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"In this book an ecological anthropologist, who has studied farming systems from small-scale African hoe cultivators to industrial American agribusiness, provides a new analysis of population and agricultural growth. This book argues that we can't make sense of population and food production without recognizing the drivers of three fundamentally different types of agriculture. It identifies and explores these three fundamental forms of agricultural growth: Malthusian (expansion), industrialization (external-input-dependent) and intensification (labour-based). Synthesizing findings from historical and scientific research, the book upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land for food production, that our only hope is development of new agricultural technologies, that new technologies are developed mainly in response to food demands, and that such technologies saved a billion lives when they were brought to India and the developing world. Containing vignettes, short histories and drawing on global case studies, this book will not only be of interest to students and scholars of agriculture, land management and development, but also those more widely interested in learning about agri-food systems and the challenges of feeding a growing population"--

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Casuality in Agrarian Settlement Systems -- 3. Agrarian Production and Settlement -- 4. The Kofyar Homeland -- 5. Frontiering -- 6. Pioneer Agrarian Settlement -- 7. Land Pressure and Intensification -- 8. Intensification, Dispersal, and Agglomeration -- 9. Agricultural Movement -- 10. Ethnicity and Settlement -- 11. Settlement and the Physical Landscape -- 12. Agrarian Ecology and Culture -- Appendix: Methods of Studying Agrarian Settlement -- Notes -- References -- Index.

By late in the twentieth century, scientists had succeeded in manipulating organisms at the genetic level, mainly by gene transfer. The major impact of this technology has been seen in the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, which has occurred with little controversy in some areas and with fierce controversy elsewhere. GM crops raise a very wide range of questions, and I address three areas of particular interest for anthropology and its allied fields. First are the political-economic aspects of GM, which include patenting of life forms and new relationships among agriculture, industry, and the academy. Second is the wide diversity in response and resistance to the technology. Third is the much-debated question of GM crops for the developing world. This analysis is approached first by determining what controls research agendas and then by evaluating actual impacts of crops to date.

Despite its use to exemplify how the world is "flat," India is in many ways "spiky." Hyderabad is a prosperous hub of information–communication technology (ICT) while its impoverished agricultural hinterland is best known for dysfunctional agriculture and farmer suicide. Based on the belief that a lack of knowledge and skill lay at the root of agrarian distress, the "e-Sagu" project aimed to leverage the city's scientific expertise and ICT capability to aid cotton farmers. The project fit with a national surge of "last mile" projects bringing ICT to the village, but it was unique in using ICT to connect farmers directly with agricultural scientists acting as advisors. Such projects fit the interests of many actors, which has led to an unrealistic national enthusiasm about their impacts. This article uses the first five years of the project as a lens to view the cultural nature of both indigenous agricultural knowledge and "scientific" agricultural advising. Unlike lay publics whose uptake of science is better known, with farmers the invention and adoption of agro-scientific knowledge is deeply embedded in daily productive activities and sociocultural interactions. E-Sagu eventually had to abandon its construction of agricultural science as objective and acultural, resorting to rural methods of persuasion. It also found that it could only survive by joining forces with companies promoting commodification of agricultural inputs, which was a cause of the agrarian distress it sought to alleviate.

Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara. John Middleton. editor in chief. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1997. vols.2466pp.