THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURE

The origin of agriculture is seen as a long-term process of fundamental social and economic
significance. It was the first profound change in the relationship between fully modern humans
and the environment: people evolved into their current form some 200,000 years ago, yet they did
not begin to engage in agriculture until about 15,000–10,000 years before the present (BP). The
history and development of agriculture is intimately related with that of civilization. The period of
civilization generally refers to the time frame when complex societies with urban settlements,
agriculture, and advanced social structures began to emerge, which is typically considered to have
started around 4000 to 3000 BCE with the earliest civilizations appearing in Mesopotamia
(modern-day Iraq) and Egypt, and later expanding to other regions like the Indus Valley and
China.The earliest civilizations developed between 4000 and 3000 B.C.E., when the rise of
agriculture and trade allowed people to have surplus food and economic stability. Many people no
longer had to practice farming, allowing a diverse array of professions and interests to flourish in
a relatively confined area.
Agriculture has no single, simple origin. Agriculture developed independently in many regions of
the world. The first agriculture appears to have developed at the closing of the last Pleistocene
glacial period, or Ice Age (about 11,700 years ago in certain suitable regions, known as “core
areas” or “nuclear zones.” At that time temperatures warmed, glaciers melted, sea levels rose, and
ecosystems throughout the world reorganized. The changes were more dramatic in temperate
regions than in the tropics. Although global climate change played a role in the development of
agriculture, it does not account for the complex and diverse cultural responses that ensued, the
specific timing of the appearance of agricultural communities in different regions, or the specific
regional impact of climate change on local environments.

Hunter Gatherers
The earliest humans lived in small bands of several families (up to 50 or so). For over a million
years (paleolithic or old stone age) humans obtained food by hunting wild animals and gathering
plants (fruits, wild grains and roots for food). They depended almost completely on the local
environment for their sustenance. Such hunter gathering societies existed extensively until 10,000
years ago. A few isolated groups continue to this day. Paleolithic cultures were nomadic by
necessity. They wandered as small family groups in search of game and edible plants. Meat was
their primary source of protein, sugars and many vitamins were provided by fruits and berries,
starches from roots and seed, and oils and vitamins from nuts. As seasons changed, nomadic
peoples moved on to follow game, gathering whatever plants were available as they travelled.
Over time, some plants and animals have become domesticated, or dependent on these and other
human interventions for their long-term propagation or survival.
Domestication is a biological process in which, under human selection, organisms develop
characteristics that increase their utility, as when plants provide larger seeds, fruit, or tubers than
their wild progenitors. Domesticated plants come from a wide range of families (groups of closely
related genera that share a common ancestor. The grass, bean, and nightshade or potato families
have produced a disproportionately large number of cultigens (plant species/variety) because they
have characteristics that are particularly amenable to domestication.
Domesticated animals tend to have developed from species that are social in the wild and that, like
plants, could be bred to increase the traits that are advantageous for people. Most domesticated
animals are more docile than their wild counterparts, and they often produce more meat, wool, or

1
milk as well. They have been used for traction, transport, pest control, assistance, and
companionship and as a form of wealth. Species with abundant domesticated varieties, or breeds,
include the dog, cat, cattle, sheep, goat, swine, horse, chicken, and duck and goose.

Earliest beginnings
The domestication of plants and animals caused changes in their form; the presence or absence of
such changes indicates whether a given organism was wild or a domesticate. On the basis of such
evidence, one of the oldest transitions from hunting and gathering to agriculture has been identified
as dating to between 14,500 and 12,000 bp in Southwest Asia. It was experienced by groups known
as Epipaleolithic peoples, who survived from the end of the Paleolithic Period into early postglacial
times and used smaller stone tools (microblades) than their predecessors. The Natufians, an
Epipaleolithic culture located in the Levant, possessed stone sickles and intensively collected many
plants, such as wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum). In the eastern Fertile Crescent, Epipaleolithic
people who had been dependent on hunting gazelles (Gazella species) and wild goats and sheep
began to raise goats and sheep, but not gazelles, as livestock. By 12,000–11,000 BP, and possibly
earlier, domesticated forms of some plants had been developed in the region, and by 10,000 BP
domesticated animals were appearing. Elsewhere in the Old World the archaeological record for
the earliest agriculture is not as well-known at this time, but by 8500–8000 BP millet (Setaria
italica and Panicum miliaceum) and rice (Oryza sativa) were being domesticated in East Asia.
In the Americas, squash (Cucurbita pepo and C. moschata) existed in domesticated form in
southern Mexico and northern Peru by about 10,000–9000 bp. By 5000–3000 BP the Native
peoples of eastern North America and what would become the southwestern United States were
turning to agriculture. In sum, plant and animal domestication, and therefore agriculture, were
undertaken in a variety of places, each independent of the others. The dog appears to have been
the earliest domesticated animal, as it is found in archaeological sites around the world by the end
of the last glacial period.

Early development
The development of agriculture involves an intensification of the processes used to extract
resources from the environment: more food, medicine, fiber, and other resources can be obtained
from a given area of land by encouraging useful plant and animal species and discouraging others.
As the productivity and predictability of local resources increased, the logistics of their
procurement changed, particularly regarding the extent to which people were prepared to travel in
order to take advantage of seasonally available items. Group composition eventually became more
stable, mobility declined, and, as a consequence, populations increased.
In terms of material culture, durable houses and heavy tools such as pestles, mortars, and
grindstones, all of which had long been known, came into more general use. Although discussions
of prehistoric cultures often imply a direct correlation between the development of pottery and the
origins of agriculture, this is not a universal relationship. In some parts of the Old World, such as
Southwest Asia, and in the Americas, pottery appears long after agriculture starts, while in East
Asia, where the first pottery dates to as early as 13,700 bp, the opposite is the case.

Early agricultural societies

In the Old World, settled life developed on the higher ground from Iran to Anatolia and the Levant
and in China in the semiarid loess plains and the humid Yangtze valley. In contrast, the earliest
civilizations based on complex and productive agriculture developed on the alluviums of the

2
Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. Villages and townships existed in the Euphrates valley in the
latter part of the 7th millennium BP. Soon the population was dispersed in hamlets and villages
over the available area. Larger settlements provided additional services that the hamlets themselves
could not.
Sumer, located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
was the home of one of the world’s first civilizations. Sumer’s Early Dynastic Phase began about
5000 BP, a century or so after the development of a nuanced writing system based on the Sumerian
language. Barley was the main crop, but wheat, flax (Linum species), dates (Phoenix species),
apples (Malus species), plums (Prunus species), and grapes (Vitaceae species) were also grown.
This was the period during which the earliest known evidence of carefully bred sheep and goats
has been found; these animals were more numerous than cattle and were kept mainly for meat,
milk, butter, and cheese. It has been estimated that at Ur, a large town covering some 50 acres (20
hectares) within a cultivated enclave, there were 10,000 animals confined in sheepfolds and
stables, of which 3,000 were slaughtered each year. Ur’s population of about 6,000 people included
a labor force of 2,500 who annually cultivated 3,000 acres of land (some 1,200 hectares), leaving
an equal amount of land fallow. The workforce included storehouse recorders, work foremen,
overseers, and harvest supervisors, as well as laborers. Agricultural produce was allocated to
temple personnel in return for their services, to important people in the community, and to small
farmers.
The land was cultivated by teams of oxen pulling light unwheeled plows, and the grain was
harvested with sickles in the spring. Wagons had solid wheels with leather tires held in position
by copper nails. They were drawn by oxen or onagers (wild asses) that were harnessed by collars,
yokes, and headstalls and controlled by reins and a ring through the nose or upper lip and a strap
under the jaw. As many as four animals, harnessed abreast to a central pole, pulled a wagon. The
horse, which was probably domesticated about 6000 BP by pastoral nomads in what is now
Ukraine, did not displace the heartier onager as a draft animal in the region until about 4000 BP.
Soon after, written instructions appeared for the grooming, exercising, and medication of horses;
presumably for breeding purposes, horses were named and records of sires kept. The upper
highland areas continued to be exploited by transhumant nomads.

The Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human
history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early
civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a
boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. It coincided
with the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene.
And it forever changed how humans live, at, and interact, paving the way for modern civilization.
During the Neolithic period, hunter-gatherers roamed the natural world, foraging for their food.
But then a dramatic shift occurred. The foragers became farmers, transitioning from a hunter-
gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the
world also began to practice agriculture. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the
Neolithic Revolution.

Causes of the Neolithic Revolution

There was no single factor that led humans to begin farming roughly 12,000 years ago. The causes
of the Neolithic Revolution may have varied from region to region. The Earth entered a warming

3
trend around 14,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Some scientists theorize that climate
changes drove the Agricultural Revolution.
In the Fertile Crescent, bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the
Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley began to grow as it got warmer. Farming is thought to have
happened first in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where multiple groups of
people developed the practice independently. Thus, the “agricultural revolution” was likely a
series of revolutions that occurred at different times in different places. Pre-Neolithic people
called Natufians started building permanent houses in the region.Other scientists suggest that
intellectual advances in the human brain may have caused people to settle down. Religious artifacts
and artistic imagery—progenitors of human civilization—have been uncovered at the earliest
Neolithic settlements.
There are other variety of hypotheses as to why humans stopped foraging and started farming.
Population pressure may have caused increased competition for food and the need to cultivate
new foods; people may have shifted to farming in order to involve elders and children in food
production; humans may have learned to depend on plants they modified in early domestication
attempts and in turn, those plants may have become dependent on humans.
The Neolithic Era began when some groups of humans gave up the nomadic, hunter-
gatherer lifestyle completely to begin farming. It may have taken humans hundreds or even
thousands of years to transition fully from a lifestyle of subsisting on wild plants to keeping small
gardens and later tending large crop fields.

Neolithic Humans
The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey is one of the best-preserved Neolithic
settlements. Studying Çatalhöyük has given researchers a better understanding of the transition
from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to an agriculture lifestyle.
Archaeologists have unearthed more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings at the 9,500 year-old Çatalhöyük.
They estimate that as many as 8,000 people may have lived here at one time. The
houses were clustered so closely back-to-back that residents had to enter the homes through a hole
in the roof.
The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük appear to have valued art and spirituality. They buried their dead
under the floors of their houses. The walls of the homes are covered with murals of men hunting,
cattle and female goddesses.
Some of the earliest evidence of farming comes from the archaeological site of Tell Abu Hureyra,
a small village located along the Euphrates River in modern Syria. The village was inhabited from
roughly 11,500 to 7,000 B.C.
Inhabitants of Tell Abu Hureyra initially hunted gazelle and other game. Around 9,700 B.C. they
began to harvest wild grains. Several large stone tools for grinding grain have been found at the
site.

Agricultural Inventions
Plant domestication: Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley were among the
first crops domesticated by Neolithic farming communities in the Fertile Crescent. These early
farmers also domesticated lentils, chickpeas, peas and flax.
Domestication is the process by which farmers select for desirable traits by breeding successive
generations of a plant or animal. Over time, a domestic species becomes different from its wild
relative.

4
Neolithic farmers selected for crops that harvested easily. Wild wheat, for instance, falls to the
ground and shatters when it is ripe. Early humans bred for wheat that stayed on the stem for easier
harvesting.
Around the same time that farmers were beginning to sow wheat in the Fertile Crescent, people in
Asia started to grow rice and millet. Scientists have discovered archaeological remnants of Stone
Age rice paddies in Chinese swamps dating back at least 7,700 years.
In Mexico, squash cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops emerged
around 9,000 years ago.
Livestock: The first livestock were domesticated from animals that Neolithic humans hunted for
meat. Domestic pigs were bred from wild boars, for instance, while goats came from the Persian
ibex. Domesticated animals made the hard, physical labor of farming possible while their milk and
meat added variety to the human diet. They also carried infectious diseases: smallpox, influenza
and the measles all spread from domesticated animals to humans.
The first farm animals also included sheep and cattle. These originated in Mesopotamia between
10,000 and 13,000 years ago. Water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after
in China, India and Tibet.
Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appeared much later—around 4,000 B.C.—as
humans developed trade routes for transporting goods.

Effects of the Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution led to masses of people establishing permanent settlements supported
by farming and agriculture. It paved the way for the innovations of the ensuing Bronze
Age and Iron Age, when advancements in creating tools for farming, wars and art swept the world
and brought civilizations together through trade and conquest.
The Bronze Age, from 3300 BC, witnessed the intensification of agriculture in civilizations such
as Mesopotamian Sumer, ancient Egypt, ancient Sudan, the Indus Valley civilization of the Indian
subcontinent, ancient China, and ancient Greece.
From 100 BC to 1600 AD, world population continued to grow along with land use, as evidenced
by the rapid increase in methane emissions from cattle and the cultivation of rice. During the Iron
Age and era of classical antiquity, the expansion of ancient Rome, both the Republic and then the
Empire, throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Western Europe built upon existing systems of
agriculture while also establishing the manorial system that became a bedrock of medieval
agriculture.
In the Middle Ages, both in Europe and in the Islamic world, agriculture was transformed with
improved techniques and the diffusion of crop plants, including the introduction of sugar, rice,
cotton and fruit trees such as the orange to Europe by way of Al-Andalus. After the voyages of
Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Columbian exchange brought New World crops such
as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc to Europe, and Old World crops such as
wheat, barley, rice, and turnips, and livestock including horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the
Americas.
Irrigation, crop rotation, and fertilizers were introduced soon after the Neolithic Revolution and
developed much further in the past 200 years, starting with the British Agricultural Revolution.
Since 1900, agriculture in the developed nations, and to a lesser extent in the developing world,
has seen large rises in productivity as human labour has been replaced by mechanization, and
assisted by synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and selective breeding. The Haber-Bosch
process allowed the synthesis of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on an industrial scale, greatly

5
increasing crop yields. Modern agriculture has raised social, political, and environmental issues
including overpopulation, water pollution, biofuels, genetically modified
organisms, tariffs and farm subsidies. In response, organic farming developed in the twentieth
century as an alternative to the use of synthetic pesticides.

The British Agricultural Revolution

Between the 17th century and the mid-19th century, Britain saw a large increase in agricultural
productivity and net output. New agricultural practices like enclosure, mechanization, four-field
crop rotation to maintain soil nutrients, and selective breeding enabled an unprecedented
population growth to 5.7 million in 1750, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce, and
thereby helped drive the Industrial Revolution. The productivity of wheat went up from 19 US
bushels to around 30 US bushels by 1840, marking a major turning point in history.
Advice on more productive techniques for farming began to appear in England in the mid-17th
century, from writers such as Samuel Hartlib, Walter Blith and others. The main problem in
sustaining agriculture in one place for a long time was the depletion of nutrients, most importantly
nitrogen levels, in the soil. To allow the soil to regenerate, productive land was often let fallow
and, in some places, crop rotation was used. The Dutch four-field rotation system was popularised
by the British agriculturist Charles Townshend in the 18th century. The system (wheat, turnips,
barley and clover) opened up a fodder crop and grazing crop allowing livestock to be bred year-
round. The use of clover was especially important as the legume roots replenished soil nitrates. The
mechanisation and rationalisation of agriculture was another important factor. Robert
Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding and initiated a process of inbreeding to
maximise desirable traits from the mid-18th century, such as the New Leicester sheep. Machines
were invented to improve the efficiency of various agricultural operation, such as Jethro Tull's seed
drill of 1701 that mechanised seeding at the correct depth and spacing and Andrew
Meikle's threshing machine of 1784. Ploughs were steadily improved, from Joseph
Foljambe's Rotherham iron plough in 1730 to James Small's improved "Scots Plough" metal in
1763. In 1789 Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies was producing 86 plough models for different
soils. Powered farm machinery began with Richard Trevithick's stationary steam engine, used to
drive a threshing machine, in 1812. Mechanisation spread to additional farm uses throughout the
19th century. The first petrol-driven tractor was built in America by John Froelich in 1892.
John Bennet Lawes began the scientific investigation of fertilization at the Rothamsted
Experimental Station in 1843. He investigated the impact of inorganic and organic fertilizers on
crop yield and founded one of the first artificial fertilizer manufacturing factories in 1842.
Fertilizer, in the shape of sodium nitrate deposits in Chile, was imported to Britain by John
Thomas North as well as guano (birds droppings). The first commercial process for fertilizer
production was the obtaining of phosphate from the dissolution of coprolites in sulphuric acid.

The 20th Century

Dan Albone constructed the first commercially successful gasoline-powered general-purpose
tractor in 1901, and the 1923 International Harvester Farmall tractor marked a major point in the
replacement of draft animals (particularly horses) with machines. Since that time, self-propelled
mechanical harvesters (combines), planters, transplanters and other equipment have been
developed, further revolutionizing agriculture. These inventions allowed farming tasks to be done
with a speed and on a scale previously impossible, leading modern farms to output much greater
volumes of high-quality produce per land unit.

6
The Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate represented a major breakthrough
and allowed crop yields to overcome previous constraints. It was first patented by German
chemist Fritz Haber. In 1910 Carl Bosch, while working for German chemical company BASF,
successfully commercialized the process and secured further patents. In the years after World War
II, the use of synthetic fertilizer increased rapidly, in sync with the increasing world population.
Collective farming was widely practiced in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China,
and Vietnam, starting in the 1930s in the Soviet Union; one result was the Soviet famine of 1932–
33. Another consequence occurred during the Great Leap Forward in China initiated by Mao Tse-
tung that resulted in the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961 and ultimately reshaped the
thinking of Deng Xiaoping.
In the past century agriculture has been characterized by increased productivity, the substitution
of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides for labour, water pollution, and farm subsidies. Other
applications of scientific research since 1950 in agriculture include gene
manipulation, hydroponics and the development of economically viable biofuels such as ethanol.
The number of people involved in farming in industrial countries fell radically from 24 percent of
the American population to 1.5 percent in 2002. The number of farms also decreased, and their
ownership became more concentrated; for example, between 1967 and 2002, one million pig farms
in America consolidated into 114,000, with 80 percent of the production on factory
farms. According to the World watch Institute, 74 percent of the world's poultry, 43 percent of
beef, and 68 percent of eggs are produced this way.
Famines however continued to sweep the globe through the 20th century. Through the effects of
climatic events, government policy, war and crop failure, millions of people died in each of at least
ten famines between the 1920s and the 1990s.

The Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution of the 1970s, is credited with saving over a billion
people worldwide from starvation.
The Green Revolution was a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives,
between the 1940s and the late 1970s. It increased agriculture production around the world,
especially from the late 1960s. The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug and credited with saving
over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal
grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques,
distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.
Synthetic nitrogen, along with mined rock phosphate, pesticides and mechanization, have greatly
increased crop yields in the early 20th century. Increased supply of grains has led to cheaper
livestock as well. Further, global yield increases were experienced later in the 20th century when
high-yield varieties of common staple grains such as rice, wheat, and corn were introduced as a
part of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution exported the technologies (including
pesticides and synthetic nitrogen) of the developed world to the developing world. Thomas
Malthus famously predicted that the Earth would not be able to support its growing population,
but technologies such as the Green Revolution have allowed the world to produce a surplus of
food.
Although the Green Revolution at first significantly increased rice yields in Asia, yield then
levelled off. The genetic "yield potential" has increased for wheat, but the yield potential for rice
has not increased since 1966, and the yield potential for maize has "barely increased in 35 years".

7
It takes only a decade or two for herbicide-resistant weeds to emerge, and insects become resistant
to insecticides within about a decade, delayed somewhat by crop rotation.

Organic agriculture
For most of its history, agriculture has been organic, without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, and
without GMOs. With the advent of chemical agriculture, Rudolf Steiner called for farming without
synthetic pesticides, and his Agriculture Course of 1924 laid the foundation for biodynamic
agriculture. Lord Northbourne developed these ideas and presented his manifesto of organic
farming in 1940. This became a worldwide movement, and organic farming is now practiced in
many countries.

Economics, politics, and agriculture

Agriculture has always been influenced by the actions of governments around the world. Never
has this been more evident than during the first half of the 20th century, when two major wars
profoundly disrupted food production. In response to the tumultuous economic climate, European
countries implemented tariffs and other measures to protect local agriculture. Such initiatives had
global ramifications, and by the mid-20th century various international organizations had been
established to monitor and promote agricultural development and the well-being of rural societies.
Western Europe, as the 20th century opened, was recovering from an economic depression during
which most of the countries had turned to protecting agriculture through tariffs, with the major
exceptions being Great Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. In the first decade of the century
there was an increasing demand for agricultural products, which was a result of industrialization
and population growth, but World War I produced devastating losses in land fertility, livestock,
and capital. The resulting shortage of food supplies did, however, benefit farmers for a time until,
in the 1920s, expanded production and a generalized recovery across Europe depressed prices.
Agricultural tariffs, generally suspended during the war, were gradually reintroduced.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought a new wave of protectionism, leading some industrial
countries to look toward self-sufficiency in food supplies. In countries such as France, Germany,
and Italy, where agriculture was already protected, the tariff structure was reinforced by new and
more drastic measures, while countries such as Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium
abandoned free trade and began to support their farmers in a variety of ways. The United States
first raised tariffs and then undertook to maintain the prices of farm products. Major exporters of
farm products, such as Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, tried a number of
plans to maintain prices.
One of the most effective of the nontariff measures was the “milling ratio” for wheat or, less often,
rye, under which millers were legally obliged to use a certain minimum percentage of domestically
produced grain in their grist. Although used in only a few European countries in the 1920s, this
device became customary in Europe and also in some non-European countries from 1930 up to
World War II. Import quotas, adopted on a large scale across Europe and elsewhere, also became
a major protective device during the 1930s. The most radical measures, however, were undertaken
in Germany under Adolf Hitler, where the Nazi government, seeking self-sufficiency in food, fixed
farm prices at relatively high levels and maintained complete control over imports.
Some exporting countries adopted extreme measures during the Depression in an attempt to
maintain prices for their commodities. Brazil burned surplus coffee stocks, destroying more than
eight billion pounds of coffee over 10 years beginning in 1931. An Inter-American Coffee

8
Agreement, signed in 1940, assigned export quotas to producer countries for shipment to the
United States and other consuming countries and was effective during World War II. Other
commodity agreements met with very limited success.
Just as World War I significantly lowered food production in Europe, so too did World War II.
Agricultural production declined in most of the European countries; shipping became difficult;
and trade channels shifted. In contrast, agriculture in the United States, undisturbed by military
action and with assurance of full demand and relatively high prices, increased productivity. The
United States, Great Britain, and Canada cooperated in a combined food board to allocate available
supplies. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was organized
in 1943 to administer postwar relief, while the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations was established in 1945 to provide education and technical assistance for
agricultural development throughout the world.
Through postwar assistance given primarily by the United States and the United Nations, recovery
in Europe was rapid. Western Europe was greatly helped from 1948 on by U.S. aid under the
Marshall Plan, administered through the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation
(OEEC). In September 1961 this organization was replaced by the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD), which subsequently pursued agricultural programs that
dealt, for example, with economic policies, standardization, and development. The eventual
expansion of the OECD’s membership to a number of non-European countries underscores the
manner in which, in the decades after World War II, the story of agriculture’s relationship to
politics and economics became a truly global one.
Most developed countries continue to offer some type of protection to their farmers—price
supports, import quotas, and plans for handling surplus production. Notable examples are the
agricultural programs run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and by the European Union. On
the other hand, many of the developing countries have had food deficits, with little in the way of
exportable goods to pay for food imports. Several national and international organizations have
been established in an effort to deal with the problems of the developing countries, and direct
assistance has also been provided by the governments of developed countries.
Individual farmers in the countries where commercial agriculture is important have been forced to
make changes to meet problems caused by world surpluses and resultant low world prices for farm
products. Thus, in many countries, farmers have increased productivity through adopting advanced
technology. This has permitted each worker, generally speaking, to farm larger areas and has thus
reduced the number of farmers. In some countries, commercialization has led to farming by large-
scale corporations, and since the late 20th century, the world tendency increasingly has been
toward larger farms. Nevertheless, in the early 21st century, the farm operated by a single family
remained the dominant unit of production in most of the developing world.

Agriculture and economic development in developing countries

Agriculture can provide many practical solutions to the economic development of emerging
countries. It is key for leaders and government policy-makers to seize the opportunities provided
by such a green engine for growth, since agriculture is one of the main components of sustainable
economic and social development.
The biggest challenge for emerging and developing countries is to transform traditional
agricultural sectors, developed over centuries and deeply embedded into the socio-economic
structures of society, into more industrial economies. Increase in output and productivity are
essential to sustain urbanization and industrialization in developing countries. Yet, the

9
development of industrial (and capital intensive) agriculture also needs to benefit smallholders and
those living in rural, impoverished areas, while ensuring enough resources for the future.
Not only does agriculture fuel economic growth through the provision of food and the necessity
for unskilled labor, it also supplies capital and labor to other industrial sectors and can serve as a
market for industrial output and innovation.
For unskilled labor and sustainable growth
While some may doubt the impact agriculture has on overall economic development, empirical
and historical evidence prove its necessity to a functioning economy.
Strong agricultural actors of past centuries are considered today among the most economically-
advanced countries. Increase in agricultural productivity and international trade transformed labor
and made it available to other industries. Moreover, economists Bravo-Ortega and Lederman
published a World Bank paper in 2005 wherein they showed the important positive effects
agricultural development could have on national welfare. There is indeed a strong interdependency
between agricultural sectors and non-agricultural activities, with the former significantly
contributing to the development of the latter.
Christiaensen, Demery and Kuhn (2011) have deconstructed the effects of agricultural
development and growth on national welfare and discovered that the sector had a large growth
multiplier effect on poverty reduction, especially at an early stage of economic development. Since
lower-income households play a large role in contributing to agriculture, improvement in the sector
leads to more poverty reduction than in non-agricultural sectors.

A need for public intervention and expenditure

In most emerging countries, agriculture is the impoverished relative of public expenditure. While
the New Partnership for Africa Development (2001) advised Sub-Saharan African countries to
allocate about 10% of public expenditure to agriculture, most countries proved unable to achieve
such a target. Western and other developed countries that finance overseas development assistance
have also neglected agriculture in recent decades. An effort is required by both emerging countries
and developed economies to remedy this financial flaw.
What can be the role of the State to foster and sustain such development? Where is financing
crucial? The transition from traditional agricultural production to an industrial system requires
land tenure reform so that individual farmers can observe the possibility of personal gain (cf.
agrarian reforms and land redistribution in eastern Asia in the late 20 th century) and trained
individuals can supply the sector with the agricultural research needed to fuel innovation. A major
emphasis should thus be placed on large expenditures for educational and vocational training.
Another central component to allow for the emergence of a productive economy is conventional
infrastructure, required not only for agriculture but also for overall development (mobile phone
penetration, roads, electricity,

10