Transforming Traditional Agriculture

.The debate on Theodore W Schultz's theories about transformation of traditional agriculture, which appeared in the pages of EPW more than eleven years ago, did not extend to tracing the Schultzian errors to their source. In fact, Schultz's characterisation of traditional agriculture was itself erroneous because there was an implicit assumption behind all that Schultz said of a certain mode of production cultivation with hired labour. In thus implicitly attributing a spurious universality to capitalist farming, Schultz was being blind to agricultural reality in underdeveloped countries, besides failing to take into account the persistence of peasant farming and family farming in the most advanced capitalist countries like the United States.