2026/01/01 by Manoj Sharma · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Land Rights and Reforms #Agricultural Innovations and Practices
paper · pdf · doi:10.5304/jafscd.2026.152.022
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/02/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
First paragraph: Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir’s Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing Countries raises a profound question: why has agricultural productivity in many developing countries slowed or stagnated despite decades of Green Revolution technologies and neoliberal globalization? The author’s central claim is that productivity in developing countries is shaped less by factor endowments and “efficient” markets than by social property relations, political settlements, and non-market accumulation. Taking Bangladesh as the empirical case, the book shows how smallholder‑ dominated agrarian structures experience short‑run output growth when capital‑biased technologies and clientelist institutions prevail, but are locked into long‑run stagnation and environmental degradation. The argument moves between neoclassical, Marxist, and neopopulist perspectives. On the one hand, Titumir engages neoclassical and new institutional economics, which stress market (re-)allocation, property‑rights reform, and (supposedly) scale‑neutral technology. On the other, he draws heavily on Marx, Brenner, Wood, and political‑settlement theory[1] to foreground class power, “politically constituted property,” and nonmarket processes. He explicitly distinguishes between market accumulation and non-market accumulation (primitive accumulation), arguing that “there are at least two dimensions of nonmarket processes[:] … primitive accumulation and the operation of the political settlement” (p. 26). These are not residual complications to an otherwise well‑functioning market order. They are, in fact, the main drivers of land misallocation, disinvestment, and, ultimately, productivity decline. . . .