TY - JOUR
T1 - Tilling the soil in Tanzania
T2 - What do emerging economies have to offer?
AU - Agyei-Holmes, Andrew
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.
PY - 2016/7/1
Y1 - 2016/7/1
N2 - Over the last two decades Tanzania's economic growth has been disproportionately biased towards industry and services, denying farmers the distributional benefits that accompany progress. Rectifying the situation requires appropriate tillage tools to raise agricultural productivity. Past attempts to either identify local tools or import technologies from advanced countries yielded limited benefits. Coincidentally, China and India have recently been developing power tillers suitable for their own production environment. Because these emerging economies are themselves developing, we hypothesize that the technologies they generate could benefit other developing countries. This article compares emerging economy power tillers with advanced country power tillers on 95 rice farms in Tanzania. Despite their adverse environmental impact, we conclude that emerging economy power tillers are more beneficial to the poor than are advanced country tillers as they provide a low acquisition cost point of entry for cash constrained producers and are more employment-intensive, and in some cases more economically profitable.
AB - Over the last two decades Tanzania's economic growth has been disproportionately biased towards industry and services, denying farmers the distributional benefits that accompany progress. Rectifying the situation requires appropriate tillage tools to raise agricultural productivity. Past attempts to either identify local tools or import technologies from advanced countries yielded limited benefits. Coincidentally, China and India have recently been developing power tillers suitable for their own production environment. Because these emerging economies are themselves developing, we hypothesize that the technologies they generate could benefit other developing countries. This article compares emerging economy power tillers with advanced country power tillers on 95 rice farms in Tanzania. Despite their adverse environmental impact, we conclude that emerging economy power tillers are more beneficial to the poor than are advanced country tillers as they provide a low acquisition cost point of entry for cash constrained producers and are more employment-intensive, and in some cases more economically profitable.
KW - China and India
KW - Tanzania
KW - agricultural mechanization
KW - appropriate technology
KW - emerging economies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84975784321&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1057/ejdr.2016.14
DO - 10.1057/ejdr.2016.14
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84975784321
SN - 0957-8811
VL - 28
SP - 379
EP - 396
JO - European Journal of Development Research
JF - European Journal of Development Research
IS - 3
ER -