Agricultural employment showed the sharpest deceleration of all, with absolute declines in the number of people employed in agriculture over the 1990s. In addition, the growing land alienation by the peasantry (as cultivation became less viable given the squeeze on the peasantry because of rising input costs and falling or stagnant crop prices) also had an impact, since peasants using family labour tend to use labour more intensively than farmers using hired labour. Further, several “economic reform” measures—such as trade liberalization, the reduction of credit allocation to the priority sector and the removal of various forms of support—worked against the interests of most small producers, who accounted not only for the most labour-intensive forms of urban production, but also for the dominant part of urban manufacturing employment.