The Green Revolution and Poverty in Northern Tamil Nadu: a Brief Synthesis of Village-Level Research in the Last Half-Century

Between 1972 and 2014, in Northern Tamil Nadu (NTN), India, the Green Revolution (GR) in agriculture was studied through five rounds of village-level studies (VLS). Over the decades, the number of villages dwindled; from 11, rigorously and randomly selected (together with a ‘Slater’ village first studied in 1916), through to a set of three villages in a rural–urban complex around a market town, to one of the original eleven, in the fifth round. During the reorganisation of districts in 1989, the villages sited on the Coromandel plain shifted administratively from North Arcot, a vanguard GR district, to Tiruvannamalai, described then as relatively backward. A wide range of concepts, disciplines, scales, field methods and analytical approaches were deployed to address i) a common core of questions about the economic and social implications of technological change in agriculture and ii) sets of other timely questions about rural development, which changed as the project lengthened. Among the latter was poverty.

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa

This book contributes to the understanding of smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa through addressing the dynamics of intensification and diversification within and outside agriculture, in contexts where women have much poorer access to agrarian resources than men. It uses a longitudinal cross-country comparative approach, relying on the Afrint dataset—unique household-level longitudinal data for six African countries collected over the period 2002–2013/15. The book first descriptively summarizes findings from the third wave of the dataset. The book nuances the current dominance of structural transformation narratives of agricultural change by adding insights from gender and village-level studies of agrarian change. It argues that placing agrarian change within broader livelihood dynamics outside agriculture, highlighting country- and region-specific contexts is an important analytical adaptation to the empirical realities of rural Africa. From the policy perspective, this book provides suggestions for more inclusive rural development policies, outlining the weaknesses of present policies illustrated by the currently gendered inequalities in access to agrarian resources. The book also provides country-specific insights from Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia.