A “Rural Take-Off”: Agricultural Intensification and Ecological Change in the Peruvian Andes, 1980–2000

Over the second half of the twentieth century, peasant agriculture was increasingly viewed as a marginal activity- an anachronistic holdover from an agrarian past doomed to disappear. And yet, in the Peruvian Andes, as elsewhere, following a period of unprecedented demographic growth, the countryside filled with a historic number of people who began to farm at a previously unimaginable scale, upending the ecological status quo in the process. The remarkable expansion and intensification of peasant agriculture, moreover, came as part and parcel of an equally stunning moment of more general growth in human activity and anthropogenic change called the ‘Great Acceleration’. Current literature, however, overwhelmingly focuses on the rise of human activity and environmental upheaval in a few specific places like the Global North or certain activities such as fossil-fuel use, the commodification of nature, and the plantation complex. Instead, this paper reveals how peasant agriculture in the Peruvian Andes, located in the Global South, with a comparatively minor carbon footprint, organized around semi-subsistence household units of production, nevertheless enacted a profound transformation of the rest of the natural world. At the very least, this case compels us to deepen our understandings of the peoples, places and activities driving recent ecological transformations.