Abstract
There has been much discussion of changing agricultural structure in the United States. In this paper, the author reviews some of the factors contributing to structural change in the United States and describes the policies adopted by the European Community with respect to agricultural structure. The European experience with structural policies suggests that this approach is not very promising for the United States where no specific structural policies exist. The argument developed in this paper is that structural changes in agriculture are simply one example of economic adjustment in a capitalist economy, that economic adjustments are generally desirable although they are not costless, and that discussions of agricultural structure should focus on methods to alleviate the costs of adjustment rather than on efforts to prevent change.
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Additional information
E. Wesley F. Peterson is assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University. He received a B.A. in anthropology from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1967, a masters in public affairs from Princeton University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Michigan State University in 1981. He worked in West Africa for five years and taught agricultural economics in France before moving to Texas in 1983.
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Wesley, E., Peterson, F. Agricultural structure and economic adjustment. Agric Hum Values 3, 6–15 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01535480
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01535480