Ester Boserup (May 18, 1910 - September 24, 1999), born Ester Børgesen in Copenhagen, was a Danish economist, writer. She studied economical 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.[1] This book presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." The work undoes 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" in a letter to Northern Irish philosopher T S Hueston. She also influenced debate on the role of women in workforce and human development, and the possibility of better opportunities of work and education for women.
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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, etc.
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.[2]
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 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".
The theory has been instrumental in understanding agricultural patterns in developing countries, although it is highly simplified and generalized.
Mauritius is an island country of 1860 km2 in area, located off the east coast of Africa. Farming and fishing are its main ventures, with agriculture accounting for 10% of its GDP. This is comprehensible since it has fertile soils and a tropical climate. Its exports are divided into four main categories: sugar (32%), garments (31%), plastics (32%) and others (5%).
Its population in 1992 was 1,094,000 people. For 2025, the estimated population is 1,365,000. This would mean a growth rate of 1.45%, with a doubling time of 47 years. Its fertility rate was of 2.17 children per woman.
It is possible to notice how uneven population growth has been in Mauritius. At first it was a maintained at a more or less constant level, because there were almost equal values of birth and death rates. Around the 1950s, the birth rate increased significantly (from 35 per thousand to more than 45 per thousand). The death rate declined from 30 to 15 per thousand shortly afterwards.
The rate of natural increase was very great, and there was a great pressure on the country for resources because of this increasing population. It was then that the government had to intervene. It promoted family planning, restricted early marriage, provided improved health care and looked to improve the status of women. The government also worked on diversifying agriculture, invested in industry and improved trading links.
With time, there were changes in general attitude toward family size and people were getting married later. As well, there was an improvement in educational and work opportunities for women (in 1975 employment of women was 22.3%, by 1990 it had increased to 35.75%). Many transnational companies came to Mauritius because of tax incentives, the Freeport at Port Luis, the large number of educated residents, a considerable amount of cheap labour and the good transportation means present.
This would assert to us Boserup’s theory that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Because the population had risen, the government had to take measures to adapt to this growth. It had to improve and diversify agriculture, so proving agricultural intensification and that “population growth causes agricultural growth.” (This idea is presented in The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure; 1965.) It also suggests that a country must improve its technology to be able to support the growing population, and that many technologies will not be taken advantage of if the population is not large enough. (These ideas are presented in Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-term Trends; 1981.) Mauritius had to build a Freeport and improve transportation to be able to maintain its population.
Ester Boserup also contributed to the discourse surrounding gender and 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". 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.[3]
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, Ester studied diligently and entered the University [of Copenhagen] when she was nineteen. No wonder that Ester championed education for women throughout her life."[4] In 1935, she graduated with a degree in theoretical economics. "During university, she 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." [5]
Her daughter, Birte, was born in 1937; her sons Anders, in 1940, and Ivan, in 1944. 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.
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