Unemployment in the rural areas is often thought to be due entirely to population growth and no doubt this Is an important contributory factor. But those who hold this view will have to explain why additional people cannot do additional work. The fact is that these people lack the skill required to perform their job.
However, great numbers of people do not work or work only intermittently; therefore, they are poor and helpless and often desperate enough to leave the viLlage, search for some kind of existence in the big city. Rural unemployment produces mass-migration into cities, leading to a rate of urban growth which would tax the resources of even the richest societies.
Rural unemployment becomes urban unemployment. The probLem may therefore be stated quite simply thus: what can be done to bring health to economic life outside the big cities, in the small towns and villages which still contain — in most cases — eighty to ninety percent of the total population? As long as the development effort is concentrated mainly on the big cities, where it is easiest to establish new Industries, to staff them with managers and men, and to find finance and markets to keep them going, the competition from these industries will further disrupt and destroy non-agricultural production in the rest of the
25 country, will cause additional unemployment outside the cities, and will further accelerate the migration of very poor people into towns that cannot
absorb them. The ‘process of mutua) poisoning’ will not be halted.
It is necessary therefore that at least an importan part of the development effort should be directly concerned with the creation of an ‘agro-industrial structure’ in the rural and small-town areas. In this connection it is necessary to emphasize that the primary need is workplaces, literally millions of workplaces.
The task then Is to bring into existence millions of new workplaces or new jobs in the rural areas and small towns. That modem industry, as It has arisen in the developed countries, cannot possibly fulfill this task should be perfectly obvious. It has arisen in societies which are rich In capital and short of labor and therefore cannot possibly be appropriate for societies short of capital and rich in labor.
The real task may be formulated in four propositions. First, that workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate. Second, that these workplaces must be on average cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and Imports. Third, that the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimized, not only in the production process itself but also In matters of organization, raw material supply, financing, marketing and so forth.
Fourth, that production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use. These four requirements can be met only if there is a conscious effort to develop and apply what might be called an ‘Intermediate technology’.
Thank You For Reading The Problem of Urbanization in Developing Countries
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