Development strategies and the rural poor

With few exceptions, the process of economic growth in the developing economies in the post-war period has been characterised by a persistence, and more recently probably an intensification, of a rural poverty. The primacy accorded universally to accelerated industrialisation in third world development strategies cast the rural sector functionally in a resource-providing supportive role. However, for most developing economies, industrialisation has been - and is likely to remain - unable to generate any significant Lewisian trickle-down flows. Indeed, the relative failure of industrialisation in Africa has created structural conditions and fresh accumulating debt burdens which have generally prevented the retention and productive utilisation of the agricultural surplus within the rural sector. A reorientation of the growth process along 'agriculture first' lines is also unlikely to create trickle-down effects which have a strong enough impact on rural poverty so long as it is based on emphasising export-orientation and technological intensification within institutionally inequitable and ecologically fragile systems. Neither piece-meal reactive policy interventions nor structural adjustment packages provide viable general solutions.