Seeking justice in Green Revolutions: Synergies and trade-offs between large-scale and smallholder agricultural intensification in Rwanda

Abstract

Agricultural intensification has long been a core focus of agrarian change research. Work demonstrating the capacity of rural societies to innovate in the face of scarce resources has helped counter and complicate the neo-Malthusian narrative that scarcity causes land degradation. Intensification has also featured prominently in agricultural development programs and policies aiming to spur economic growth in the global South. Intensification agendas drove Green Revolutions in Asia and Mexico in the 1960s and underwrite ongoing development efforts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. These large-scale intensification programs rely on adoption of ‘improved’ seed, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and agro-engineering to increase yields of staple crops. These external visions of intensification often fit poorly with cultural-ecological realities of smallholder farming systems where producers pursue locally-viable intensification strategies tailored to complex social-environmental systems. However, little work has explored how various intensification models can overlap and hybridize. In this paper, I explore intensification as a social-environmental process with empirical material from Rwanda, where a recent large-scale agricultural intensification campaign intersects with centuries of smallholder-led intensification. I demonstrate that these polarized strategies of intensification converge as tradeoffs for some and synergies for others, leading to uneven rural livelihood outcomes. Considering agricultural intensification as a plural, dynamic, and contested social-environmental process situated within broader currents of agrarian change helps nuance binary depictions of intensification programs as purely success or failure. Moreover, understanding how modes of intensification hybridize may help enhance justice in Green Revolutions by facilitating more constructive dialogue among smallholder communities, researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners.