ABSTRACT
The fundamental importance of agriculture to economic development was first expounded by Johnston and Mellor (1961). They argued that agriculture provided five vital contributions to the development process: (1) meeting the demand for food for a growing population, as long as this was consistent with comparative advantage; (2) providing a source of foreign savings or earnings; (3) providing a source of savings for investment in development of other sectors, mainly industry; (4) providing human resources and raw materials for other sectors; (5) providing an internal market for the goods and services of other sectors (industry and services). Despite the vital role that agriculture can play in the development process, both the theory and practice of development economics in the 1950s and 1960s tended to neglect the agricultural sector (Mellor, 1986; Little, 1982), regarding the latter as peripheral to the fundamental task of industrialisation.
