Abstract
Two competing models have served as the basis for agricultural development policies. One is based on observations and assumptions of The Reverend Thomas Malthus in late eighteenth century Britain, and the other from the Danish economist Ester Boserup in the mid-twentieth century. However, rational agricultural development decisions can only be made using a model that incorporates assumptions based on a technically appropriate model that takes into account the currently status of global systems. A new development model may incorporate elements of both Neo-Malthusian and Boserupian economic-demographic models, but because the world has changed substantially, it can be neither of them alone, nor a hybrid of the two models without significant expansion and refinement. The principles espoused by Malthus and Boserup can thus be used as the starting points in a dialectic argument to arrive at a new agricultural development paradigm.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aktar, M. W., Sengupta, D., & Chowdhury, A. (2009). Impact of pesticides use in agriculture: Their benefits and hazards. Interdisciplinary Toxicology, 2(1), 1–12. doi:10.2478/v10102-009-0001-7.
Boserup, E. (1965). The conditions of agricultural growth: The economics of agrarian change under population pressure. New Brunswick: AldineTransaction.
Boserup, E. (1981). Population and technological change: A study of long-term trends (p. xi). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grigg, D. (1979). Ester Boserup’s theory of agrarian change: A critical review. Progress in Human Geography, 3(1), 64–84.
Hirsch, P. R., & Mauchline, T. H. (2015). The importance of the microbial N cycle in soil for crop plant nutrition. Advances in Applied Microbiology, 93, 45–71. doi:10.1016/bs.aambs.2015.09.001.
Jaramillo, F., & Destouni, G. (2015). Local flow regulation and irrigation raise global human water consumption and footprint. Science, 350(6265), 1248–1251. doi:10.1126/science.aad1010.
Josephson, A. L., Ricker-Gilbert, J., & Florax, R. J. G. M. (2014). How does population density influence agricultural intensification and productivity? Evidence from Ethiopia. Food Policy, 48, 142–152. doi:10.1016/j.foodpol.2014.03.004.
Krautkraemer, J. A. (1994). Population growth, soil fertility, and agricultural intensification. Journal of Development Economics, 44(2), 403–428.
Laney, R. M. (2002). Disaggregating Induced Intensification for land-change analysis: A case study from Madagascar. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 702–726. doi:10.1111/1467-8306.00312.
Malthus, T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population: An Essay on the principle of populatin, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (p. 125). London, UK: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard. (Reprinted from http://www.esp.org).
Mekonnen, M. M., & Hoekstra, A. Y. (2016). Four billion people facing severe water scarcity. Science Advances, 2(2), e1500323.
Pender, J. L. (1998). Population growth, agricultural intensification, induced innovation and natural resource sustainability: An application of neoclassical growth theory. Agricultural Economics, 19(1–2), 99–112. doi:10.1016/S0169-5150(98)00024-3.
Pingali, P. L. (2012). Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(31), 12302–12308. doi:10.1073/pnas.0912953109.
Ross, E. B. (1996). Malthusianism and agricultural development: False premises, false promises. Biotechnology and Development Monitor, 26, 24.
Ross, E. B. (2003). Malthusianism, capitalist agriculture and the fate of peasants in the making of the modern world food system. Review of Radical Political Economics, 35(4), 437–461.
Ruttan, V. W. (1999). The transition to agricultural sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 96(11), 5960–5967.
Scudellari, M. (2015). The science myths that will not die. Nature, 528(7582), 322–325. doi:10.1038/528322a.
Soby, S. D. (2013). The end of the green revolution. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 26(3), 537–546. doi:10.1007/s10806-012-9393-z.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science. doi:10.1126/science.1259855.
Turner, B. L., & Ali, A. M. S. (1996). Induced intensification: Agricultural change in Bangladesh with implications for Malthus and Boserup. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 93(25), 14984–14991.
Turner, B. L., & Fischer-Kowalski, M. (2010). Ester Boserup: An interdisciplinary visionary relevant for sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(51), 21963–21965. doi:10.1073/pnas.1013972108.
Wood, J. C. (Ed.). (1986). Thomas Robert Malthus: critical assessments (Vol. 2). Croom Helm, London.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Biomedical Sciences Program, College of Health Sciences. The author would like to thank Dr. Kim Cooper for helpful discussions about the construction and validation of models.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
There are no known conflicts of interest on the part of the author or host institution associated with the preparation of this manuscript.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Soby, S. Thomas Malthus, Ester Boserup, and Agricultural Development Models in the Age of Limits. J Agric Environ Ethics 30, 87–98 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9655-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9655-x