Robert V. Burke, “Green Revolution Technologies and Farm Class in Mexico,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28, no. 1 (Oct. 1979), 135-154.

Notes

• 135 – Robert Burke works for the U.S. Treasury Department
• “The initial enthusiasm for the ‘Green Revolution,’ following the development and widespread use of high-yielding varieties, has been replaced by an equally widespread concern and pessimism about the consequences of the introduction of these technologies. In some regions, their introduction has been closely followed by widespread mechanization and displacement of tenants, which appear to have worsened the distribution of income. The experience of the Puebla Project in Mexico has suggested that serious problems may be encountered in inducing small farmers to adopt even those biological and chemical technologies which have been specifically designed for their needs. The question still being explored, however, is whether these problems are fundamental and inherent in the technologies, or whether they are part of an adjustment process, whose workings could, perhaps, be improved with an appropriate set of public policies.”
• 136 – “The basic data involved in these estimation are derived from the 1970 Censos Agricola-Ganadero y Ejidal, published by the Mexican Direccion General de Estadistica, which give municipio-level summaries of the various items. A municipio is an administrative subdivision of a state. There are, in all, approximately 2,400 municipios in Mexico. Although they vary considerably in size and population, these units are sufficiently small to be reasonably homogeneous for purposes of an agricultural study.”

• “The data sample for this study has been confined to the 28 states for which municipio-level data had been published as of the end of June 1976. Data had not been published as of that date for Michoacan, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas.”

• “The total value of agricultural production (agricultural, in this context, excludes production of forest products, animals, and animal products).”
  • A large part of indigenous foodsourcing comes from forest foraging. Is this accounted for?
• 139 – “The census summary provides data for the amount spent in 1969 for fertilizer and other purchased inputs. For the estimations here, only the amount spent on fertilizer is used. However, since fertilizer use is highly correlated with use of other purchased inputs, and with use of improved seed in particular, it can be regarded as a proxy for all such purchased inputs.”
• 143 – [SECTION: TECHNOLOGY SHIFTS AS MEASURED BY THE LEVEL OF FERTILIZER APPLICATION]
• “Inevitably, in most municipios some mixture of technologies will be employed as some farmers adopt new technologies, others do not, and still others, perhaps, employ some mixture of new and old methods. In order to separate those observations in which new technologies predominate from those in which old techniques are employed, the level of expenditure on fertilizer per unit land is used. It was decided to classify those municipios and tenure groups within municipios in which fertilizer application per hectare exceeded the national average by 50% as high fertilizer using. Those observations in which fertilizer application per hectare was less than three-quarters of the national average were classified as low fertilizer using. Although these levels are somewhat arbitrary, they are similar to the increases in levels of fertilization recommended by agricultural scientists to farmers participating in the Puebla Project.”
• “The crucial issue in this connection is whether the high-fertilizer technology as adopted on large private farms is significantly different from that employed on small private farms and ejidos. Casual observation suggests that there is a substantial difference.”
• 148 – “First, and most strikingly, the farms that adopt the new technology are substantially more capital intensive than those that do not. This is true whether capital is measured per unit land or per agricultural worker. The difference is smaller for the small private farms, but even there it is substantial.”
• “In terms of hectares per agricultural worker, the farms not adopting new technology are substantially more land intensive than those adopting it. In terms of land value, however, when land is measured in pesos per man rather than hectares per man, it is the adopting farms that are more land intensive. The role of land quality and potential for irrigation appears to be crucial.”
• “A final characteristic of the high-fertilizer-using farms is the level of fertilizer use itself. The rate of fertilizer application per hectare on these farms is almost identical in each of the three tenure classes. It might be thought that small farms might have a tendency to restrict their use of purchased inputs somewhat to limit their exposure to risk. Broadly speaking, this does not appear to be the case.”
• “It is not remarkable that the fertilizer share in output is substantially higher in the case of observations where the new technology is employed. Much of the agricultural research in the 1950s and 1960s was designed to increase the productivity of fertilizer. What is striking, however, is the wide disparity in fertilizer coefficients among tenure classes. Among the new technology group, the fertilizer coefficient on large private farms is substantially greater than that on small private farms. This is somewhat surprising in a technology that appears to be, at least superficially, without any economies of scale. What is even more surprising is the very large difference between the productivity of fertilizer on small private farms and on ejidos. To attempt an explanation of this, it is necessary to look at the capital coefficient.”
• 148-9 – “The difference in capital productivity may offer a clue to the differences in fertilizer productivity among the three tenure classes. One possibility is that, as noted previously, while the biological and chemical technologies may not be characterized by the sort of indivisibilities that would be the source of economies of scale, the productivity of feretilizer may be closely tied to the availability of certain kinds of capital goods. Capital goods may certainly be subject to limitations of minimum efficient size and rental markets and provisions for sharing may be impractical. Thus the package of fertilizer and associated capital equipment might be subject to diseconomies of small scale even though the pure biological technology would not be. The results here are consistent with this explanation.// Another possibility is that, as a result of institutional constraints or risk aversion on the part of very small farmers, small farmers may not have access to the capital goods which are necessary for a full exploitation of the benefits possible from new seed varieties and cultivation practices. To summarize, the problem could be inherent in the technology, or it could be a result of institutional factors which limit access to the technology.”
• 149 – “As was seen previously on table 4, small private farms and ejidos have approximately equal amounts of capital per worker available to them. But the capital is likely to take a very different form. On the ejidos, a substantial part of the capital goods is likely to be in the form of irrigation equipment. Nearly half are, on average, machinery and implements. On the small private farms, over the country as a whole [ignoring of course those states not included in the census which happen to be large centers of indigenous population], about 60% of the capital equipment owned by these farmers is in the form of buildings and constructions. . . . Whatever the cause, the capital equipment owned by ejidatarios appears to be more likely to be of of a kind which can take advantage of the yield-increasing characteristics of the new seed varieties.”
• 150 – “. . . a final point is that the share of labor in output is substantially smaller in the high-fertilizer-using areas than in the low-fertilizer-using areas. It has been suggested that the ‘Green Revolution’ technology should increase the demand for labor because of the increased labor requirement involved in fertilizer application and in controlling weed growth stimulated by fertilizer application. There is some evidence for this effect here.”
• “The results of the previous section give, in part, a reassuring picture of the effects of fertilizer-intensive technologies in Mexico, in those areas where the technologies have been adopted. The differences between the technologies as they have been implemented on the large private farms and on the ejidos are very minor. Since ejidos are, by almost any definition, small farms, and ejidatarios constitute the largest single class of farmers within the rural population, the fact that they have been able to adopt the new technologies, essentially intact, has favorable implications for rural income distribution.”
• 150-1 – “On the other hand, the fact that substantially more large farms were classified as using new technology suggests that the relatively smaller farms lag behind in their adoption of new techniques, if they adopt at all, a tendency which has been confirmed by other studies. This fact and the fact that small private farms appear not to have been able to fully adopt the new technology suggest that the difficulties of developing appropriate technologies and inducing small farmers to adopt them have not been overcome.”