the usa as a developing country: historical insights into contemporary agricultural development

The USA as a developing country

Students in developed countries pre- paring for overseas careers in agricultural development may not appreciate the value of studying their own country’s agricultural system, especially its history. Three topics chosen from the agricultural development of the USA show the relevance of such studies: disposition of the public lands, programmes to help sharecroppers in the cotton-producing South in the 19309, and interagency conflicts and institutional factors in the overall agricultural programme of the 1930s. All involve generic issues now being faced by many agriculturally developing na- tions, and the US record in each offers valuable and sometimes surprising insights into their subtleties.

Keywords: Agricultural history; Rural development; USA

The author is Research Associate at the School of Nutrition, Tufts University, Med- ford, MA 02155, USA

This is an edited version of an article presented at the Conference on Agri- culture, Change, and Human Values, Gainesville, Florida, 18-21 October 1982. Proceedings may be obtained from Pro- fessor R. Haynes, The Humanities and Agriculture Program, University of Florida, 381 Arts and Sciences Building, Gaines- ville, FL 32811, USA.

Historical insights into contemporary agricultural development

William Lockeretz

Students in a developed country like the USA can train for a career in overseas agricultural development without having had any exposure to their own agricultural system. Granted that such a system has little in common with the far less technologically evolved ones that they eventually will be concerned with. Nevertheless, a potentially very valuable learning opportunity has been forgone when a student acquires specialized knowledge of agricultural issues as they occur in an unfamiliar setting without also acquiring at least some knowledge of these same issues as they occur at home. One would wonder about a student who majored in some foreign language, but who did not have at least a passing acquaintance with English literature or a serviceable command of English grammar and syntax.

Yet this is quite analogous to what may happen when a student studies ‘agricultural development’ rather than ‘agriculture’. Indeed, at most non-agricultural schools in the USA, even those students who might wish to learn about their own country’s agriculture have little opportunity to do so. However, it is more than a question of opportunity. Some students interested in the social, institutional or political aspects of agricultural development see no particular reason to bother with US agriculture, since they intend to work on these issues as they apply to some other part of the world. Only the exotic, the remote and the unfamiliar attract them. What matters is the Third World, and the ‘thirder’ the better.

Why bother studying about the USA, which is the quintessential example of a ‘developed’ agriculture ? Any students who feel that way might consider the following quotation:

When a people or a region rely almost exclusively for their living upon the extraction of raw materials . . these natural resources are put under a severe drain to support a growing population. The income which comes to a region from cutting trees or growing cotton and bringing them to the point of

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transportation is only a small fraction of the income, the ‘value added’, when those trees have been processed into paper or the cotton into overalls. If a region depends - as most ‘colonial’ regions are forced to do - almost entirely upon the income from cutting the lumber or growing the cotton, and hardly at all upon making the paper, the textiles, the furniture, or any of the other articles manufactured from the raw resources, then the pressure to ‘mine’ the fertility of the soil, to devastate the forests for lumber, to deplete the oil fields and coal reserves becomes very great indeed.

One hears a similar view quite frequently these days in connection with any number of former colonies, an understandable reaction to earlier, more exploitative, attitudes. Yet remarkably, this quotation is from 1944, before some promoters of the supposedly modern view of these things were born. But even more remarkable is the fact that the

‘colonial’ region is the Tennessee Valley. (The quotation is from former Tennessee Valley Authority Chairman, David Lilienthal.‘) Indeed, even while the USA as a whole was well on its way to becoming a global agricultural power, a major portion of it was trying to deal with a fundamental issue that now affects agriculturally developing countries everywhere.

In fact, every developed country was once a developing country, and US agriculture once faced a great many of the problems and decisions now being pondered by many other countries. What a shame for a student to miss the benefits of studying such issues in a setting whose economic, political and social features are so much more familiar.

This does not require becoming an expert on the agricultural system of one’s own country; rather only a reasonable level of exposure to those aspects of its agricultural past that are most relevant to contemporary agricultural development issues is necessary, together with enough familiarity with the present situation to appreciate the eventual results of earlier policies.

Learning from US agricultural development

From the long and rich agricultural history of the USA have been selected just three topics as illustrations of the potential benefits of historical studies in agricultural development. They are all well documented in many excellent and readily available primary and secondary sources; they relate to generic problems that arise in many different agricultural systems all over the world; and they occurred sufficiently long ago that we can see their long-range consequences (which often were quite unanticipated), but not so long ago that the context is completely irrelevant to today’s world.

All of these examples reveal some negative consequences in US agricultural development. This is because the examples were selected for their instructional value, not because they represent the dominant features of that development. It should be clearly understood that what are described here are adverse side effects of the evolution of an immensely productive and efficient agricultural system.

The first example, land policy, is perhaps the single most pervasive substantive issue in agricultural development. The second, tenancy in the Cotton South, shows the value of a broad-based regional analysis; the third, bureaucratic and political considerations, covers the very important gap separating broad theoretical ideas from specific action

‘David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March, 2 ed, Harper, New York, 1944, p 56. programmes.

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Land tenure

Agricultural development anywhere must inevitably deal with land ownership, for as Breimyer has commented: ‘In all agrarian societies the rules governing access to land and division of its bounty go far to account for both the family structure and prevailing economic system.‘* His dictum that ‘land has provided many lessons to be taught all who will learn’3 seems particularly applicable to studies of US land tenure.

Of the many different systems of land ownership used at various times, the dominant one, at least as an ideal, was that of moderate-sized farms owned by the families that operated them. The most important exception, the plantation system of the South, will be considered in the next section.

The independent farm was the goal of most of the transfer of undeveloped public land to private ownership. The best known and most important law governing this transfer, which occurred during the entire nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, was the Homestead Act of 1862. The egalitarian spirit of this ‘act of extraordinary benevolence’4 contrasted sharply with the extreme stratification of land ownership in the former mother country and much of the remainder of Europe.’ Culminating a trend towards increasingly easier terms for acquiring land since the turn of the nineteenth century, this law made land available free to those who settled and farmed it.

%arold F. Breimyer, Farm Policy: 13 Essays, Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA, 1977. p 10. 3/hid, b 18. “Paul Gates. ‘Homesteadina in the Hiah Plains’, Agrihural History, kol 51, No?, 1977, pp 109-133. 5A. Whitney Griswold, Farming and Demo- cracy, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1948, Ch 3. 6William Lockeretz, ‘The lessons of the Dust Bowl’, American Scientist, Vol 66, No 5, 1978, pp 560-569. ‘Great Plains Committee, The Future of the Great Plains, House Dot No 144, 75th Congress, 1st Session, Washington, DC, 1937.

Adapted land use

The clearest lesson from studies of this process is the need to match the land tenure system to the best suited production system, and therefore to the ecological and economic conditions of the particular region. While this may sound trite in today’s ecologically aware world, its subtleties can easily be underestimated. The consequences of violating it are well illustrated by the homesteading era.

Despite many adjustments to the Homestead Act, the land system never attained the flexibility needed for a region so large and heterogeneous. An obvious inflexibility was that the same farm size (160 acres) was used in the semi-arid Great Plains as in the more humid prairies. This forced settlers into intensive cropping in areas where extensive livestock grazing would have been more suitable. This was one - but only one - factor leading to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s the most spectacular example of the consequences of poorly adapted land use.6 A government panel investigating this problem presented a far-reaching and understanding analysis in 1937 whose ecological awareness anticipates that of more recent times by several decades.’ Their report can be recommended to any student of agricultural development as an excellent example of clarity and thoroughness (but also brevity!) in a regional case study. Moreover, it reflects a commitment and passion rare in more recent government reports (cf quotation from Baldwin at end of the section on interagency disputes).

Another problem was that the land within a particular region typically was not classified by appropriate use - dryland farming, irrigated farming, grazing, forestry or mineral extraction - before being settled. This caused great distress for individual farmers and a considerable squandering of the nation’s natural resources. Classification is a slow, tedious process, while the pressure to acquire and develop land is immediate. Even today, ill-conceived land use schemes still occur in the

FOOD POLICY May 1984 159


USA. The problem will be even more severe in a country that lacks enough professionals in land resources and where economic problems exert an even greater pressure for an immediate financial return from land.

Speculation and tenancy

Disposition of the public domain also fell short of realizing its framers’ ideals because of speculation in supposedly ‘free’ land. The leniency of the Homestead Act, intended to permit widespread settlement by independent smallholders, often had the opposite effect. Free land encouraged settlement by people with inadequate experience or who lacked the capital needed for the livestock, buildings and equipment of an economically viable farm.s High interest payments could not be met during the periodic financial depressions.’ Inappropriate land use further contributed to farm abandonment and therefore played into the hands of speculators. The problem was particularly bad on the semi-arid Great Plains because of the ‘boom and bust’ pattern caused by highly variable rainfall.

Land speculatively acquired from bankrupt farmers could then be resold to new settlers or rented out to former owner-operators. Speculation and tenancy might seem unlikely where land is abundant and relatively cheap, or even free. It is ironic that many tenants had left a comparable situation in Europe in the hope of getting a piece of land of their own.

In developing its land policy, the USA had the unique advantage of having a large public domain with no established landowners or entrenched historical and political constraints. Nevertheless, as Gates has commented, ‘Not one of the policies adopted worked out in accordance with its advocates’ objectives (or what they publicly stated as their objectives), speculator accumulations were rarely contained, whatever the intent of the legislation’.‘0

Advocates of land reform in many parts of the world have goals similar to those of nineteenth century land policy in the USA. Where land is in short supply and where strongly ingrained patterns must be overcome, fulfilment of an egalitarian ideal will be even more difficult. In the record of the United States, land reformers of today can find an excellent example of how much more is involved than merely giving each person a certain amount of land.

The Cotton South

Effective agricultural development on a comprehensive scale must take

‘Thomas LeDuc, ‘History and appraisal of a regional approach that considers the interactions among the natural U.S. land policy to 1862’, in Howard Ottoson, ed, land Use Policy and Prob-

resources, agricultural system, people and institutions specific to the

/ems in the Unifed States, University of region. The South between the world wars is a particularly appropriate

Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1963, pp region for students of agricultural development, for several reasons: 3-27. ‘Allan Bogue, From Prairie to Cornbelt: 0 Its landholding system, even after the Civil War, was similar to the Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century, University of Chi-

plantations of many developing countries.

cage Press, Chicago, IL, 1963, Ch 3. 0 Problems such as illiteracy, dilapidated housing, inadequate health

“‘Paul Gates, ‘An overview of American services and disenfranchisement remained widespread much longer land policy’, in Vivian Wiser, ed, Two Centuries of American Agriculture, Agri-

than in most other parts of the country.

cultural History Society, Washington, DC, 0 Agriculture was dominated by a single cash crop more than in any

1976, pp 213-229. other major region of the country; moreover, this was a non-food

160 FOOD POLICY May 1984

“Arthur Raper, ‘The cotton belt’, in Rural Life in the United States, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1949, pp 334-359. “C.S. Johnson, E.R. Embree and W.W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenan- cv, Universitv of North Carolina Press, dhapel Hill, iC, 1935, excerpts reprinted in George McGovern, ed, Agricultural Thought in the Twentieth Century, Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, IN, 1967, pp 190- 208.

0

0


crop in a region with serious malnutrition. The region (in part) was the territory of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which instituted the most imaginative, comprehensive - and substantially successful - regional development programme in the nation’s history, one that has been emulated in many parts of the world. Several important national programmes, described later, were particularly important in the South because of the region’s special characteristics.

Historical background

After the Civil War, many farmers in several regions of the country moved down the ‘agricultural ladder’ from owners to tenants or labourers. This contradiction of the ideal of the independent owner- operator was especially pronounced in the South. Despite the freeing of the slaves, earlier social, political and economic values and institutions continued to remain important. Also, not only the agricultural system, but even the lifestyle of both towns and rural areas was conditioned by cotton to an extraordinary degree.” This crop was particularly vulnerable to domestic and world markets: in 1932 its price was 6.5 cents/lb, from a post-war high of 31.3 cents/lb in 1919. It also is very erosion prone and nutrient depleting, especially when raised in monoculture, which was the common practice of the time.

Compared with the rest of the country, where tenancy was mainly an economic relationship, southern tenancy was particularly oppressive. The lowest rank of tenants in the South, sharecroppers, were politically and socially subordinate as well. Even their family life was substantially under the landowners’ control.

Sharecroppers obtained not only land, but also draft animals, implements, fertilizer and seed on credit from the landlord. As a consequence, they were virtually always in debt, even for family living expenses. An influential book of the 1930s described how this ‘new kind of slavery’ operated:

As a part of the age-old custom in the South, the landlord keeps the books and handles the sale of all the crops. The owner returns to the cropper only what is left over of his share of the profits after deductions for all items which the landlord had advanced to him during the year . . . The landlord often supplies the food - ‘pantry supplies’ or ‘furnish’ - and other current necessities through his own store or commissary. Fancy prices at the commissary, exorbitant interest, and careless or manipulated accounts, make it easy for the owner to keep his tenants constantly in debt . . . . Even more than the credit system, the traditions of the region hold the tenant in thrall . . . . It continues on the old master and slave pattern . . . Although white families now form the great majority of the cotton tenants, the old ‘boss and black’ attitude still pervades the whole system . . . The status of tenancy demands complete dependence . . . . Even the choice of diet is determined . . . The present system is so constructed that the landless remain landless and the propertyless remain propertyless.”

New Deal programmes

Several innovative and controversial programmes to attack these problems were begun in the 1930s as part of the ‘New Deal’ of Franklin Roosevelt. The following four federal agencies are particularly relevant here:

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This was established in 1933 and



j30p cit. Ref 1. 14Wayne Rasmussen and Gladys Baker, Price-Support and Adjustment Programs from 1933 through 1978: a Short History, Agriculture Information Bulletin NO 424, US Dept of Agriculture, Washington, DC, 1979. j5Hugh Hammond Bennett, Soil Consefva- tion, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1939; Rus- sell Lord, To Ho/d This Soil, Mist Pub No 321, US Dept of Agriculture, Washington, DC, 1938. ‘6President’s Committee on Farm Tenan- cy, Farm Tenancy, House Dot No 149, 75th Congress, 1st Session, Washington, DC, 1937. ‘Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration, University of North Caroli- na Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1968, pp 281-282.

served a seven-state region that included the major cotton sharecrop- ping areas. It launched an extremely broad programme that involved fertilizer research and production, demonstrations of better farming methods, soil conservation, reforestation, flood control, hydroelectric- ity and navigation improvement. Its approach emphasized a high degree of decentralization and ‘grass roots’ participation, and a unified, integrated plan that simultaneously dealt with all the natural and human resources of the region.13

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). This was established in 1933 and was national in scope, as were the other two agencies of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) described below. Its price support payments and production control programmes were particularly important for cotton. The plough-down of 10 million acres of already planted cotton in 1933 was one of the two most dramatic and controversial actions in the history of farm price support programmes. The more conventional devices, especially payments for acreage reductions, have been part of the farm programme in varied forms for the past half-century (although, characteristically, they were labelled as ‘temporary’ at the time.)14

The Soil Conservation Service (SCS). This was established in 1935; it conducts research and demonstration projects and provides technical and financial assistance for farmers who institute practices such as terracing, contour farming, grass waterways and strip cropping. Erosion by rainfall in the South, especially on cotton, was a particularly severe and widely publicized soil erosion problem that helped galvanize public support for a major national conservation effort.15

The Farm Security Administration (FSA). This replaced, in 1937, the Resettlement Administration (1935) and attempted to deal with the bottom rungs of the agricultural ladder: sharecroppers, migrants, labourers and marginal farmers. It was established mainly in accordance with the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy,16 which focused particularly on the plight of sharecroppers in the South. An innovative and controversial agency, the FSA was embroiled in almost continuous struggles with other branches of USDA, some members of Congress and outside interest groups, as discussed later. Its activities, which were particularly important in the South, included cooperative farms, subsistence homesteads, rehabilitation loans and new kinds of long-term leases and other tenure arrangements. Underlying these programmes was a very distinct ideal:

While other agencies, such as the AAA, the SCS, and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), distributed their benefits more broadly, with farmers in middle and upper classes receiving the lion’s share, the FSA served those at or near the bottom. Furthermore, not limiting itself to technical problems of price, production, conservation, or electric power, the FSA promoted education, interaction, and political awareness - even more dangerously, it preached a philosophy of life. It was thus more intimately and visibly involved in the changes that the New Deal was bringing to the South.”

Taken together, these agencies engaged in many of the agricultural and

rural development activities now common around the world. Moreover,

since they worked in the same region at the same time, they displayed



the interactions and conflicts possible between programmes having

different methods or goals.

Effects of production controls on sharecroppers

A particularly striking example of this type of conflict involved tenants and landowners in the cotton programmes of the AAA. The AAA paid farmers to reduce cotton production, in order to raise the price. But it was not clear who in particular should or would receive the benefits from direct payments and higher prices. Farm labourers, who had no commodities to sell, would gain only if the benefits ‘trickled down’. Sharecroppers could expect little benefit because of domination by landowners. Similarly, smallholders producing mainly for family con- sumption would hardly benefit from higher prices. In contrast, landowners could expect to receive a considerable portion of the increase in total net income. Indeed, a continuing problem in subsequent price support actions in the USA had been that land, as the input with the least elastic supply, is the ‘residual claimant’ that captures an increase in net farm income unless specific steps are taken to channel some of the increase elsewhere, such as to labour.

The AAA did not do this, so its cotton programme offered the most to large landowners. In fact, its effects on sharecroppers were worse than neutral. The payments were supposed to be divided between tenants and landowners. But tenants usually were on an annual basis and did not have to be carried over from year to year. By changing their tenants to labourers, landowners could keep all of the payments; the acreage reductions also helped them eliminate some tenants. Moreover, the payments and the higher crop prices permitted larger farmers to invest in machinery, thereby further reducing the need for both tenants and labourers. This phenomenon was not confined to the South. In the Great Plains, which was well suited to mechanized cotton and wheat production, it was a very important cause, along with drought and dust storms, of the great migration of ‘Dust Bowl refugees’ to California.‘s

The tenant/landowner conflict became the subject of a bitter and intensely fought internal battle within the AAA.19 The so-called ‘agrarian’ fraction, representing the established tenure system, wanted the AAA to serve the traditional agrarian goal of higher prices, with benefits coupled to land, the pre-eminently agrarian resource. While not unsympathetic to the sharecroppers, they wanted to keep welfare- type programmes separate from the commercially orientated mission of the AAA. On the other side, the so-called ‘liberals’ were concerned about within-sector distribution and equity, strongly sympathizing with labourers and sharecroppers. They were willing to challenge the prevailing power structure by linking price supports to more far- reaching changes. They lost, but many of them had another chance to try in the FSA.

The issue of whether to raise crop prices, and if so, how, is a recurrent one all over the world. The complexities of price supports, particularly the way they can help farmers as a whole but not help certain kinds of

“Walter Stein, California and the Dust farmers, as well as the impetus that supports provide for displacement of

Bowl Migration, Greenwood Press, West- labour by capital, are well illustrated by the 1930s cotton programme. port, CT, 1973, Ch 1. lgDavid Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers:

Because of the dominance of a cash crop, and because up to the 1930s

The Story of Sharecroppers in the New the South still was using mainly unmechanized, labour-intensive

Deal, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, methods, the situation just described is particularly analogous to that of IL, 1965. many developing countries today. Moreover, whereas throughout most



20Michael Childs and J.C. Headley, ‘Soil conservation and Extension in Missouri: a study of conflict’, J. Soil and Water Con- servation, Vol37, No 4,1982, pp 200-203; Charles Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture, The Free Press, Glencoe, IL, 1952, pp 72-73. 2’R. Burnell Held and Marion Clawson, Soil Conservation in Perspective, Re- sources for the Future/Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD, 1985, p 50. 220p tit, Ref 17, p 290. 230p tit, Ref 1, p 131. 24Philip Selznick, 7VA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization, Harper & Row, New York, 1949, reprinted 1986, p 13.

of US history workers displaced from agriculture could find jobs in industry - indeed, agricultural productivity helped make industrializa- tion possible - this was not so during the Great Depression, as in non-industrialized countries today.

Bureaucratic, institutional and political factors

Quite apart from large-scale structural issues or broad goals, efforts in agricultural development must also take adequate account of the more prosaic pressures and constraints affecting the specific people and agencies responsible for getting the work done. The agencies discussed above provide many excellent examples.

Interagency disputes

Poor relations between various agricultural agencies may arise from deep-seated ideological differences, as in the AAA cotton programme, or from more mundane considerations, such as turf battles, empire building or even personal relations.

For the two decades before the New Deal, the state extension services were the only agencies dealing directly with individual farmers. Thus they understandably resented the intrusion of the New Deal agencies, and tried to maintain supremacy. In addition, Extension was primarily a state-controlled activity, whereas the newer ones were entirely federal. In some cases, this led to strong state opposition to the formation of soil conservation districts,*’ as well as a continuing battle on the national level.‘l

Extension’s conflict with the FSA in part reflected the FSA’s threat to Extension’s monopoly, but also was ideological. In contrast to the FSA’s concern for tenants and labourers, Extension ‘did little to stimulate a desire for improvement among those who needed it most’ and ‘played safe - they retreated into technology and conformed to local and regional attitudes, avoiding wherever possible anything that might be construed as subversive of the social, political or ideological status

quo’? The farm organization that represented the largest and most commercialized farmers, and that was a strong defender of Extension, not coincidently was a leading force in the dismantling of the FSA in the 1940s.

Extension’s relation with the TVA provides a very interesting contrast. In its commitment to the most ‘New Dealish’ aspects of the New Deal, the TVA was much more like the FSA than like Extension. But whereas the FSA maintained an ideological purity in the face of attacks on its ‘socialistic’ views, the TVA very early chose to reach a remarkable accommodation with the established agricultural powers in the Tennessee Valley. Rather than setting up a parallel, competitive set of demonstration projects, it subordinated itself to the existing extension mechanism. This was in keeping with its strongly held commitment to ‘grass-roots democracy’, which meant that the TVA should ‘work itself out of a job’.23 But since the existing agencies were quite unsympathetic to some of the TVA’s avowed principles, outsiders preferred a less noble-sounding word: co-optation, or ‘the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership of a policy-determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence’.24 By sacrificing its ideals in agriculture to a powerfully



entrenched group of potential enemies, the TVA could save the rest of its programme. But the price was high:

TVA’s commitments to its agricultural constituency resulted in a factional alignment involving unanticipated consequences for its role on the national scene . . . . The New Deal agricultural agencies, such as Farm Security Administration and Soil Conservation Service, came under attack . . . . Under the pressure of its agriculturists, the Authority did not recognize Farm Security Administration and sought to exclude Soil Conservation Service from operation within the Valley area. This resulted in the politically paradoxical situation that the eminently New Deal TVA failed to support agencies with which it shared a political communion, and aligned itself with the enemies of those agencies.25

The different ultimate fates of the TVA and FSA exemplify a fundamental choice in any agricultural and rural development efforts that could entail important social and economic realignments. Baldwin comments about the defeat of the FSA that: ‘It is tantalizing to speculate about whether the more rational course of action for the leaders of the FSA would have been to adjust to the environment, as did the leaders of the Tennessee Valley Authority . . . . or to pursue their quest regardless of the glorious defeat toward which they were headed. ‘26 Writing during the ‘War on Poverty’, in its way the heir to the New Deal legacy of three decades earlier, he observes that:

The alleged gratifications of glorious defeat, however, are unlikely to capture the hearts of this modern ‘cool’ generation of public administrators and poverty warriors . . . The visionary optimism of [FSA’S founders] was a defiant and blasphemous faith which is generally viewed today as naive or quaint by many presumably sophisticated poverty warriors. Lacking such a faith, the social and political innovator is tempted to flee from conflict and to find refuge in feasibility and in a preoccupation with administrative minutiae and, perhaps, personal careerism . . The leaders of the FSA, on the other hand, were risk-takers.27

He concludes that what we need is not just the right administrative mechanisms, but also an element of the quixotic, that is, some FSA-style daring and optimism.

‘Grass-roots’ programmes and the Establishment

The FSA’s most unconventional programmes, especially its cooperative farms, provide an unusual twist to a recurring debate: who shall choose the goals of an agricultural development effort? These days, old-style agricultural development programmes are commonly criticized as elitist, since development professionals impose their goals and values on the population as a whole. A related criticism is that the development agencies are too strongly committed to the values of the most powerful elements of the society. Thus they are unwilling to challenge the entrenched economic, social and political patterns that radical critics point to as the root of the problems which the agencies are supposed to solve.

251bid, p 263. 260p cit. Ref 17, p 409. 270p tit, Ref 17, p 419.

It is typically assumed that solving the first problem would also solve the second. That is, if development agencies went to the people affected to learn their wishes and aspirations, they would end up challenging the status quo. Thus, those whose main interest is to change the content of development programmes, ie to make them serve more far-reaching goals, may instead try to achieve this by calling for a change in the process, namely, to have goals formulated according to the target



population’s wishes. The latter tactic, since it is not explicitly political, may find more support among people who are sensitive to the charge of elitism, even though they might not agree with the specific substance of the criticisms of the current system.

However, this tactic could be a big mistake. What do you do when you learn that the dispossessed masses you are trying to help strongly share the values of the power structure? Moreover, suppose that there are no multinational corporations or client governments around whose advertising/propaganda campaigns can serve as a convenient excuse for differentiating between (your version of) the ‘real’ needs of the people and their ‘perceived’ needs.

The case of the FSA is highly informative. The FSA was unusual in its willingness - indeed its eagerness - to challenge deeply rooted social, political and economic values and institutions. It strongly identified with the dispossessed classes of the Cotton South and elsewhere. Moreover, some FSA leaders advocated alternatives to the cherished ideal of free simple land ownership and the dominance of private property, and their experiments with cooperative farms were criticized as ‘socialistic’.

But the people these experiments were supposed to help did not share this belief in communal farms. Despite having lost out in the competitive, individualistic private property system, they did not want to overturn that system. What they wanted was a piece of the action: they wanted to buy in. The FSA also had to accept its cooperators’ ‘pie-in-the-sky’ religious fundamentalism and its white cooperators’ insistence on racial segregation, even though these were in violent contradiction with the FSA’s progressive ideology.*’

Other governments with more radical economic views than their peasants or tenants might simply impose collectivization by brute force. However, the FSA was strongly committed to democratic values. Moreover, it obviously would not have been permitted to impose its programmes even if it had wanted to. Consequently, the communal farms gradually turned into individual, privately held farms. In contrast, the FSA’s loans to help tenants purchase their farms or to help distressed small farmers keep their farms, both of which supported the individual, private farm concept, were among its most well-received and successful activities. Indeed, they were popular even with the conserva- tive critics of the rest of the FSA.

There is a simple lesson here for agricultural developers: you can do what the people say they want, or you can do what you think they should want. If you are lucky, these will be the same. But if not, something has to give. It would be better to decide in advance - and to declare publicly - which of the two you believe in more strongly. That way, any expression of non-elitist faith in the ‘grass roots’ will be reserved for those whose hearts are really in it. It also will prevent you from being exposed for the hypocrisy and cynicism of using such high-sounding sentiments only as an expedient that you adopted because you expected it would get you the particular result you had in mind all along.

Choice of clientele

Every programme dealing with individual farmers faces the important question of whom to work with. Even an agency specifically concerned

*“Op tit, Ref 19, Ch 8; op tit, Ref 18, PP with those most in need is under pressure to select relatively more

171-172. motivated, better educated and less impoverished clients.

166 FOOD POLICY May 1984


For example, extreme apathy, hopelessness and fear of landlords on the part of southern black tenants made it difficult for both Extension and the FSA to obtain their cooperation. Moreover, agents - necessarily black - who wished to work with black tenants would first have to approach the tenants’ white landlords. Because of the obvious problems that this entailed, they typically chose to work instead with black landowners, who were far fewer than tenants.29

Extension agents in the 1930s were not, in general, inclined to work with tenants or submarginal farmers: ‘The county agent has been a technical teacher who has been more concerned with the immediate and apparent results of his advice than with its social implications.‘30 Likewise, the TVA demonstration programme preferentially involved larger farms in the region, where better results could be expected.31

Even the FSA, with its clear commitment to those at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, tended to ‘skim the cream’ in selecting recipients of rural rehabilitation loans. Baldwin noted that ‘at congressional appropriation time, they talked more like bankers than social work-

ers . . . County supervisors tended to become preoccupied with “making a good showing” in their loan collection records’.32 As a result, ‘they tended to select loan borrowers from higher social and economic levels - applicants with larger farming units, higher net incomes, greater net worth, fewer dependent children, better health and more education’. This strategy also helped ward off criticism from political interests unsympathetic to those at the bottom.

This clearly shows that the issue is a very difficult one, since no one doubts the FSA’s sincere commitment to those most in need of help. More typical agencies would be even quicker to choose the more comfortable route of working with less needy farmers who presented far fewer problems. Familiarity with previous manifestations of this issue can help remind development agencies to address the choice of clients explicitly and consciously. Otherwise, underlying forces will run their natural course and thereby make the choice for them.

Comparative studies of agricultural development

This article has suggested just a few aspects of US experience that students of agricultural development might profitably study. The point is not that one’s own country should be regarded as a model (positive or negative) for other countries to consider; rather, such studies can help develop an understanding of the differences between universal principles of agricultural development (if there are any) as opposed to consequences of particular circumstances. Comparisons of different developing countries’ current attempts to deal with the same issue are common. This article suggests an extension of such comparisons to a social and economic environment that in some ways is similar to, but is also quite different from, that of the developing world today. The broader the range of conditions one examines, the more accurately one can separate the particular from the general, and thereby know whether one can extrapolate one country’s experience to another.

=Gladys Baker, The County Agent, Uni- Students interested in a particular developing country might look into versity of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, some aspect of agricultural development both in that country and in 1939, p 204; op cit. Ref 17, p 201. mOp tit, Ref 29, p 204.

their own. The similarities and the differences could be very valuable in

3’Op tit, Ref 24, p 136. deepening their insights into the basic principles of agricultural =Op tit, Ref 17, pp 217-216. development.


the usa as a developing country: historical insights into contemporary agricultural development

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