Quite ... maintaining existing income flows to vested interests has a higher priority than what is needed for agrarian growth.

Of course, those conditions when they happen are not necessarily deliberately planned that way.

Consider the agrarian revolution in Japan under the Shogunate, as a side effect of the system of having the Daimyo live in the capital every second year (to keep an eye on them) pushing them to encourage commercial and cash crop agricultural activity in order to have cash incomes to tax as opposed to the traditional payment of land tax in weight of rice.

Or the system of allowing coffee farmers on the large estates to grow crops alongside the coffee to avoid having to paying them subsistence, which laid the fuondation for much of Sao Paulo's progressive small farm sector.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.