Article Summary: Exploring Synergies, Eradicating Poverty by Cristobal Kay

"The fight against hunger and poverty is also predicated on the creation of a world order that accords priority to social and economic development."                                                                                                                                                                                                  

       ~Lula de Silva

[Note to Reader: This writing assumes the causal links between poverty and hunger, given that food production exceeds population requirements and yet starvation still persists.]

                

                A developmental paradigm in which industry and agriculture are viewed as separate entities is a crutch in the understanding of state development and the eradication of poverty. It is commonly argued in discussing the evolution of the Industrial Revolution whether or not it was caused by agricultural improvement, and the mobilization of the resulting surplus in to industry, or vice versa. Cristobal Kay argues instead that it was a synergy between industry and agriculture, and that this framework for policymaking must be adopted by states today in order to eradicate poverty. Kay ’s theory proposes a solution to two common misperceptions in state development.

                ‘Agriculture first,’ the withholding of agricultural productivity surpluses for reinvestment in agriculture can stagnate industry and thus agricultural technological improvement and productivity, as well as leave the country with an insufficient industrial foothold in the competitive global economy. In contrast, the ‘Industry first’ concept can lead to an over-extraction of resources from the agricultural sector, thus stagnating agriculture and halting any industrial progress. Using the ‘Soviet industrialization debate’ as a case study for this concept, Kay argues that under Lenin the Soviet Union focused too heavily on rapid industrialization without investment towards increasing agricultural output within a distressed collective farming system, thus leading to the inability of peasant farmers to meet quotas for a growing urban and industrial populace. When quotas were enforced the peasants were left with inadequate resources to feed themselves leading to further agricultural erosion, thereby “killing the goose which laid the golden egg.”  

                South Korea and Taiwan, using a more synergistic approach, ignored neoliberal policy directions and used price discrimination and selective investment in agriculture, the Green Revolution’s agricultural industry, and labour-intensive consumer-good oriented industry to successfully distribute surpluses and effectively decrease inequality and poverty. Enabling such policies was a “redistributionist agrarian reform” which allowed for an egalitarian transfer of investment and technology from state and industry to agriculture. Kay argues Latin American countries would be in a similar position had they successfully carried out agrarian reform instead of focusing all their investment on the “large-scale commercial farm sector” while adhering to neoliberal policies reliant solely on free market mechanisms.

                Kay states that a synergistic industrial-agricultural paradigm for development leaves room for contextual differences; that we can “confront and come to terms with the diversity that exists in the real world – whatever uniform tendencies some abstract theories might suggest.” In analyzing developmental paths Kay presumes an export-oriented economy is essential, and assumes the necessary context of a global market. This is either more wise than arguing for a romanticized past of restrictive trade barriers, or more ignorant, in lacking discourse on the perceived, post hoc necessity and ever-presence of a globalized economy. Whatever the case, Kay argues successfully within the present context of globalization for a new, synergistic approach where urban-rural and industrial-agricultural lines are consistently being blurred.

                Ignoring, however, environmental debates about the sustainability of Green Revolution technology, which allowed for the export-driven surpluses and industrial-agricultural synergies in South Korea and Taiwan leaves Kay’s argument contextually dependent upon older, expansionist, pre-ecological paradigms of economy. If his model can overcome such an ecological context, then it would be wise to adopt it in replacement of current one-sided paradigms which claim universality in the processes of social and economic development which are necessary for eradicating poverty, and thus hunger.