Transforming Traditional Agriculture

Professor Schultz seeks to explain the economic behavior of farmers in poor, long-settled, agricultural communities and emphasizes a number of facts regarding traditional or subsistence agriculture that were previously ignored or not recognized. Whether the other subsets are to be put aside by abstracting from them or introduced explicitly depends upon the particular problem under analysis. Schultz thus recognizes that his definition of "traditional agriculture" has connotations which go far beyond economics, even though he delimits it as a purely economic concept that abstracts from particular cultural components. As set forth by Schultz, the economic logic underlying the particular economic equilibrium of traditional agriculture is closely akin to that of the classical long-run stationary state. Dandekar believes that the pressure of population upon traditional agriculture is of a special nature and, because it is mainly self-employed, permits the employment of residual labor on the basis of survival irrespective of its marginal productivity.