Agricultural Intensification

There are a variety of definitions of agricultural intensification, but they all essentially refer to a process whereby inputs of capital and/or labor are increased to raise the productivity or yield (output) of a fixed land area. The academic interest in agricultural intensification has been concerned with the technical, social, and ecological details of local intensification processes as well as more broadly with agricultural intensification as key in the rise of complex societies and development in general. Agricultural intensification is a process that involves both societal (social, political, and economic) and environmental processes of change, and it has been an important research topic in geography, particularly during the second half of the 20th century. The challenge of meeting future global food demands, as well as framing policies for more sustainable food production and land use systems, means that agricultural intensification is likely to remain an important concept during the 21st century.

It is common to distinguish between two ways of intensifying agricultural production by increasing inputs of capital or labor. Capital-intensive agriculture depends on high inputs of capital, such as machinery, energy, and biotechnology, while labor-intensive agriculture primarily depends on high inputs of manual labor. If high inputs of land are used in an agricultural system, while capital and labor inputs are kept at a minimum, it is referred to as extensive agriculture, indicating its character of being the opposite strategy to that of intensive agriculture. Hence, a farming system with long fallow periods (e.g., swidden systems, slash-and-burn, or shifting cultivation) that in its totality encompasses a relatively large land area is more extensive than a system based on permanent tillage (i.e., with no or minimum fallow periods) of the same amount of land. Levels of agricultural intensity are thus commonly graded on a scale from “extensive” to “intensive” systems. A laborintensive farming system is thus characterized by relatively high inputs of manual labor on rather small arable fields, while a capital-intensive system requires high inputs of capital investments per land area. This grading is part of the standard evolutionary model of agricultural and societal development, where societies are understood to progress from a primitive state—that is, with low technical and social complexity, low population density, and extensive production systems—to more advanced, complex, densely populated, and socially stratified societies with increasing levels of agricultural intensity. But, as detailed studies of agricultural intensification have shown, this historical scenario does not fit in all places. In some areas, intensive practices were also part of early agricultural strategies.

Studies of agricultural intensification have been closely linked to a broad range of issues related to the development of human societies and their use of natural resources, such as the evolution of political centralization, urbanization, land degradation, and population dynamics. Rapid population growth combined with limits on expanding cultivated land typically strengthens the imperative to intensify agricultural production, and from a policy perspective, concerns with agricultural intensification are generally grounded in the fundamental question of how to produce enough food for future consumers. To what extent processes of agricultural intensification can indeed satisfy the three critical development goals of (1) agricultural growth, (2) poverty alleviation, and (3) sustainable resource use is a critical issue in contemporary development research and policy debates. The Green Revolution, by which agricultural productivity was greatly enhanced in many countries during the 1950s to 1980s, is a classical and much debated case of the positive and negative effects of agricultural intensification.

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