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Labor Productivity and Agricultural Development: Testing Boserup

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Human Ecology

Abstract

It seems fair to say that in the Neolithic age, every household was involved in food production, but during industrial times, only a very small proportion of households (<10%) were involved in farming and feeding everyone. Food producing went from being the activity of everyone to being a sector of the economy employing few people and at the same time producing a large agricultural surplus that is exported to the rest of the economy. This is often called agricultural development, and the process by which this development has been accomplished is often referred to as intensification. There are two positions on what has happened to the productivity of labor in this developmental process: the rise thesis and the decline thesis.

The original article Labor Productivity and Agricultural Development: Boserup Revisited appeared in Human Ecology, Vol. 28, No. 2, June 2000.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sawah is annual cropping on flat level valley land, with soil preparation by animal drawn plows and harrows, irrigation, seed beds for rice, and transplanting of the seedlings. The harvest cutting tool is the sickle.

  2. 2.

    Swidden is a long-fallow technique with slashing, felling, and burning, planting by means of dibble stick, many cultivars, extensive hand weeding, and bush knife (or machete), ax, and baskets. The harvest cutting tool may be the finger knife, or the sickle. It is never irrigated, and usually occurs on hilly slopes.

  3. 3.

    A nominal scale may seem peculiar, given our standard notions of the increase in technology over the longue duree. Turner and Doolittle (1978) attempted an ordinal scale of technology, and they claimed to have established an interval scale for cropping frequency. Boserup (1981) also has an ordinal scale for fallow. There is reason to be skeptical on the completeness, and ordinality, of these scales.

    Turner and Doolittle’s agro technology scale, leaves out genetic materials, metals, traction sources, and engines (water, wind, as well as electric and heat). They mixed competitor control with fertility. And the weights they assign to the traits are unmotivated, in the sense that I have not been able to imagine the dimension involved. If that dimension is labor, then of course it is conflated with the measure of labor input, and no investigation of the correlation of labor productivity with agricultural intensity will be valid.

    Boserup has an ordinal scale for frequency of cropping (the inverse of which is length of fallow.) Just in terms of the years (or days) that a field is without a crop it is a good ordinal scale. But the difference between long-fallow and annual cropping is more than a difference in time, it is also a major change in technology, and it is not clear that the necessary technology changes can be described as an ordinal variable.

  4. 4.

    There is an old tradition in Europe of measuring crop output by volume (the bushel). This tradition was changed to mass (the kilogram) in the nineteenth century on the continent with the widespread adoption of the metric system of weights and measures. In the USA the bushel is still the major reporting unit for output.

  5. 5.

    Both Kunstadter et al. (1978, p. xii) and Moerman (1968, p. 210) state that the tang contains 20 l. Freeman (personal communication) states that he must have been using the Imperial pint for his Iban studies. The Imperial gallon contains 4.546 l (the US gallon contains 3.7583 l). Moerman (1968, p. 210) states that the tang contains approximately 11 kg of rough paddy.

  6. 6.

    All output is a product of factors of production (land, labor, technology for a start), and it is possible to imagine decomposing that output and assigning some fraction of it to land, another fraction to labor, etc. In fact it is possible, under ideal circumstances, to measure the inputs of the factors, and to analyze the output in terms of the factor proportions. Data that permit this are usually available only under highly controlled experimental conditions. What we will have available to us will be total factor inputs, and the total output. The only ratio we can construct with these data is what is called total factor productivity. The labor input is divided by the total output. But as the technology package differs, and so does land form, all of these inputs are conflated in the ratio.

  7. 7.

    Under conditions of stone-age technology it is likely that the difference between swidden and sawah labor productivities would be even larger. We have only a tiny handful of studies of the productivity of stone tools used for cutting woody vegetation (Salisbury 1962; Carneiro 1976; Toth et al. 1992). They are not very persuasive, being crude estimates at best. It is easy to imagine that iron (and steel), are much more effective than stone when it comes to felling a large tropical hardwood tree, but that may be no more than an iron-age bias.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

    Robert C. Hunt

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  1. City University of New York, Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, New York, 10065, USA

    Daniel G. Bates

  2. 124th Avenue 185, Shelbyville, 49344, USA

    Judith Tucker

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Hunt, R.C. (2010). Labor Productivity and Agricultural Development: Testing Boserup. In: Bates, D., Tucker, J. (eds) Human Ecology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5701-6_13

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