Government Policy: the Agriculture Market - Essay Example

Moreover, they believe that if they bring rural workers/farmers into the cities and get them working in modern industrial positions greater amounts of investment funds would follow the low cost of industrial labor. The government also welcomes free trade with their neighbors and even welcomes the competition from neighboring agriculture producers because of the attractive macro-economic predictions normally associated with free trade. However, the policy and those macro predictions fail on a micro level, due to insensitivity to the way the local families live.

Clearly delineated, sexual roles, where men earn the money and women feed their families form the groundwork of the rural family, and have turned corn production in country A into a question of sexual and familiar identity. While men take the macroeconomic bait associated with the government policy pulling them to the cities and move to the cities to industrial centers to find work, corn production and usage, the dietary and social tradition of the rural family, falls to the women. Used as food, as fuel, sold at local markets to provide money for necessities, and possibly turned into crafts and jewelry by some families, corn becomes a rural woman's lifeblood and subsistence.

It's the healthiest alternative for the dietary needs of her family and the only area of personal power she feels in her society. Letting go of her property and her corn would mean losing revenue, health, and reverting back to the domination of all areas of life by the man in the family. In emerging societies, personal freedom comes seldom and dearly. The foreign influence of competing companies, the overwhelming influence of men over women in the decisions of the family, and even the influence of government over the population are stricter and darker.

So for women in country A, government policy to pull men from the countryside into the cities forms a rare, momentary opportunity for some element of economic freedom. Control overproduction. Control over land. Even control over distribution and usage (whether to eat, sell, barter, etc), becomes an area of greater management for women. Rather than creating an economic playing field weighted toward the aspirations of agribusiness, government policy weights the game toward women and possibly creates greater levels of domestic capitalism in the process.

The government's policy toward land usage in country A was shortsighted and culturally insensitive. It provides a view into the mentality that sometimes confuses government policy. When blind assertions as to the productive value of macroeconomic principles take precedent over the realities of local culture, existing land use and the nature of how land is cultivated and products used, and when the important issues of power and micro-economic conditions are overlooked to serve those general macro ideas, government policy can end up with very different results from those intended.

In the case of country A, the expansion of capitalism into the rural areas was the intention of government policy. Actually, in some sense, they achieved their goals. Women definitely capitalized on the opportunity and utilized the land and local markets to the best of their abilities. Perhaps one failure of the government's policy was to foresee the many ways that liberalizing the agriculture market to attract better land-use ignored one of the most important uses of land, most notably to achieve a greater degree of personal freedom.