以农业促发展:成功新模式与选择

Agriculture and Development:New Paradigm and Options for Success

20世纪60年代盛行的发展经济学经典模式中农业增长被视为工业增长的重要支柱,而后者则被看作经济发展的同义词。尽管有许多成功例子,但因政策转向支持进口替代工业化并伴随严重农业价格歧视政策,到20世纪70年代和80年代初该模式的推行日益困难。20世纪70年代制定了适合广义发展目标的农村综合发展战略,其中包括扶贫和减少不平等。这个战略被证明很难成功实施,部分是由于农业收益率低,部分是由于过分复杂的政府主导方式。1982年随着债务危机爆发及随后华盛顿共识达成并实行的稳定和调整政策,人们抛弃了以农业促发展的政策,转而采用其他发展模式,如采用经济开放的工业化来促进增长,采取现金转移、工作福利来减少贫困。除了中国、越南等几个著名特例依然坚持追求小农农业增长,忽视农业所带来的经济、社会和环境代价非常巨大。实现以农业促发展的目标需要一系列的政策条件支持并且需要不懈的努力。

In the classical paradigm of development economics that prevailed in the 1960s,agricultural growth was held to be the key pillar for industrial growth,itself seen to be synonymous with economic development. The paradigm was anchored in telling success stories,from the long history of the 'Western Experience' to the then-recent 'Asian miracles'. And it was supported by rigorous modeling exercises. But,in spite of success stories,implementation of this paradigm was running into increasing difficulty in the 1970s and early 1980s as policy favored import substitution industrialization with strong anti-agriculture price policy biases. Integrated rural development strategies,designed to meet the broadened development objectives introduced in the 1970s that included poverty and inequality reduction,were also proving difficult to implement successfully,in part because of the low profitability of agriculture and in part because of excessively complex state-led approaches. With the debt crisis of 1982,and the subsequent implementation of stabilization and adjustment policies under the Washington Consensus,use of agriculture as an instrument for development was disregarded in favor of other approaches to development such as open economy industrialization to accelerate growth and cash transfers or workfare programs to reduce poverty. With a few notable exceptions such as China and Vietnam where smallholder-based agricultural growth was pursued vigorously,the economic,social,and environmental costs of this neglect of agriculture have been huge.