Agriculture and economic development.

A he last three decades have been marked by a resurgence of interest in the determinants of the process of economic and social development. Before the Second World War, colonies provided agricultural (mainly tropical) commodities and raw materials to the metropolitan areas in line with the complementary trade and production pattern which prevailed between the industrialized center and the primary-producing periphery. Hence, the structure of production and society in the latter embracing most of the developing countries of today tended to be characterized by small-scale traditional subsistence agriculture, on the one hand, and large-scale export-oriented plantation-type agriculture on the other. The industrialization of the Third World was clearly not desired by the colonial rulers before the Second World War as such a development would have been inconsistent with the underlying division of labor and trading patterns within and among colonial blocs. Thus the end of World War II signalled the beginning of a new era for the less-developed countries, involving the evolution from symbiotic to inward-looking growth and from dependent to a somewhat more independent relation vis-a-vis the excolonial powers. Because the great bulk of the total output (GNP) originated in agriculture and most of the labor force was employed in that sector, a key question which had to be addressed was what role and function agriculture had to perform throughout the process of economic and social development. An understand-