"Subsistence Agriculture": Analytical Problems and Alternative Concepts

This article argues that the concept of "subsistence agriculture"—widely encountered and long used in the literature—is not meaningful enough to be analytically useful as usually employed and should be abandoned. Particularly important for policy is the fact that use of the term "subsistence agriculture" leads to implicitly treating all small-scale agriculture as a homogeneous residual made up of producers who vary little in their potential contribution to economic development. Data are presented which strongly suggest that small-scale agriculture in less-developed countries is not homogeneous so far as decision-making situations are concerned. The second half of the article considers development of an alternative set of criteria for classifying small-scale farmers that would reflect meaningful differences in decision-making experience and decision-making situations. A tentative set of such criteria for which data are now available, or could be developed with relative ease, are presented to illustrate the relevance of such a classification for development planning and policy.