Book reviews 117
exercise as well as being an area of active research. In particular, plants
more than 2.0 m high, such as some tall crops and trees, are excluded. The
user should also be able to alter the reflection coefficient, which currently
has a fixed value of 0.20. Some important types of vegetation have a
reflection coefficient which is lower than this.
In summary, this is a useful piece of software with a rigorous scientific
basis, but beginners should use the package under supervision or with
additional documentation.
Graham Russell
The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: the Economics of Agrarian Change
Under Population Pressure. Ester Boserup. Earthscan Publications Ltd,
London, 1993 (first published in 1965). 124 pp. Price: &IO.95 (paperback).
ISBN 1 85383 159 X.
The mid-1960s witnessed a re-evaluation of the role of agriculture in
economic development and the rationality of small-scale farmers in
countries with little or no industrialization. Two books in particular
contributed to this reassessment. One was T. W. Schultz’ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcb
Transforming
Traditional Agriculture; the other Ester Boserup’s The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth. Though differing in perspective, and sometimes
generating conflicting hypotheses, neither book could be understood
without accepting the hypothesis that small-scale cultivators’ decisions are
guided by economic rationality, and not ignorance or tradition.
Boserup’s principal argument is to counter the classical contention
(most frequently associated with Malthus) that the rate of population
growth is endogenous, governed by an inelastic food supply. Instead,
the line of causation has been in the other direction, with expanding
population leading to agricultural intensification and development.
Two related assumptions lead to this conclusion. Comparing different
periods in agricultural history, and even looking at different parts of the
world today, the frequency with which a given piece of land is cropped
varies widely, from long fallow systems in which cropping may occur one
year in twenty to intensive systems in which two or three crops per year
are planted. Returns to labour-hour are often much higher in less land-
intensive systems. As a result, increasing population pressure on the land
has often been necessary to spur the changes in agricultural technique and
the investment necessary to keep output per labour-hour from decreasing
too much, and output per capita per year steady. If these changes in land
use and technique are sufficiently large, agricultural output per capita
increases despite possible decreases in output per labour hour, and this
increased output can contribute to growth in the total economy.
118 Book reviews
Boserup also presents arguments concerning accompanying changes in
institutions, particularly land tenure, and investment in the course of
agricultural development. In her view, land tenure is endogenous, moving
from general cultivation rights to specific rights in a particular plot over
long periods of agricultural development. In Boserup’s analysis, in pre-
industrial agriculture, investment is less a matter of cutting current con-
sumption or infusion of modern industrial inputs than of lengthening
work hours and applying more effort in order to improve land and infra-
structure. In a modern sense, current consumption in the form of leisure zyxwvutsrqponml
is restricted, but the classical definition of reduced food consumption
per head to fund investment only holds when all able-bodied members of
rural society ‘are labouring from sunrise to sunset all the year.’ Boserup
also sketches the changing relationships between agriculture and non-
agriculture over the course of development, but as her focus is on
agriculture, the treatment of this subject is less detailed.
Boserup’s scholarship is broad and her arguments powerful. In one
sense, however, she was unfortunate to have published The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth on the eve of the Green Revolution. Hayami and
Ruttan, in Agricultural Development: an International Perspective, identify
three different periods of agricultural development: pre-industrial inten-
sification capable of creating sustained rates of growth in agricultural
output of around one percent per year; use of industrial inputs, which
shifts the potential growth rate to 1.52.5%; and science-based agri-
culture, which raises the potential growth rate to over four percent in
newly industrializing countries and helps to maintain annual rates of
around two percent in older industrialized nations. Strictly speaking,
Boserup’s arguments apply only to the first period of agricultural
development; she considers the role of industrial inputs but gives them
rather short shrift for countries with a small industrial sector. Based on
the analysis of this book alone, it is difficult to share Boserup’s optimism
for agricultural development potential in the face of population growth
rates which can now be three percent or higher, before the ‘demographic
transition’ to both low mortality and low birth rates has been completed.
Other important questions are not raised directly by The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth. How would Boserup’s arguments change were one to
include the increasing integration of the world economy, with even the
most remote forest fallow systems likely to be affected by changes in
international markets? In such an integrated world, do countries only now
beginning to intensify agriculture face only disadvantages, or are there
certain advantages for ‘late intensifiers’? The book also lacks a real theory
of technical change, as Boserup’s well-documented arguments depend
more on the spread of already known techniques than on a theory of how
Book reviews 119
new techniques are developed in the first instance. Furthermore, in a
complete dynamic model, might not both agricultural production and
population growth be endogenous?
On the other hand, the more phases of agricultural development one
tries to analyse using a single unifying theory, the more qualifications one
has to make in confronting empirical reality. Hayami and Ruttan, for
example, treat mainly the periods of increasing use of industrial inputs and
of science-based agriculture, and are most interested in the latter. Boserup’s
arguments are clear and forceful, and well worthy of consideration by
students of agricultural history. Economists are often accused of lacking a
dynamic theory that is both accurate and tractable; The Conditions of
AgriculturaZ Growth provides an excellent example of the masterful use of
short-run economic concepts to explain extremely long-run agricultural
change.
Beyond this, however, there are many reasons why Boserup’s analysis
can generate a whole host of hypotheses useful even today. First, many
argue solely on the basis of low or even declining rates in aggregate land
areas for a given crop that the world has finally reached its land frontier.
However, it is still possible to find areas where cultivated area is expand-
ing, even in ‘densely populated’ Asia; it is still possible to find areas where
the different kinds of fallow system defined by Boserup are in use; and, as
noted by Robert Chambers in his introduction to this edition, it is still
possible to find systems in which the type of intensification described by
Boserup is occurring. At the very least, careful consideration of Boserup’s
analysis should give pause to the easy association of ‘slash and burn
agriculture’ with ‘population pressure forcing the use of less productive
land’. Even if more careful argument would still reach the conclusion that
the spread of long fallow systems into the world’s remaining forests is
environmentally harmful, it is likely that increasing world demand for
timber and livestock products pose a much larger threat than small farmer
activities. Additional research avenues suggested by The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth include the need to define ‘land’ more carefully in
aggregate models, in the same way that ‘labour’ can be defined more
precisely since the idea of human capital gained currency. Scholars of
African agricultural development pondering the deep problem of stag-
nating or even declining per capita food production might ask if in a long-
term historical sense Africa has been caught in a double bind. Earlier low
population density, and even depopulation, meant that unlike in Asia or
Europe, an ‘African model’ of pre-industrial agricultural intensification
never developed. This, in turn, has left a much more limited technical base
on which to build in the current period of extremely rapid population
growth. In similar fashion, policy makers and researchers considering the
120 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Book reviews
questions of labour productivity in agriculture, seasonality, and endogenous
institutional change could all profit by reading or re-reading The Conditions
of Agricultural Growth.
Paul Heisey
Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a
Theoretical Synthesis. Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hauasler
and Saskia Wierings. Zed Books in association with INSTRAW, London,
1994. 220 pp. Price: 612.95, US$ 19.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 184 6.
Since 1982, INSTRAW, the United Nations International Research and
Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, has been involving
women in programs aimed at promoting environmentally sound use of
water and energy sources. These programs broke new ground at that time
by integrating women’s needs in the programs as well as involving them in
planning and technical operations. The focus has moved on from
responding to immediate water and energy needs to establishing links
between these sectoral problems and wider environmental issues. To this
end, INSTRAW launched a new program in 1990 on Gender, Environ-
ment and Sustainable Development. One output of the program has been
the present study, a state-of-the-art report on debates around the issues of
women, the environment and sustainable development.
The book was conceived as a platform for the various positions which
are perceived to be relevant to topic. In the process of researching this
theme, the authors became aware of the many underlying assumptions
held by those involved in the women’s environmental and development
movements, which are not always made manifest in their writings. They
attempt to uncover the latent assumptions and reveal some of the implicit
biases in the writings reviewed. By this process of clarification they hope
to highlight the political and theoretical issues that are at stake in the
debates on women, the environment and sustainable development. The
authors themselves, from the Women’s Program in the Humanities at
the University of Utrecht and the Women and Development Program at
the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, illustrate the broad scope of the
book and the richness of its inter-disciplinary coverage. They come from
fields as different as Western philosophy, non-Western sociology, linguistics,
forestry and development studies. The four women claim to be held
together not only by a common interest in the research topic and political
practice linked to development issues, but also by the complementarity of
their differences in orientation and training.
