Beyond Intensification? Reconsidering Agricultural Transformations

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Almost four decades since Ester Boserup’s ground-breaking introduction of the concept of intensification in agricultural production, what value does the concept still hold for researchers seeking to account for transformations in smallholder production in the newer nations of the Asia-Pacific region? In countries such as Papua New Guinea, smallholder production is still of paramount significance, in terms both of overall production, and of the proportion of the population dependent upon it. In November 1998 a group of international researchers with a common interest in agricultural transformation came together for a workshop at the Australian National University in Canberra. The meeting was organised partly to consider information from the recently completed Mapping Agricultural Systems in Papua New Guinea project (MASP), and also to reflect on what this information might contribute to the ongoing debate over the process of agricultural intensification. In recognition of his pioneering research on the geography of Papua New Guinea and on broader theories of agricultural intensification, Harold Brookfield was invited to present a keynote address. It is a mark of his exceptional influence as a thinker and his appetite for scholarship that Brookfield should continue to be integral to a debate organised in celebration of his work, and that he remains his own most stringent critic. As one participant observed, if we came to praise Harold Brookfield, he seemed determined to bury his younger self. Drawing on a review of recent international papers on agricultural change, Brookfield presented a sweeping critique of his own early work and of the usefulness of ‘intensification’ in understanding transformations of agriculture. Brookfield’s interest in intensification was initially stimulated by attempts to explain the highly uneven distribution of population in Papua New Guinea. He drew heavily on Ester Boserup’s (1965) revolutionary ideas about the role of population growth on the historical development of agriculture. In Brookfield with Hart (1971), itself a tour de force in the geographical literature, he proposed a process of intensification in Melanesia, defined as ‘essentially the degree to which technology is applied to