ABSTRACT
Most of the world’s poor and food insecure depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihood. Much-needed increases in agricultural production can in principal come about through two pathways of rural development: expansion of cultivated area or increases in yields. We term the former the pathway of agricultural extensification since it does not require increases in agricultural productivity by using modern inputs, such as high-yielding seed varieties and mineral fertilizers. Shifting cultivation, by burning tropical forests to gain arable land, is a prime example of the first pathway. The second is called the pathway of agricultural intensification (Boserup, 1965; Pingali et al., 1987; Ruthenberg, 1980). Which factors induce rural communities to follow a certain pathway of land and forest resource use, and how can policy assist in achieving environmentally sustainable pathways of development while at the same time improving incomes and alleviating poverty? In this chapter, we seek to shed some light on this complex question, using a descriptive and econometric analysis of community level data from Madagascar.
