RURAL INVESTMENT, EMPLOYMENT, AND CONSUMPTION 51 prior near-complete exhaustion of technical slack, the scope for market-oriented production which does not undermine food security, seems to be extremely limited and the problem which had been tackled with a 'food first' policy under Mao Zedong, has-reemerged in a big way in just a decade of the 'exportables and commercial crops first' policies of Deng Hsiao Ping. The second consequence of privatization has been a sharp decline in investment of labour in the maintenance and expansion of productive infrastructure— irrigation works, land reclamation, afforestation—which had been a strikingly successful feature of the earlier strategy of collective labour mobilisation in the commune system. Apart from adversely affecting the potential for farm product growth this has rendered a large mass of labour, amounting to 30 per cent of labour force on some estimates, openly surplus and has induced massive waves of rural-urban migration of 80 to 100 million people every year. They have little prospect of full absorption into productive employment, given falling elasticities of employment with respect to non-agricultural output. On the other hand unregulated labour markets of the rural destitutes, proliferation of their slum settlements and lack of access to health and educational facilities, viz. all the familiar features of unplanned capitalist growth in other developing countries, are now becoming a feature of Chinese growth as well. We would argue therefore that China's experience seems to show that high growth rates under strategies of privatization are compatible with and indeed logically entail the reemergence of two major problems plaguing large developing economies: food security, and unemployment. < HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION AND INVESTMENT PROBLEMS IN A LAND-SHORT ECONOMY With a longer history of settled agriculture than in India, the land-man ratio in 1950 was considerably lower .in China and cultivation practices correspondingly more intensive with much higher inputs of human labour days and organic manures per unit of area. A population which was two-fifths larger than ours, had to subsist on a total cultivated area which was one-fifth smaller. Owing to intensive practices grain yield per unit area in China in 1950 was already about double ours at that time; as population grew at around 2 per cent annually, the increased labour force had to be absorbed into productive employment and a rising commoditised output of food and raw materials ensured. The strategy through which this was done between 1955—the formation of the rural cooperatives—upto 1979, the dismantling of production teams and brigades—was a massive mobilisation of rural labour surplus for direct transformation into capital in the form of meso-level irrigation works, land reclamation and afforestation, diversification into agro-processing units and rural manufacturing enterprises, and construction of schools and clinics (Mao Zedong 1969; Wheelwright and Macfarlane 1970). Physical mobilisation of surplus labour by withdrawing workers was possible because ^-he problem