Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- I Understanding Green Revolutions: an overview
- II Agrarian change at village level
- 5 Agrarian policy and agrarian change in tribal India
- 6 Migration and agrarian change in Garhwal District, Uttar Pradesh
- 7 Agricultural development in Tamil Nadu: two decades of land use change at village level
- 8 Energy flows and agrarian change in Karnataka: the Green Revolution at micro-scale
- 9 Income and wealth disparities in a land settlement of the Sri Lanka Dry Zone
- 10 Agrarian structure and agricultural innovation in Bangladesh: Panimara village, Dhaka district
- 11 A structural analysis of two farms in Bangladesh
- III Development planning and agrarian change
- Index
8 - Energy flows and agrarian change in Karnataka: the Green Revolution at micro-scale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- I Understanding Green Revolutions: an overview
- II Agrarian change at village level
- 5 Agrarian policy and agrarian change in tribal India
- 6 Migration and agrarian change in Garhwal District, Uttar Pradesh
- 7 Agricultural development in Tamil Nadu: two decades of land use change at village level
- 8 Energy flows and agrarian change in Karnataka: the Green Revolution at micro-scale
- 9 Income and wealth disparities in a land settlement of the Sri Lanka Dry Zone
- 10 Agrarian structure and agricultural innovation in Bangladesh: Panimara village, Dhaka district
- 11 A structural analysis of two farms in Bangladesh
- III Development planning and agrarian change
- Index
Summary
Reviewing his project on agrarian change in rice-growing areas undergoing the earlier stages of a Green Revolution, B.H. Farmer concluded:
Macro-scale planning of agricultural development spreads far too coarse a net over the landscape, given the great variations between areas and, within areas, between villages … Those who only contemplate villages from capital cities or from their desks might reflect that conclusions on inter-village variation … could only be made by prolonged work in the villages and paddy fields of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.
(Farmer, 1977b, p. 205)This chapter, unlike most of the work that Benny Farmer has inspired, does not result from the author's own ‘prolonged work in the villages and paddy fields’, but it does draw upon other people's data from detailed field studies that are entirely within the Farmer tradition. My objective is to explore a methodology for the comparative analysis of agricultural systems. This methodology was developed by agriculturalists and social scientists in response to the ‘energy crisis’, following the oil shortages and oil price fluctuations of the 1970s which were seen as threatening the whole basis of modern technology, including that of the Green Revolution (e.g. Makhijani & Poole, 1975; Leach, 1976; Pimentel & Pimentel, 1979; Pimentel, 1980; Bayliss- Smith, 1982a).
To discover the degree of dependence of an agricultural system upon new technology an analysis is required of energy flows within the system. Given the variability in peasant farming practice that Farmer refers to above, data on energy flows become meaningless unless they refer to a particular farming environment. We are therefore drawn towards the micro-scale of enquiry, towards particular villages, and within these villages to consider particular households. Such data are available for the Mandya district of Karnataka State, India, an area which was studied by the economic anthropologist T.
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- Information
- Understanding Green RevolutionsAgrarian Change and Development Planning in South Asia, pp. 153 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984
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