The Asian Green Revolution at a crossroads due to increasing labor shortage : the case of rice farming in the Philippines

The Asian Green Revolution at a crossroads due to increasing labor shortage: the case of rice farming in the Philippines The Asian Green Revolution at a crossroads due to increasing labor shortage: the case of rice farming in the Philippines 1)Kei Kajisa 1 Introduction Rapid growth in the industrial and service sectors has triggered many Asian countries' economic "take-offs."This has accelerated the economic migration of laborers from rural areas to cities and industrial zones.Consequently, the Green Revolution, led by a combination of seed-fertilizer technology and labor-intensive crop care, is facing challenges due to increasing rural labor shortage (Viswanathan et al., 2013 Briones and Felipe, 2013) .Thus, for economically sustainable farming under such circumstances, a structural change toward labor-saving farming-that is, simultaneous mechanization and farm size enlargement in the agricultural sector-is needed.As Timmer (1988) has argued in his landmark article, such structural change is unavoidable in the course of economic development, and thus, unless it proceeds smoothly, economic growth could be hampered, possibly resulting in the socalled middle income trap.However, the detailed process of such change and, consequently, strategies to ensure it are not yet well understood.In fact, the reality tells us that it is difficult to