ABSTRACT
Subsistence agriculture has changed and developed in the past, even in situations where there was no deliberate or conscious effort to achieve development. The deliberate or planned development of subsistence agriculture requires more than theories and empirical evidence supporting them. Intervention into the growth process in agriculture has taken a variety of forms and has operated at several levels. There have been governmental schemes and private activities by the agribusiness community. Agriculture involves a large number of geographically scattered decisionmakers and a large number of different kinds of productive decisions temporally dispersed. Four case studies have been selected out of the many that could have been considered as being particularly relevant to the problems of developing subsistence agriculture. The case studies are: Vicos in Peru; Comilla in Pakistan; Acar in Brazil, and The Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico.
