ABSTRACT
The inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is widely accepted as a 'stylised fact' of agriculture in developing countries, a generalised phenomenon observed in widely differing agro-climatic conditions and agrarian structures. Class relations of exploitation in a relatively backward agriculture exert forces of economic compulsion on the poor peasantry to intensify cultivation, thus generating an inverse relationship. Such a relationship has obvious importance for policy issues such as land ceilings and redistribution, as well as co-operative and other forms of land reorganisation, involving discussion of factors such as market imperfections and the institutional framework of traditional agriculture. Class-based approach proceeds from the proposition that the peasant farm is embedded in the socio-economic context of an emerging capitalist agriculture in which, non-capitalist forms of surplus appropriation are still prevalent. Such a transitional state has been described by Bhaduri and Bharadwaj as one of semi-feudalism, a situation in which the relations of production have more in common with feudalism than capitalism.
