AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION1970s suggested that development would likely
exacerbate rural inequality; that most of the bene-
fits of innovation would accrue to farmers who
were wealthy enough to afford the new inputs
(Frankel 1971; Poleman and Freebairn 1973); and
that the rural poor would be further marginalized
and forced to seek employment in the increasingly
capital-intensive industries developing in cities.
The Green Revolution, so the thinking went, con-
tained the seeds of civil unrest in the cities—an
urban Red Revolution (Sharma and Poleman 1993).
Recent research in agricultural economics
paints a more optimistic portrait of the long-run
distributional effects of the Green Revolution.
Once small farmers were given the necessary
infrastructural support, their productivity and in-
comes increased. Growing rural incomes and the
resulting growth in consumption demand stimu-
lates the development of a wide variety of off-farm
and noncrop employment opportunities. Through
participation in these ‘‘second generation’’ effects
of the Green Revolution, the incomes of landless
and near-landless households have increased dra-
matically (Sharma and Poleman 1993). These indi-
rect consequences of agricultural innovation are
not limited to the Green Revolution. Innovation in
agriculture and the expansion of rural, nonagricul-
tural manufacturing were strongly associated in
the development of Western Europe and East Asia
as far back as the eighteenth century (Grabowski
1995). We tend to think of the Industrial Revolu-
tion as an urban phenomenon in which agricultur-
al surplus labor was transferred from occupations
of low productivity in agriculture to those of high
productivity in urban manufacturing. Yet in this
early phase of industrialization, the flow of people
and economic activity went the other way—from
town to country. Then, as now, agricultural inno-
vation influenced and was influenced by the growth
of rural manufacturing. Expanding commerciali-
zation of rural areas fosters innovation by provid-
ing many of the inputs needed by agriculture, as
well as sources of credit for farm operations and
alternative sources of income to buffer the risks
associated with innovations. These reciprocal ef-
fects have been observed in the experience of
China in the 1990s (Islam and Hehui 1994).
Economists have argued that agricultural in-
novation is induced by changes in the availability
and cost of major factors of production, particu-
larly land and labor (Binswanger and Ruttan 1978).
Historical, cross-national studies show that coun-
tries differently endowed with land and labor have
followed distinct paths of technological change in
agriculture. Population pressures on land resourc-
es have impelled technological change and devel-
opment (Boserup 1965, 1981; Binswanger 1986).
Rather than focusing on individual farmers’ adop-
tion decisions, research in this tradition has exam-
ined variation in innovation by region according
to demographic and other conditions.The social context of innovation also has an
important political dimension. Political structures
powerfully influence the path of innovation. When
family farms were turned over to collective man-
agement by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
local farmers in both the lowland and upland areas
were unable to use their own knowledge of farm
management (Jamieson et al. 1998). Traditional
knowledge passed down over many generations
became lost to new generations of farmers. Yet
local knowledge systems are often crucial to the
successful implementation of modern farming tech-
nologies brought in from the outside. Such prob-
lems are compounded when the power to make
decisions about the course of development is cen-
tralized in national agencies, as is the case in
Vietnam.Innovation can also call forth new political
structures. India’s Green Revolution became
politicized as the terms and prices at which agricul-
tural inputs could be obtained and the price at
which agricultural products could be sold were
determined by government and its local agencies.
Peasant movements arose as a response to con-
cern about access to the new farming technology.
The incidence of improved agricultural practices
has been associated with the rise of political parties
such as the Lok Dal of Uttar Pradesh, which most
clearly articulated rural interests (Duncan 1997).
By asserting new identities and interests created in
the changed circumstances brought about by the
Green Revolution, the Lok Dal was able to mobi-
lize across traditional lines of caste and locality.The social, economic, and political structures
of the social context of innovation do not exist in
isolation from one another. In any development
setting, a contextually informed understanding of