Changing farm size and agricultural development in East Asia

In this section, we follow Chapter 5 of Hayami and Ruttan (1985) to overview long-term changes experienced by East Asian countries. Asian paths in Hayami and Ruttan (1985) are characterized by continuous efforts to increase land productivity by intensifying labor and other input use, especially through biochemical technological innovations, given that the initial condition was that the majority of farmers were small family-based cultivators including owner and tenant farmers. Arable land per person, land-labor ratio, and the average farm size were generally small under high population density (though there are some differences in the initial factor endowment between Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia). As described in the next section, rapid and successful industrialization in this region has absorbed a large share of the labor force, which has resulted in a shortage of labor in agriculture. The rapidly rising real wage makes it necessary to substitute for labor. Divergence from historical paths observed in the past has been recently confirmed in Japan and is expected to happen soon in many other countries in the region.PRIFPRI4MTI