RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE EVOLUTION OF ITS PARADIGM

IN THE PHILIPPINES S H E R W I N B . M A N U A L

Outline Of Presentation

- Introduction - Definition of Terms - Paradigm Shifts in Rural Development - Key Strands and Rural Dev’t School of Thoughts- Government Policies

INTRODUCTIONRural development as field of study and economic

activity can be traced during the feudal system. In this system agriculture was the main economic activity whereby the feudal lords owned lands and serfs worked for the feudal lords. Its this system state emerged in Europe and it brought about the state self substance in terms of  major provision such food health education and so on. (Ismail)

In the books of economic and development guru, Todaro, he has cited the numerous rural activity that fueled many great economies in the world.

In the Philippines, rural development concept can be traced back as far as the Spanish time but more strikingly after the World War 2 ended.

Roughly in the Philippines, rural development can be characterized in the following phases as it evolves through time: 1960’s as modernization, the 1970’s as state of intervention, the 1980’s as market liberation and the 1990’s as participation and empowerment.

INTRODUCTION

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Rural – is usually areas which are sparsely settled places away from the influence of large cities and towns. People in rural areas live in villages, on farms and in other isolated houses, as in pre-industrial societies. Rural areas usually have agriculture character though many areas are characterized by an economy based on logging, mining, petroleum and natural gas exploration, or tourism.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

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.

Development includes:

The people (self esteem, dignity, security, potential); the economy; technology; Culture; Moral values; 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

DEFINITION OF TERMS

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.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Rural Development – As a phenomenon, it is the result of interactions between various physical, technological, economic, socio-cultural, institutional factors.

Rural Development – 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.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Rural Development, ergo, is defined 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 (Singh, 1986).

PARADIGM SHIFT IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT

RURAL DEV’T PARADIGM SHIFT

STRANDS AND SWITCHES IN RURAL DEV’T THINKING

SMALL FARM FOCUS

This is the “agricultural growth based on small-farm efficiency’ paradigm.

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.

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).

SMALL FARM FOCUS

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 high- yielding 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).

SMALL FARM FOCUS

The notion of ‘rural growth linkages’ has proved particularly pervasive and durable (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).

‘The growth of the non- farm economy depends on the vitality of the farm economy; without agricultural growth in rural areas, redressing poverty is an impossible task’ (Singh, 1990).

PROCESS APPROACHES

TO RURAL DEV’TThe 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

KEY STRANDS ON APPROACHES TO RURAL DEV’TThe 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;

KEY STRANDS ON APPROACHES TO RURAL DEV’T

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.

KEY STRANDS ON APPROACHES TO RURAL DEV’T

CONCLUSIONCurrently 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 (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.

CONCLUSIONIf 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 non- rural 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.

GOVERNMENT 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

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).

SECTORAL POLICIES

• Masagana 99 and launched in 1974, the program called for government assistance in the form of credit, irrigation, extension services and fertilizer subsidy.

•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 . •NGA transformed to NFA in January 14, 1981 – PD 1770

• Agrarian reform (land reform)in 70’s 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.

• 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.

• the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). Launched in 1988 under Republic Act 6675

• 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.

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.

SUMMARY

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 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).

DAGHANG SALAMAT!