14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST times on a seasonal basis. In so far as the data permit. Section 4 provides an assessment of seasonality and the role of secondary employment in the non-agricultural sector. Evidence on the activity status, land ownership, age and other characteristics of rural non-agricultural workers is discussed in Section 5. The concluding Section 6 summarises the major findings of the paper and explores the implications of these results for understanding the determinants of rural non-agricultural employment. THE SCOPE OF RURAL NON-AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES For % majority of the rural population in the developing countries, farming is the major activity. However, there are relatively few households for which agriculture is the exclusive source of income. Men, women and children in rural areas also undertake a variety of other activities besides farming, Some of these non-farm activities flow directly from agriculture or are closely related to it. Others are distinct, ranging from full-time but temporary wage employment in industry or construction to regular but part-time self employment in home-based handicrafts, and trading or other services (ILO, 1983:5). There is another set of rural households whose primary occupations do not involve farming but which nevertheless cultivate at least small parcels of land. Some members of these households may also work as agricultural labourers during the peak farming season. Even in some of the urban areas of developing countries, a few households are often involved in cultivation. ^ What emerges, then, is a complex pattern of different activities, with widely varying degrees of emphasis on farm and non-farm work, These complexities are difficult to embrace in any specific set of definitions or through established systems of collecting data about enterprises, occupations and employment status. Besides, there are practical difficulties in analysis owing to the limitations of aggregate data obtained from census returns and labour force surveys (ILO, 1983:86). It is probably due to these problems that a well-established and consistent definitional framework to measure and analyse rural non-agricultural activities does not exist (ILO, 1983:6; World Bank, 1978:13). It has been argued that these (non-agricultural) activities lie on, or between, the boundaries of ^ the usual rural-urban and agriculture/non-agriculture categories, and any classification or definition of activities inevitably involves a degree of arbitrariness in imposing a single dividing line on what is, in fact, a continuous spectrum of situations (World Bank, 1978:13). . Broadly speaking, however, non-agricultural activities can include all those activities which are undertaken outside agriculture. In this sense/ rural non-agricultural activity is essentially a residual category. And this paper adopts this broad definition of rural non-agricultural activities.