Glenn Davis Stone

The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths

Common understanding of the causes of land-use and land-cover change is dominated by simplifications which, in turn, underlie many environment-development policies. This article tracks some of the major myths on driving forces of land-cover change and proposes alternative pathways of change that are better supported by case study evidence. Cases reviewed support the conclusion that neither population nor poverty alone constitute the sole and major underlying causes of land-cover change worldwide. Rather, peoples’ responses to economic opportunities, as mediated by institutional factors, drive land-cover changes. Opportunities and

Agricultural Deskilling and the Spread of Genetically Modified Cotton in Warangal

Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh, India, is a key cotton‐growing area in one of the most closely watched arenas of the global struggle over genetically modified crops. In 2005 farmers adopted India’s first genetically modified crop, Bt cotton, in numbers that resemble a fad. Various parties, including the biotechnology firm behind the new technology, interpret the spread as the result of farmer experimentation and management skill, alluding to orthodox innovation‐diffusion theory. However, a multiyear ethnography of Warangal cotton farmers shows a striking pattern of localized, ephemeral cotton seed fads preceding the spread of the genetically modified seeds. The Bt cotton fad is symptomatic of systematic disruption of the process of experimentation and development of management skill. In fact, Warangal cotton farming offers a case study in agricultural deskilling, a process that differs in fundamental ways from the better‐known process of industrial deskilling. In terms of cultural evolutionary theory, deskilling severs a vital link between environmental and social learning, leaving social learning to propagate practices with little or no environmental basis. However, crop genetic modification is not inherently deskilling and, ironically, has played a role in reinvolving farmers in Gujarat in the process of breeding.

Both Sides Now

It is rather remarkable that a process as esoteric as the genetic modification of crops would become the subject of a global war of rhetoric. Yet for the past few years Western audiences have been bombarded with deceptive rhetoric, spin, and soundbite science portraying the wonders—or horrors—of the new technology. Books and fullpage newspaper advertisements warn of a wrecked environment and food insecurity; children are brought to demonstrations dressed as monarch butterflies, swooning at the arrival of “GM (Genetically Modified) Corn Man.” Meanwhile, organizations pour fortunes into television commercials and newspaper ads showing fields of healthy grain, smiling farmers, and poor children restored to health through genetically modified crops; the

Kofyar Cash-Cropping: Choice and Change in Indigenous Agricultural Development

Amid discussions of an agricultural crisis and the failure of largescale, mechanized, capitalintensive development schemes in Nigeria, the Kofyar of Plateau State provide a case study of farmers spontaneously expanding food crop production for the market, using indigenous lowenergy technology. Temporary, followed by permanent, migration from the Jos Plateau homeland to frontier settlements on the fertile Benue plains has been accompanied by a change from initial shifting cultivation in forest clearings to permanent, intensively tilled and fertilized homestead fields. Labor is organized primarily in households that have grown in size and complexity. Cooperative and exchange work groups are also important for meeting seasonal bottlenecks and providing the careful, disciplined cultivation that intensive agriculture requires. Kofyar now devote up to 50% of their labor to cash crops, and they purchase considerable quantities of manufactured goods and medical services. Their uncoerced adaptation to an environment of new land resources and market incentives suggests both the advantages of indigenous development with a minimum of state control or interference and the limitations of a conventional dependency theory perspective.

Theory of the square chicken: advances in agricultural intensification theory

Scientific understanding of agricultural change has grown considerably since Boserups seminal 1965 work, but her models simplicity has provided a foundation for building more complex understandings of farming societies. Much of the development of these more sophisticated understandings has been led by Harold Brookfield. The first section of this paper summarises our current understanding of the salient points of commonality in intensive smallholder systems. The second section looks at findings from studies that relax Boserupian constraints, revealing new kinds of variability in agricultural systems. Both sections stress the need for continued research on the political- economic context of agricultural intensification.

Typological Schemes and Agricultural Change: Beyond Boserup in Precolonial South India [and Comments and Reply]

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“Predatory Sedentism”: Intimidation and Intensification in the Nigerian Savanna

While many studies have explored how agriculture changes when population density rises, this paper examines actions farmers may take to control whether population density rises. Using information from ethnographic fieldwork, colonial archives, and air photography, two agricultural groups migrating into an agricultural frontier in the Nigerian savanna are compared. Population density in Kofyar communities has risen to over 100/km2; Tiv communities, although older, have maintained population densities of around 50/km2, in part through intimidation of encroachers. This use of intimidation is a component of a distinctive adaptive strategy that includes settlement stability, high population mobility tied to witchcraft accusations, relatively extensive cultivation allowing considerable off-time, and reliance on social networks to facilitate residential mobility and land access. Population pressure must be seen as an integral part of this adaptive strategy, rather than as cause or consequence.

Agricultural Territories in a Dispersed Settlement System

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An ethnoarchaeological perspective on soils

Abstract As archaeologists become increasingly sophisticated in their use of soils in understanding settlement patterns, it is necessary to consider what prehistoric food producers might have known about the soils of their landscape and how this could have influenced their land use strategies. A review of ethnopedological studies demonstrates that non‐Western soil classifications tend to be less developed than comparable folk botanical or zoological classifications and that they usually consist of no more than four or five soil categories. An analysis of historic settlement patterns of the Nigerian Kofyar shows that soil variability may not be the primary determinant in the location of early agricultural settlements. Archaeologists may wish to follow the lead of traditional agriculturalists and understand the full variety of locational constraints on agricultural settlements, before using subtle differences in the distribution of soils as the primary explanation of settlement variability.

Household Variability and Inequality in Kofyar Subsistence and Cash-Cropping Economies

Social scientists have argued that the change from subsistence to market-oriented production leads to the development of socioeconomic inequality in generally egalitarian agrarian societies. A reanalysis of data on households and production among the Nigerian Kofyar suggests that the relation of population to resources is a more important determinant of inequality than the subsistence/market distinction. The Kofyar homeland, with its traditional system of intensive subsistence farming, has distinct regions characterized by differing levels of land pressure associated with population density, per capita production, household size, household developmental cycles, migration rates, and economic inequality. Households voluntarily moving to plentiful land on the frontier and adopting cash-cropping substantially increase their labor forces and money incomes without raising the level of inequality.