Subsistence Agriculture in Population Concentrations

Three-fourths of the world’s people live in developing countries, and the form of subsistence agriculture that feeds most of them is intensive subsistence agriculture. The term intensive implies that farmers must work intensively to subsist on a parcel of land.

Intensive Subsistence Farming

In developing countries, most people produce food for their own consumption. This is especially true in intensive subsistence agriculture, the most widely practiced form of agriculture in densely populated East, South, and Southeast Asia.

Intensive subsistence agriculture involves careful agricultural practices refined over thousands of years in response to local environmental and cultural patterns. Because the agricultural density—the ratio of farmers to arable land—is so high in parts of East and South Asia, families must produce enough food for their survival from a very small area of land. Most of the work is done by hand or with animals rather than with machines, in part due to abundant labor but largely from lack of funds to buy equipment. Rice is the most important crop.

Rice Production

China and India produce one-half of the world’s rice.

The typical farm in Asia’s intensive subsistence agriculture regions is much smaller than farms elsewhere in the world. Many Asian farmers own several fragmented plots, frequently a result of dividing individual holdings among several children over several centuries. To maximize food production, intensive subsistence farmers waste virtually no land. Corners of fields and irregularly shaped pieces of land are planted rather than left idle. Paths and roads are kept as narrow as possible to minimize the loss of arable land. Livestock are rarely permitted to graze on land that could be used to plant crops, and little grain is grown to feed the animals.

Land is used even more intensively in parts of Asia by obtaining two harvests per year from one field, a process known as double cropping. Double cropping is common in places that have warm winters, such as southern China and Taiwan, but is relatively rare in India, where most areas have dry winters. Normally, double cropping involves alternating between wet rice, grown in the summer when precipitation is higher, and wheat, barley, or another dry crop, grown in the drier winter season. Crops other than rice may be grown in the wet-rice region in the summer on nonirrigated land.

Wet-Rice Not Dominant

Climate discourages farmers from growing wet rice in portions of Asia, especially where summer precipitation levels are too low and winters are too harsh. Agriculture in much of the interior of India and northeastern China is devoted to crops other than wet rice. Wheat is the most important crop, followed by barley. Other grains and legumes are grown for household consumption, including millet, oats, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. In addition, some crops are grown in order to be sold for cash, such as cotton, flax, hemp, and tobacco.

Aside from what is grown, this region shares most of the features of the wet-rice region. Land is used intensively and worked primarily by human power, with the assistance of some hand implements and animals. In milder parts of the region where wet rice does not dominate, more than one harvest can be obtained some years through skilled use of crop rotation, which is the practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year to avoid exhausting the soil. In colder climates, wheat or another crop is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, but no crops can be sown through the winter.

Wet-Rice Dominant

The intensive agriculture region of Asia can be divided between areas where wet rice dominates and areas where it does not. The term wet rice refers to rice planted on dry land in a nursery and then moved as seedlings to a flooded field to promote growth. Wet rice occupies a relatively small percentage of Asia’s agricultural land but is the region’s most important source of food.

Intensive wet-rice farming is the dominant type of agriculture in southeastern China, East India, and much of Southeast Asia. China and India account for nearly 50 percent of the world’s rice production, and more than 90 percent is produced in East, South, and Southeast Asia.

Successful production of large yields of rice is an elaborate process that is time-consuming and done mostly by hand. The consumers of the rice also perform the work, and all family members, including children, contribute to the effort. Growing rice involves four principal steps. As the name implies, all four steps are intensive:

1. The field is prepared, typically using animal power. Flat land is needed to grow rice, so hillsides are terraced.

2. The field is flooded with water. The flooded field is called a sawah in Indonesia and is increasingly referred to as a paddy, which is actually the Malay word for wet rice.

3. Rice seedlings grown for the first month in a nursery are transplanted into the flooded field.

4. Rice plants are harvested with knives. The chaff (husks) is separated from the seeds by threshing (beating) the husks on the ground. The threshed rice is placed in a tray for winnowing, in which the lighter chaff is allowed to be blown away by the wind.

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Growing Rice: Preparing the Field

Water buffalo plow the rice paddy, Goa, India.

Growing Rice: Flooding the Field

Flooded fields, Bali.

Growing Rice: Transplanting Plants

Rice plants are transplanted by hand, Dali, China.

Growing Rice: Harvesting

Harvesting and threshing rice by hand, Myanmar.

Pause & Reflect 9.3.2

What challenges might farmers in East and South Asia face if they wish to adopt farming practices that are less labor intensive than growing wet rice?