1.1 Introduction
In the late 1950s, food crisis was a worldwide phenomenon. In addition to China, South and Southeast Asian and Latin American countries were also subject to a potential risk of famine. But the results were different.
In 1953, Norman Borlaug1 cross-bred the semi-dwarf Norin 102-Brevor3 with the disease-resistant cultivars to create new varieties of wheat according to the climatic conditions of Mexico.4 Borlaug’s synthetic hybrid improvement of wheat varieties from Central and South America marked the beginning of the famous Green Revolution . Along with the first wave of green revolution in Central and South America, hybrid improvement of new wheat seed technology spread to Asia. In 1962, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) produced a rice hybrid—International Rice No. 8 (IR8)—by crossing Dee-Geo-woo-gen with Peta. Its high-yielding nature has led to IR8 being hailed as a green revolution ‘Miracle Rice’. In the Philippines, the IR8 technology created a 55 per cent5 increase in rice output within ten years of the inauguration of the green revolution6; within 20 years rice output had more than doubled. The application of the IR8 ‘Miracle Rice’ developed by IRRI enabled the Philippines to advance from mere self -sufficiency in food-grain production to the status of net exporter within a short period of time in the twentieth century.
In the thousands of years of paddy rice planting history, IR8 stands as one of the most important technological revolutions in rice production. Increased agricultural productivity brought about by green revolution technological innovations in Mexico and South and Southeast Asia promised a solution to the perennial threat of food insecurity, and fundamentally changed the nature of agricultural production. India and the Philippines took the lead in Asia in introducing new technology and began to adapt the new practices to their own local conditions. This sparked the diffusion of a green revolution in Asia.
However, China—the most populous country in Asia—failed to share in this process of external technology diffusion. In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Mao Zedong (毛泽东) regime sought to use political campaigns to raise agricultural productivity and total output, whilst resorting to state-enforced procurements to squeeze peasants’ producer surplus. The culmination of these processes was the Great Leap Forward (da yue jin, 大跃进, hereafter GLF)—and the subsequent great famine. Meanwhile, the political framework in which China operated caused its technological exchanges with most other countries of the world to stagnate.7
These two results illustrate two basic elements of agricultural transition. The first relates to the source of agricultural productivity growth. In the 1950s, China and western scientists were aware that increasing factor intensification was not the only way to enhance the potential growth of agricultural output. They recognised that an even more important factor was technological innovation in agriculture, with its great potential for agricultural productivity growth. After the initiation of the green revolution, a series of breakthrough agricultural initiatives, in areas such as seed and fertiliser development and field management, marked the beginning of a new and transformative phase in the long history of global grain production.
The second and critically important element was the way in which technological innovation can be applied to agricultural production. In the 1950s, the CCP’s introduction of central planning within a collectivised framework of farm production was the chosen means of trying to improve the institutions of agricultural production and thereby increase per hectare productivity. In the event, however, collectivisation and subsequent communisation failed to facilitate the adoption of new agricultural technologies. It is striking that while the GLF was being implemented in China, the impact of the green revolution was making itself felt throughout developing economies in Southeast Asia and Central and South America, as the new technologies were adapted to local conditions. China could also have benefited from the same process of technological diffusion. Instead, however, it was completely excluded from this process. With its existing indigenous agricultural technological base (including seeds, fertilisers and irrigation resources), it still failed to avoid the calamity of the great famine.
When Central and South America, and subsequent South and Southeast Asian economies, entered the era of high growth of agricultural production after the green revolution, agricultural technological change in East Asian economies, especially China and Japan, showed a different growth pattern. Irrespective of the timing, duration and the choice of technology changes, East Asian economies’ agricultural technology transitions were very different compared to South and Southeast Asian economies. Inter-regional agricultural technology changes within the East Asian economies, even within China, also vary.
This work will follow the main clue of agricultural technology change to track down the particularities in East Asian economies’ agricultural transitions, focusing on irrigated paddy -field rice planting regions such as China, Taiwan and Japan. The evaluation benchmark that this work used is the standard Induced Institutional Change (IIC) (Hayami 1969; Hayami and Ruttan 1970a, b, 1985, 1995) paradigm of technology change under a neoclassical economic framework. Furthermore, the work in subsequent chapters will try to gradually release the hypothesis of perfect market institutions and adequate factor accumulation, trying to extend the standard IIC theory to explain the agricultural transition under complex institutional conditions, with an application to China and selected East Asian economies .
The comparison of the experiences of China and other East Asian economies that have undertaken green revolution, as outlined above, highlights the importance of institutions as a factor shaping the different outcomes. When science and technology—the replacement of traditional inputs by modern inputs—have developed the potential for sustained agricultural productivity and output growth to generate sufficient food supplies to accommodate population growth, other factors may intervene to postpone or even prevent the application and diffusion of new technologies. Identifying such factors has become a key issue in understanding East Asian economies’ agricultural transitions.
Two major questions define the main research thrust.
The first of these questions relates to the accessibility of technology. The comparative experiences of China and developing economies in South and Southeast Asia are a reminder that even when conditions allow for the universal adoption of new agricultural technologies, the time and place at which technology diffusion occurs may still differ between economies. Thus, for example, while the Philippines embarked on its green revolution in the early 1960s, China did not initiate its agricultural technological transition until two decades later, in the 1980s. What postpones or prevents the local agriculture from accessing the frontier technology is a vital question to understand the agricultural technological change, in short, the accessibility of technology.
The second question addressed relates to the choice of technology. In other words, at any given time when faced with a range of feasible technologies in the given technology set, which of these technologies will be selected, and under what specific conditions will the selection be made.
As Norman Borlaug’s (2000) speech indicated, in most cases advanced agricultural technologies are already available for developing economies.8 It follows that when technology has ceased to be a constraint on agricultural production, the most critical issue affecting farm output growth is how to make these technologies accessible to farmers. This work seeks to offer insights into those factors that determine differences in technological transition in agriculture between East Asian economies when the conditions and paths of technology choice simultaneously interact.
1.2 A General Theory Review
Classic...