Conclusions on the future of poverty reform

How do these various considerations relate to our central concerns for food issues in this group? I intend to underline three basic points here. First, I hold (along with many of the people whose expert views we have heard through the past several years) that the world food crisis is basically an income problem, not an agricultural technology problem. Poor people do not have sufficient access to food; and poor people are poor because of the structure of property ownership and employment opportunities that are embodied in their societies. There is a fairly plausible view that agriculture produces food; so if the less- developed world is hungry, a solution is to in crease the productivity of third-world agricultural systems. However, the arguments offered here suggest that the diagnosis is inaccurate and the remedy ineffective. It is fully possible to increase agricultural productivity without substantially affecting the occurrence and intensity of poverty (low-income population) in less-developed countries. Depending on the particulars of the local property system, the benefits of modernization may well flow almost exclusively to those segments of society that are already well-fed. By emphasizing the centrality of the institutions that determine income distribution, then, our attention is led to a consideration of the institutional arrangements through which agricultural modernization takes place; primarily the property relations that are so central in the distribution both of income and of political influence.

Second, I have emphasized the extreme difficulties that face the task of introducing agrarian reform into a society already highly stratified along the lines of land ownership. It would appear that the most promising strategy is one of attempting to increase the political militancy and power of the rural poor; to the extent that they can make their demands for reform politically influential, agrarian reform becomes more plausible.

Finally, I have suggested that there are models of rural development that do not work through private property and traditional political elites, and that have some promise as remedies to inequality and poverty in the countryside. Fundamental land reform, production cooperatives, democratic economic institutions, and sophisticated market socialism appear to represent a viable alternative route to modernized agriculture and economic development.

Strategies

I have now argued that justice requires that development strategy place top priority on poverty alleviation. More abstractly, development policies ought to conform to the difference principle. We now need to ask to whom this normative advice is directed? There are two agents in the development process who have the ability to adopt this policy goal, and they are agents of quite unequal influence. First, there are the governments of the developing countries them selves. Each government invests substantial resources in development planning and implementation, and these processes are guided by national economic priorities. Many national governments already give rhetorical allegiance to a "poverty first" approach-for example, Indian planning has fairly consistently taken this stance since independence. However, in many instances this rhetoric is not accompanied by corresponding policy commitments. Each government has a set of domestic constituencies who are affected in different ways by the development process. So the first audience of this normative argument is the government planning agencies and domestic constituencies-the poor-in the less developed countries.

The second category of player in the development game is the international development agency that offers advice and aid to developing countries. The World Bank, US-AID, United Nations agencies, EEC development agencies, and the like, offer advice and program aid to poor countries; and these interventions are based on a mix of normative and analytical assumptions. We must not overestimate the ability of international agencies to affect the development process in various poor countries; in general it is domestic governments rather than international agencies that call the tune. However, it is also clearly true that international agencies have some leverage with domestic governments. The sort of argument offered above is intended to reaffirm and deepen the "poverty first" normative orientation that was current in development thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, but that is now regarded as infeasible or undesirable. There are good normative reasons for concluding that the "poverty first" approach is superior to the "growth first" approach on welfare grounds. And there are good analytical reasons to believe that there are economically feasible development strategies available that effectively pursue the poverty first approach. So a second goal of this argument is to make the argument to development policy makers in the industrialized world that development advice and aid should be structured around this goal.