I can think of three reasons why land productivity is such an
important indicator of agricultural efficiency.
1) Obviuosly since we are talking about land - which also
happened to be the largest sector of pre-industrial societies - we
should be concerned with those practices which increase or
decrease land productivity, i.e. yield per seed sown, and yield per
sown acre.
2) Assuming that agrarian societies were close to a Malthusian
equilibrium, and assuming, furthermore, that some agrarian
societies were reaching, by the late 18th century, a point at which
additional increases in output were increasingly difficult, land-
saving-innovations become all the more important irrespective of
increasing labor inputs.
3) Measuring economic efficiency purely in terms of labor saving
technologies merely reflects a westernized bias which defines
progress using exclusively capitalistic criteria of efficiency. Is a
large farm of 250 hectares specializing in wheat maintained by
three people better than numerous small farms cultivating sixteen
different crops and keeping many families busy? Even the HDI is
biased in this direction. The Province of Alberta would probably
rank first among all Candian provinces in the 1980s and 1990s
using this indicator. Yet, as was reported two weeks or so ago in
the Globe and Mail, the social life in that province has deteriorated.
Divorces, obesity and stress-related maladies have all increased -
to which I am sure one could add gambling addictions, traffic jams,
school bullying, teenage suicide, drug addictions, environmental
diseases.......
