Lazo, 'The commission on agricultural productivity and its role in rice production', Paper presented at the IRRI Thursday Seminar, March 11, 1965. IRRI. 13 p.

A novel approach to planning of agricultural production and comprehensive rural development is described in this paper. According to this concept, regional development has a two‐fold function: “vertical” in planning of agricultural production by connecting macro‐planning at the national level and micro‐planning at the level of individual production units; “horizontal” in integration of agriculture, industry, and services from the economic, social, organisational, and physical point of view. The institutional structure of implementation is analysed and described. The concept of regional planning described evolved out of the attempts to solve socio‐economic problems of the rural population of Afro‐Asian origin which had to be settled in Israel.

Since 1947 Sweden has been following an explicit policy of maintaining a domestic agriculture capable of supplying the country's food needs in case of national isolation. This is an integral part of Sweden's foreign policy of neutrality. At the same time, the aim is to provide the agricultural work force with a standard of living equal to that of “comparable” groups. The policy has mainly been implemented through variable import fees. Three different systems have been used to establish these fees, with varying degrees of success in maintaining both agricultural incomes and some flexibility in production. The government has also aided the modernization of agricultural production. It is estimated that the current cost of supporting agriculture is between $200 and $300 million per year.

Several alternative methods have been presented to measure weather effects upon crop production. This paper presents two more methods. These are the work of de Martonne and Ångström in the 1920's and 1930's applied to an econometric production model. The use of composite “aridity indexes” might provide a relatively simple approach to a difficult problem encountered in agricultural supply analysis. The concept is simple and is not confined to a single agricultural area or to a single crop. The indexes, both de Martonne's and Ångström's, can be calculated wherever basic weather data—precipitation and temperature—are available.

Be the main objective of the extension; the development of people and the development of rural areas. Agricultural enterprises are addressed in their improvement of agricultural production, therefore it is an important area that needs attention. Increasing the amounts of food and fiber is essential to sustain population growth and support industrial expansion.

Coffee has been known to be an agricultural product of considerable remunerative value in international trade. The dispersion of the Coffee industry in the last four centuries or so has been associated with the empire expansion of the European nations and the comparative advantages possessed by various regions, which have consequently persistently maintained competitive production costs. In the 1950s the industry became the key industry in the agricultural sector of at least a dozen developing countries. The chief source of foreign exchange earnings of these countries is the agricultural sector and therefore dominance of the Coffee industry in the sector made it the chief source of foreign exchange earnings. For the same reason the role of agriculture in economic development in these countries is heavily dependent on the Coffee industry. The past connections between these developing countries and the former colonial powers have left inevitable political and economic interdependence. For this reason the former colonial powers and their allies have recognised the importance of the viability of the Coffee industry in their general policies of maintaining the political and economic interdependence. The Coffee industry is complicated by risks and uncertainties on the supply side. The chief sources of uncertainty are associated with long production periods and physiological vegetative cycles of the Coffee plant. Besides these the supply response is further complicated by the fact that one third of total world production is accounted for by peasant producers. These live under conditions of high levels of unemployment and disguised employment. For these reasons the chief source of labour in peasant production is the family unit. Unlike this type of production system, two thirds of the world Coffee supply is produced in larger farms and plantations which depend heavily on paid labour. In this system of production, the level of capital investment per unit of output is much higher than in the peasant system. Because of the nature of the production systems, the industry has varied response to economic stimulus, but the response tends to be high in the production systems with high capital investment and low in the peasant production system where capital investment is comparatively low. The demand side of the industry is discouraging to the producer, because, typical of the agricultural industry, gains from technological advance are almost entirely passed on to the consumer in the form of low prices, thereby leaving little benefit to the Coffee planters in form of higher real incomes. Typical of primary production too, the Coffee producers are "price takers" and not "price makers". Besides these impediments, the economic viability of the industry is influenced by levels of total coffee consumption in the principal markets.