. More food is good because it increases the chance that our people have adequate food to eat. An example might make it clear. In 1960, India used to produce less food and we were on the verge of mass starvation. But a decade later, we were producing a lot more food, and though even now a few hundred people starve to death every year and millions of people are hungry, we are no longer faced with the prospect of massive starvation. This clearly indicates that more food is good.

But of course, though human needs are unbounded, there is a limit to how much food a human being can consume. So ultimately we will have enough food and then it will turn out that mindless pursuit of more food will lead to problems.
In that case, we should concentrate on the denominator, i.e. the resources engaged in producing food. We should try to reduce it.
We can reduce the number of people engaged in producing food for us. Having less people producing food is good. Because land is in limited supply, as our population increases, the area of land owned by any individual person will keep reducing. This means that people get poorer with each succeeding generation and there are fights among brothers. So it is a good thing if less people are engaged in agriculture. Those few farmers who remain can farm larger plots of land using machinery. If they save up enough, they can buy laptops and create intellectual property with it.
We can also try to reduce the area of land that is used up in farming. The land that is freed up can be given back to forests, or if needed to build cities.

So that is why we need to increase productivity.


One Response to “Agricultural country - Final Word”  

  1. 1 Nandan

    Yes, agreed that productivity needs to be an important consideration. However, by itself, it is a poor measure. Taking your example further, if the quality of foodgrain is so low that it can only allow sustenance, then productivity has not achieved much. My point: Productivity is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for fulfillment.
    As ol’ Pete Drucker says, it’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.