Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000 available in Paperback, eBook
Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000
- ISBN-10:
- 0691138532
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691138534
- Pub. Date:
- 12/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691138532
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691138534
- Pub. Date:
- 12/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000
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Overview
Feeding the World synthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691138534 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2008 |
| Series: | The Princeton Economic History of the Western World , #24 |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 775,227 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Feeding the World
An Economic History of World Agriculture, 1800-2000Chapter One
INTRODUCTIONAgriculture has always been absolutely necessary for the very survival of humankind. For centuries, it has provided people with food, clothing, and heating, and it has employed most of the total active population. Nowadays, we dress mainly in artificial and synthetic fibers and heat themselves with fossil fuels, but the primary sector still supplies all the food we need. The available projections suggest that the world population will grow further in the next decades, while the nutritional status of the world poor must improve. Thus, agricultural production has to rise, and it has to rise with little or no further environmental damage: modern agriculture has, in fact, the reputation, largely deserved, of being environment-unfriendly.
The challenges ahead, however, should not let people forget the past achievements. From 1800 to 2000, the world population has risen about six- to sevenfold, from less than one billion to six billion. Yet, world agricultural production has increased substantially faster-at the very least, tenfold in the same period. Nowadays, people are better fed than in the past: each person in the world has, in theory, 2,800 calories available, with a minimumof some 2,200 in sub-Saharan Africa. Famines, which haunted preindustrial times, have disappeared from most of the world. The latest survey by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that 800 million people (i.e., some 10-15% of the world population) are still undernourished-but this may be an overestimation, and the proportion has drastically fallen by about a quarter since 1970. Furthermore, undernourishment and famine are caused much more by the skewed distribution of income (poor entitlements in Sen's definition) and by political events (international wars, civil wars, terrorism), than by sheer lack of food. Actually, many OECD countries have, since the 1950s, been struggling with an overproduction of food. The achievements of agriculture appear even more remarkable if one looks at employment. Agriculture employed more than 75 percent of the total workforce in traditional agrarian societies, and, as late as 1950, about two-thirds throughout the world. Nowadays, in the advanced countries, the share is about 2.5 percent-eleven million people out of 430. In the rest of the world, agricultural workers still account for almost half the labor force, with a world total of some 1.3 billion workers (775 million in China and India alone). Such a massive transfer of labor, one of the key features of modern economic growth in the past two centuries, was made possible by a dramatic increase in product per worker. In short, agriculture is an outstanding success story. Its achievements have been outshone by the even faster growth of industry and services, but the latter would have been almost impossible if the workers had not had sufficient food to eat.
The aim of this book is to describe this success, and to understand its causes. Chapter 2 illustrates the peculiarities of agriculture. Its production depends on the environment: soil, climate, and the availability of water have always determined what peasants could grow, how much they had to work, and how much they could obtain from their efforts. These constraints have been relaxed in recent times, without totally disappearing. The factor endowment, and notably the amount of land per agricultural worker, determines the intensity of cultivation. The combined effects of the environment and the factor endowment have created long-lasting and area-specific patterns of land use, crop mix, and techniques ("agricultural systems"). The next three chapters present the main statistical evidence, loosely arranged in a production-function framework. Chapter 3 deals with the long-term trends in output (which has always been growing), relative prices (increasing in the first half of the nineteenth century, then roughly constant or slowly declining), and world trade in agricultural products (increasing quite fast before 1913 and again after 1950). The focus then shifts to the proximate causes of this growth, the increase in the use of factors (chapter 4) and productivity growth (chapter 5). Historians have a fairly clear idea about the long-run change in factors. The total agricultural work force remained roughly constant all over the world, with the notable exception of Western settlement countries (North America, Australia, Argentina, and so on) during settlement process-that is, until the beginning of the twentieth century. The stock of capital grew fast beginning in the late nineteenth century, as machines substituted labor. Although this conventional wisdom is not exactly wrong, it is, however, inspired a bit too much by the experience of the Western world. The growth of land stock has been much more geographically widespread and has lasted for longer than is commonly assumed. Agricultural capital consists mainly of building, irrigation works, and the like, and thus it increased slowly but steadily throughout the period. The real process of mechanization started only in the 1950s, and the agricultural work force has gone on growing in absolute terms. Thus, the growth of inputs (extensive growth) was the major cause of worldwide growth in agricultural production until the 1930s, but after World War II, it slowed down. Consequently, most of the big increase in total output in the past half-century has been achieved thanks to the growth in total factor productivity. The available estimates, surveyed in chapter 5, suggest that its growth has been increasing over time and that it has been faster in "advanced" countries than in LDCs. In the "advanced" countries, productivity growth has accounted for the whole of the increase in agricultural output. Contrary to a common view, productivity growth has been faster in agriculture than in the rest of the economy, including manufacturing. Chapter 6 focuses on the main source of this great achievement, technical progress. It starts by describing the main innovations, and then focuses on the process of their adoption. As in the rest of the economy, innovations are adopted when profitable, and profitability ultimately depends on the expected productivity gains and on factor endowment and factor prices. However, as the chapter argues, a standard neoclassical model cannot explain all the features of technical progress in agriculture. Agricultural innovations depend on the environment and entail a high level of risk, and many of them yield little or no financial rewards to the inventor. These features call for a greater role of the state, both in the production and the diffusion of innovations. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 deal with the institutional framework of agricultural production. "Institutions" is a fairly vague word, which resists all attempts at a general definition. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with property rights on labor and land, markets for goods and inputs (labor, land, capital), and agricultural co-operatives. Chapter 7 is, to some extent, a general introduction to these issues and to the approaches of economists and historians to institutions. It discusses how institutions work and how they might affect the performance of agriculture. Chapter 8 describes the main changes-the creation of property rights on labor and land, the trends in the average size of farms, in landownership, and in contracts, and the development of markets for goods and factors. It also puts forward some tentative hypotheses on the likely causes of these changes and on their effects on agricultural performance-although, it is fair to say, the discussion on these issues is surprisingly thin when compared to the attention they have received in the theoretical literature. Chapter 9 focuses on the effects of agricultural policies. It argues that state intervention has only really affected agricultural development since the 1930s, and that, by and large, it has reduced the aggregate welfare of the whole population. The tenth, and last, chapter shifts the focus from agriculture to the whole economy. How did the growth of agricultural output and the change in input use affect modern economic growth? This issue has been the subject of much discussion in historical perspective, and it still looms large in the debates about the optimal development strategy for less developed countries. The chapter has no ambition to solve such a controversial issue. It sketches out the prevailing theories and deals very briefly with three case studies. The book closes with some very general remarks about the future of agriculture.
The summary makes it clear that this is quite an ambitious book. It deals with many issues, and covers two centuries of agricultural history in the whole world, from Monsoon Asia to Midwest prairies. Any attempt to be comprehensive would be foolish. The potentially relevant literature spans dozens of languages, and many disciplines, from "traditional" agricultural economics and history to more "trendy" social and environmental history. Just to quote an example, the fourth volume of A Survey of Agricultural Economics Literature, Agriculture in Economic Development, contains more than two hundred pages of references. Assuming (conservatively) that there are twenty entries per page, the total sums up to almost four thousand entries. Some of these works may be purely theoretical, and thus outside the scope of this book, but the majority should still be considered. The survey refers only to the less developed countries, deals (almost) exclusively with the post-World War II period, lists only works in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese published before 1990, and is probably, as with all surveys, not complete. A simple proportion suggests that there are thousands of potentially relevant references. Clearly, no one in the world (certainly not this author) can reasonably claim to master all the literature. And even if this miracle were possible, it would be impossible to review it thoroughly and keep the book to a reasonable size. Selective reading is an imperative. Thus, I have decided to focus on more general contributions, and to favor works that frame their views in economic theory and buttress their statements with data.
This approach has some clear and often rehearsed shortcomings. Mainstream economic theory may appear too abstract to be relevant. Agriculture is a highly local activity, and specialists in agrarian history always warn against broad generalizations, which, they claim, cannot capture the peculiarities of the area that they are dealing with. Many data are missing, unreliable, or sometimes plainly wrong. Reliable "historical" (pre-1950) data are available only for some "advanced" countries (those of Western Europe, USA, Japan, etc). International organizations such as the UN, FAO, World Bank, and the OECD have made a magnificent effort to extract comparable data for all countries from the information provided by national statistical offices, which are sometimes incomplete and/or of dubious quality. However, there are some reasons for hope. Modern development economics, with its emphasis on institutions, transaction costs, information, and so on, provides powerful tools for understanding rural societies, which can also be employed to explore societies of the past. Economic historians have unearthed a great deal of new data, which, in spite of all their shortcomings, do throw light on many key issues. And, last but not least, I feel that there is no real alternative. A history of agriculture based on anecdotal evidence from local case studies would be a boundless and largely meaningless list of details. But details are sometimes fascinating and are useful for illustrating general points-to put some flesh on the bare bones of quantitative analysis, so to speak. The reader may find the selection of these examples somewhat haphazard (why-for example-discuss tenure in China during the 1930s instead of that in Guatemala during the 1970s?). It is, however, guided, whenever possible, by two principles: first, to deal with "large" countries (China, India, Russia, the USA) and, second, to focus on controversial cases. The interest of "big" countries is self-evident, while focusing on controversial issues makes it possible to give the reader a flavor of the current research and debates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feeding the World by Giovanni Federico Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables ix
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Why Is Agriculture Different? 5
2.1 Introduction 5
2.2 Agriculture and the Environment: An Uneasy Relationship 5
2.3 Factor Endowment and the Characteristics of Agriculture 13
Chapter 3 Trends in the Long Run 16
3.1 Introduction 16
3.2 Output 16
3.3 Prices 21
3.4 The Composition of Agricultural Output 26
3.5 Trade 28
Chapter 4 Patterns of Growth: The Inputs 31
4.1 Introduction 31
4.2 Land 31
4.3 Capital 40
4.4 Labor 56
4.5 Conclusion: Factor Endowment and Factor Prices in the Long Run 64
Chapter 5 The Causes of Growth: The Increase in Productivity 69
5.1 Introduction 69
5.2 The Productivity of Land and Labor 70
5.3 The Total Factor Productivity 74
5.4 Conclusion: On the Interpretation of Total Factor Productivity Growth 82
Chapter 6 Technical Progress in Agriculture 83
6.1 Introduction: Productivity Growth and Technical Progress 83
6.2 The Major Innovations 84
6.3 The Macroeconomics of Innovations: Factor Prices and Technical Progress 93
6.4 The Microeconomics of Agricultural Innovation: Appropriability, Complementarity, Environment, and Risk 101
6.5 The Microeconomics of Agricultural Innovation: Research Institutions and Technical Progress 105
6.6 Conclusion: On the Causes of Technical Progress 114
Chapter 7 The Microeconomics of Agricultural Institutions 117
7.1 Introduction: What Are the Institutions, and Why Should We Care about Them? 117
7.2 Property Rights 118
7.3 The "Structure": Matching Land and Labor 121
7.4 Finding the Money: Formal and Informal Credit 128
7.5 TheCo-operative: The Best of All Possible Worlds? 133
7.6 Conclusion: Is There an "Ideal" Farm? 136
Chapter 8 Agricultural Institutions and Growth 143
8.1 Introduction 143
8.2 Prelude: The Establishing of Modern Property Rights 144
8.3 Meddling with Property Rights: Land Reform and Other Structural Interventions 149
8.4 The "Structural" Change in the Long Run 152
8.5 The Development of Markets 160
8.6 Self-help: The Growth of the Co-operative Movement 168
8.7 Institutions and Agricultural Growth: The Creation of Property Rights and "Structural" Interventions 172
8.8 Institutions and Agricultural Growth: Landownership, Farm Size, and Contracts 177
8.9 Institutions and Agricultural Growth: The Development of Markets 181
8.10 Conclusion: Did Institutions Really Matter? 186
Chapter 9 The State and the Market 187
9.1 Introduction: On the Design of Agricultural Policies 187
9.2 Before 1914: The Era of Laissez Faire 189
9.3 The Interwar Years: The Great Discontinuity 191
9.4 The OECD Countries after 1945: The Era of Surpluses 196
9.5 The Less Developed Countries after Independence: The Green Revolution and the "Development" Policies 201
9.6 The Socialist Countries 205
9.7 On the Effects of Agricultural Policies 211
9.8 Conclusion: The Political Economy of Agricultural Policies 215
Chapter 10 Conclusions: Agriculture and Economic Growth in the Long Run 221
10.1 Fifteen Stylized Facts 221
10.2 Agriculture and Economic Growth: Some Theory 222
10.3 Agriculture and Economic Growth: Debates and Historical Evidence 226
10.4 Concluding Remarks: A Look to the Future 231
Statistical Appendix 233
Notes 251
Bibliography 325
Index 381
What People are Saying About This
In the past two centuries, farm production has grown faster than the population, so we now produce enough food to abolish hunger around most of the globe. Federico has done a monumental job in documenting the growth of agricultural output, inputs, and productivity on a world scale. This book will be of great interest to all those interested in the interplay between humanity and the natural environment, as well as to historians, development specialists, and policy makers.
— Robert Allen, University of Oxford
"This book does more than any other work to bring together economic history and current day issues of policy, particularly in developing countries. It is useful not just for readers in economic history, but in other areas of economics, sociology, and even political science."—Philip T. Hoffman, California Institute of Technology"In the past two centuries, farm production has grown faster than the population, so we now produce enough food to abolish hunger around most of the globe. Federico has done a monumental job in documenting the growth of agricultural output, inputs, and productivity on a world scale. This book will be of great interest to all those interested in the interplay between humanity and the natural environment, as well as to historians, development specialists, and policy makers."—Robert Allen, University of Oxford
This book does more than any other work to bring together economic history and current day issues of policy, particularly in developing countries. It is useful not just for readers in economic history, but in other areas of economics, sociology, and even political science.
— Philip T. Hoffman, California Institute of Technology