Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
see a need for an Honours degree. This is seems to be the norm, the exception being those
who go on to obtain Masters and PhDs and aspire to, and actually do, rise to the top. But
this is a frustratingly small minority. A number of questions immediately come to mind,
principally: how can mindsets change fast enough for the majority of high school leavers to
move into the science and technology disciplines and commit to a long-term involvement
with academia that is needed to develop strong skills and competence to bridge the capacity
gaps? There is no shortage of scholarships and bursaries and international cooperation
agreements in pursuit of this goal, but it may well be that the fundamental problems are
not yet properly defined. Again, it is not know for certain if this observation represents the
product of free choice or rather some inevitability as a consequence of conditions that are
deliberately manipulated to achieve those outcomes. Whichever way, these are institutional
questions that call for deeper scrutiny.
This works much the same way in farming when a smallholder who has access to a large
piece of land actually settles for a small garden around the homestead. Orthodox neo-
classical economics teaches that a farm unit will continue to deploy variable productive
resources to fixed factors such as land as long as the marginal product is rising. This relates
to the concept of allocative efficiency. But this does not happen in environments where
the 'mental model' does not make provision for surplus production. The farmer would
invariably stop producing even when it would have made sense to continue. Researchers and
policy makers do not understand why the poor rural people cannot bring more land under
cultivation to expand their agricultural production. Even with numerous credit schemes
available, the majority of the resource-poor people do not consider that they qualify and
do not even apply. The former Minister of Agriculture, Ms Lulu Xingwana, once decried
the existence of uncultivated land which she described as 'dead assets in the hands of the
poor'. In the Eastern Cape Province, government is trying to change this by implementing
the Massive Food Production Programme, but both the interest and the coverage are
limited (Dirwayi, 2010). Though only anecdotal at this stage, it has been said that a sizeable
number of rural people prefer the social grants they receive for old age, child, disability,
etc. Researchers often try to explain the low demand for institutional credit and uptake
of improved technology in terms of insufficient information available to remotely-located
rural people. But there does not seem to be any difficulty for the rural people in obtaining
information about the various social grants. How do they know about the social grants and
yet lack information about production credits and farm support schemes. Could it be in
the way the message is packaged that makes them feel excluded from productive credits?
There are obviously more to this than meets the eyes and we need more information before
we can conclude one way or another. These are clearly institutional questions that need to
be understood and addressed.
In attempting an explanation of the sizeable welfare and income differences between rich
and poor countries, Rodrik and Subramanian (2003) short-listed three key determinants,
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