A rice village saga: Three decades of Green Revolution in the Philippines

摘要

Readers familiar with other works of Yujiro Hayami (such as his 1997 book on development economics) will expect good things in this latest book, and they will not be disappointed. In spite of it being a joint effort of synthesis with his long-standing collaborator Masao Kikuchi, it is a distinctly personal account, from the opening description of his bumpy 1974 search of Laguna Province for the 'typical rice village', to the Epilogue emerging from his attendance at a village key-person's funeral in 1997. He did well to fix on (the innocence-protecting pseudo-named) East Laguna Village for this study saga. Just one village can only be typical of a restricted population but the story of this one does seem to capture important aspects of the reality of many villages in the Philippines, not to mention other ASEAN countries. A reader grows to feel quite intimate in the understanding of village life here, as well as knowledgeable of how this case shares similarities with the dynamics of village life elsewhere in Asia, especially Japan, over the past century. The writing style is accessible and inviting, if not always in perfect English and, if one is prepared not to dwell too much on the richly detailed tabular presentations of factual survey data from the many field studies, the work can be read almost as a novel or a family saga.