2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST In his paper Abhijit Sen presents a detailed critique of the World Bank view of the policy regime suitable for agriculture, describing it as 'transcendental* in simply asserting a theoretical position unsupported by any except tendentiously selective empirical evidence. Sen expreses concern over what he calls the 'agricultural non-strategy* of the government in the face of a combination of highly disturbing trends: the sharply increased regional concentration of output, the marked decline in public and private investment in agriculture, and the increased dependence of output on current inputs like fertiliser, to the extent that 'the principal determinant of short-run yield changes* is fertiliser application, and the latter in turn depends on real fertiliser price. In this context he criticises the large cut in fertiliser subsidy, pointing out a logical error in the government's optimism that raising procurement prices to the farmer can compensate for the cut. In her paper Jayati Ghosh tackles the common fallacies regarding 'getting prices right* in agriculture in the form of a round dozen of fallacious propositions widely propounded by Fund-Bank economists and their Indian minions; and shows the points at which the logic of these propositions fails to hold up. Readers may be amused to know that both Sen and Ghosh through their sustained criticism of Fund-Bank theories and policies have, incidentally, incurred the intemperate ire of the economic adviser to Dunkel namely a nonresident economist of Indian origin named Jagdish Bhagwati. The present author in her paper argues that the effect of opening up the agricultural sector of developing countries to the free play of international market forces, is the same as permitting the immensely superior purchasing power of consumers in the advanced countries to determine cropping patterns shifts in the third world. She argues that the precipitous decline in per capita food production and consumption in sub-Saharan Africa and the creation of famine conditions in a number of countries is the direct outcome of the drive to increase exports from agriculture. Since international prices have been moving unfavourably for such exports, the export earnings of African countries remain near-stagnant while more land is shifted out of foodgrain to exportable crops. Africa today thus both replicates India's colonial experience, and holds up a mirror in which Indians under a 'liberalised* regime can see their own future. Readers are likely to find especially interesting, the paper by Prabhat Patnaik which explores the political' economy of the policy regime shift ever rightwards during the last two decades: the demise of the concept of welfare capitalism and social democracy in the west, and the rise of a predatory anti-labour and anti-egalitarian ideology. The rise of an analogous ideology and policy regime shift in this country is related by him to the contradictions of the Nehruvian model; the argument should provide food for thought even where there may not necessarily be agreement with it.