ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 opens with three vignettes: biologist Paul Ehrlich’s hellish arrival in crowded Delhi, which he later used to dramatize the feeling of overpopulation and the impossibility of producing enough food; my own arrival in urban India 33 years later when India was struggling to store its excess grain; and anthropologist Robert Netting’s first encounter with the Nigeria farmers that would become a classic case of sustainable intensive agriculture. The chapter then lays out the book’s overarching argument that we need to recognize the drivers of three fundamentally different types of agriculture reflected in the vignettes. Malthusian agriculture grows only by expansion and contains the belief that there is no other route to growth; industrialized agriculture runs on external inputs that appropriate local processes and receive state subsidy of both upstream (development) costs and downstream (externalized) costs; and sustainable intensive agriculture grows by increased labor and local technologies.
