In countries with high population to land ratios, industry has a fundamental role to play in the creation of the conditions necessary for progress in agriculture.
Industry helps promote growth at several levels.
But through the employment it creates' it also determines, directly or indirectly, the number of agriculturally active workers, the productivity of the peasants' labour, their income level and, ultimately, the overall agricultural demand for consumer and capital goods. Industry is the basis for the growth of an internal market, an indispensable element in the dynamic of development in which agricultural demand is a fundamental factor. In Algeria, the farmers have very substantially improved their marginal income, more by employing the manpower resources of rural households and raising the price of agricultural products than by increasing the productivity of labour. The state, striving to intensify agriculture, has laid great stress on farming equipment, tractors' harvesters, crop treatment and irrigation techniques. This progress in equipment was supposed to promote the adoption and diffusion of new, more intensive production methods and to improve crop yields.