Developing Asia's Countryside
STUART, PETER C.
UNDOING MALTHUS Developing Asia's Countryside by peter cstuart Chang Hung, South Korea It's a bumper harvest and the gleanings lend seasonal adornment to this dusty grey village north of Seoul....
...This pattern is not unique: It is being repeated, with minor variations, across the continent...
...Nonetheless, there is visible evidence that, although incomes and living standards remain abysmally low, traces of the rural revival are beginning to improve the lot of the people who work the soil —and in many ways that decades of empty "land reform" promises rarely have...
...The Thai government, openly alarmed, is trying to develop "urban growth centers" elsewhere in the country to cope with the situation...
...In Manila, the din of morning rush-hour traffic mingles with the crowing of roosters on rusty, corrugated-tin-roofed shantytowns where barefoot children rub their eyes and draw water from holes dug deep in the ground...
...signs—admittedly tentative and fragmentary—that the picture is changing...
...Last but not least, Asian governments are discovering that pumping money into the countryside—besides alleviating hunger and urban overcrowding—can also be good politics...
...You can go into the villages across this country," he said in an interview at his Bangkok home, "and village people will point to the Kukrit road, or the Kukrit well or the Kukrit canal...
...Other cities, where relief has been tardier, are the targets of national plans to stem their growth...
...Nor are encouraging demographic curves, agricultural indexes and economic projections any substitute for food-in-the-belly...
...In a global context, Asia's rising per capita food production is, alas, the exception among Third World regions...
...The figure in Thailand has fallen in the last seven years by almost 20 per cent (3.1 per cent to 2.5 per cent...
...Population expansion throughout the country has contracted sharply as well—from 2.9 per cent in 1961 to 1.5 per cent today...
...Thailand's most endur-ingly popular political leader, former Prime Minister M. R. Kukrit Pramoj, owes much of his mass appeal to a program of village development aid he inaugurated in the mid-1970s that was then considered revolutionary...
...And the ADB has adopted a policy of channeling projects to the rural poor, specifically to discourage migration to the cities...
...Indeed, the Indonesian capital, along with Calcutta and Bombay, are reported—for the first time since the early 1940s—to be losing more residents to the countryside than they are gaining from it...
...and Indonesia has had record-low shortfalls...
...Most often their only shelter is a thatched straw hut or a teak shack without even so basic a convenience as electricity...
...In Seoul, beneath the sleek skyscrapers made possible by the South Korean "economic miracle," men in rags fight flies and pick through piles of garbage...
...What many crowded Asian cities—and the rural areas from whence the crowds flow—seem to be experiencing are the first dividends of birth-control...
...Another agency that could play an important role in future birth control efforts is the continent's self-help lending institution, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB...
...But now that the Bank is finally forsaking its Victorian standoffishness, Yoshida predicts more vigorous action...
...In the northwestern Thai village of Mae Rim, some of the weathered teak houses in a jungle-like thicket of bamboo and lamyai fruit trees are cooled by electric fans...
...Even drought-prone India is savoring the luxury of a sizeable rice surplus...
...This, in turn, could mean that Asia will eventually be able to feed itself...
...A young Filipino father of two, helping to build an irrigation project near Valencia in the rolling coconut-and-pineapple area of Mindanao, suggested to me that traditional attitudes toward childbearing were changing...
...Their "equipment" typically consists of a water buffalo and rice sickle...
...The latest demographic, agricultural and economic statistics indicate that Malthusian trends may be on the wane...
...Families like these have for centuries been struggling—seldom with success—to feed themselves and the rest of the world's most populous continent...
...His impassive face betrayed a flicker of pride...
...Apart from the examples already cited, China, home for nearly one-quarter of the world's people, last year succeeded in recording its lowest birth rate in eight years...
...Meanwhile, an increase in incentives for farmers and villagers to remain in the countryside is complementing population control campaigns...
...There have been four consecutive bumper harvests...
...The ambitious and those without hope escape these conditions by packing themselves off to the capital cities—a migration that has drained Asia's resources, redoubled the burden on the countryside and made the metropolises overflowing catch-basins for the poor...
...Crash programs are lifting hundreds of thousands of farmers out of the rainy-season/dry-season cycle, enabling them to grow more than the traditional one yearly crop...
...As recently as 1960, only India and Pakistan had government policies to curb population growth...
...Grain being planted here in Chang Hung and elsewhere in South Korea, for instance, is yielding two-thirds more rice per acre than in the early 1960s—an increase that has helped the nation become self-sufficient in its staple food...
...Taroichi Yoshida, the ADB president, concedes that its involvement here has so far been "very modest...
...As children increasingly leave home for school—instead of spending their growing years helping to work the family farm—the old equation "more children mean more wealth" is no longer appropriate, he said...
...The spread of high-yield, so-called "miracle" rice is producing more sacks of rice per acre...
...Djakarta, which spurted in the last 15 years from 3 million to 5 million persons, also is leveling off now...
...Such successes are due chiefly to the widening acceptance of family-planning in rural areas...
...They are particularly benefiting from a flow of international development aid (the United Nations estimates that assistance of this kind has doubled in real terms over the past five years, from $2 billion to $4 billion...
...In the surrounding network of dry rice paddies, families with sickles cut browning stalks of rice, handful by precious handful...
...Burma has record surpluses...
...In addition, it is trying to modify a tax structure that encourages urban migration by imposing a significantly heavier tax on farmers (23 per cent) than on city-dwellers (15 per cent...
...But, as the place where 58 per cent of the world's population lives, it is a considerable exception...
...In 10 years, Sri Lanka has reduced its rate by more than one-third (2.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent), while in the principal Indonesian island of Java and in the neighboring island of Bali, population growth has plummeted by a whopping 44 per cent compared to what it was eight years ago (2.5 per cent to 1.4 per cent...
...Currently, almost every country on the continent has instituted family-planning programs...
...Sheaves of barley are neatly stacked alongside each cottage...
...The improvements are not yet sufficient to have much meaning for most Asian peasants...
...Financial returns are growing, too: Income in agricultural areas is now rising faster at a faster pace than in the cities so many South Koreans have fled to...
...Two of the most teeming cities, Hong Kong (4.5 million) and Singapore (2.3 million) have slowed their annual population growth rates by one-third, to 1.5 per cent and 1.2 per cent, respectively...
...Consequently, South Korea has become self-sufficient in rice...
...But after a day's toil in the rice paddies they can relax before that most symbolic trapping of 20th century modernity: the family television set...
...In this South Korean hamlet of Hang Chung, farmers continue to draw water from rusty iron hand-pumps and trek to drafty outdoor toilets...
...Taken together these programs, at least theoretically, cover 96 per cent of all Asians, and they give every indication of working...
...The details will be outlined in an internal study later this year...
...But this slight overall drop conceals the more dramatic achievements of individual countries during the same decade...
...Since 1975, when a world food conference forecasted massive food-grain deficits, rice production on the continent—which grows 91 per cent of the world's supply—has increased to approximately 15 per cent, and the yield per acre has gone up by almost 10 per cent...
...the Philippines, for the first time, has become a marginal rice exporter...
...Bangkok —where the populace has ballooned from 2 million to 5 million in the past 15 years or so—is a case in point...
...In Bangkok, the cafe-au-lait-col-ored canals are lined with a honey-comb-on-stilts of makeshift shacks and creaking tenements, and filled with small children laughing and swimming, adults bathing and women laundering...
...True, the average annual population growth rate of the continent's developing nations during the past five years, compared to the previous five year span, has only declined from 2.4 to 2.3 per cent...
...As a result, rural regions are enjoying something of a renaissance...
...Shiny red peppers are drying in front of dirt-floored cement cottages whose only concessions to Oriental grace are tiny windows and upturned tile eaves...
...Recently, however, there have been Peter C. Stuart, a Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and a previous contributor to these pages, has just returned from an extensive tour of the Far East...
...They are at the mercy of the weather, their growing season fluctuating between monsoon and drought...
...A higher rice productivity and a string of good harvests on the one hand, plus a decline in the birth rate and in the number of people leaving the countryside on the other, mean a higher per capita food supply...
...Barely 15 per cent of the households on Mindanao, second largest island in the Philippines, for example, have electric power...
...Small wonder, then, that the population of Seoul—which mushroomed from 2 million to over 7 million during the last quarter century is now stabilized...
...The majority of the continent's 2.5 billion inhabitants still depend on subsistence farming, working under nearly intolerable conditions...
...Throughout Asia they have been rewarded for their efforts with the smallest per capita income, lowest standard of living and most consistent government neglect...
...That kind of rural investment is buying Asia more predictable food security...
...Parked outside many are motor scooters...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
