Green Revolution India India Green Revolution | Page 12

12

In conclusion, the second Green Revolution in India during the 1980s was able to play a
critical role in preparing a wide market in rural areas for non-agricultural products and services,
which became the basis of the rapid economic growth based on non-agricultural sector development
in the country after the 1990s. The author emphasizes here the „final demand effects‟ of the
agricultural development in the 1980s, although the author does not deny the existence and the
importance of „backward and forward linkage effects‟ of it too.

III.

Implications for Sub-Saharan Africa

What are the implications of the experience of India for the development of Sub-Saharan
Africa? In terms of the living standard of ordinary people, the two regions made a great divergence
in the 1980s when India started to escape from the hitherto low-level equilibrium. If the major
argument so far of this paper is summarized, the critical difference between the two regions was the
performance of the agricultural sector during the 1980s. During that decade, India accomplished a
nationwide development of the agricultural sector due to the spread of the second Green Revolution
while the agricultural sector was more or less stagnated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Actually the growth
rate of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s was less than 2 percent, which lagged
behind even the population growth rate. Per capita food production was thereby decreased and food
import (rice and wheat) started to rise rapidly from the 1980s. And per capita calorie intake is still
stagnating in Sub-Saharan Africa at around 2100 calorie/day. To be worse, while the population
growth rate largely decelerated in India to nearly 1.5 percent per annum in recent years, Sub-Saharan
Africa is still suffering from the „population explosion‟ at about 2.5 percent per annum. Note that the
major reason why India came to the last stage of the so-called demographic transition (the stage in
which birth rate started to decline substantially) was the successful transition of the economy from
agriculture-based to non-agriculture-based.
The most important implication of the experience of India for Sub-Saharan Africa, therefore,
is to raise rural income to „a certain level‟ and alleviate poverty in rural areas, thus to make rural
areas a big market for non-agricultural products and services. If it is realized, Sub-Saharan Africa
can most probably proceed to the next step of economic development based on industrialization. And
in order to raise rural income to a certain level, the agricultural sector, especially the staple food
production sector, should be developed by productivity growth (not by horizontal expansion of
farmland, as experienced in most of the regions in Sub-Saharan Africa so far). The other method
such as introducing cottage industry in rural areas, for example, cannot be universal enough for
raising rural income in everywhere. The key question is thus how to introduce the Green Revolution
in the context of the existing natural and socio-economic environment in Sub-Saharan Africa.