Urban dreams, rural roots: Why millions still farm

Time of India

07-05-2025

Cooking, and eating, are often on Abhijit Banerjee's mind. But for the Nobel-winning economist, what starts with planning the night's dinner usually ends up in questions about the consumption, production, distribution of food, and their intimate relation to the broader economic issues of our times. His new monthly column for The Sunday Times, is about eating and thinking, about pleasure and responsibility, about global food and the Indian palate. Illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier, it offers recipes for life and lunch LESS ... MORE
My grandfather was a devoted, if not particularly gifted, gardener. Our terrace was lined with earthenware pots where jasmines and tuberoses grew in the summer and roses in the winter. Every year, sometime in October, my grandfather would broach his plans for the winter seasonals — this year, we would agree, unlike the last many years, the dahlias will be as large as a man's hand and the marigolds tight as a child's fist around an unexpected candy. We would come back from Gariahat market carrying bags of damp earth ('best quality from Hooghly') and the pomace left after pressing out mustard oil, its potency confirmed by its repulsive odour.
My job was to empty the pots and break up the clods, reluctantly bringing chaos into the lives of a hundred peaceable earthworms, before mixing our old dirt with the new. One year, when I was eight or nine, I decided to launch an agricultural project of my own. With a spoonful of cement from the kind man who was fixing our terrace, I blocked the drainage hole at the bottom of a pot to have the standing water one needs for rice to germinate and planted a handful of unhusked rice that our cook had found while cleaning the rice and discarded. The grains turned into green shoots that I carefully transplanted in other pots. In due course there was rice, a whole handful that I peeled off the sprigs and proudly brought to our cook to ask him to get them husked and make rice. I still recall the look of infinite contempt that quickly flashed over his face before he patiently explained that there was not enough for one mouthful.
If this was an appropriate learning experience for a future development economist, Cheyenne's memory of being lost among the cherry tomatoes seems to presage a future artist. Her father, like my grandfather, found gardening a bit mysterious and frustrating, but this one time the cherry tomatoes went wild in their front yard. Cheyenne, looking for the sweetest of them all, found herself surrounded by plants a foot taller than her, laden with bright red fruits, but no dad in sight. These days, Cheyenne does the gardening, but she has stayed away from growing vegetables. As for me, my one attempt to grow flowers in our then front garden in Cambridge was such a disaster (weeds everywhere, dead plants, poor landscaping) that an obviously irate neighbour came to warn us that we were depressing everyone's property values.
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Cheyenne Olivier
Many amateur gardeners find gardening hard. And yet the world over, poor rural families manage to do it successfully enough to make farming the single largest occupation in the world. Nearly 900 million people, more than 10% of the world, farm for a living, by a recent Food and Agriculture Organisation estimate. And this does not include all those, mostly women at least in India, who grow their own chilies and curry leaves, tulsi and lemongrass on a tiny plot of land adjacent to their homes, or in pots on their porch. I have an indelible memory of being somewhere in central Bengal, interviewing a woman whose face was framed by two beautiful, velvet green winter melons ( chaal kumro in Bangla) hanging from the bamboo eaves of her hut. One side of her little house was crisscrossed by creepers that went onto her roof, filtering the sunlight through the mosaic of giant leaves and yellow flowers.
Interestingly, when we surveyed poor families in rural Udaipur district in the early 2000s, while more than 90% said they worked in agriculture, only 17% said farming was the main source of their earnings. This is a pattern that shows up in many places in the world today, very different from how it was, for example, in India 100 years ago.
What explains this pattern? Why don't they give up farming and specialise in whatever else they do that pays most of their bills? Why does almost every poor family we surveyed in Udaipur own some little land? A part of the answer is that in many developing countries like India, living in the city is expensive and/or unpleasant for low-income families. The shortage of decent affordable housing is acute — the choice is usually between crowding into a slum or spending 4-5 hours a day commuting. Many migrants, therefore, prefer to leave their families in their home village and make regular trips back. The land in their village gives them a place to call home, and something for their family to do while they are away (they will often come back for the planting and the harvest).
For policy makers in many low and middle-income countries, who are often acutely aware of just how inadequate their urban infrastructure is, this continuing attachment to the village takes a bit of the pressure off. Even China, the most dramatic example of large-scale urbanisation in our times, movement to urban areas was strictly regulated through the hukou system (residence registration) to ensure demand for housing did not outpace its supply.
Land ownership also offers a form of social security in places where the state does not offer one. If you lose your job, it is a way to feed the family and survive. In China, in the depression after the Tiananmen Square episode in 1989, a large portion of the urban labour force went back home to cool their heels. Farming is what sustained them. Something similar happened in India and many other countries during the pandemic.
Of course, this requires the households to worry about future uncertainty enough to hold onto the land. It is not clear that they always do: when things are good, they may be tempted to sell the land and take a job elsewhere, but if the job suddenly vanishes, they will still need to be supported by the community or the state. This is another reason why the state may try to force them to hold onto a certain amount of land — that way they have something to fall back upon.
This might explain the unique position of land as an asset in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. What farmers call their own land isn't actually theirs to sell, though they might have been farming it for generations. For example, until recently, land in China remained state property to be allocated to households for cultivation based on need. At least in theory, families that were too busy to cultivate their land were meant to lose it to those with unemployed hands. Elsewhere, such as in the northeast of India, but also in large parts of Africa and the Mexican ejidos, for example, the decision to sell land rests with the community. And even where there are no legal restrictions on land sales, as in much of India, there is a strong sentiment attached to land that belonged to the family ( baap-dada ki zamin ), which probably serves a similar purpose. I see that pride on the face of our cook when she offers me a bilati amra (apparently called hog plum in English) that grew in her family's garden south of Kolkata. With a pinch of salt and some chili powder, it makes a rare healthy snack that I adore.
There are other commitment advantages to keeping some land in the family: if something happens to the main income earner or he (it is typically a man) simply abandons them, it can provide a minimum sustenance. In Africa, for example, unlike in India, land that a woman brings into the marriage or acquires as a part of her bride-price continues to belong to her even if the man marries again.
Indeed, this attempt to codify the special social role of land can go even further. A study by my wife and colleague Esther Duflo and Chris Udry from Northwestern University, finds that in Côte D'Ivoire, there are three types of land in each marriage. There is land that the man controls and cultivates, whose produce belongs to him and he might use in whatever way he pleases; land his wife controls and cultivates and whose produce belongs to her; and land, which the father is expected to cultivate, to grow 'appreciated crops', crops that can only be used for the welfare of the children. The main example of such a crop turns out to be yam, which both feeds the family and gets sold in the market, but the money from it can only be used for things like children's education. This seems to be a way, in a setting where men often marry multiple times, for each wife and her children to have a long-term claim on the father's time.
But beyond all this careful social engineering, in a world where women often live very circumscribed lives where they mostly get to do the drudge work and rarely get credit for the results, having a bit of land offers them the pleasure of being able to deliver something delicious and/ or beautiful to the family. I remember the joy with which my aunt, who never worked outside and never had a child, would make karaishutir kochuri (breads stuffed with peas) for us, 'with peas', as she would say with her slightly withheld smile, 'from my own garden.'
This is part of a monthly column by Nobel-winning economist Abhijit Banerjee illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier.
RECIPE: Karaishuti diye begun pora
(Smoky eggplant salad)
Here is a recipe for when the peas are at their sweetest…
Pop 500 gm of peapods and boil the peas till cooked but not mushy (6-8 minutes). Char two eggplants of 500 gm each that have been scored with a sharp knife (or 3 or 4 smaller ones) on a gas fire or under a broiler till the skin is mostly burnt and the flesh is falling apart. Cool.
Discard the skin and the stem. Mash the flesh and leave in a colander for any liquid to drip out. Mix with the cooked peas, ½ cup minced red onion, 1 heaped tablespoon finely chopped ginger, 2 thinly sliced green chilies, ¼ cup chopped cilantro, ½ cup finely chopped tomato, 2 tbs mustard oil, and 1 tsp salt (or to taste). Serve with slightly charred bhakris or phulkas.
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Cheyenne Olivier
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Views expressed above are the author's own.