Ester Boserup

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Ester Boserup (1910 - September 24, 1999), born Børgesen, was a Danish economist and writer who studied economical and agricultural development. She worked at the United Nations and other international organizations and wrote several books.

Boserup's most notable work is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (Chicago, Aldine, 1965, ISBN 0-415-31298-1). This book presented a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." In doing so, she upended the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time (and still held in many quarters) that agricultural methods determine population (via food supply). Instead, she shows that population determines agricultural methods. A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention".

She argued that when population density is low enough to allow it, land tends to be used intermittently, with heavy reliance on fire to clear fields and fallowing to restore fertility (often called slash and burn farming). Numerous studies have shown such methods to be favourable in total workload and also effiency (output versus input). In Boserup’s theory, it is only when rising population density curtails the use of fallowing (and therefore the use of fire) that fields are moved towards annual cultivation. Contending with insufficiently fallowed, less fertile plots, covered with grass or bushes rather than forest, mandates expanded efforts at fertilizing, field preparation, weed control, and irrigation. These changes often induce agricultural innovation but increase marginal labour cost to the farmer as well: the higher the rural population density, the more hours the farmer must work for the same amount of produce. Therefore workloads tend to rise while efficiency drops. This process of raising production at the cost of more work at lower efficiency is what Boserup describes as "agricultural intensification".

The theory has been instrumental in understanding agricultural patterns in developing countries, although it is highly simplified and generalized.

Ester Boserup also complemented the discourse surrounding development practises with her 1970 work "Woman's Role in Economic Development" (London, Earthscan, 1970, ISBN 1-85383-040-2). The work is "the first investigation ever undertaken into what happens to women in the process of economic and social growth throughout the Third World". According to the foreword in the 1989 edition by Dr. Swasti Mitter, "It is [Boserup's] committed and scholarly work that inspired the UN Decade for Women between 1975 and 1985, and that has encouraged aid agencies to question the assumption of gender neutrality in the costs as well as in the benefits of development"..