ABSTRACT
Graham Chapman, a geographer with considerable consulting experience in dryland and irrigation farming in India and Bangladesh, has conducted detailed analyses of individual farmers and their farm operations and has come away with an increased respect for the astute evaluations and decisions they make within their own worlds. Geographic space is organized, structured, treated and reorganized over time is seen as an increasingly important issue in many societies around the world. It is to deal with many of these problems that hundreds of consulting firms have sprung up and in the United States many of them align themselves along the big ring or beltway roads that are such a characteristic of America's cities Route 128 around Boston, Route 695 around Baltimore and perhaps especially Route 495 around Washington, DC, It is for this reason that they are sometimes called the Beltway Bandits a term used in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, self-depreciating sense and not necessarily in a pejorative way.
