First published in 1982. Until the nineteenth-century the history of agriculture was the history of mankind but it has not perhaps received the wide attention that this importance justifies. In this study, the author reviews for the student of agricultural history successive attempts to describe and explain agricultural changes that are not specific to a limited area or a particular time. In a sense The Dynamics of Agricultural Change is a systematic historical geography of agriculture. Some of the models the author explores have been developed within agricultural history; some, drawn from other disciplines, can be applied fruitfully to it. What is the relationship between population growth and agricultural development? Between environmental changes and those in agriculture? What was the effect of the industrial revolution? And has there been an agricultural revolution? This book suggests to university students of economic history, historical geography and agriculture, a number of stimulating ways of interpreting and reinterpreting agricultural history.

Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges extend beyond national borders. Tying all this together, Agricultural Development explores policy options and strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. The changing global landscape combined with new and better data, technologies, and understanding means that agriculture can and must contribute to a wider range of development outcomes than ever before, including reducing poverty, ensuring adequate nutrition, creating strong food value chains, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting gender equity and equality. Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World, with its unprecedented breadth and scope, will be an indispensable resource for the next generation of policymakers, researchers, and students dedicated to improving agriculture for global wellbeing.

Farming Systems Research has three core characteristics: it builds on systems thinking, it depends on the close collaboration between social and biophysical sciences, and it relies on participation to build co-learning processes. Farming Systems Research posits that to contribute towards sustainable rural development, both interdisciplinary collaborations and local actor engagement are needed. Together, they allow for changes in understanding and changes in practices. This book gives an overview of the insights generated in 20 years of Farming Systems Research. It retraces the emergence and development of Farming Systems Research in Europe, summarises the state-of-the-art for key areas, and provides an outlook on new explorations, especially those tackling the dynamic nature of farming systems and their interaction with the natural environment and the context of action.

Using a political-economic approach supplemented with insights from human ecology, this volume analyzes the long-term dynamics of food security and economic growth. The book begins by discussing the nature of preindustrial food crises and the changes that have occurred since the 19th century with the ascent of technical science and the fossil fuel revolution. It explains how these changes improved living standards but that the realization of this improvement was usually dependent on government support for smallholder modernization. The author sets out how the evolution of food security in different regions has been influenced by farm policy choices and how these choices were shaped by local societal characteristics, international relations and changing configurations in metropolitan countries. Separate chapters are devoted to the interaction of this evolution with debates on food security and economic growth and with international economic policies. The final chapters highlight the new challenges for global food security that will arise as traditional sources of biomass production and the more easily extractable reserves of fossil biomass become depleted or can no longer be used. Overall, the book emphasizes the inadequacy of current explanations with regard to these challenges. It explores what is needed to ensure a sustainable future and calls for a rethinking of these issues; a necessary reflection in today's unstable global political situation.

Agriculture as a sector; Factor growth and allocation; Technology; Static and dynamic behavior.

In the last few decades, Brazilian agriculture has experienced a seismic transformation, and its contradictory facets have fed different and opposing narratives regarding recent changes. This book covers these changes, exploring the issues from several empirical and analytical angles, including the role of agriculture in the contemporary Brazilian economy, the dynamics of Brazilian agricultural value chains, environmental challenges and the processes of social differentiation. Brazilian agriculture continues to be viewed in the international literature, either through the lenses of the past century - those of former problems relating to land use and land tenure - or apologetically. This collection of essays aims at updating the current interpretations, providing objective accounting of the main transformations, its determinants, results, contradictions and limitations. As it covers the most relevant traits of Brazilian agricultural and rural development, the book will provide the reader with an encompassing view of contemporary Brazilian agriculture, including the positive and negative sides of the so-called tropical agriculture revolution. It highlights the tremendous economic potential as well as the continuing structural heterogeneity, concentration of production and marginalization of millions of small farmers. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book will be perfect for all those interested in learning about Brazilian agriculture. It will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students of economic development, agricultural economics, rural sociology, comparative economic development, rural development and agricultural policies.

Why are poor countries poor and rich countries rich? How are wealth and poverty related to changes in nutrition, health, life expectancy, education, population growth and politics? This modern, non-technical 2005 introduction to development studies explores the dynamics of socio-economic development and stagnation in developing countries. Taking a quantitative and comparative approach to contemporary debates within their broader context, Szirmai examines historical, institutional, demographic, sociological, political and cultural factors. Key chapters focus on economic growth, technological change, industrialisation, agricultural development, and consider social dimensions such as population growth, health and education. Each chapter contains comparative statistics on trends from a sample of twenty-nine developing countries. This rich statistical database allows students to strengthen their understanding of comparative development experiences. Assuming no prior knowledge of economics the book is suited for use in inter-disciplinary development studies programmes as well as economics courses, and will also interest practitioners pursuing careers in developing countries.

This book examines the role of agriculture in the economic transformation of developing low- and middle-income countries and explores means for accelerating agricultural growth and poverty reduction. In this volume, Mellor measures by household class the employment impact of alternative agricultural growth rates and land tenure systems, and impact on cereal consumption and food security. The book provides detailed analysis of each element of agricultural modernization, emphasizing the central role of government in accelerated growth in private sector dominated agriculture. The book differs from the bulk of current conventional wisdom in its placement of the non-poor small commercial farmer at the center of growth, and explains how growth translates into poverty reduction. This new book is a follow up to Mellor’s classic, prize-winning text, The Economics of Agricultural Development. Listed as a Best Books of 2017: Economics by Financial Times.

This book examines how crop diversification strategies can help to ensure sustainable agricultural development across different land-size categories, with a focus on Malda District in West Bengal, India. Using Malda as the study area, a region with nearly 4 million people, the book assesses the extent, pattern, factors and future of crop diversification and its contribution to the development of agriculture in Malda and in India as a whole. The work presents data from 1995-2015 concerning changing cropping patterns at various land-size distributions, and analyzes the information over the twenty year period to understand the link between crop diversification and agricultural development, in order to combat major agricultural issues and make suitable policy recommendations at micro (rural) and macro (urban) levels of agricultural planning. The study is a unique contribution to the field of agricultural geography, and will be of use to students and researchers, as well as government organizations, city/community planners and agriculture managers.