Induced intensification: Agricultural change in Bangladesh with implications for Malthus and Boserup

Induced intensification: Agricultural change in Bangladesh with implications for Malthus and Boserup

B. L. Turner IIa and
A. M. Shajaat Alib

^aCenter for Technology, Environment, and Development (CENTED), George Perkins Marsh Institute and Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610; and ^bDepartment of Social Sciences, 3900 University Boulevard, University of Texas, Tyler, TX 75799

Abstract

Bangladesh is dominated by a small-holder agrarian economy under extreme stress. Production shortfalls, increasing economic polarization, and chronic malnutrition are persistent, but major famine has been diverted in part by significant growth in agriculture. This recent history is open to both Malthusian and Boserupian interpretations—a history we explore here through a test of the induced intensification thesis of agricultural change. This thesis, framed by variations in the behavior of small-holders, has grown from a simple demand-production relationship to a consideration of the mediating influences on that relationship. The induced intensification thesis is reviewed and tested for 265 households in 6 villages in Bangladesh from 1950–1986. A time-series analysis of an induced intensification model provides relatively high levels of explained variance in cropping intensity (frequency and land productivity) and also indicates the relative impacts of household class, environment, and cropping strategies. On average, the small-holders in question kept pace with the demands on production, although important class and village variations were evident and the proportion of landless households increased. These results, coupled with evidence that agricultural growth involved intensification thresholds, provide clues about Malthusian and Boserupian interpretations of Bangladesh, and suggest that small-holder agriculture there is likely to continue on a “muted” path of growth.

Footnotes

This contribution is a part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected on April 25, 1995
B. L. Turner II
Abbreviations: ha, hectare; HYV, high-yielding variety(ies).
↵ c The United Nations Development Programme ranks Bangladesh 146 of 174 developing countries in terms of its “human development index,” an indicator of socioeconomic well being.
↵ d A parallel thesis linking research and development in agriculture to the changing pressures on production is known as “induced innovation.”
↵ e Various research communities apply different terms to describe farmers who are not fully integrated into market economies; each strongly objects to the terms used by the other. The term used here, small-holder, refers to all farm units not fully integrated into market production and growing a measure of their own subsistence. These farm units for the Bangladesh case study are further classified by the size of land holdings.
↵ f Subsistence farmers may engage in “prestige” production to demonstrate their skills and status within the community, but this production usually involves a small fraction of total inputs and outputs of production.
↵ g These changes also release the safety nets structured to ensure basic needs, offering instead the potential for some individuals and households to raise their material standard of living and for others to fail to do so. Increased polarization of material standards of living among households usually follows.
↵ h These processes work in reverse creating “reduced” intensification or disintensification. As demand for agricultural production declines, so too do the inputs to cultivation, ultimately resulting in a decline in land productivity. Disintensification, however, may involve a considerable lag-time between drops in demand and intensity of cultivation, particularly where significant land improvements have been made. Such systems may continue to function long after maintenance capital ceases or declines.
↵ i Landesque capital is “permanent” improvement of the land for cropping and usually involves terrace, drainage, and irrigation systems.
↵ j Many capital inputs were obtained in the informal sector, including associated debts. We suspect that a significant amount of produce is sold in this sector as well. Our field data did not seek to identify in which sector the produce was sold, only the total amount involved.
↵ k The variables used for PDEN and MARK were not complementary. The bivariate correlation between the two was not statistically significant.
↵ l In our larger work, the model includes positive and negative feedbacks from the output variables to the input variables. The results of this loop suggest that higher intensity levels reinforce demand through larger populations, whereas lower intensities damper demand through smaller populations.
↵ m Other studies show that various inputs to cultivation, including capital inputs, vary little by farmstead class in Bangladesh because land pressures are so great that any cultivation requires them. Class was a factor for ownership of low-lift pumps, but owner-plots only could not be served because of land fragmentation. Other farmers with adjacent plots purchased water. While the pump owner reaped handsome benefits, irrigation increased on other farm plots (2).
↵ n Environmental themes are self-explanatory. Technological themes, such as those that underpin most diffusion and some development theory, treat changes in technology as an exogenous variable that once introduced is uniformly and voluntarily adopted. Typically, these themes do not explicitly include a rationale of small-holder behavior—goals and decision rules—and thus do not link the use of the land or adoption of the technology to the larger forces to which the small-holder responds.
↵ o Whether or not the origins of the impacts of “green revolution” technology support Malthus or Boserup is a complicated question that cannot be addressed here, but the answer depends in a large part on temporal and spatial scale of the analysis employed.