Democratic Planning in Agriculture, I

Planning has always been regarded as a matter for the experts. Laymen affected by the plans have usually participated in the process only by accepting or rejecting through their representatives planning projects drawn up by technicians. The necessary importance of the rôle of technicians and the inevitable conflict between technical considerations, which must determine the recommendations of the experts, and political considerations, which must determine the attitude of representatives, have led many to regard the whole idea of systematic planning (in any large field of production) as undemocratic in its general trend. The whole idea of planning, they insist, points necessarily toward bureaucratic centralization of responsibility. The significance of the recently launched County Land Use Planning program lies in the effort to achieve from the first stages of the process and at the most local levels of organization that fusion between the skill and experience of the expert and the political choices of laymen which is the essence of modern democracy. Decentralization and localization of planning is, of course, particularly essential in agriculture because of the need to adapt methods for attaining general objectives to widely varying sectional differences. At the same time, lay participation in agricultural planning can mean widespread participation because of the wide spread of individual responsibility for individual farm enterprises. It may well be, therefore, that the lessons to be learned from this experiment in democratic planning for agriculture are not readily transferable to other fields of productive enterprise. That is a question that I must leave to others

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