Agriculture, Intensive

Agricultural intensification can affect any of the inputs of an agricultural system—the crops planted, the labor expended, and the productivity exacted from the land. It can be driven by increasing population relative to the land available or by changes in market prices and demand for crops. It can result in dramatic investments in and transformations of the landscape, and it can be accompanied by, but will not necessarily result in, intensive social change.

There are several ways of categorizing the changes in intensive agriculture. In small-holder systems, intensive agriculture is marked by high investments of time in weeding, planting, and especially watering crops and manuring the soil. Several crops will be planted in the same field and mature at different times, and fields will also be worked several times a year as long as conditions support growth. All this requires a high population density and a strong work ethic. In Chagga agriculture on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, for example, competition for land is high, and use of space intensified by the complex systems of agroforestry that are practiced. These involve planting shade-tolerant species (yams, coffee) intermingled with banana and [Page 37]fruit and timber trees. In anthropology, the work of Robert Netting is probably the most well-known corpus of study on the ecology and practices of intensive small-holder agriculture in diverse parts of the world.

Agricultural intensification can be driven by population increase. This has been famously theorized by Esther Boserup in The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. Boserup, in contrast to Malthus, saw population growth as the independent variable driving agricultural and social change, not as the consequence of agricultural output or social systems. But the changes resulting are also intimately related to market pressures and increased demand for crops. The development of labor-intensive irrigated agriculture in the Pare mountains, in Tanzania, for example, is thought to have preceded their dense settlement and was driven by the need to acquire livestock for marriage through trade with neighboring pastoralists. Similarly, there are many cases where population increase has not been marked by intensification.

The landscapes of intensive small-holder agriculture have tended to attract admiration from people who enjoy the gardenscape of different patches of intensive use. Some of the most dramatic anthropogenic landscapes in the world are the complex layers of irrigated rice terraces, which can produce 5 to 10 tons per hectare per year (higher yields are dependent on advanced technology). One famous study of intensification in Machakos, Kenya, has recorded the transformation of a land characterized by extensive land use and apparent erosion to a gardenscape of trees, terraces, and well-tended land.

But we should note that changes in landscape are never socially neutral. The Machakos case was widely received as a good-news story of averted degradation. But at the same time, the transformation in the land has had its social costs, with poorer families finding it harder to cope with population pressure. In other parts of Africa, investment in agricultural intensification and land improvement is reduced [Page 38]because of the changes they portend to social support mechanisms. Similarly, the intensification of agriculture in the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries was accompanied by an extraordinarily vigorous enclosure movement, which concentrated land in the hands of wealthy estate owners. Improving estates was intimately bound up in denying others access to rural resources. Clifford Geertz has famously characterized change in Indonesian agriculture as “Agricultural Involution,” which saw increased labor investment in agriculture with no real increase in per capita productivity.

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