do so because they have a piece of
waterlogged land not suitable for crop
production. Such people are usually young
and lack experience to obtain additional
land ofbetter quality. Thus few fish farmers
are in the subsistence household category
(defined as having less than 1.6 ha), since
they are unwilling to risk adoption of an as
yet unproven innovation and only 10.5%
of those sampled are in the "below
subsistence category" (defined as having
less than 0.8 ha).
Together with land, family labor is the
principal household resource in rural
MalaGi. Extra labor is obtained by hiring,
the role of the formerly important
reciprocal labor having declined with the
rapid socioeconomic change that has
occurred in Southern MalaGi (Banda
1989).
The Emergence
of Entrepreneurship
A rare case of household
entrepreneurship on a large scale in an
old-established aquaculture system is well
illustrated by changes that have occurred
during the last decade in the dike-pond
system of integrated farming in the
Zhujiang(Pear1 River) Delta of Guangdong
Province, southern China (Ruddle and
Zhong 1988).
From late 1978 there occurred in rural
China a progressive repudiation of the
notion of a highly collectivized and
egalitarian society and the concomitant
beginnings of amixed economy. Inessence,
the reforms decollectivized many
agricultural practices, transformed from
de facto to de jure the status of the
individual family as the fundamental rural
economic unit, and removed the controls
that prevented households from freely
marketing surplus production. Farm
households obtained considerable freedom
in deciding how to allocate their own
capital, labor and management resources.
As a result, productivity and household
incomes rose dramatically and household
activity schedules and the allocation of
labor also became more flexible (Ruddle
and Zhong1988). Thusvariationsernerged
among households in terms, among other
things, of the allocation of working capital
and labor to the system, management
strategies and levels of productivity, the
energy efficiency of household ponds, and
household economics. This was, of course,
a response to individual household
circumstances that affected their physical
and financial capacity to supply different
inputs (such as excrements and elephant
grass on the one hand; and purchased
fingerlings and concentrated feed on the
other) at different rates, as well as differing
perceptions with regard to the comparative
worth of traditional and modern inputs.
By manipulating energy inputs to
actualize opportunity costs of on-farm
sourced inputs, and thereby offset costs of
purchased energy sources, modelling
demonstrated that household cash incomes
could be raised 3-12% (Ruddle and Zhong
1988). In practice, rates would probably be
higher, since substituting concentrated
feed for traditional inputs would improve
water quality, thus, all things being equal,
improving fish yields.
However, to make these simple
changes at the household level requires
important changes at higher levels in the
system. Amongthe most important ofthese
are the regular and sufficient supply of
concentrated feed to local pond operators
from the newly opened factory in the
county; the adoption of concentrated feeds
as a consequence ofrepeated and successful
demonstration effects; a continued market
for household produced and surplus
excrements that would absorb these
surpluses as they continued to increase
with the wider adoption of concentrates;
the ability to divert sugar cane waste to
other productive industrial uses (e.g.,
pelletized feeds); and the industrial use of
silkworm waste, among others.