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inegalitarian and power is concentrated, it is likely that farmer

control will mean control of the extension system by large farmers.

Small farmers, tenants, and laborers, may not benefit. In the south-

ern U.S., for example, it is difficult to see how local control over

extension by (white) farmers could have helped (black) sharecroppers.

Land owners were eager to mechanize cotton and the sharecroppers

were forced to migrate. Given the character of local political,

judicial, marketing and credit structures, the black sharecroppers

could have been protected only with strong, countervailing central

pressures.

 Analogously, males may use an extension system to extend male

control in certain parts of the economy where females had strong

claims. Particularly in Africa, woman commonly manage farms

and do much of the marketing. In Haiti, too, women are fre-

quently farm managers. However, it is also common that extension

systems are staffed and controlled by men, who give inadequate ser-

vices to the women farmers.1 Such a system is ineffective at best,

and probably reduces the relative role of women.

 Hence, the crucial question is always: to whom is power to

control an extension system decentralized? Sometimes central power

is useful to control local elites (defined by wealth, age, sex,

caste, ethnicity, etc.), and to facilitate more equitable participa-

tion in local organizations of more numerous but less powerful

people, such as low caste groups and women.

 1
 For a detailed analysis of this situation in Kenya, see
Kathleen Staudt, "Women Farmers and Inequities in Agricultural Ser-
vices," Rural Africana 29 (Winter 1975-76), pp. 81-94.