Ester Boserup

Ester Boserup
Born Ester Børgesen
(1910-05-18)18 May 1910
Copenhagen, Denmark
Died 24 September 1999(1999-09-24) (aged 89)
Nationality Danish
Influenced Irene Tinker

Ester Boserup (May 18, 1910[1] – September 24, 1999), was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and she wrote several books.

Her most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure.[2] This "classic ... work on agricultural intensification"[3] presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." (Boserup, E. 1965. p 13) The work challenges the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time (and still held in many quarters) that agricultural methods determine population (via food supply). Instead, Boserup argued that population determines agricultural methods. A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention".

It was her great belief that humanity would always find a way and was quoted in saying "The power of ingenuity would always outmatch that of demand". She also influenced the debate on the women in workforce and human development, and the possibility of better opportunities of work and education for women.

Biography

Born Ester Børgesen in Copenhagen, she was the only daughter of a Danish engineer, who died when she was two years old and the family was almost destitute for several years. Then, "encouraged by her mother and aware of her limited prospects without a good degree,"[4] she studied economic and agricultural development at the University of Copenhagen from 1929, and obtained her degree in theoretical economics in 1935.

After graduation Boserup worked for the Danish government from 1935–1947, right through the Nazi occupation in WWII, as head of its planning office, on studies including trade and the effects of subsidies. She made almost no reference to conflicts between family and work during her lifetime. The family moved to Geneva in 1947 to work with the UN Economic Commission of Europe (ECE). In 1957, she and Mogens worked in India in a research project run by Gunnar Myrdal. For the rest of her life she worked as a consultant and writer, based in Copenhagen and then near Geneva when her husband died in 1980.

Ester had married Mogens Boserup when both were twenty-one; the young couple lived on his allowance from his well-off family during their remaining university years."[4] Their daughter, Birte, was born in 1937; her sons Anders, in 1940, and Ivan, in 1944.

Work

Scholarly contributions

According to Malthusian theory, the size and growth of the population depends on the food supply and agricultural methods. In Boserup’s theory, agricultural methods depend on the size of the population. In the Malthusian view, in times when food is not sufficient for everyone, the excess population will die. However, Boserup argued that in those times of pressure, people will find ways to increase the production of food by increasing workforce, machinery, fertilizers.

This graph shows how the rate of food supply may vary but never reaches its carrying capacity because every time it is getting near, there is an invention or development that causes the food supply to increase.

Although Boserup is widely regarded as anti-Malthusian, both her insights and those of Malthus can be comfortably combined within the same general theoretical framework.[5]

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 favorable in total workload and also efficiency (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".

Boserupian Theory

Although Boserup's original theory was highly simplified and generalized, it proved instrumental in understanding agricultural patterns in developing countries.[6] By 1978, her theory of agricultural change began to be reframed as a more generalized theory.[7] The field continued to mature in to relation to population and environmental studies in developing countries.[8] Neo-Boserupian theory continues to generate controversy with regards to population density and sustainable agriculture.[9]

Gender studies

Ester Boserup also contributed to the discourse surrounding gender and development practises with her 1970 work Woman's Role in Economic Development.[10] 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 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". Boserup's text evaluated how work was divided between men and women, the types of jobs that constituted productive work, and the type of education women needed to enhance development. This text marked a shift in the Women in Development (WID) debates, because it argued that women's contributions, both domestic and in the paid workforce, contributed to national economies. Many liberal feminists took Boserup's analysis further to argue that the costs of modern economic development were shouldered by women.[11]

Selected bibliography

Books

Reprinted as: Boserup, Ester (2007). Woman's role in economic development. London Sterling, Virginia: Earthscan. ISBN 9781844073924. 
Reprinted as: Boserup, Ester (2005). The conditions of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Aldine Transaction. ISBN 9780202307930. 

Chapters in books

Journal articles

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ "Boserup, Ester". Library of Congress. Retrieved 12 August 2014. data sheet. (b. 5-18-10)
  2. ↑ (Chicago, Aldine, 1965, ISBN 0-415-31298-1)
  3. ↑ Andrew C. Revkin, "An Ecologist Explains His Contested View of Planetary Limits", New York Times, Sept. 16, 2013.
  4. 1 2 Tinker, Irene (9–10 March 2001). "Ester Boserup: a tribute (presented at Global Tensions Conference held at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York)". via WordPress.
  5. ↑ Turchin and Nefedov: Secular Cycles
  6. ↑ Stone, Glen Davis (August–December 2001). "Theory of the square chicken: advances in agricultural intensification theory". Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Wiley Online. 42 (2-3): 163–180. doi:10.1111/1467-8373.00142.
  7. ↑ Datoo, B.A. (April 1978). "Toward a reformulation of Boserup's theory of agricultural change". Economic Geography. Clark University via JSTOR. 54 (2): 135–144. doi:10.2307/142848. The paper first summarizes Boserup's theory of agricultural change and dispels the misconceptions to which it has given rise. It then attempts to recast the theory in a systems framework and thereby to eliminate certain fundamental weaknesses in it....
  8. ↑ Marquette, Catherine M. (October 1997). "Turning but not Toppling Malthus: Boserupian Theory on Population and the Environment Relationships". CMI Working Papers. Development Studies and Human Rights. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute (WP 1997: 16): 14 p. ISSN 0804-3639. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 28, 2013. Retrieved May 28, 2013. Summary: Subsequently to the Brundtland Report, the 1992 Earh Summt, and the resu1ting Agenda 21, the issue of population and development has increasingly evolved into discussion on the "population, environment and development nexus". In the face of this new mandate for research on population, environment and development dynamcs, theoretical frameworks are limited. Conceptual thinking on population and environment within both the social and natural sciences has traditionally suffered from a long-term confinement within opposing "Malthusian" versus "Cornucopian" views. The work of Ester Boserup, however, continues to transcend the boundaries of this polarized discourse. This paper reviews the main points of Boserupian theory and its relevance to developing regions, in particular to sub-Saharan Africa. Recent reinterpretations of Boserup's work relevant to population and environment relationships in developing countries are also considered.
  9. ↑ Romero, Marino R.; deGroot, Wouter T. (2008), "Farmers investing in sustainable land use at a tropical forest fringe, the Philippines", in Dellink, Rob B.; Ruijs, Arjan, Economics of poverty, environment and natural-resource use, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, pp. 157–184, ISBN 9781402083037 Pdf version.
  10. ↑ Boserup, Ester (1970). Woman's role in economic development. London: George Allen & Unwin. Reprinted as: Boserup, Ester (2007). Woman's role in economic development. London Sterling, Virginia: Earthscan. ISBN 9781844073924.
  11. ↑ Jain, Devaki (2005). Women, development, and the UN: a sixty-year quest for equality and justice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253218193.
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