ABSTRACT
The major purpose of the conference was to provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary exchanges in order to determine the major issues and to arrive at some general consensus on the priorities for research that might help attack the problems of developing subsistence agriculture. Since the primary focus of the conference was upon economic behavior, it was the economic dimension that received the greatest attention. Given the wide range of disciplines represented in the group, there was an equally wide range of preferred analytical and research approaches. Throughout the meeting a fundamental issue repeatedly raised concerned the dominance of economic versus noneconomic forces upon the economic behavior of subsistence farmers. For some participants the general conditions of subsistence agriculture automatically de-delimit an area where, on net balance, the noneconomic frequently outweighs the purely economic, leading to behavior that goes against the postulated behavior of economics.
