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Ester Boserup was a Danish economist who studied economic and agricultural development. Her most notable work is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (1965). Boserup presented her work as a “framework for a dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture.” She posited the theory that instead of agricultural output determining population size, population pressure was a precondition for the emergence and development of agricultural innovation and intensification, primarily among subsistence and peasant producers. Boserup described how societies with moderate population growth can increase agricultural productivity by investing additional labor and applying innovations to their farming systems, such as digging irrigation channels or building terraces. Her theory that population pressure stimulates agricultural innovations directly contradicted Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus, an English political economist, argued that increased food production triggered population growth, and that population growth would always outpace the food supply because population grows geometrically while the food supply grows linearly. Thus, population growth would outstrip agricultural output, eventually resulting in famine and population crash. This cycle was labeled the “Malthusian catastrophe.”

Challenging Malthus

Malthus’s theory held sway for over a century until Ester Boserup’s provocative thesis challenged his ideas. Drawing on Boserup’s work, social scientists intensified their research into agricultural change. Anthropologists and geographers, most notably those studying swidden agriculture (closely related to shifting cultivation), sought evidence to test Boserup’s thesis. Many scientists found that at low population densities, swidden agriculture was the most efficient way to produce food, in terms of workload and productivity. Following Boserup’s model, it was demonstrated that with population growth, the swidden fallowing periods often became too short, fields became less fertile, and the workload increased, while productivity decreased. At this point, rather than collapsing into famine, societies developed ways to intensify agricultural production through innovation. In many cases, the innovations that supported increased populations came in the form of inputs, such as fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yielding crop varieties, technologies that Malthus could not have imagined in 18th-century England.

Many of the current debates on population and the environment trace their intellectual roots to Malthus or Boserup. For neo-Malthusians like Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), societies become mired in a cycle of high population growth, resulting in an inability to produce enough food. Ecological degradation inevitably follows this scenario. Boserup provided an alternative viewpoint in the current population-environment debate by arguing that population growth may stimulate agricultural intensification, thereby suggesting that population growth can ultimately have a benign or possibly even a positive effect on the environment.

Although Boserup’s theory is generally considered oversimplified and too general, it has been supported by research on agricultural societies that are not fully integrated into market economies. However, in some of the world’s poorest regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, population pressures have outstripped food production, resulting in famines. Boserup’s theory was not fully developed and cannot explain these contradictions. Geographers such as David Carr who examine the evolution of thought on population-environment theories believe that further research is necessary to understand under what conditions population pressure will lead to agricultural intensification, and whether or not this intensification will result in more or less environmental degradation.

Bibliography:

Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (G. Allen and Unwin, 1965);
Brush and B.L. Turner II, eds., Comparative Farming Systems (Guilford Press, 1987);
David L. Carr, “Proximate Population Factors and Deforestation in Tropical Agricultural Frontiers,” Population and Environment (v.25/6, 2004);
Paul Erlich, The Population Bomb (Buccaneer Books, 1995 [1968]);
Grigg, “Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agricultural Change: A Critical Review,” Progress in Human Geography (v.3/1, 1979);
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford, 1999 [1798]);
L. Turner II, Robert Hanham, and Anthony Portataro, “Population Pressure and Agricultural Intensity,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (v.67/3, 1977).