But it seems to me you're the one who's projecting a lot here: farming the land they have farmed for thousands of years. How do you know this?
There's overpopulation, as linca says. There are quite probably social distinctions that mean some families may have too little land or animals to live off. And there may well be - as was for long the case in Europe - a family structure in which some sons at least have to go off to "seek their fortune" or more prosaically go where they hear you can get $1.50 a day shipbreaking.
Generalising about subsistence farming on this basis seems a stretch. (And my comments are not meant to defend dirt-poor subsistence farming either: just that subsistence farming on which you can subsist is surely not "unimaginably awful"). When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Some don't have any at all. Not all lower castes were for farmers... *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
We can also look back at our own history. In 19th century Europe people left the countryside en masse for the horrible industrial cities, because the cities were less horrible than the alternative.
And eventually, things got better. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
What's meant by "romanticising" the third world farmer, and who do you believe is doing it?
The C18 Agricultural Revolution began in England, where the move to the cities was not a flight of peasants from the land that they were desperate to get away from, but a result of the Enclosures, which destroyed by privatisation the previous mode of agricultural production.
The idea that "things got better" when heaps of people were living in exploited filth in C19 industrial cities, compared to rural poverty, is so potty I think you're just trying to stir it up. Right? When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
And then there is the promise of opportunity. Capitalism is indeed good in providing great opportunities, to relatively few eventually. People apparently like to make a lottery choice, even with substantial life-size risks. Concentrating on success stories while ignoring silent evidence of loosers is one of those logical fallacies that Taleb talks in "The Black Swan".
