Rural Development and Food Security in the 21st Century: A Review and Proposal

Abstract

This review of recent research on rural development and food security makes clear that despite global trends favoring urbanization and large farm expansions, the most efficacious ways of generating advances in rural incomes and agronomic productivity are to promote land titling programs, agricultural extension services, a broad distribution of rural-located industrial projects, and sustained engagement with social capital-based rural networks.¹

Keywords

Rural development food security rural industrialization land tenure security rural social capital

In this article, based on an extensive review of pertinent research, I suggest policies that are most likely to produce the greatest gains in rural economic development and in food security in developing areas of the world as the twenty-first century progresses. To do so, first I set forth the broad contours of the current development policy context, focusing on the key challenges and policy decisions over the past several decades that set the stage for the contemporary period and the hurdles that need to be overcome to improve rural living standards and agronomic reliability. Then I make clear those strategies which, based on the analysis presented here, would generate increasing success at achieving rural development progress. I emphasize the importance of keeping smallholders on their lands and supporting their efforts to produce surplus food harvests; expanding state-supported farmer outreach and agricultural extension programs; the ‘spreading out’ of industrial projects across rural areas; the provisioning of land ownership documents; and the restoration or augmentation of producer pricing supports. It is equally important to collaborate with members of already-existing grassroots social capital networks, as they represent a key cross-village and inter-regional foundation for rural development.

Given the reliance of agriculturalists on sales to national and global markets but also the unpredictable and frequent changes in the purchase prices of harvested crops within those markets, it is crucial to aim for rural development policies that facilitate the ability of farmers to remain on their own lands. The more that smallholders are provided with legal assurances of land tenure and are supported with infrastructural inputs, the greater the likelihood that advances can be made in food security and rural development. For this reason, it is essential to assist them with extension support so that they can produce agronomic surpluses to assure household subsistence and to use for barter or for sale on accessible markets. At the same time, despite imposing challenges to smallholder-based development—land privatizations, rural-to-urban migrations, environmental degradation—many rural areas in the developing world are characterized by socially dense inter-personal and inter-community networks, which facilitate trade and access to markets while also providing incentives for protecting local ecologies. Safeguarding and strengthening such networks can help to assure that rural social capital plays an important role in making continued progress toward both food security and economic development.

Development Policy Context

In the past two decades, in much of the developing world, the hurdles to achieving rural development gains and national food security became increasingly imposing due to: a diminution of global market prices for many agricultural crops (rice, wheat, vegetables, coffee, sugar, cotton, and others); a reduction of government-provided producer price supports and agricultural extension; and a decrease in transportation capacity in the wake of state fiscal decline, thereby lessening the ability to consistently assure that rural food harvests are brought to cities or to ports for shipment overseas (Davis, 2008; Ellis & Freeman, 2004; Hazell, Poulton, Wiggins, & Dorward, 2010; Khor, 2005; McMichael, 2009; Nelson et al., 2010; Rosegrant & Cline, 2003; Tschamtke et al., 2012). In addition, multiple wars and climate change-related droughts in some developing areas (especially the Middle East and northern Africa) have generated a massive out-flow of farmers and led to the degradation of farmland, the abandonment of many food marketing operations, and the spread of rural hunger (DW News, 2016; Gray & Mueller, 2012; Huang, Von Lampe, & Van Tongeren, 2011; Nelson et al., 2010; OXFAM, 2011; Tschamtke et al., 2012; World Food Programme, 2015). In the early twenty-first century, due at least in part to these factors, approximately one-sixth of the world’s populace (1.089 billion people), were categorized by economists as ‘very poor’ (earning less than $1 per day) or ‘poor’ (less than $2 per day) (Dowla & Barua, 2006, pp. 3–4).

Meanwhile, as from the 1980s to 1990s, due to the spread of agrarian privatization policies, millions of small farmers became the target of intensifying economic pressure to abandon their landholdings. Farmlands in many developing nations are legally considered “public domain” and are therefore relatively vulnerable to national policy shifts, despite the fact that smallholding families may have been tilling particular sites for decades. Rising global pressure to grow ever-greater quantities of corn, sugar, and soy for the purpose of biofuel production spurred an aggressive movement toward the creation of large-scale plantations. In Brazil, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the Sudan, and other countries, the national government sought to usher small farmers off their lands even as the proverbial ink was barely dry on land deals being forged with domestic and foreign firms eager to establish mechanized mega-farms. Such “land grabs” were strongly contested by farmers, local governments, development agencies, and environmental activists—and as a result of these protests and resistance, most anticipated land confiscations have not (yet) been carried out—or only a fraction of the targeted agrarian area has actually been put into production (Bourne, 2014; Deininger & Byerlee, 2012; Izquierdo, 2011; Milgroom, 2015; Revelli, 2010; The World Bank, 2013). However, land confiscations continue to represent a major threat to small farmer agriculture—and to food security—in Mexico, Argentina, Columbia, Guatemala, India, Laos, Uganda, Madagascar, and other developing nations (Edelman et al., 2015; Rocheleau, 2015).

Beyond these global development challenges, three sets of broad policy errors (however well-intentioned) added to the overall difficulties facing small farmers. First, the long term and continuing impacts of structural adjustment and liberalization policies that had initially been advanced by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s–1990s proved particularly harmful to poor farmers for a number of reasons. Once producer price subsidies in developing nations were reduced or eliminated, unimpeded global competition from subsidized producers in first world countries and in newly industrializing nations led to severely reduced profits for many small farmers. Moreover, governments in the global South, under international pressure to reduce expenditures, cut back their provisioning of direct agricultural extension services and marketing assistance. Millions of small farmers experienced subsequent declines in annual income while economic inequality between large-scale (already wealthy) farmers and smallholders widened (Cornia, 2005, pp. 4, 6, 7, 10; Davidson & Ahmad, 2003, pp. 1–2; Hazell et al., 2010, p. 1354; Hellin & Higman, 2003, pp. 96, 99–101; Khor, 2005, p. 4, 12–14, 24).

Second, some developing nations, aiming to pursue a classic economic growth strategy, focused on land commercialization in order to remove smallholders from much of the countryside to make way for mechanized large-farm agriculture (Grinspun, 2003, p. 50; Kay, 2009, pp. 105–106; Kuznets, 1966; Schultz, 1964). In fact, however, this development paradigm often ended up exacerbating rural poverty (even if it sometimes generated profits for elites and investors) (Deininger & Byerlee, 2012, pp. 702–704, 707–709; Hazell et al., 2010, p. 1352; North, 2003a, p. 2).

The third major policy error refers to the unfulfilled promise of the “green revolution” of the 1960s–1980s: despite advances in agronomic technology and in the quality of on-farm inputs such as crop fertilizer and genetically modified crop seeds, their uneven application, and implementation distortions produced disappointing outcomes in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia (apart from some notable successes in India and elsewhere). Governments too often focused on providing large corporate-run farms with modern hybrid seeds rather than widely distributing them to smallholders; poor farmers who did receive them were not granted credit access or marketing assistance. And in many developing countries, farmers were encouraged to abandon traditional multi-crop plantings in favor of a monocrop approach to take fuller advantage of genetically modified grains, but this frequently resulted in greater market vulnerability and a lesser availability of nutritional foods. Thus, overall, the green revolution in agronomy often exacerbated food insecurity and failed to generate the expected gains in rural development (Bourne, 2009, pp. 38–39, 41, 46–49; Breisinger & Diao, 2008, p. 44; Dawson, Martin & Sikor, 2015, pp. 205, 207, 212, 215; Glaesser, 2011; Lo & Chen, 2011).

In contrast to the policy misfires denoted previously, some nations adopted radically different, cutting edge policies that resulted in significant progress regarding food security and rural development. In the following section, we delineate the chief strategies that have characterized these relatively successful cases.

Smallholders, Agronomy, and Rural Industrialization

Beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century, some rural development planners opted for an alternative policy approach: supporting smallholders with agricultural extension services, technical inputs, and expanded credit access; spreading industrialization investments through various parts of the countryside (rather than concentrating them in large cities); providing smallholders with land rights codified in a written registry; and restoring a reliable base purchase price for agrarian produce while keeping consumer prices for food staples relatively low.

In parts of rural Latin America, smallholders made noteworthy gains over time in regard to crop productivity, crop sales, and income increases as a result of the decision by a number of national governments to offer localities a reliable funding stream specifically targeted to strengthen their ability to hire skilled agricultural extension agents. Also helpful was the provision of technical support to farmers by community-based organizations (CBOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs) (Andersson, De Anda, & Van Laerhoven, 2009a, pp. 154–155, 157; 2009b, p. 200). Thus, in Peru, the national state invested approximately $38 million annually in a vast expansion of locally based agricultural extension programs (especially in the highlands) that were affixed both to rural local governments and to NGOs, with some 250,000 farmers receiving agronomic support and subsequently experiencing significant improvement in crop harvest output, income growth, and crop diversification—and thereby greater food security (Baanante, 2009, p. 119). Similar improvements took place in parts of rural Columbia, Chile, and Ecuador. In contrast, in Mexico and Chile, the majority of smallholders remained bereft of access to local agricultural extension programs and they consequently struggled to maintain subsistence levels of production (Van Laerhoven, Andersson, de Anda, & Lewin, 2009, pp. 70, 88; Van Laerhoven, Andersson, de Anda, González, & Ochoa, 2009, p. 94).

In India and Uganda, productivity increased when researchers worked closely with small farmers to improve crop seeds and to increase the effectiveness of traditional methods of crop disease prevention (Bryant & Kappaz, 2005, pp. 89, 102–103). In Thailand, from the 1960s through the 1990s, smallholders made steady productivity gains (34% rise in rice yields over the period of 1960–1970 alone) due to the intensive application of high-yield crop seed varieties, diligent use of fertilizers, as well as the provisioning of mechanized rice-tillers and threshers (Breisinger & Diao, 2008, pp. 34–35). Indeed, significant gains in food security and living standards occur when an expansion of agronomy programs is carried out that is specifically tailored to small farmers, especially on-farm technology supports (Birner & Resnick, 2010, p. 1443; Breisinger & Diao, 2008, p. 50; Davidson & Ahmad, 2003, pp. 113–114; Rivera, 2003, pp. 25–39).

A key factor in appreciating the value of extension programs is that smallholdings tend to out-perform large farms in per-hectare productivity (Barrett, Bellemare, & Hou, 2010, p. 88; Hazell et al., 2010, pp. 1350, 1351, 1356). This is largely because smaller farms are typically managed with particular square-footage intensity (Barrett et al., 2010, pp. 88, 89, 94), but also because smaller farms facilitate the simultaneous application of multiple technologies (such as high grade fertilizer and hybrid crop seeds) (Larson, Otsuka, Matsumoto, & Kilic, 2014, p. 364). Thus, among maize producers in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, the smaller the farm plot size, the higher the per-hectare productivity rate (Larson et al., 2014, pp. 365, 366). Here, we may note that of the 570 million farms operating world-wide, approximately 84 percent are very small—2 hectares or less—but nonetheless demonstrate impressive productivity, especially when on-farm operations are enhanced through extension support (Hazell et al., 2010, p. 1352; Larson et al., 2014, p. 356; Lowder, Skoet, & Raney, 2016, p. 11). When smallholder agronomic harvest surpluses are sold at multiple rural outlets, a relatively horizontal dispersion of needed foods takes place in parts of the countryside that would otherwise be food-short. By way of contrast, harvests from commercial large farms in developing nations are usually more narrowly directed toward exporters or urban supermarkets (Haggblade, Hazell, & Reardon, 2010, p. 1436).

Dramatic development gains can also occur when investments in industry take place in reasonably close travel proximity to—or are actually located within—predominantly agricultural zones (Kay, 2009, p. 122). Such investments tend to generate a nexus of economic and social activity that results in rises in educational and health outcomes and new job opportunities for members of farming households (Breisinger & Diao, 2008, pp. 49–51; Deininger & Byerlee, 2011, p. 69; Hazell et al., 2010, p. 1352; The World Bank, 2007, pp. 1, 20). Some of the nations which have achieved the greatest recent success in health, education, and wages as well as in assuring food security (including Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Kyrgyzstan, and several Indian states)—embarked on a mix of industrial and agrarian strategies (Breisinger & Diao, 2008, pp. 26–67; Deininger & Byerlee, 2011, pp. 40, 100–101; Kay, 2009, pp. 117–118). These included the creation of a property rights system of land ownership; the distribution of manufacturing centers through the countryside; and strengthening the rural transport and communications infrastructure (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 337–338).

These strategies were crucial in the raising of rural living standards, helping to establish a social and economic basis for the creation of a diversity of rural-based work opportunities, while at the same time retaining a large percentage of the traditional food-producing small farmer populace on the land (Kay, 2009, p. 123). In the process of bolstering small-farm agriculture while facilitating rural-based industrial growth, farming households send family members to rural factories or to work in the rural service sector in order to augment household incomes (Haggblade et al., 2010, pp. 1431, 1437; Kay, 2009, p. 122). It is estimated that between one-third and one-half of rural household income in developing countries (34% in Africa, 47% in Latin America, and 50% in Asia) derives from off-farm wage employment (Haggblade et al., 2010, pp. 1429–1430). The additional income accrued is often re-invested in on-farm technical improvements—which can in turn compensate for the labor time lost through off-farm temporary migration (Haggblade et al., 2010, pp. 1430, 1437).

When paired with government-provided information flows detailing marketing options, improvements in farming efficiencies and inputs as a result of off-farm earnings tend to produce further gains in household income (due to more robust crop sales) and thereby contributes to improved food security. Thus, temporary migration —even 1 day trips for the purpose of industrial or service sector work—increases the likelihood of farming households being able to remain on their lands, in part because the augmented income better assures members of such households of being able to purchase necessities in the agricultural off-season and in part because of the added investment in on-farm inputs (Haggblade et al., 2010, pp. 1437, 1438; Kay, 2009, pp. 119, 122). This is what took place in Taiwan in the 1960s, which led directly to rises in rural income and to measurable gains in rural living standards (North, 2003a, p. 16; Ranis, 2007, p. 39). A “relatively decentralized rural industrialization strategy” led to relative equity in income distribution among farming households and to quality-of-life outcomes that closely approximated those of the most highly industrialized Western nations (Ranis, 2007, pp. 44, 52). Taiwanese small farmers remain competitive in global food markets by relying on high-tech inputs and high-performance on-farm machines (rice combines, transplanters, drills, loaders, seeders, shellers, sprayers, tractors) constructed locally, demonstrating the dramatic economic efficiency of a rural development strategy that embraces farming improvements with industrial modernization (Fon, 2005).

In a somewhat similar pattern, in parts of northern Ghana, salaried off-farm work opportunities helped to stabilize and substantially augment rural incomes and food security, enabling farmers to re-invest in their agronomic land-holdings—in turn leading to marked gains in rural poverty alleviation (Owusu, Abdulai, & Abdul-Rahman, 2011). In Ecuador, a land reform program coincided with the sending of town-to-countryside labor remittances from factory workers who continued to think of themselves as “peasants” fully integrated into rural-based households. They consistently lifted rural household incomes while also saving part of their earnings so as to be able to purchase land plots in their home villages (Korovkin, 2003, p. 135).

In Vietnam, the government successfully pursued an explicit dual track agro-industrial strategy. Intensive investment in genetically modified hybrid rice seeds led to the distribution of 142 advanced seed varieties to more than half the country’s farmers. These hardy, fast-growing seeds, along with improvements in farm irrigation and insect-control programs, resulted in more than a doubling of rice production from the 1980s to the early 2000s (Vietnam Business Forum, 2010). At the same time, thousands of new factories and businesses were established through segments of the Vietnamese countryside, providing jobs to rural household members and leading to significant increases in rural incomes. This dual development approach produced dramatic improvements in food security for most Vietnamese households as well as generating major gains in personal health and other social development indicators (O’Rourke, 2004, pp. 36–37, 40–41).

Similar combinations of targeted programs aimed at keeping agriculturalists on their lands while augmenting industrial capacity in the countryside have led to impressive achievements regarding food security and economic development in other countries as well. For example, in Chile and in Columbia, the creation of “functional territories” was characterized by the increasing ability of medium-sized urban areas to provide significant job opportunities to members of rural-based households (Berdegué, Fernando Carriazo, Jara, Modrego, & Soloaga, 2015, p. 57). This, in turn, resulted in major increases in rural incomes. A diversification of income sources was facilitated by investment in transportation infrastructure linking urban and rural locales and by intensifying public and private investment in a range of business and industrial pursuits in medium-sized cities located within otherwise-rural regions. This fostered a robust exchange of goods and services between rural and urban areas and resulted in a pronounced reduction in rural poverty, increases in educational levels, improved food consumption and a diminution of rural–urban inequality (Berdegué et al., 2015, p. 62).

In addition to a dual-track agro-industrial approach, it is evident that secure land-holding through the establishment of rural property judicial regimes is central to enabling agriculturalists to remain on their farms and to assuring long-term improvements in levels of food security and rural development. When smallholders possess physical proof of land ownership or of land use rights—in the form of legally binding papers (ideally with copies filed at a local land registry)—no matter how small their plots may be, these farmers are more likely to invest in long-term production inputs (Handelman, 2003, p. 157; Hanstad, Prosterman, & Mitchell, 2007; Holden & Otsuka, 2014; Lefeber, 2003, p. 79; Mitchell, 2009). Doing so better assures a wide range of food crops harvested for consumption or sale on a year-to-year basis. In China, for example, in 2009, proof of land ownership was estimated to represent an increase in income of more than $2,000 per farming household annually—along with gains in food availability (Keliang & Riedinger, 2011, p. 7).

In Vietnam, an exponential rise in farm productivity in the 1990s was closely associated with the widespread distribution of land titles during that decade. The consequences included marked decreases in rural poverty and increases in rural (and national) economic growth (Kirk & Tuan, 2009, pp. 8–9; Van Arkadie, 2003, pp. 226–227). In Kyrgyzstan, the post-Soviet allocation of land titles to small farmers led to a doubling of per-farm agricultural output in the 1990s and dramatically increased overall food availability (Akramov & Omuraliev, 2004, pp. 4–5, 7, 12). In Ecuador, a land reform program in the 1970s made it possible for smallholders to begin to claim “communal institutional spaces” within which they were able to establish and expand community-managed farms that improved their level of agronomic self-reliance (Korovkin, 2003, pp. 129, 136). Gains in food accessibility and social development in rural areas of Malawi, Brazil, Ghana, and Niger occurred as a direct consequence of improved land plot security and followed long-term investments in on-farm technical inputs such as fencing and hedges to prevent soil erosion (Lovo, 2015, pp. 223–224, 227; Place, 2009, p. 1329; Wolford, 2010, pp. 95–96, 98, 103, 106).

Finally, in addition to the factors discussed previously—the provision of on-farm technical supports, the dispersal of industrial investments throughout the countryside, and the consolidation of rural property legal regimes—government-supported food producer pricing programs can also play a useful role in helping to assure that small farm producers receive adequate annual incomes and attain greater food security (Cornia, 2005, pp. 4, 6, 10; Hellin & Higman, 2003, pp. 64, 204–211; Khor, 2005, p. 28). Countries whose farmers experienced major reductions in the size of food harvests during the 1990s and 2000s as a result of the impact of structural adjustment-related conditionality agreements and the related abandonment or reduction of national pricing supports would benefit most from a return to government-provided food crop producer price guarantees (Birner & Resnick, 2010, p. 1444; Hazell et al., 2010, pp. 1353–1355; Khor, 2005, pp. 5, 7; North, 2003a, pp. 1–4, 14). Rice growers in West Africa, for example, suffered in the first decade of the 2000s in the wake of the reduction of agricultural producer price supports, increasing their dependency on high-priced food imports (Moseley, Carney, & Becker, 2010). The restoration of such price supports would boost smallholder incomes and overall rural household well-being (Khor, 2005, p. 28).

Still, it should be acknowledged that in some cases, national governments no longer have the financial resources to offer country-wide agronomy producer price guarantees, with many state-run marketing support organizations having atrophied or having been re-purposed in the post-structural adjustment period. In such cases, more flexible approaches—such as providing income supports on a narrowly structured basis—for example, when world market prices of a specific food crop decline precipitously or when measurable smallholder incomes fall below a pre-defined lowest-acceptable level. For instance, Mexico’s small farm maize producers were provided with income support payments only on an as-needed basis (Ávalos-Sartorio, 2006, pp. 314–317, 319, 326). While not optimal, selective income supports can potentially facilitate at least a bare-minimum income if cash crop markets are dangerously under-performing (Byerlee, Jayne, & Myer, 2006, pp. 277–278).

In the following section, it is suggested that the policies advocated here work best when they are implemented in rural areas characterized by relatively high levels of social capital.

Rural Social Capital

When already-existing, historically nested social networks are operational within and between localities in rural areas, it is more likely that agricultural and rural development policies will benefit from a horizontal multiplier effect. Thus, in Mali and in Tanzania, government plans to improve food security worked best where local elites were able to channel the allocation of new agricultural technologies into already-existing village networks oriented around grain-growing and livestock herding (Isham, 2002; Moore, Cissé, & Touré, 2005). In Ecuador, the decision to steer rural development efforts toward textile producers who in turn were closely linked to extensive village networks helped to assure that rural development gains would be widely shared (North, 2003b, pp. 209–210). By targeting food security-enhancing programs within historically entrenched village social networks, Bolivia’s potato farms, grain farms in Guatemala, and milk cooperatives in India all generated noteworthy improvements in overall household income and in food availability (Uphoff, Milton, Esman, & Krishna, 1998, pp. 12–14, 25–27, 38).

Rural agronomic cooperatives have expanded significantly in recent years (especially in Africa), relying on farmers’ already-existing networks to enhance market access, organizational capacity, per-farm viability, and on-farm innovations. The results included improvements in agronomic productivity, enhancement of marketing strategies, more financial security, and reductions of expenditures due to fewer transaction costs (Borda-Rodriguez, Johnson, Shaw, & Vicari, 2016, pp. 93, 95). The case of banana growers in Kenya’s central highlands is instructive in this respect as well: by creating well-organized producer cooperatives, they were eventually able to secure higher sale prices than when selling individually while also lowering their marketing costs (Fischer & Qaim, 2012, pp. 1256, 1257, 1262, 1266).

More generally, agriculturalists embedded in exchange-oriented grids conjoining farmers with non-farmers tend to share newly acquired information about access to inputs and market entry points (Lobao & Sharp, 2013, p. 131). Thus, multi-village economic “syndicates” in Botswana, traditional social networks in Burkina Faso, and inter-household and cross-district “solidarity networks” in central Africa enhanced the ability of poor agriculturalists to survive disappointing harvests, to gain access to market outlets, and to work cooperatively to protect fragile ecosystems (Barr, 2002; Grootaert, Oh, & Swamy, 2002; Peters, 1994, pp. 74–75). The continued expansion and operational success of agricultural cooperatives in Uganda, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Lesotho, and Ethiopia have been due in large part to a history of rural network-building, with participants having been already habituated to the practice of mitigating costs and risks through the construction of trust-based economic relationships. When rural areas in these (and other) countries suffered from the withdrawal of state-provided support programs (in the 1990s–2000s), farmers poured more energy into networking and remained competitive in agrarian export markets (Borda-Rodriguez et al., 2016, pp. 94, 98, 102).

It is furthermore beneficial for members of such networks to reach out to CBOs, NGOs, private firms, and/or local government officials to lobby regional and national agencies for technical support. Thus, those African agricultural cooperatives that have proven consistently successful in gaining access to national and global markets were, mostly, those which had collaborated with local governments, NGOs and rural businesses while also being characterized by high levels of internal organizational efficiency (Borda-Rodriguez et al., 2016, pp. 99, 101, 102). Indeed, when local political leaders are capable of steering national-level policy benefits toward local farmers, the locality typically generates substantial economic growth (Andersson et al., 2009a, p. 155; 2009b, pp. 190, 192, 200; 2009c, p. 13).

Thus, in parts of rural Peru (especially in the highlands), some local mayors chose to work collaboratively with farmers and local NGOs while also serving as development lobbyists in order to obtain technical farming support from provincial and national government agencies. Such rural municipalities were exceptional, as most localities remained under the control of mayors who were not as interested in assisting the local peasantry. But in some cases, a local leadership culture marked by both a long tradition of intensive social network-building and de facto self-rule (due in part to geographic isolation) helped to assure that local politicians would aim for technical farming support from national agencies. This, in turn, led to noteworthy gains in local agronomic productivity, along with health-related benefits (Andersson et al., 2009d, pp. 37, 40; Baanante, 2009, p. 115). In Brazil and Mexico, similarly to Peru, those rural communities which experienced increases in food crop harvests were typically characterized by high levels of rural social capital as manifested by extensive collaboration among subsistence farmers, local leaders, and technically advanced NGOs (Van Laerhoven, 2009, pp. 60, 63; Van Laerhoven, Andersson, de Anda, et al., 2009, p. 92).

In China, villages embedded within a “strong” local civil society, marked by such indices as widespread participation in temple, church, or ethno-cultural institutions, tended to benefit the most from economic development efforts. This was in part due to the fact that local leaders perceived their own interests to lie in sharing inputs they obtained from the provincial government or from a national agency with members of the local civil society institutions (Tsai, 2007, pp. 4, 7, 51, 101). Similarly in Vietnam, the most successful villages were those for which local elites had secured a substantial district government-originated provisioning of on-farm technical inputs and who helped villagers to better assure the ecological sustainability of the locality (Wescott, 2006).

In southern Kenya’s Mau Forest, a Joint Enforcement Unit relying on local networks tapped by an indigenous CBO—the Council of Elders of the indigenous Ogiek community—proved crucial in organizing forest patrols to protect against illegal tree harvesting. This, in turn, enabled that community to regenerate portions of the forest and to be able to harvest its plant products (Chacha, 2015, p. 127). In Cameroon, forest communities specializing in the collection of tropical fruits and intensive cocoa crop farming relied on technical aid from local and foreign NGOs to augment productivity levels and turned to inter-village networks to channel their harvests toward regional and national markets. Increased profits made possible a development pay-off: the construction of new water wells and primary schools (Brown & Sonwa, 2015). Here, as in the cases depicted previously, the pre-formation of horizontal social networks had set the stage for a relatively effective diffusion of knowledge and opportunities that, in turn, helped to generate improvements in health, education and other aspects of rural development.

Conclusion

Socio-political, demographic and ecological crises that emerged in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century—including civil wars, massive out-migrations, and drought—combined with the cumulative, deleterious impacts of structural adjustment-initiated privatization and the favoring of bio-fuel agriculture to result in agronomic shortages and rural decay in much of the developing world. In this context, development strategies that have the best chance to make progress toward food security and rural development are not those that reproduce the classic economic modernization emphasis on depopulating rural zones and privileging large-farm corporate agriculture. Rather, what would be most beneficial is a major expansion of agro-technical extension assistance to smallholders; the dispersal of small-scale industrialization initiatives through rural areas; the bolstering of rural communications and transportation infrastructures; the establishment of reliable land tenure registries; and the targeting of development aid to communities characterized by high levels of rural social capital.

The rural diffusion of industrially productive sites is critical to overall economic development progress in part because it makes it more likely that off-farm earners can obtain wage employment and contribute to farm household earnings. The resultant increase in spending in turn stimulates more trade and an uptick in overall economic activity in the countryside. The fact that many industrial workers in rural areas where such a development agenda has been instituted are able to return to their farm-based homes reduces the impact of social rupture that typically occurs in wholesale rural-to-city migrations. It also markedly augments the likelihood that members of farming households will seek and obtain access to educational opportunities and to health care services, both of which are integral aspects of overall rural development.

It is furthermore clear that the provision of hard-copy land titles, representing juridical proof of farm ownership, is the single-most critical factor in assuring that smallholders will not be coerced into abandoning their farms and that they invest in permanent on-farm agronomic infrastructure. (Birner & Resnick, 2010, pp. 1442–1443, 1450; Bryant & Kappaz, 2005, p. 102; Grinspun, 2003 pp. 50, 54; Hazell et al., 2010, pp. 1349–1351, 1357; North, 2003a, pp. 5, 22; Rivera, 2003, pp. 11–16). Ideally, this should be combined with producer price or farmer income supports. These policies, when instituted conjointly, generate major gains in agronomic productivity, food security, and improvements in farmers’ overall well-being.

Finally, rural development programs which collaborate with already-existing social capital-based networks—that is,, villages and rural regions characterized by historically “deep,” entrenched inter-community and inter-personal mutual support traditions and linkages—are likely to achieve the most dramatic success in regard to economic development and food security. Development agents who take the time and effort to pursue collaborations with members of such networks would be well-positioned to help generate meaningful gains in productivity, household income, and knowledge-sharing. To achieve such progress over the long-term, it would be helpful to craft development strategies that reflect an understanding of local social institutions and the ways in which multi-level ties among agriculturalists, community leaders, NGOs, and relevant government agencies are created and sustained within and beyond rural localities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to conference participants for helpful suggestions. The author remains solely responsible for any remaining errors.

Note

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