APPENDIX D, Course Reference No. 4
INTRODUCTION
This course reference provides a brief overview of the major switches in rural
development thinking that have occurred over the past half-century or so.
Dominant and subsidiary paradigms are identified, as well as the co-existence
of different narratives running in parallel. The continuing success of the
long-running ‘small-farm efficiency’ paradigm is highlighted.
Any attempt to portray evolving ideas in rural development over the past halfcentury risks oversimplification. While it is superficially neat to characterize the 1960s as
modernization, the 1970s as state intervention, the 1980s as market liberalization, and the
1990s as participation and empowerment, popular ideas and their practical effects on
rural policies did not, indeed, undergo these transitions in such an uncluttered manner.
Understanding about sets of rural development ideas across different disciplines, centers
of learning, influential think-tanks, international agencies and national governments is
very uneven. There are leads and lags in the transmission of new ideas across space and
time. The interpretation that follows is mindful of this complexity, but nevertheless seeks
to identify dominant and subsidiary themes that have had major impacts on rural
development practice since the 1950s. It also seeks to identify critical areas of divergence
between rural development narratives that have co-existed but moved in opposing
directions, and it examines whether current events, ideas, and policy proposals are
converging towards some sort of consensus about rural livelihoods.
The paper compiles definitions of rural, development and rural development as
they relate to the evolution of rural development worldwide as well as in the Philippines;
DEFINITION OF TERMS AND CONCEPTS
RURAL. Rural areas are sparsely settled places away from the influence of large
cities and towns. Such areas are distinct from more intensively settled urban and
suburban areas, and also from unsettled lands such as outback or wilderness. People in
rural areas live in villages, on farms and in other isolated houses, as in pre-industrial
societies.
In modern usage, rural areas can have an agricultural character, though many rural
areas are characterized by an economy based on logging, mining, petroleum and natural
gas exploration, or tourism.
Lifestyles in rural areas are different than those in urban areas, mainly because of
the limited services, especially public services. Governmental services like law
enforcement, schools, fire departments, and libraries may be distant, limited in scope, or
unavailable. Utilities like water, sewage, street lighting, and public waste management
may not be present. Public transport is absent or very limited, people use their own
vehicles, walk, bicycle, or ride an animal.1
Rural areas are those which are not classified as urban areas. They are outside
the jurisdiction of municipal corporations and committees and notified town area
committees (Singh, 1986).
DEVELOPMENT. Development is a process of continues rise in the capability
of the people to control their present and future well being (Cuyno, et al., 1982). The
definition embraces three basic concepts.
1. It is a process suggesting change in people’s outlook, capabilities and way of life;
2. Man’s capability to accomplish work by him or with minimum assistance;
3. Control of oneself.
Therefore, development as a process involves both economic growth and social
development.
From the economist point of view, development is usually associated with the
material well being of a given society. It is commonly thought of a sustained increase in
per capita income commonly known as GNP (Garcia, 1985).
Development is a sociological perspective that involves primarily social change.
Bernard S. Philips (1970) as cited by Garcia (1985) emphasized that the concept of social
change converges around the idea of development. For development to take place in a
society, all its structures – social, economic and political – should serve as stimulants to
change. If they pose as barriers, development becomes unattainable. Hence,
development seems to be much closely related to social change.
To the layman, development means having adequate food, i.e. the opportunity to
eat three times a day; adequate education or being able to send the children to school,
even just high school, trade school; enough income to meet the basic needs like clothing,
housing, food and free from sickness.
Development therefore, includes:
a. The people (self esteem, dignity, security, potential)
b. The economy
c. Technology
d. Culture
e. Moral values
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
o.
Environmental preservation
Social justice
Literacy and education
Change in social structure
Equal distribution of wealth
Organization
Discipline
Freedom (from servitude, debt, etc.)
Control over political destiny
Peace and order
It is a process wherein people are enabled through collective planning and action
to mobilize their resources to create and transform institutions so that these become
authentically responsive to their needs.
Development is basically to improve in the standard of living of the entire
population of a given country or region. It is a process with many economic and social
dimensions, but requires as a minimum, rising per capita incomes, eradication of
absolute poverty, and reduction in inequality over the long term.
RURAL DEVELOPMENT. As a concept, it connotes overall development in
the rural areas* with a view to improve the quality of life of the rural people. In this
sense, it is a comprehensive and multidimensional concept and encompasses the
development of agriculture and allied activities – village and cottage industries and crafts,
socio-economic, infrastructure, community services and facilities, and above all, the
human resources in rural areas. As a phenomenon, it is the result of interactions between
various physical, technological, economic, socio-cultural, institutional factors. As a
strategy, it is designed to improve the economic and social well-being of a specific group
of people – the rural poor. As a discipline, it is multidisciplinary in nature representing
an intersection of agricultural, social, behavioral, engineering, and management sciences.
In the words of Robert Chamber,
“Rural Development is a strategy to enable a specific group of people,
poor rural women and men, to gain for themselves and their children more
of what they want and need. It involves helping the poorest among those
who seek a livelihood in the rural areas to demand and control more of the
benefits of rural development. The group includes small scale farmers,
tenants, and the landless.”
Thus, rural development may mean any one of these, depending upon our focus.
To avoid ineffective floundering among the myriad definitions we shall define rural
development as a process of developing and utilizing natural and human resources,
technologies, infrastructural facilities, institutions and organizations, and government
policies and programmes to encourage and speed up economic growth in rural areas, to
provide jobs and to improve the quality of rural life towards self-sustenance. In addition
to economic growth, this process typically involves changes in popular attitudes, and in
many cases even in customs and beliefs. In a nutshell, the process of rural development
must represent the entire gamut of change by which a social system moves away from a
state of life perceived as “unsatisfactory” towards a materially and spiritually better
condition of life (Singh, 1986).
Rural development is a process of providing opportunities, services and amenities
to the rural people so that they can improve their social, economic, political, cultural and
physical well-being an environmental consciousness (Battad, 2003).
Rural development is a desired state for people residing in the rural areas. It is
characterized by increased agricultural productivity and incomes, good governance,
improved people empowerment, good health and nutrition, has dignity and honor to live
in a sustainable environment and free society.
Sison and Valera (1991) defined rural development as follows: A process through
which rural poverty is alleviated by sustained increase in productivity and incomes of
low-income rural workers and households (World Bank, 1975). A process of change
among hundreds of thousands of rural people … development refers only to those
changes which are seen as desirable among rural people who are changing (Axin, 1978).
PARADIGM. Definitions of paradigms from the dictionary and internet are given as
follows: 1) One that serves as a pattern or model; 2) A set or list of all the inflectional
forms of a word or of one of its grammatical categories: the paradigm of an irregular
verb; and 3) A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices, that constitutes a way
of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual
discipline 2.
PARADIGM SHIFT is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the process and result of a change in basic
assumptions within the ruling theory of science. Don Tapscott was the first to use the
term to describe information technology and business in his book of the same title. It has
since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well 3
SHIFTS in PARADIGMS of RURAL DEVELOPMENT
This review is oriented more towards ‘production’ aspects of rural development
than towards education, health and social services. The case for integrated rural
development was made persuasively by Johnston and Clark (1982), but has proved
elusive in practice, although re-emerging in recent times in a sustainable livelihood guise
(Carney, 1998).
A Rural Development Timeline
Figure 1 uses the device of a timeline to list a great number of theories, themes,
strategies, approaches, and policy thrusts that have been influential in rural development
thinking since the 1950s. It is not intended here to advance a definitive account of these
strands of thought and their historical influence upon each other, but rather to highlight
mainstream rural development narratives and to explore the turning points between them.
It is immediately evident from Figure 1 that predominant or popular rural development
ideas are not trapped in time capsules conveniently organized in decades. Ideas that first
appear in one decade often gain strength in the following decade, and only begin to affect
rural development practice in a widespread way ten or fifteen years after they were first
put forward. This is true, for example, of the sustainable livelihood approach (Carney,
1998), which is listed as an idea of the current decade because this is the period when it is
being widely deployed as a guiding principle for rural development practice. But this
approach originates from strands of livelihoods ideas developed through the 1980s and
1990s (Chambers, 1983; Chambers and Conway, 1992; Bernstein et al., 1992), and from
famine analysis of the 1980s (Sen, 1981; Swift, 1989). In piloting a route through the
ideas depicted in Figure 1, it is useful to distinguish substantive theories or bodies of
thought from trivial or transient ones, majority discourses from minority ones, and
general development themes from specifically rural sector ones. In addition, some themes
can be characterized as development ‘spin’ whereby ways of mobilizing the development
lobby in rich countries are phrased in different ways over time. The rallying calls of
“poverty alleviation” (1980s), “poverty reduction” (1990s) and “poverty eradication”
(2000s) perhaps fall into this category. By removing from the sequential list given in
Figure 1 general development themes, transient ideas, and minority discourses, the
identification of the key approaches to rural development of the past half-century is
facilitated (Figure 2). Structural adjustment and its adjuncts in the form of trade and
market liberalization (1980s) are multi-sectoral in intent, as also are their downstream
extensions in the areas of state-market relations and good governance (1990s and 2000s).
To be sure, these macro policy processes take on particular variations when played out in
rural and agricultural settings, but there is nothing intrinsically rural or agricultural about
them at root. Similarly, both gender and the environment as development policy themes
have specific rural manifestations, but they are society- or economy-wide in their overall
scope. The flirtation in the 1970s with ideas of “basic needs” and “redistribution with
growth” was also economy- or society-wide in scope. And to the extent that they may
have contributed to the pursuit of specifically rural policies and programmes (e.g.
integrated rural development projects), this was more to do with the identification of
“rural” with “poverty” than with anything specifically rural or agricultural in their
formulation as development ideas or theories. An important continuing minority
discourse of rural development that manifested itself especially strongly in debates of the
1970s, is the “political economy of agrarian change” strand of thinking inspired largely
by Marxist or neo-Marxist social science approaches and methods. The well-known
collection by Harriss (1982) exemplifies rural development debates within this discourse.
The emphases here were (and still are) on class, power, inequality, and social
differentiation in agrarian settings driven by the large-scale forces and tendencies of
development under capitalism. This branch of the rural development literature has tended
to be critical of the mainstream rural development orthodoxy discussed below, principally
on the grounds of the latter’s neglect of divisions in rural society in its pursuit of smallfarm policies.
Figure 1. Rural Development Ideas Timeline
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
Modernization
dual economy model
backward agriculture
community development
lazy peasants
Transformation approach
Technology transfer
Mechanization
Agricultural Extension
Growth role of agriculture
Green revolution (start)
Rational Peasant
Redistribution with growth
basic needs
Integrated rural devt
State agric policies
State-led credit
Urban bias
Induced innovation
Green Revolution (cont’n.)
Rural growth linkages
Structural adjustment
Free markets
Getting prices right
Retreat of the state
Rise of NGOs
Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)
Farming Systems Research (FSR)
Food security and famine analysis
RD as process not product
Women in Development (WID)
Poverty alleviation
Micro credit
Participatory rural appraisal (PRA)
Actor-oriented RD
Stakeholder analysis
Rural safety nets
Gender and development (GAD)
Environment and sustainability
Poverty reduction
Sustainable livelihoods
Good governance
Decentralization
Critique of participation
Sector-wide approaches
Social protection
Poverty eradication
Key Strands and Switches in Rural Development Thinking
Small-farm focus
In retrospect, it is evident that one major body of thought, albeit with plenty of
side- excursions and add-ons, has dominated the landscape of rural development thinking
throughout the last half-century. This is the “agricultural growth based on small-farm
efficiency’ paradigm. It is convenient to use the shorthand “small-farm first” to describe
this discourse or narrative. Probably the decisive contribution resulting in the widespread
acceptance of this narrative was the publication in 1964 of Schultz’s Transforming
Traditional Agriculture, in which the rational allocation of resources by “traditional”
small farmers was a central proposition. However, leading members of the US academic
community interested in the contribution of agriculture to economic development were
already at that time engaging with similar ideas, an emphasis on the benefits of
agricultural growth not just restricted to the commercial sector appearing in early
contributions by John Mellor and Bruce Johnston (Johnston and Mellor, 1961; Mellor,
1966).
The idea that the great bulk of what were then called ‘traditional’ or ‘subsistence’
agriculturalists in low-income countries could form the basis of agriculture-led processes
of economic development was a significant break from the received wisdom of the 1950s,
embodied in the dual-economy theories of development (Lewis, 1954; Fei and Ranis,
1964). According to these theories, the subsistence sector possessed negligible prospects
for rising productivity or growth, and therefore could play only a passive role in the
process of economic development, supplying resources to the modern sector of the
economy until the latter eventually expanded to take its place. This modern sector was
envisaged as containing large-scale ‘modern’ agriculture (plantations, estates,
commercial farms and ranches) in addition to manufacturing industry. Important
underlying propositions included the existence of economies of scale in agriculture, i.e.
that large farms could make more efficient use of resources and modern technologies
than small farms. This proposition was, incidentally, also important for social is strategies
of agricultural development as practiced in the Soviet Union and in low- income
developing countries that had socialist-leaning governments in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus,
a first ‘paradigm shift’ in rural development occurred in the early to mid- 1960s period,
when small-farm agriculture switched to being considered the very engine of growth and
development. However, as illustrated in Figure 2, the accomplishment of a serious
change in intellectual direction does not result in the immediate demise of the set of ideas
which is being replaced. There was life left in the idea that large-scale farming using
mechanized technology was more efficient than the ‘peasant sector’ well into the 1970s.
Indeed, the same ideas continue to crop up, often in whispered asides at rural
development workshops, right up to the present time. The small-farm-first narrative
begins with the proposition that agriculture plays a key role in overall economic growth,
by providing labour, capital, food, foreign exchange, and a market in consumer goods for
the nascent industrial sector in a low- income country. In the words of one of its most
enthusiastic proponents, John Mellor, ‘the faster agriculture grows, the faster its relative
size declines’ (Mellor, 1966). This occurs because rising agricultural productivity
stimulates demand for non-farm input services to agriculture, as well as creating an
internal consumer market for industrial goods. As already indicated, it was not any old
agriculture, but small-farm agriculture in particular, that should form the central focus of
an agriculture-centred development strategy. The overall narrative is composed of many
interlocking components, some of the principal ones being as follows (Ellis, 2000: 22):
• small farmers are rational economic agents making efficient farm decisions
(Schultz, 1964);
• small farmers are just as capable as big farmers of taking advantage of highyielding crop varieties because the input combinations (seed, fertilizer, water)
required for successful cultivation are ‘neutral to scale’ (Lipton and Longhurst,
1989);
 the substitution of labour for scarce land involved in small-farm HYV
cultivation is an ‘induced innovation’ that accurately reflects relative resource
scarcities and factor prices in labor-abundant agrarian economies (Hayami and
Ruttan, 1971);
 there exists an ‘inverse relationship’ between farm size and economic
efficiency, such that small farmers are more efficient than large farmers
because of the intensity of their use of abundant labor in combination with
small land holdings and low requirements for scarce capital (Berry and Cline,
1979);
 these factors lead in the direction of a ‘unimodal’ agricultural strategy
favouring small family farms rather than a ‘bimodal’ strategy that bets on the
strength of a modern farm sector composed of large farms and estates
(Johnston and Kilby, 1975: Ch.4);
 rising agricultural output in the small-farm sector results in ‘rural growth
linkages’ that spur the growth of labour-intensive non-farm activities in rural
areas, and these are higher than for large farms (Johnston and Kilby, 1975;
Mellor, 1976).
Amongst these ideas, the notion of ‘rural growth linkages’ has proved particularly
pervasive and durable (see e.g. Delgado et al., 1998; IFAD, 2001), even though the
methods used to substantiate the significance of such linkages are somewhat debatable
(Harriss, 1987; Hart, 1989; 1993). In the words of one authority, ‘the growth of the nonfarm economy depends on the vitality of the farm economy; without agricultural growth
in rural areas, redressing poverty is an impossible task’ (Singh, 1990: xix). A crucial
attribute of the narrative is that both growth and equity goals appear to be satisfied
simultaneously via the emphasis on small-farm agriculture: its enduring success owes
much to this felicitous conjunction of outcomes. Much rests on the rural poor being poor
small farmers. This has always been open to the criticism that the poor in rural areas are
often poor because they are landless. However, the small-farm paradigm counters such
doubts by stating that even the landless poor gain by being employed in a buoyant labourintensive small-farm sector. Whether this remains an acceptable premise in the light of
emerging evidence that the rural poor tend to depend on non-farm (and often non-rural)
sources of income in order to sustain their livelihoods is a key issue that might contribute
to a re-appraisal of the validity of the small-farm-first orthodoxy (Ellis, 1998).
Figure 2. Dominant and sequential themes in rural development
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
Dominant paradigm and switches
Modernization, dual economy
Rising yield on efficient small farms
Process, participation empowerment
SL approach
Some sequential RD emphases
Community Development
Small farm growth
Integrated Rural Development
Market Liberalization
Participation
PRSRs
Returning to the timeline, various unexplained entries can be interpreted as
excursions around or non-economic bolt-ons to the core small-farm-first engine. The
urban bias theory advanced by Michael Lipton in the 1970s, for example, may be
interpreted as a particular detour and advocacy around the imperative of a small-farmcentered strategy (Lipton, 1977). Similarly, the sequence of debates in agricultural
research policy that resulted in the 1980s’ promotion of farming systems research (FSR)
as an improved process for raising small-farm productivity were entirely consistent with
the small-farm orthodoxy.
Process approaches to rural development
The second ‘paradigm shift’ was the switch occurring during the 1980s and 1990s
from the top-down or “blueprint” approach to rural development, characterized by
external technologies and national-level policies, to the bottom-up, grassroots, or
“process” approach (Rondinelli, 1983; Mosse et al., 1998). This envisages rural
development as a participatory process that empowers rural dwellers to take control of
their own priorities for change. Some key strands in this period were:
 the advent of farming systems research (FSR), and the growing argument that
the Green Revolution in monocrop farming systems (rice and wheat), mainly
in Asia, might not necessarily work for raising incomes in diverse, risk-prone
and resource-poor environments (e.g. Chambers et al., 1989);
 a growing acknowledgement of the validity of indigenous technical
knowledge (ITK), and of the ability of the poor themselves to contribute to
solutions to the problems they confront (Richards, 1985);
 the rise of the participatory method, originating in rapid rural appraisal (RRA)
techniques in the 1980s and evolving into participatory rural appraisal (PRA)
and participatory learning and action (PLA) during the 1990s (Chambers,
1994; 1997);
 the advent of an “actor-oriented” perspective on rural policies, emphasizing
that participants in rural development, including the poor themselves, are
actors with differing understandings of the processes of change in which they
are involved (Long and Long, 1992);
 structural adjustment and market liberalization beginning in the early 1980s,
leading to the withdrawal of governments from previous large-scale
“management” of the agricultural sector;
 disenchantment with the performance of governments in the delivery of rural
services, leading donors to look for other partners;
 the rise of NGOs as agents for rural development, occurring at the same time
as, and benefiting from, the decline in enthusiasm for big government;
 the rejection of overarching theories as a useful guide to action, arising in part
from post-modern intellectual ideas emphasizing the uniqueness of local and
individual experience (for an overview see Booth, 1994);
 the rise of gender as a concern in rural development, emphasizing the different
experience of women from men, and the need to consider closely the differing
impacts of rural politics on women and men.
Note that these strands are interlocking and not readily separable one from
another in real time, even if they emerge from different directions. While advocates of
grassroots approaches to development may like to think that they have nothing in
common with World Bank market liberalizers, nevertheless the spaces in which
grassroots action flourished from the mid-1980s onwards were created in some measure
by the backing off by big government from heavy-handed involvement in the rural
economy. A growing disenchantment with the performance of state rural development
agencies was an important shared agenda across a number of divergent rural development
actors. Nor did the retreat of the state occur voluntarily, but resulted from much armtwisting by the external financial institutions under structural adjustment programmes. In
addition, the World Bank has subsequently adopted, at least in principle if not always in
practice, many of the ideas associated with bottom-up rural development approaches, as
manifested in the Vision to Action statement (World Bank, 1997) and in the energetic
pursuit of participatory poverty assessments, leading to the publication of Voices of the
Poor (Narayan et al., 2000).
Phases in Rural Development Practice
While economic and agricultural development theories have exerted a powerful
influence on rural development policies throughout the past half-century, the practices of
donors and governments have also been influenced by broader thinking about social, nonagricultural and national development. This is manifested in sequential phases in rural
development practice in low-income countries, occurring as a series of overlapping
transitions as portrayed in the bottom half of Figure 2:
(a) from community development (1950s) to the emphasis on small-farm growth
(1960s);
(b) continuing small-farm growth within integrated rural development (1970s);
(c) from state-led rural development (1970s) to market liberalization (1980s);
(d) process, participation, empowerment and actor approaches (1980s and 1990s);
(e) emergence of sustainable livelihoods as an integrating framework (1990s);
(f) mainstreaming rural development in poverty reduction strategy papers (2000s).
This rendering has the merit of highlighting the various banners, for example
“community development” (Holdcroft, 1978) or “integrated rural development” (World
Bank, 1975; 1988), under which donors set their priorities for development assistance in
rural areas over particular periods of historical time. However, the underlying preeminence of the small-farm efficiency paradigm is to some degree obscured in so doing,
as also is the paradoxical interweaving of the market liberalization and participatory
strands that featured so strongly towards the end of the twentieth century.
The Livelihoods Approach: A Challenge to Farming First?
It has already been pointed out above that the switch from top-down to bottom-up
thinking about rural development occurs in a separate plane from economic theories
about the role of agriculture in growth and poverty reduction, where the primacy of
small-scale agriculture appears to roll on without serious challenge. For a recent
restatement of the orthodoxy, including a vigorous reassertion of the primacy of new
technology in small-farm food production, and rural growth linkages as purportedly
powerful mechanisms of rural poverty reduction, see the IFAD Rural Poverty Report
2001 (IFAD, 2001).
It is possible that the so-called sustainable livelihood (SL) approach (Carney,
1998; Scoones, 1998) could provide a challenge to the small-farm orthodoxy, while at the
same time being entirely compatible with progress made in bottoms-up rural
development. This approach has significant economic antecedents in another branch of
literature that crops up in Figure 1, namely, the food-security and famine analysis
originating in the publication of Amartya Sen’s (1981) seminal work on famines. The
“asset vulnerability framework” which is at the centre of the SL approach arises from this
literature, and engages with the factors that make rural families vulnerable to shocks, and
the policies and processes that can improve their resilience in the face of disaster. The
livelihoods approach also draws on other antecedents connected with the multiple
realities of rural poverty (Chambers, 1983).
This is not the place to expound the livelihood approach (see Ellis, 2000). In the
current context, what is interesting is that it embodies no prior requirement for the poor
rural individual or family to be a “small farmer”. The livelihood concept takes an openended view of the combination of assets and activities that turn out to constitute a viable
livelihood strategy for the rural family. Empirical research suggests that, in reality,
farming activities, on average, tend to correspond to only 40-60% of the livelihood
“package” put together by rural households in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (see,
for example, Reardon, 1997). Nor do rural growth linkages explain the patterns of
activity and income sources that correspond to the non-farm components of rural
livelihood. On the contrary, remittances and transfers are always important, as are wages
and salaries in activities that have little or nothing to do with agricultural linkages.
The starting point of the livelihood approach – the assets and diverse strategies of
a poor household – is therefore fundamentally different from the principles underlying
“small-farm first” thinking, and can lead analysis in new directions. The evidence for
sub-Saharan Africa points to the gathering momentum of livelihood strategies based on
part-time farming supplemented by other activities and income sources (Bryceson and
Jamal, 1997). One reason that this occurs is the continued sub-division of land at
inheritance, resulting in declining farm size, and this is especially prevalent in areas of
high agricultural potential. However, the implications of such rural livelihood strategies
for poverty-reduction policies are hitherto poorly assimilated, resulting potentially in
policy drift with no clear sense of direction (Bryceson and Bank, 2001).
Conclusion
Currently few developing country governments, and few donors, take a
sufficiently cross- or multi-sectoral view of the possibilities of rural poverty reduction
Notwithstanding energetic assertions about the underfunding of agriculture (e.g. IFAD,
2001), the reality on the ground is that agriculture is preferred in the public funding of
services to rural productive activity (via research, extension, credit, seeds and so on) to
say, providing an enabling environment for start-up non-farm activities, or removing
barriers to trade and mobility, or reducing licensing requirements for small businesses, or
a host of other potential means by which the options and opportunities of the rural poor
can be expanded in their non-farm variety and range.
If a new paradigm of rural development is to emerge, it will be one in which
agriculture takes its place along with a host of other actual and potential rural and nonrural activities that are important to the construction of viable rural livelihoods, without
undue preference being given to farming as the unique solution to rural poverty. It is in
this sense that the cross-sectoral and multi-occupational diversity of rural livelihoods may
need to become the cornerstone of rural development policy if efforts to reduce rural
poverty are to be effective in the future.
MAJOR GOVERNMENT POLICIES
AFFECTING RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Government Policies Affecting Rural Development
A. Development Strategies and Economy-wide Policies
There has emerged a consensus among economic researchers that the failure of
the Philippines to grow robustly on a sustainable basis and to induce substantial poverty
reduction during the last half century stems mainly from the absence of an “effective
allocation mechanism” that allows the true comparative advantage of various industries
to emerge (Bautista, Power and Associates, 1979; de Dios and Associates, 1993; Bautista
and Tecson, 2000). Instead, past governments introduced distortions in economic
policies, which, in not a few cases, made socially undesirable investments attractive to
private investors and desirable ones (i.e., promising and efficient activities) relatively
unprofitable (Power and Sicat, 1971; Medalla et al., 1995; Fabella, 2000). Such policies
not only hampered economic growth at the national level but also produced side effects
deleterious to rural development.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, an array of policies meant to push the country
towards an import substituting industrialization track inadvertently stunted the
development of the rural sector by creating a bias towards large-scale, capital-intensive
manufacturing industries located in urban areas (especially Metro Manila) to the
detriment of rural enterprises which are inherently smaller in size, hire more labor and
make greater use of local materials (Medalla et al., 1995; Ranis and Stewart, 1993).
These policies also created an incentive structure that was significantly biased
against agriculture, the economic backbone of the rural sector. Trade and exchange rate
policies then distorted the relative prices of agricultural inputs and outputs, preventing an
efficient allocation of resources, and tended to heavily favor the manufacturing sector
over agriculture, non-tradable over tradable goods, and import-competing over export
products. In the long run, resources move away from agriculture and export sectors; new
investments into these sectors are discouraged. Since agricultural production is more
labor-intensive, less import-dependent, and more efficient in earning (or saving) foreign
exchange than industrial production (especially of import-competing industrial consumer
goods), the premature shift of resources away from agriculture dampens the growth of
employment opportunities and output in rural areas.
Many authors point out that the bias did not come largely from measures aimed
directly at agricultural commodities, although government interventions in the form of
taxes, custom duties, subsidies, quantitative trade restrictions, import prohibitions, price
controls and monopoly control in international trade had, up until the late 1980s and mid1990s, affected agricultural incentives. It was rather the indirect effect of the overall
development strategy that accounted for a substantial part of the policy bias in the past
(e.g., Intal and Power, 1990; Bautista, 1987; Bautista and Tecson, 2000). The primary
channel had been the overvaluation of the domestic currency, which in turn had its roots
in the industrial protection system and in fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies,
specifically those adopted to promote import substitution and accommodate current
account imbalances.
Estimates of the overvaluation of the domestic currency in the 1970s and 1980s
are in the order of 20-30 percent. Making use of the same methodology, Bautista (1990)
showed that these rates are much higher than those derived for Thailand (16-24 percent)
and Malaysia (less than 3 percent).
B. Sectoral Policies
In the early 1970s, government interventions in Philippine agriculture started to
rise in unprecedented proportions. The government intervened intensively in agricultural
production, marketing and international trade. The intervention in the rice sector was
precipitated by a rice crisis in 1971-72 resulting from both local (poor weather, pest
infestation and the great flood in Central Luzon) and international (a sharp price hike in
the world market) shocks. The government responded to the crisis by imposing price
controls on rice and embarking on a massive program aimed at achieving rice selfsufficiency. Dubbed Masagana 99 and launched in 1974, the program called for
government assistance in the form of credit, irrigation, extension services and fertilizer
subsidy.
Furthermore, the National Grains Authority (NGA), the government’s rice and
corn agency, expanded its control of the food sector to include the effective
monopolization of wheat (beginning 1975) and soybean (beginning 1978) imports.
Marketing controls included all food commodities by the early 1980s when the NGA was
transformed into the National Food Authority (NFA) as the government’s food price
stabilization arm. The NFA financed its expanded operations partly from price margins
on its duty-free imports. In the case of the export crop sector, the government’s
intervention shifted from its traditional role of allocating domestic sugar quotas,
collecting minor export taxes and undertaking research and extension in tandem with the
private sector, to one of monopolizing domestic and export marketing.
The economic consequences and cost of government interventions in the 1970s
and 1980s have been well documented in the literature. In most cases, the interventions
were either ineffective or yielded results contrary to avowed intentions. In the case of
rice, for example, while increased government intervention during the 1970s reduced
seasonal fluctuations in palay (paddy) prices, the intervention was inadequate to maintain
producer prices at the official floor price. This meant that the opportunities to sell at the
official price had to be rationed, often to the disadvantage of small farmers. In addition,
because the difference between official ceiling and floor prices was insufficient to cover
normal marketing margins, the intervention prevented the development of private trading
and storage. Arguably, the government’s objective of reducing marketing margins could
have been achieved with non-price policy interventions such as investment in transport
and communication infrastructure.
One other major piece of policy measure that was high on agenda during the early
1970s was agrarian reform (land reform). Presidential Decree No. 27 (PD 27) was issued
stipulating that all rice and corn fields of over 7 hectares be transferred to the tenants who
tilled them at a price 2.5 times the value of average annual production and that all the rice
and corn lands of 7 hectares or less under share tenancy be converted to fixed-rent
leasehold with the official rental ceiling of 25 percent of average output for the three
‘normal’ years prior to land reform. Compared to the earlier land reform legislations,
PD27 expanded the potential coverage of the lands under the reform program by
lowering the retention limit, among other things.
While the 1970s saw an unprecedented rise of government interventions in
agriculture in the form of price and quantitative controls, levies and taxes as well as entry
into activities for which the public good argument was unjustified, the late 1980s saw an
undoing of these policies towards a market-oriented agricultural economy, relieved of the
burden of explicit as well as implicit taxation of agriculture. The deregulation that
commenced starting 1986 took the following forms:
 Lifting of the export ban on copra and export taxes on copra (10 percent) and
coconut oil (5 percent);
 Abolition of monopsonistic agencies and arrangements in sugar and coconut
trading and the dismantling of government monopoly control over
international trade in coconut oil, corn, soybeans, soybean meal and the
marketing of sugar;

controls on rice, poultry products and pork;
 Opening up of import trade in wheat, flour and animal feeds to the private
sector;
 Divestment of the National Food Authority (NFA) from non-grain activities
and the reorientation of its primary function to price stabilization of rice and
corn; and

-specific funds into the Comprehensive
Agricultural Loan Fund (CALF) to unify various agricultural lending
programs and minimize government participation in these programs.
Despite these reform measures, however, the deregulation of agriculture was left
substantially incomplete. Reforms undertaken did not include the abolition of the
remaining restrictions such as:

and corn; Import controls on sugar;
 Import prohibitions on onions, potatoes, garlic, cabbage, coffee and seeds;
 Hectarage controls on banana production;
 Centralized importation of ruminants (for breeding and/or slaughter) and beef;


ctions on animal and animal products; and
agricultural goods.
Rather than expanding the scope of deregulation, which could have had a positive
impact on the welfare of rural population (see Balisacan, 1991), the government moved
instead to strengthen the regulation of agriculture, especially over the international trade
of agricultural products. In 1992, Congress, with the endorsement of the executive
branch, passed the Magna Carta of Small Farmers (Republic Act 7607), which barred
importation of agricultural products produced locally in sufficient quantity.
Another major government program initiated in the late 1980s with a profound
effect on the agriculture sector was the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program
(CARP). Launched in 1988 under Republic Act 6675, the program covered, unlike its
predecessor PD27, all agricultural lands, regardless of commodity produced and type of
tenurial arrangement and included the provision of support services for farmers. CARP
intends to redistribute about 580,000 hectares of rice and corn lands (which was also
covered under PD27) and over 2 million hectares of privately-owned nonrice/ corn lands
(which was newly covered under CARP) over a period of ten years. The huge budgetary
requirement of the program, together with the limited capacity of the agencies tasked to
implement it, stood in the way of swift implementation.
The uncertainty surrounding the program implementation served to discourage the
flow of private investments into agriculture as well as encouraged non-planting and
premature conversion of agricultural lands into nonagricultural uses, a trend exacerbated
by weak monitoring of the government and absence of a comprehensive land use policy
(e. g., Medalla and Centeno, 1995). Aside from dampening the flow of agricultural
investments, the CARP also diminished the collateral value of agricultural lands by
constraining private land sales. This feature of the program has caused the demise of
private markets for agricultural lands. Indeed, the amount of loans (at constant prices)
granted by private and government banks in the early 1990s was only half of that in the
early 1980s. Loans by private institutions, including private commercial banks, dropped
by much more than loans by public institutions. Loans per peso of agricultural value
added fell from about 0.42 in 1980-82 to 0.20 in 1985-87 and 0.16 in 1991-92 (Balisacan,
1998).
As we saw in the previous section, production growth rates decelerated during the
1980s and the early 1990s for most crops. The deceleration can be attributed to the
combination of some exogenous factors (such as price changes in world market, natural
calamities and droughts) and government policies. The negative policy impact includes
the unintended negative side effects of CARP as mentioned above as well as the sharp
fall in public investment in agriculture – especially rural roads, irrigation and research –
in the 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, investments in agricultural research and
development (R&D), the single most important source of long-term output growth,
stagnated in the 1970s and then dropped in absolute value in the 1980s; the total spent on
R&D in the early 1990s comprised merely 60 percent of that in the early 1970s.
A change in the policy environment had been anticipated with the country’s
accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 since this required opening up
local agricultural markets to competition as well as enacting laws prescribed by the trade
treaty.5 Political negotiations to win public support for this policy direction, in turn,
severely weakened the drive towards greater openness in the farm sector. Rice, for
instance, has been exempted from the trade commitments for a period of ten years. In
1996, Congress passed a law (Republic Act 8178) lifting all quantitative restrictions on
agricultural imports (save for rice) but replacing non-tariff barriers with the highest
possible tariff protection of 100 percent (i.e., the ceiling or binding tariff rates).6 Clarete
(1999) pointed out that the manner of “tariffication” resulted in tariff levels that exceeded
the corresponding equivalent rates of most products. The tariff rate equivalent of
quantitative restrictions on corn, for example, was estimated to be only 60 percent, but
government “tariffied” the commodity at the maximum rate of 100 percent.7 David
(2000) similarly expounded that binding tariffs were higher than either the nominal
protection rates from quantitative trade restrictions or the book tariff rates under EO 470.
As noted in the previous section, after a decade of stagnation in the 1980s,
production growth in the agricultural sector recovered in the 1990s. The combination of
the sweeping reforms in nonagricultural sectors and the increasing government protection
on agriculture apparently led to a rise in relative prices of agricultural products in
domestic market, and thus may partially explain the upturn in agricultural growth in the
1990s.
The Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) was enacted in 1997
partly in response to the farm lobbies’ opposition to the country’s entry to the WTO. The
AFMA prescribes a coordinated set of measures aimed at enhancing the competitiveness
of domestic agriculture in the global marketplace. These include infrastructure
development, devolution of communal irrigation systems to local government units,
budgetary allocation for R&D in agriculture, phase-out of directed credit programs, and
provision of post-harvest facilities
While there have been efforts to liberalize the agriculture sector, crucial
restrictions remained, such as the continued monopoly of the NFA over rice trade and
hectarage controls on banana production. In addition, profitability levels of the sugar and
corn sectors were becoming artificially high due to increased protection afforded by the
new tariff regime as well as regulatory barriers, reducing the competitiveness of allied
industries. Corn is the main input of the livestock sector, while sugar is an essential
ingredient in the food processing industry.
The land reform program, meanwhile, could not be completed as scheduled (i.e.,
by 1997) although relevant local agencies performed relatively well compared to their
predecessors in terms of land distribution. Only a little over half the total coverage was
achieved. Implementation had been particularly slow for public alienable and disposable
(A & D) lands and private agricultural lands (other than rice and corn lands), representing
about 45 percent and 25 percent, respectively, of the total coverage of the program. For
public A&D lands, the poor performance could be traced mainly to delays in undertaking
land surveys, slow reconstitution of land records and sluggish resolution of land conflicts
among competing claimants. For private agricultural lands, the main problems included
the time-consuming process involved in land acquisition and distribution, insufficient
technical capacity of implementing agencies, legal disputes relating to coverage and land
valuation, landowners’ resistance, harassment, an unstable peace and order condition and
budget constraints (Balisacan, 1996c). As noted earlier, the negative indirect effects of
the slow and incomplete implementation and the uncertainty created as a result (i. e.,
disincentives for private investment, incentives for non-planting or premature land
conversion and negative effects on land market transactions) continue to be a serious
problem for stimulating agricultural development.
A convenient summary measure of the direct impact of trade and industrial
policies is the effective rate of protection (ERP), defined as the percentage excess of
protected value-added over non-protected value-added of a particular economic activity.
This measure takes into account the changes in the domestic prices of both inputs and
outputs arising from tariffs and import controls. A positive ERP implies that the sector is
accorded protection by the system of tariffs and import controls while a negative ERP
indicates that the system penalizes (i.e., taxes) the activity of the sector.
The primary and agricultural sectors typically had lower ERPs than
manufacturing during the period between 1965 and the early 1990s—most of the period
under our review. The agricultural sector as a whole was thus penalized vis-à-vis the
manufacturing sector in terms of relative prices up to the early 1990s (Table 8). Through
the 1990s, however, such bias against agriculture (at least on aggregate) appears to have
finally disappeared; the ERPs for agriculture became roughly equivalent to the ERPs for
manufacturing. Such result can largely be attributed to the substantial changes in the
country’s tariff structure over the last ten years. Clarete’s (1991) and Medalla’s (1992)
assessment of EO 470 indicates that the tariff reform program moved the country towards
a lower, sector-neutral and trade-neutral effective protection policy.
With the steady progression of the tariff reform program during the period, the
1990s saw both declining protection rates of manufactured inputs (including agricultural
inputs) and increased (tariff) protection of major agricultural commodities for which
quantitative restrictions have been removed. Falling input prices (with the obvious
exception of yellow corn for the livestock industry) imply that the effective protection
level of agriculture afforded by domestic policy has outstripped the nomina protection
level of the sector.
SUMMARY
The paper attempted to portray evolving ideas in rural development over the past
half-century. Generally, there are only 2 major paradigm shifts of rural development in
the Philippines. The first ‘paradigm shift’ in rural development occurred in the early to
mid- 1960s period, when small-farm agriculture switched to being considered the very
engine of growth and development. The accomplishment of a serious change in
intellectual direction does not result in the immediate demise of the set of ideas which is
being replaced. There was life left in the idea that large-scale farming using mechanized
technology was more efficient than the ‘peasant sector’ well into the 1970s. Indeed, the
same ideas continue to crop up, often in whispered asides at rural development
workshops, right up to the present time. The small-farm-first narrative begins with the
proposition that agriculture plays a key role in overall economic growth, by providing
labor, capital, food, foreign exchange, and a market in consumer goods for the nascent
industrial sector in a low- income country. The second ‘paradigm shift’ was the switch
occurring during the 1980s and 1990s from the top-down or ‘blueprint’ approach to rural
development, characterized by external technologies and national-level policies, to the
bottom-up, grassroots, or ‘process’ approach (Rondinelli, 1983; Mosse et al., 1998). This
envisages rural development as a participatory process that empowers rural dwellers to
take control of their own priorities for change.
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