Izvorni znanstveni članak
Agriculture and the Political Scientist
Rudolf Bićanić
Sažetak
The purpose of this paper is to explore how a political scientist should behave in
matters of agricultural policy under varying conditions. First an attempt is made to
delimit the political scientist's sphere of action within the framework of the problem.
Here four constraints are found: technical, sociological, economic and political, the last
being of special significance for the political scientist.
There are so many types of agriculture that the dichtomy developed-underdeveloped
simply does not satisfy requirements for analysis, least of all an analysis from a political
point of view. There are peasants, farmers, agricultural labour and scholarly experts,
there are sovkhozes, kolhozes and agribuisnesses not to mention feudal, tribal and
village community forms of agricultural activity. Each of these expriences a different
process of decision making, all have different objectives in farming and different means
to achieve these objectives. For each of them a different type of agricultural policy is
optimal.
The problem was how to deal with all types of agriculture at various levels of development and under different socio-economic and political systems in order to cover
the overall problem of the accelerated changes taking place in world agriculture today.
Some rather bold generalizations in choice of types had to be made to meet this
situation. These types do not necessarily represent consecutives stages or phases in the
process of development. Indeed they can exist simultaneously iin one and the same
country, and reverse movement can take place in the change of one type into another.
We have distinguished four such ideal-types: subsistence agriculture, market (commercial)
agriculture, entrepreneurial (industrial) agriculture and contract or planning agriculture
(which some people call scientific agriculture). In devising such ideal-types we were
aware that the old fashioned distinction of money versus natural mechanisms of exchange
does not provide the scientist with powerful enough tools for his analysis and that a
more refined approach is necessary. The antropologists speak of these mechanisms in a
primitive economy: the gift, redistribution and market mechanisms. To these we need
to add two more, those of contract and planning agriculture which are spreading so
rapidly with new technological changes.
In order to distinguish between these various types of agriculture we used as general indicator the changes in agricultural population both in absolute numbers and
in relative terms to the total population of a country. Thus we divided the whole economy
of a country into two sectors only: the agricultural and the non-agricultural. We took
the population figures only as a tool in our analytical efforts dealing with the process
of change. We did not think for a moment that such a complex phenomenon as changes
in general and agricultural population could be reduced to one single overall cause
determining types of agricultural change.
The recently developed analytical tools of costbenefit analysis or operational research
have proved that the market mechanism cannot provide all the answers. Since
the cost-benefit analysis has recently spread over many fields and is used to cover
varied objectives we feel inclined to proceed to some systematisation of these approaches
incorporating them into some approaches we considered till now as »normal methods«.
The activity of political scientists is to discover these different parity lines in
order to find solutions, issue warnings and advise action. Their function has been
described according to the intensity of their personal engagement and risk taking departing
from the indifferent position of expert, adviser, lobbyist or arbiter. Probably
the best tool of the political scientist could be forged along the theory of games
using a non-zero game as the most suitable instrument.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
118628
URI
Datum izdavanja:
13.9.1967.
Posjeta: 831 *