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The problems of rural development are increasingly
of interest to regional planners and regional
policymakers. Rural development projects in the
developed countries, and often in the developing
countries as well, put more emphasis on rural
industry, tourism, or services than on the modernization of agriculture. But the latter still remains the basic rural function, at least in terms of
resource utilization. Agriculture is not generally
treated as a dynamic element of regional development. The reason is simple: the rapid development
of agriculture, contrary to the rapid growth of
industry or the tertiary sector, has generally been
accompanied by a substantial decline of employment.
Consequently, at least according to the experiences of the developed nations, modern agriculture
cannot fulfill the basic function of a developed
region, because depopulation undermines the functioning of services.
These effects are of a certain type of technical-economic modernization. On a global scale,
however, we must suppose the existence of different
types, aspects, and, consequently, different effects
of agricultural modernization.
For what we call "modern agriculture" today,
North America has served as the innovation center.
This type of modern agriculture has been characterized by high capital intensity, a high technical
level, massive utilization of machinery, clear
profit-orientation, very low manpower use, owneroperated private farms, and a great abundance of land. We can add that agriculture has played a
secondary role as compared to the dominant industry,
and that the density of agricultural population was
already low at the beginning of modernization. This
North American type of technical modernization was
introduced, with modifications, to Western Europe.
The western part of the European continent has a
long tradition in certain agricultural innovations,
such as animal breeding and crop rotations, but the
highly mechanized agricultural technology was transplanted there from North America. Modifications were
justified by the smaller scale of farms and by
certain peasant traditions surviving in Western
Europe. A special innovation center for modern
agriculture was formed in Japan, suitable for the
microfundia and high density of agricultural population. |
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