Land Use in an Urban Hinterland: Ethnography and Remote Sensing in the Study of African Intensification

Abstract

In the study of African agricultural intensification, stronger inferences may be drawn by combining ethnographic study of small samples with the comprehensive coverage afforded by remote sensing than would be possible with either method alone. Study in the hinterland of Ibadan, Nigeria, suggests that land use by small‐scale farmers is tending to diverge into two different patterns of cropping, land use and labor intensity. Remote sensing analysis allows us to suggest that, largely due to market response, agricultural practice is developing in a dynamic fashion in advance of population pressure on Ruthenberg's threshold for humid savanna agriculture of four years of cultivation to eight years of fallow.