ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why the brilliant exercise in model-building seems to have only limited relevance to the important policy issues in the field of agricultural development. The principal implication of this concept of a relative surplus of labor in agriculture at the early stages of development concerns the choice of measures or the appropriate strategy to be pursued in fostering agricultural development. First, extraordinarily high rates of population growth are to an increasing extent characteristic of the less-developed countries; and there are very strong indications that for the short and medium term the population growth in these countries must be regarded as an essentially exogenous variable, determined mainly by rapid and large reductions in mortality rates that are not dependent on any major change in economic and social structure. The second implication of the changing nature of the interrelationships between agriculture and nonagriculture that the author wants to mention concerns the increase in agricultural productivity.
