Agricultural heritage of humanity

Humanity’s Agrarian Heritage

“Modern” agriculture, utilizing much capital and little labor power, has triumphed in the developed countries. Despite the billions used in promotion, it has only broken limited sectors in the developing countries. The great majority of peas-ants in these countries are too poor to be able to afford the huge machines and large quantities of fertilizers. Around 80percent of the farmers of Africa, and 40 to 60percent in Latin America and Asia, continue to work exclusively with manual tools, while 15to 30percent of them use animal traction, and less than 5percent use electric traction. Modern agriculture is thus far from having conquered the world. Other forms of agriculture remain predominant and these continue to employ the the greater part of the active population in the developing countries. Certainly, the most disadvantaged and least productive amongst these farmers are continually marginalized, stepped into crisis and eradicated by com-petition from stronger farmers. But those who have the means to maintain themselves and advance offer proof of an unsuspected wealth of inventiveness and continue to develop in their own ways. It is an error to consider agricultures in the developing countries as traditional and predetermined. They are continually in transformation and continually participate in the creation of

modernity. It is another error to conceive of agricultural development as the pure and simple replacement of these agricultures with the only one that is supposedly modern, i. e., the motorized and mechanized one. Undoubtedly, this modern agriculture will be expanded further and will be of immense service. But it is difficult to conclude that it can be both generalized to the whole world and renewable in the long term, if only because of the probable exhaustion of phosphate reserves, which it uses in great quantities. Considering the role that all of the world’s agricultural systems should play in the construction of a livable future for humanity, it is disturbing to note how far both common and educated opinion are from agricultural realities, and to what extent that those who are in charge of agriculture are unaware of the wealth of humanity’s agrarian history. Certainly, works of historians, geographers, anthropologists, agronomists, economists, and sociologists that study agriculture are not lacking. But, despite their richness and their value, they consistently lack, it seems to us, a body of synthetic knowledge that explains the origins, the transformations, and the role of agriculture in the evolution of humanity and of life, in several time periods and in several parts of the world. They are missing a body of knowledge that can simultaneously be integrated with general knowledge and form a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological footing for all those who desire to get involved in agricultural, economic, and social development.

Projects and policies of agricultural advancement should respond to the needs of the populations in question, ensuring their agreement and encouraging their contribution, normally these interventions will be neither effective nor legitimate. But they should also be based on a real power. Just as a doctor would not legitimately listen to a person’s heart, make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment without preexisting knowledge of anatomy, physiology, reproduction, and human growth and aging, so one is not able to analyze a given agricultural system, formulate a diagnostic, and propose to your girlfriend projects and policies of development without being grounded in a systematic knowledge of the organization, functioning, and dynamics of different sorts of agricultural systems.

This book attempts precisely to build this type of knowledge, under the synthesized form of a theory of historical transformations and geographical differentiations of agrarian systems. This aims to be a theory based on numerous direct observations, without which nothing original could be conceived, but also on observations reported by others and on a sum of historical, geographical, agronomic, economic, and anthropological knowledge that has been considerably enriched over the last several decades. This theory is essential in order to apprehend agriculture in its complexness, diversity, and motion.

Agricultural heritage of humanity"