Technical change and wheat production

There seems to be a consensus in the literature on the the spread since 1965 of high-yielding cereal varieties has agricultural transformation in many parts of Asia. Fear of ‘green revolutions that ushered in an era of the Malthusian spectre’ has been somewhat allayed and new hope for these countries generated. The realizable potential for greater agricultural output improves the prospects for sustained growth of these economies, The challenge facing pol icymakers and planners of these and other less developed countries is to convert the potentiai into a sustained basis for economic development and growth. While the technological breakthrough in cereal production has obviously generated increased agricultural output and farm incomes, the distribution of gains seems not to be even. Larger land owners appear to be benefiting from the new technology much more than small farmers and iaborers. This constitutes another challenge to the pol icymakers of these countries to design programs which will distribute the gains from the new agricultural technology more eveniy. The answers to these challenges are by no means easy to intuit. At the very least it requires an understanding of the nature and impact of the transformation that has already occurred or is under way. What we need is not a simpie impression-istic assessment of this change but quantitative measures which can be usefu *Researc\l for this paper was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and th