Promoting Agricultural Entrepreneurs Against Food Shortage, Overproduction And Protectionism In Northern Africa And Other Regions Of The World - A Critique To Nobel Laureate Schultz And Nominee Hirschman

The paper reveals that ever since the 1950s, after the first land reform of distributing land ownership (or possession under public ownership) to small farmers, the irrational and polyopolistic land use by able-bodied part-time and absent small farmers earning higher off-farm income but unwilling to lease the under-producing land beyond their family consumption need to full-time farmers, has been a global obstacle with both public and private land ownership, traditional and modern agriculture, fragmented small and consolidatorily enlarged land, low and high income economies, food under-self-sufficiency and overproduction, and developing and developed countries, even if land property rights have been well defined and sale/lease allowed. [Polyopoly is invented by the author to denote the control of a resource by many sellers in contrast to monopoly (by one seller) and oligopoly (by a few sellers)]. This is mainly due to low rents, avoidance of misuse by tenants, jealousy in preventing neighbors from prospering, and hobby use. In those countries where this land reform has not been completed, there are also large landowners who exercise it. The full-time farmers, without right to use such under-utilized or idled land, have to subsist on their tiny farms, cut forests for more land, or quit agriculture for cities or developed countries. The land of the emigrants is ineffectively used by their old parents, wives or children, or just idled, without being leased to the remaining able-bodied full-time farmers. Numerous developing nations have to import food with scarce foreign exchanges or ask for donations to cope with food shortage (such as in Northern Africa), while many industrialized nations have provided huge subsidies to maintain farmers on agriculture which may cause overproduction. This obstacle has thus harmed agriculture, rural development, income distribution, government expenditure, competition, trade, environment, etc. It has become the most fundamental microeconomic root of the three persisting global macroeconomic problems: food under-self-sufficiency, overproduction and agricultural protectionism. It has turned to be the most fundamental root (though not the unique one) when the rural facilities are backward (such as in numerous developing countries currently), and the unique root when the rural facilities are advanced (such as in many developed countries presently). The global food shortage crises since 2005 have exposed and confirmed this obstacle.