2.3 THE GREEN REVOLUTION AND LAND TENURE
One of the objectives of those concerned with agrarian reforms
was to increase production. In the countries where food shortages
are chronic- India and Pakistan- as well, agrarian reforms
have been justified by the necessity to increase the production
of basic foodstuffs. Since the measures were mostly restricted
to a redistribution of control over land but brought about
little change in the traditional cultivation, little production
increases ensued from the reforms. The lack of measures to
change cultivation caused the two countries to depend largely
on cereal imports with the ensuing economic and political
consequences.
In the second half of the sixties, technological changes
took place in agriculture which exercised a strong influence
on the production level. The yield increases resulting from
the Green Revolution were so obvious that, within just a few
years, the new technologyhad taken over in all of the regions
where it was possible to apply it. It was remarkable that
these large yield increases bad been achieved without institutional
changes in the agrarian sector. This soon led to the assumption
that it was possible to develop agriculture without institutional
reforms and that one could do without complicated agrarian
reforms. However, this soon proved to be an erroneous conclusion.
A more comprehensive analysis of the process shows that numerous
bottlenecks arose due to the prevailing agrarran structure
and that the implications of the Green Revolution actually
made a change in the agrarian structure even more necessary.
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