The number of people living in poverty in South Asia is 520 million, the majority of whom are in India, while those suffering from malnutrition is 270 million, comprising 47% and 34% respectively of each category of the global population, and 51% and 24% of the total population in South Asia (1) The only way to resolve this problem of hunger is to promote agricultural and rural development within the affected areas rather than redistribution of food, because basically hunger is caused by insufficient purchasing power, especially in South Asia where most of the population directly or indirectly make their living through agriculture.
The share of agriculture in South Asian economy is still high (Table 2). Although the GDP share has been falling rapidly to below 30% recently, 70〜90% of the population are still living in rural areas, and also 50〜60% of the labor force is employed in agriculture.
Agriculture can't be the engine of economic development in South Asia because it has scarce land resources. However, agricultural growth is one of the important basic conditions of economic development, and development strategies that have ignored agriculture have all failed, which can be seen throughout the history without recalling the failure of the heavy chemical industrialization in India in the mid-sixties. India has shifted to economic liberalization since 1991 and it has been supported by the consumption boom of the 'new middle class' up to now, but its continued success will largely depend on the agricultural performance. The Chinese experience may be an important lesson for South Asia as well, as it achieved rapid industrialization based on rural enterprises, on the basis of the fact that the agrarian reforms in the late seventies raised agricultural productivity and brought about an equitable and significant increase in rural income.
Under the disadvantages of increasing population pressure and
