Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:English of Global Economics. Учебное пособие
.pdf
60
Finally, he is often not even free to consume his own crop, but
must hand over a portion of his own crop to the owner of his
land, till the lord’s fields, work in his shops and pay dues such as
head taxes, death duties, a marriage fee or dues to use the lord’s
mill. Later the old feudal payments in kind were converted into
payments of dues and rents in money.
Early peasants did not own their land. They were but tenants
of a great lord, who possessed a huge commercial estate or a
manor that often included many thousands of acres. The estate
was the lord’s homestead, a great manor house, walled off from
the surrounding countryside. In the enclosed courtyard of the
manor were working shops in which cloth might be spun or
woven, grapes pressed, food stored, simple ironwork performed,
coarse grain ground. Extending out around the manor were fields,
subdivided into acre or half-acre strips, each with its own rotation
cycle of crops and rest.
By introducing two-field and three-field systems of cultivation,
rotating winter, summer and other crops, leaving some part
of arable land to fallow and reducing plowing time of cultivated
land (in those days it was customary to plow fallow land twice,
and cultivated land only once) peasant productivity improved.
Unit Two
***
In England the landlords began to view their estates as
potential sources of cash revenue. In order to raise larger cash
crops, they “enclosed” the pasture that had previously been deemed
“common land”. Communal grazing fields, which had in fact always
belonged to the lord despite their communal use, were turned into
sheepwalks. A rising demand for woolen cloth was making sheep
raising a highly profitable occupation. The enclosure process in
England proceeded at an irregular pace over the long centuries
(from the 15th to the 19th century). By its end, nearly half the
arable land of England had been enclosed for sheep raising and
for commercial farming, and the greater part of the tenants was
simply turned off the farm.
Though British agriculture was making great advances in
improving agricultural implements and machines, in introducing
new methods of agricultural techniques and applying artificial
fertilizers, the country could not keep pace with all demands
of an industrial society and was becoming more dependent on
AGRICULTURE
foreign food supplies, especially cereals. In these circumstances
British agriculture had to adapt itself to producing those foodstuffs
in which home farmers were at a less competitive disadvantage:
dairy produce, fruit, and vegetables. By devoting more attention
to these, using the diminished resources more carefully and by
heavily cutting returns to landlords, British agriculture as a whole
enjoyed moderate prosperity in the early years of the twentieth
century.
***
Now the primary concern of Rural England is the future of
the countryside and the restructuring of agriculture. The people
fear that in the course of the restructuring of agriculture small
farmers who have already been shaken by all sort of disasters and
foot-and-mouth disease, will be rattled further. Farm acreages,
already larger than those on the continent, will continue to get
bigger. More owner-farmers will opt out of farming, preferring to
sell up or have their land farmed by a contractor.
In terms of the national economy, none of this matters very
much. Agriculture contributes only 1% to the economy. Following
job losses of some 20,000 a year, it is no longer a big employer,
even in rural areas. Successive food scares have undermined trust
between farmers and the consumer. While almost every Parisian
knows someone who works the land, many young English
urbanites appear to hate the rural lobby.
Leaving aside the devastation of tourism as well as agriculture
caused by foot-and-mouth, the countryside has not done so
badly. More new businesses are started in the countryside each
year than in towns. It is the place where entrepreneurs, like
many other people, want to live. Rural lobbies such as Countryside
Alliance talk up the problems of rural dwellers and the rate of
decline in rural life has, in some areas, slowed to a standstill.
A $58 million fund has been established to help schools with
less than 200 pupils, hospitals, village shops and other services.
More money is being spent on agri-environmental schemes to
safeguard wildlife habitats and open footpaths. There has been
some progress in reviving rural markets. Five years ago there were
no farmers’ markets in England; and now there are over 200.
However, though the government officially backs the revival of
market towns, the reality is that the supermarket giants will put
61
62
high-street shops under still greater pressure in the next few years.
Supporters of the alternative food economy have to contend with
the British shoppers’ reluctance to spend more at the check-out.
While the average family spent 30% of its income on food in
the 1950s, that figure has now fallen to around 10%. This is
extraordinary low. Relative poverty, more sporadic in the country
than in towns and therefore more difficult to tackle, will increase
in the future
to till the fields обрабатывать поля; tiller земледелец; to project
backwards мысленно перенестись в прошлое, представлять; a book of
profit and loss книга уч¸та прибыли и убытков; to fashion делать,
производить; dues подати, пошлины; head tax подушный налог; death
duties пошлины на наследство; to pay rents and dues in kind оплачи
вать аренду земли и подати натурой; tenant арендатор; a manor круп
ное земельное владение, (феодальное) поместье; homestead усадьба;
to grind coarse grain молоть, размалывать серые хлеба; crop rotation
cycle севооборот; a two-field (three-field) system двупольная (тр¸хполь-
ная) система севооборота; winter crops озимые; summer crops яровые;
to leave land to fallow оставлять землю под паром; cash crop товар-
ная культура; to enclose common land огораживать общинные земли;
enclosure огораживание; to deem полагать, считать; ñash revenue доход
в денежной форме; a sheepwalk овечий загон; foot-and-mouth disease
ÿùóð; scare паника; wildlife habitat место обитания диких животных;
check-out касса (при выходе из магазина); sporadic случающийся время от времени.
2
.
Unit Two
-
-
Ex. 7. Read the text and answer the following questions: (a) What
was characteristic of American agriculture in the past? (b) How do
you understand the term inelastic demand? (c) What is oligopoly?
an oligopolistic market? (d) Can you describe the economic
situation in the USA when the New Deal was introduced? How
was it implemented? (e) Why was the Agricultural Adjustment Act
adopted? (f) How did the government f ight overproduction? Did
it succeed in achieving its goal? (g) What is the US agricultural
policy now?
Part of the trouble on the farm in America in the 20th century,
without question, stemmed from the difficult heritage of the
past. Beset now by drought, now by the exploitation of powerful
railroad and storage combines, now by his own inclination for land
speculation, the farmer was an ailing member of the economy.
In addition, American farmers had been traditionally careless
of the earth, indifferent to the technology of agriculture. Looking
AGRICULTURE
at the average individual farmer, one would have said that he
was poor because he was unproductive. Between 1920 and 1930,
farm productivity improved somewhat, but not nearly so fast as
productivity off the farm. For the great majority of the nation’s
agricultural producers, the trouble appeared to be that they could
not grow or raise enough to make a decent living.
The demand for farm products was quite unlike that for
manufactured products generally. In the manufacturing sector,
when productivity rose and costs accordingly fell, the cheaper
prices of manufactured goods attracted vast new markets, as with
the Ford car. Not so with farm products, however. When food
prices fell, people do not tend to increase their actual consumption
very greatly. Increases in overall farm output resulted in much
lower prices but not in larger cash receipts for the farmer. Faced
with what is called an “inelastic” demand (a demand that does
not respond in proportion to price changes) sellers are worse off
than they were before a f lood of output.
Had farmers constituted an oligopolistic market (only with a
few sellers), the decline in farm income might have been limited.
A few producers, facing an inelastic demand for their products,
can see the sense in mutually curtailing output. Rather than
flooding a market that does not want their product, they can
agree, tacitly or otherwise, to hold back production to some
amount that the market will absorb at a reasonable price. But the
individual farmer is about as far from an oligopolist as one can
imagine. When the price for his crop falls, it gains the individual
farmer nothing to decrease his output. On the contrary, in his
highly competitive situation, the best that he can do is to rush to
sell as much as he can before things get worse, thereby unwittingly
making things worse.
So the problem arose in large part from two causes: the nature
of the inelastic demand for farm products, and the highly
competitive, “atomistic” structure of the agricultural market itself.
The New Deal (or the Hundred Days introduced by F.D. Roosevelt
in the 1930s) could not alter the first cause, the inelasticity of
demand, for this arose from the nature of the consumers’ desire
for food. But it could change the condition of supply. Hence, one
of the earliest pieces of New Deal legislation — the Agricultural
Adjustment Act — sought to establish machinery by which farmers,
as a group, could accomplish what they could not as competitive
individuals: curtailment of output.
63
64
The curtailment was sought by offering payments to farmers
who agreed to cut back their acreage or in other ways hold down
their output. The attack on overproduction was not without
result. In the 1930s more than 30 million acres were taken out of
production in return for government payments of $1,0 billion.
Farm prices rose as a result. Cotton doubled in price, wheat
and hog prices tripled, and the net income of the American
farmer climbed from the fearful low of $2.5 billion in 1932 to
$5 billion in 1936.
***
When technology caught up with American agriculture,
productivity on the farm began to soar. In fact, it rose faster than
productivity in industry. Hence, despite the limitation of acreage,
the actual output of crops increased steadily: between 1940 and
the late 1960s, for instance, the amount of harvested acreage
declined by 15 percent, but the yield per acre increased by more
than 70 percent. The result was a f lood of output, huge quantities
of which had to be purchased and stored by the government
under its support programs. Despite the gradual distribution of
these surpluses to the underdeveloped lands during the 1960s and
the emergence of a world food shortage in the 1970s, the surplus
problem has been a recurrent embarrassment.
Thus the attempt to solve the farm problem has been a mixed
success. It has, for instance, succeeded in much improving the
economic status of the million and a half least-productive small
farmers. In addition, many middle-class farmers have been hard
hit by the vagaries of the agricultural market. In the late 1970s,
successful farmers who borrowed heavily to improve their farms
found themselves saddled with crushing interest payments when
crop prices fell in the early 1980s. In constant dollars, net farm
incomes in 1983 were only one-third of their 1979 level. Farm
foreclosures were once again headline news, and some of the
heartbreaking drama of the 1930s was visible on TV. Now things
are again changing, this time for the better.
In truth, farming has always been an economically difficult
way of life, a fact that helps us understand the presence of farm
support programs of one kind or another in all advanced capitalist
nations, not just in the United States. Today virtually all farms
are electrified and refrigerator ownership is over 95 percent.
Unit Two
AGRICULTURE
Thus, despite the hardships that aff lict the industry, the million-odd
farmers who produce some 90 percent of agricultural output
have risen to enjoy an essentially middle-class standard of living,
a parity with the urban middle class that was never achieved
3
before
a combine картель, синдикат; cash receipts выручка, доход; oligopolistic
market олигополистический рынок (с ограниченным числом продав
цов и множеством покупателей); to curtail сокращать, ограничивать;
curtailment сокращение, ограничение; tacitly молчаливо; an atomistic
structure атомистическая, разрозненная структура; the New Deal «Hîâûé
курс» (экономическая политика США в 1930-е годы); the Agricultural
Adjustment Act закон о приспособлении сельского хозяйства к тре
бованиям рынка; surplus излишек, избыток; vagaries [!veig
market причуды рынка.
Ex. 8. Drawing your information from the following text exchange
.
əriz] of the
opinions on (a) the problems of Japan’s agriculture; (b) the way it
differs from the agriculture of Western countries; (c) steps taken
by the Japanese government to improve the situation; (d) Japan’s
solution to food issues of developing countries.
There are three points that must be made when considering
the future of Japanese agriculture in general and rice production
in particular.
The first is Japan’s marked lack of self-sufficiency when
it comes to food. The country is able to meet only 42% of its
requirements (calorie-supply self-sufficiency rate). When the
Agricultural Basic Law was passed in 1961, Japan was producing
80% of its food (calorific) requirements. In the intervening years
that rate has dropped by half. This is in sharp contrast to other
advanced industrial countries, where the self-sufficiency rate has,
in the main, been rising.
Food is the most necessary of necessities, literally a matter of
life and death, and Japan is reaching a precipitous point. For
Japan, food is a serious security issue, one that could impinge
on its continued existence.
The second point to be considered is the renewed importance
of rural, agricultural villages to Japanese society. After World
War II, Japan marshaled all of its resources towards catching up
with the more advanced countries of Europe and North America.
This was as true of agriculture as any other field.
65
-
-
66
The final point is that agriculture in the West is completely
different in type and style from that in Japan. Agriculture in
Western Europe basically involves fields, with livestock as an
appendage. This entails several problems. Unless a certain amount
of what is harvested is returned to the earth in the form of
fertilizer, European agriculture becomes an exploitative process
that robs the land of its nutrients and causes the topsoil itself
to run off. The centre of Japanese agriculture, however, is the
paddy not the field. This is in some senses a recycling-oriented
method, a peculiar use of resources that has enabled the same
paddies to be used literally for 2,000 years in a row, something
inconceivable in the world of fields.
Until South Korea joint their ranks, Japan was the only one of
the industrialized countries to have a background in rice cultivation.
Other rice producers will eventually join them (Thailand, the
Philippines, Vietnam) and as that happens Japan will not be so
much a peculiarity as merely a holder of a certain share of
production on a redefined world stage. Understanding Japan is
the key to foreseeing the future of Asia.
Since the 1980s there has been a growing recognition in
Europe and North America that, far from being friendly to the
environment, agricultural production is actually a burden on the
environment. Certainly Japan shares many of these problems.
Fertilizers and agrochemicals are made heavy use of in field
crops, while paddies give off methane, but Japanese nonetheless
see agriculture in general as contributing to the protection of its
environment, including water and soil resources.
The Commission on Basic Problems in Food, Agriculture, and
Rural Villages began an intensive and wide-ranging debate on
the principles that should underlie agricultural policy in today’s
internationalized world. Certainly it is time for a general reevaluation
of the agricultural framework that has been in place since the
war. The government must rethink and rework the divisions between
those areas best left up to market mechanisms and those that
require a planned, government-led approach.
The new Staple Food Law, for example, can be seen as a
laudable step in this direction — though it does contain provisions
both for free production and sales on the one hand, and for supply
and demand regulation and price stabilization on the other, systems
which seem to be fundamentally in opposition to each other.
Rice distribution has been liberalized to the point that rice can
Unit Two
AGRICULTURE
be sold when and where one wills, and the barriers to entry are
extremely low. This represents a considerable expansion in the
scope given to market mechanisms so that production can run
without the need for regulation. Stock piles as well ought to be
maintained in a systematic manner so that the country is prepared
for unseen occurrences.
It is senseless that 800 million people in the world should be
starving while the most advanced countries try to hold back their
food production. The problem lies in unequal distribution of
purchasing power. Correcting this is the basic solution to food
issues. Starvation is therefore not a problem of food so much as
income, and the question eventually boils down to how to increase
the food production capacities and incomes of developing countries.
What Japanese need to think about are ways to prevent developing
countries from becoming any more dependent on food aid and
render emergency assistance that improves supply capacity.
calorie-supply self-sufficiency rate уровень самообеспеченности продовольствием с достаточной калорийностью; a precipitous point кризисная ситуация; to impinge (on) посягать, покушаться (на); to catch up
(with) догнать; to entail влечь за собой, вызывать; topsoil верхний слой
почвы; paddy рисовое поле с затоплением; inconceivable непостижимый, невероятный; methane [!me
ный углеводородом; reevaluation переоценка; a laudable step похвальный шаг; agricultural framework структура сельского хозяйства.
θein] метан; болотный газ, насыщен-
67
Ex. 9. Read the text and comment on the food security of India.
What is the present day situation with food supply in India? Why
do you think Indian scientists are so unwilling to conduct research
for the benefit of the country? Are Indian tastes changing with the
economic growth of the country? What are assumptions for the
future food demand in India?
The contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product
(GDP) has declined in the last 50 years, and is now about 28 per
cent of the total GDP. However, this does not belittle the
importance of the agricultural sector. This sector contributes to
food security, provides employment and supports many industries.
Agriculture is thus a highly interactive core sector and inf luences
a number of other sectors of economy. The performance of the
agricultural sector is often judged by the foodgrain production.
Foodgrain production increased at a modest rate of 1.43 per cent
68
during 1990—98. The growth rate of pulses and coarse grains has
been negative in this period.
Thus, most of the growth in foodgrain production has occurred
due to increased production of wheat and rice. Foodgrain production
growth is lower than the population growth rate, which has been
around 1.8 per cent during the same period. Except onions,
vegetable oils and some pulses, the country did not import any
commodity but in fact exported rice and oil cake. The annual
growth of vegetables and fruits has been more than 10 per cent.
The nation’s agricultural output continues to shrink as farmland
is being increasingly diverted to other uses, hindering sustainability
in foodgrain production. While much of the land under the Green
Revolution practices is being rendered unproductive, an estimated
two million small and marginal farmers are deprived of their
meagre land holdings every year to become a part of the growing
landless labour force. One-third of India’s population lives in urban
areas and consumes most of the foodstuffs, leaving very little
to the rural population. This means that food is not available in
the country for a vast section of the population. Therefore, while
the country is self-sufficient in foodgrain production, in reality
a large section of the population does not get the recommended
amounts of calories and proteins. Also, soil micronutrients have
been depleting over the years, affecting the micronutrient content
of grains. Heavy use of fertilizers has ruined soil fertility and
exacerbated the problem of soil erosion.
Agricultural scientists have abdicated their responsibility to
conduct research that directly benefits the farming community.
Agricultural research is being slowly passed on to private companies.
The allotment of 15 hectares of farmland to the Israel Government
for initiating research on water management, by asking Pepsi Foods
to set up a research centre for fruit and vegetable breeding and
Unilever for establishing a biotech laboratory, the Indian scientists
have demonstrated their unwillingness to help the country.
Currently, the seed multinational, Monsanto, has emerged as
a major player in biotechnology research, overshadowing the
performance of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.
With Monsanto already heaving financial stakes in at least three
Indian seed companies, it is evident that research institutes would
join more lucrative assignments in the multinationals. It is a
matter of few years before companies like Monsanto begin to set
the national agricultural research agenda. The agenda would not be
Unit Two
AGRICULTURE
defined by national needs; rather it would be shaped by the profit
motives of these companies.
The food demand in India would be determined by the
population size and economic growth. Economic growth will have
impact on the consumption pattern. In view of the changing
patterns of consumption, it is possible to make some assumptions
based on social and cultural traditions of Indians. One assumption
is that most Indians will remain vegetarians at least for the next
20 years. The second assumption is that among animal products,
the consumption of milk, milk products, eggs and fish would
increase. The consumption of beef and pork will remain limited
or negligible, but the consumption of poultry products would
increase. The demand for food grains is estimated to rise to more
than 320 million tons in 2020.
The difficulties in balancing the differential needs of small
and marginal farmers and resource-poor consumers in the pricing
of input and output threaten the economic sustainability of farm
production systems. The national policies over the years attempted
massive transfer of resources and incomes from the rural to the
urban areas. Since 1971, with the terms of trade for agriculture
turning negative, real rural incomes have been squeezed at the rate
of 12 per cent. All these years, farmers have been heavily taxed
4
.
69
coarse grains кормовое зерно; oil cake æìûõ; a marginal farmer маржинальный фермер (ведущий хозяйство на малоплодородных землях); meagre [!mi:g
to abdicate отказываться (от); allotment участок, отдаваемый в аренду;
financial stake доля в капитале; lucrative выгодный, прибыльный; input
and output затраты на производство и выпуск продукции.
Ex. 10. The text is about Peru’s alpaca industry and the diff iculties
it faces. What ways would you suggest that might help Peruvians
to overcome them?
ə] скудный; to exacerbate [eks!səbeit] усугублять;
As her family has for generations past, Juana Vasquez gets up
before dawn to move her herd of alpacas, now more than a
thousand strong, from their pens to pasture on the high plains,
some 4,400 metres above sea level in southern Peru. As it has been
since Inca times, the shaggy alpaca, a South American cameloid
with fine, long wool, is the economic mainstay of the village life.
But Ms Vasquez is not a typical alpaca herder. She attended a
nearby university, and is trying to turn subsistence herding into
a viable business.
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]