The Great Leap Forward: Changing Flows and Commercial Patterns of Land Use

In the nineteenth century agriculture became integrated on a global scale on a level not known before. Not only high value but also bulk crops from tropical as well as temperate zones took part in long distance trade. Earlier relatively extensively used areas came under intensive cultivation. In the South the expanding cash crop production was organized in large scale plantations and by peasant farmers integrated on the world market though a diversity of different middlemen. The late 19^th and early 20^th century saw a spectacular growth in land rich and labour poor frontier regions. It is well known that a large share of the wheat entering the world market came from transoceanic frontier zones such as the Great Plains in USA, the Canadian prairie, the Argentine Pampas and wheat lands of Australia. The role of the deltas in South East Asia, the Mekong, the Burma and Thai delta for the globally traded rice is less noted. In fact these areas were until the second half of the 19^th century sparsely populated and extensively cultivated lands. The flow of tropical goods produced by small holder and to a lesser extent on plantation in the South is also very much part of the emerging increasingly global food system taking shape from the mid 19^th century. To understand the dynamics of the changes and the driving forces behind them a systemic approach is necessary but it cannot be put into a single mould different regional trajectories must be taken into serious account