Changes of agricultural extension service in Asia

This study aimed to grasp the evolution of the agricultural extension services in Asian countries across the board chronologically. As a result, one understands that the agricultural extension services in Asian countries under went substantial evolution during the last twenty years with the process of transition of agriculture from subsistance farming to commercial farming in the background. Extension advisers have been more densely deployed steadily over time, and particularly Thai land four times as many advisers today as in 1975. In the meantime, quality of the extension advisers has also been substantially improved, with the number of university professional school graduates among them increasing. The contents of the extension services have grown to include a wide range of crops from staple food to diverse commercial farm products and the guidance given by the extension advisers reaches out from production techniques to planting methods. Further, as rural women's consciousness grows, home-life improvement aspects of the extension services are expanding gradually. As above stated, the business of the agricultural extension services in Asian countries is considered to have followed a path of positive evolution so far, there are since recently negative factors surfacing in various Asian countries to people's serious concern. These situations have been caused by the administrative reform demanded by the World Bank and IMF as a condition for their lending to those countries. Such demand accelerates decentralization of administration and finance, which in turn prompts transfer of the initiative for the agricultural extension services from the central government to local governments. As a result, the state of local finance directly affects the agricultural extension services, thus weakening the same or otherwise creating imbalance in its progress