The first path was a mistake -- it looked modern, all those big machines, but was optimised for near-infinite land and very expensive labor. What poor countries typically had was the opposite: plenty of peasants and no room, and no diesel. So the winning strategy was actually closer to a million vegetable patches, with incentives, training, and transport to get this to the cities & export. An acre of vegetable patches can easily produce 100x the market value of an acre of wheat. Getting this right was a big part of how Taiwan & Korea for instance kick-started their growth. Getting it wrong was part of what killed the USSR -- if I remember right, they never even equalled the 1917 harvest.
From my notes:
* Soviet collectivization. Inspired by huge mechanized farms in the US. Vision of doing for farming what assembly lines did for manufacturing. Both Soviet and US attempts to do so failed badly. Party resorted instead to martial law and grain seizures, creating peasant uprisings. Forcibly relocated peasants into standardized, pre-planned mega-farms which were ruled by agricultural specialists. Ignored local conditions, vastly over-simplified and over-abstracted different areas of land and differently-skilled populations. Pressure from above to deny failures led to plans quickly losing contact with reality. Peasants gained most of their food by farming their own private plots in their little free time. Peasants effectively became indentured slaves, stripped of any cultural institutions that might be a focal point for rebellion, and naturally responded with terrible productivity. More deaths from starvation that WW1 and civil war combined.
* Compulsory villagization in Tanzania. Similar story. Government (with support of the Western world) wanted to modernize the peasantry. Forcibly relocated peasants to standardized, pre-planned villages. (Was supposed to be voluntary, but top-down pressure for results led to initiative-taking). Peasants were moved vast distances, rendering their deep local knowledge worthless. (Peasants don’t come in standardized, fungible units). Forced to apply Western farming techniques which failed badly in the local climate and ecology. (The peasant practices of dense polycropping turn out to be much more effective in climates with high primary productivity than monocropping and ridging as is common in the West). Authorities heard reports of atrocities but insisted they were isolated cases.
* And again in Ethiopia. Lead to widespread famine.
Some, like in Ethiopia, were closer to ethnic cleansing -- deliberately moving people (esp from Tigray IIRC) who were violently unhappy with the government, to less fertile places where they didn't understand how to farm, especially with new crops to boot. But by claiming this was a modernisation scheme was excellent PR, people like those, and the resulting famine was seen primarily as a great tragedy, and brought in lots of aid money.
For russia I also like Yegor Gaidar, there's a book but the summary is http://www.aei.org/feature/the-soviet-collapse/
What people did with the resulting free time was generally to make war on those nearby.
But there have been many societies which
- didn't engage in agriculture at all, or
- engaged in tropical horticulture, which is low-effort
And those societies (plains Indians / Australian aborigines / sub-Saharan Bantu (they're farmers! But they're not labor-intensive farmers) / central Asian Turks and Mongols / etc. etc. etc...) are characterized by near-constant warfare.
Not all societies are ancestral to yours. Most aren't.
And seriously, claiming that a society will engage in warfare by comparing it to an example that is as remote to it as possible in terms of technological development and culture (we do view warfare as negative, not all societies do and ours used to not do so) is not exactly convincing.
The reason, if I understand right, was that the limit on human population was set by disease not labor. In northern climates (where fewer of the diseases we evolved with thrive) instead the marginal farmer was on some stony hillside from which maximum effort could only just produce enough calories for winter.
I'm less sure whether such societies were involved in more warfare, it's possible (the men had time on their hands & soccer hadn't been invented...) but I don't know the data.
I also don't know how to extrapolate this to the future of our society.
> But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one.
Are you suggesting that the reason the US/Europe is not at the Malthusian limit / has a low population growth is because we don't grow enough food? You'll have to pardon my incredulity.
Your point is strictly true - we are growing less food than we theoretically could grow, but that seems beside the point: we still have an enormous surplus of food.
Population growth isn't being restricted by food availability. As to the other questions, I wouldn't want to argue causation in either direction. I'm pretty sure it goes in both.
If we started to reproduce at the level supported by our food production, we'd end up in the Malthusian equilibrium.
At earlier times, say 800 years ago, I think it can be argued that population densities in Europe were lower than in China because farming was optimized more for labor than for land -- plowing with horses is less work, but less food, per area, than planting rice by hand. But it's super-hard to figure out cause & effect obviously.
As someone who is grateful for computers, toilets, psychotherapy, punctual trains, and an efficient medical system... I am very grateful for our ability to produce food without high labor inputs.
I live close to both a rural hackerspace and a permaculture community. I am currently working on a suspended wirebot to help them automate the most tedious tasks. Pest removal, weeding, monitoring seem to be the low hanging fruits there.
Yes.
There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high.
But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. But most of those people will be subsistence farmers who don't earn much more than the marginal extra food they provide by intensively caring for the land. This is why historically most of the population -- anywhere -- was rural peasants.
The grotesquely inefficient capitalist who uses a workforce of 10 people and 300 acres of land to produce the yield of 50 acres of land is part of a "wealthy" society -- everyone else has more food because of his very low need for labor. But it's also a very low-population society. In a more traditional society, all the land would be farmed efficiently and the population would be much larger, but non-farmers would have much less surplus to capture.