A modified collective agriculture in rural growth-with-equity: Reconsidering the private,unimodal solution

This paper identifies limitations of an agricultural structure of small, private farms as a basis for rural growth with distributive equity, and points out potential advantages of democratically-managed collectives characterized by flexibility with respect to production scale, group checks on inequality in land use, and avoidance of the underemployment-generating tendencies of large-scale non-collective agriculture. After a critique of recent literature on scale economies and a discussion of stratification tendencies in private agriculture, a model of democratic rural collectives incorporating features of Chinese and Tanzanian precedents is introduced and evaluated. Political feasibility is considered in a concluding discussion.