Asian Agriculture: Achievements and Challenges

A significant yet not fully appreciated development of the last decade was the remarkable growth of agricultural production in the Asian developing countries, a performance in marked contrast to the agricultural stagnation in many developing countries in other parts of the world. Of the ten South and Southeast Asian countries examined in this article, seven – Burma, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in South Asia and Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand in Southeast Asia – had average annual growth rates of 3 per cent or more during the 1970s. Bangladesh and India, two of the most populous countries in Asia, had slightly less than 3 per cent, while Nepal had a low 1.2 per cent. The growth rates of food production, the major subsector, were also relatively high, exceeding population growth rates in all but two of the ten countries. In Bangladesh, these growth rates were about the same, but in Nepal, the population growth rate was significantly higher than that of food production (see Table 1)…