ABSTRACT
In discussions about the use of industrial input in primitive agriculture some economists draw a sharp line of distinction between laboursaving and land-saving kinds of input. In the view of these authors, labour-saving inputs are inappropriate in underdeveloped economies in periods of rapid growth of population, except for countries with much uncultivated land where such inputs might help to raise both total output and output per active in agriculture. In countries with little or no uncultivated land suitable for cultivation, only land-saving inputs such as industrial fertilizer and other chemicals should be used, according to this view, since they would raise not only output per active in agriculture but also total output, while the use of labour-saving inputs in such cases would add little or nothing to total output and might displace agricultural labour beyond the possibility of absorption in the urban sector. It is this fear of creating unemployment and underemployment in agriculture which lies behind the wish to distinguish between labour-saving and land-saving inputs.