Problems

Agricultural

In P-Ng

Asia has come to mean a lot of things; in Agricultural De

velopment in Asia, editor, R. T.

Shand, makes no apologies for leaving out East Pakistan, Laos and Cambodia and including an

interesting chapter on Papua-

New Guinea.

Whether P-NG can be said to have any cultural or geographic links left with Asia is a matter for argu ment, but certainly it is within the economic framework of both South East Asia and the South Pacific.

Different writers offer a chapter each to give a condensed picture of the history, present conditions and the future of agriculture in Asia. The mighty growth of Japan and Taiwan since the war is contrasted with the worsening plight of over-populated India and Java; mysterious Burma where for the past decade tourists and agriculturists alike have been allowed into the country for 24 hours at a time, is contrasted to Thailand which has, like the Philippines, experienced something of a boom since the war, allowing for some corruption in higher places.

For the South Pacific, the chapters on P-NG and Indonesia will remain the most important. R. T. Shand (Fellow in the Department of Economics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University) takes the complicated story of P-NG’s agriculture on his own wide shoulders, and gives it, on the whole, an optimistic future.

Isolation of N. Guinea

He says the historical isolation of the territory, combined with the economic independence of the small subsistence agricultural communities within it, has given rise to problems different from the rest of Asia.

With a plentiful supply of land, a continued growth of non-marketed subsistence production has been pos sible, as population has expanded without the necessity of government intervention. Now the encourage ment of marketed output has required a lot of money to find crops in de mand on world markets, to dissemin ate the skills and knowledge required for their production, and to provide “an incentive which would encourage

participation among the indigenous population”.

As in Malaysia, he adds, there has been heavy reliance upon large-scale estate operations run by expatriates, for which intervention has mainly meant the provision of transport and marketing facilities.

For smallholders it has been, and will continue to be, necessary to create a research service for the in troduction and adoption of new crops, an extension service to spread in formation on these crops to the viUage, and to develop an economic infrastructure to faciliate the trans port and marketing of smallholder output.

It will be necessary to supply these services where private enterprise can not, at least initially, be encouraged to provide them. Finally, he con cludes, it is necessary to stimulate the sale of consumer goods within the agricultural sector.

Shand acknowledges that the pro blems of the territory to a great extent are different to those of the rest of Asia.—JSE.

(Agricultural Development In

ASIA. Australian National University Press. $8.50.)