ABSTRACT
Aging farmers often divide their farmlands among their children. This is not a problem if there are no more than two children. However, many farm families have many children to help in the work on the farm. In this case, the children each have less land than the parents. If this is done over a few generations, the nal farm size may not be enough to provide suf cient food for the family.1 Sociologists studied this problem in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico in the 1930s. Rwanda affords a more recent illustration. The population grew from 2.5 to 8.8 million from 1950 to 1994 as the average woman had eight children, the highest rate in the world.2 The nation had the highest population density in Africa. The average family was trying to support itself on only 0.7 ha in the 1990s.3 This may have been one of the reasons for the bitter civil war to have erupted in that nation.
