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.

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.

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.

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.

A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences as dire as death. In Cultivating Knowledge anthropologist Andrew Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture. By comparing the experiences of farmers engaged with these mutually exclusive visions for the future of agriculture, Cultivating Knowledge investigates the human responses to global agrarian change. It illuminates the local impact of global changes: the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. It all begins with a seed.

This book provides a thorough introduction to and examination of agricultural value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, the authors introduce the economic theory of agri-food value chains and value chain governance, focusing on domestic and regional trade in (and consumption of) food crops in a low-income country context. In addition to mainstream and heterodox thinking about value chain development, the book pays attention to political economy considerations. The book also reviews the empirical evidence on value chain development and performance in Africa. It adopts multiple lenses to examine agricultural value chains, zooming out from the micro level (e.g., relational contracting in a context of market imperfections) to the meso level (e.g., distributional implications of various value chain interventions, inclusion of specific social groups) and the macro level (underlying income, population and urbanization trends, volumes and prices, etc.).Furthermore, this book places value chain development in the context of a process the authors refer to as structural transformation 2.0, which refers to a process where production factors (labor, land and capital) move from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity agriculture. Finally, throughout the book the authors interpret the evidence in light of three important debates: (i) how competitive are rural factor and product markets, and what does this imply for distribution and innovation? (ii) what role do foreign investment and factor proportions play in the development of agri-food value chains in Africa? (iii) what complementary government policies can help facilitate a process of agricultural value chain transformation, towards high-productive activities and enhancing the capacity of value chains to generate employment opportunities and food security for a growing population.

This book sets out to investigate the process of agrarian change from new angles and with new results. It starts on firm ground rather than from abstract economic theory. Upon its initial appearance, it was heralded as "a small masterpiece, which economic historians should read--and not simply quote"--Giovanni Frederico, Economic History Services. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth remains a breakthrough in the theory of agricultural development. In linking ethnography with economy, developmental studies reached new heights. Whereas "development" had been seen previously as the transformation of traditional communities by the introduction (or imposition) of new technologies, Ester Boserup argues that changes and improvements occur from within agricultural communities, and that improvements are governed not simply by external interference, but by those communities themselves Using extensive analyses of the costs and productivity of the main systems of traditional agriculture, Ester Boserup concludes that technical, economic, and social changes are unlikely to take place unless the community concerned is exposed to the pressure of population growth.