Remembering Wendell Berry and the Questions He Left For Developing Economies Like India

Wendell Berry died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. A farmer, poet, novelist and essayist, Berry spent more than half a century writing about agriculture, land, food, community and the meaning of a good life. His death comes at an uncanny moment as just days earlier, a 50th-anniversary edition of his most influential work, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, had appeared with a new foreword, written by Berry himself.

It is tempting to remember Berry as an American writer, who practised agriculture at his farm in Kentucky, ploughed with draft horses, wrote by hand and resisted the logic of industrial agriculture. His relevance, however, lies less in whether one agrees with his preferred way of farming than in the questions his work raises about development. What, after all, do we mean when we say that an economy has developed? 

The answer seems straightforward, more so for sectors like agriculture: more output, higher yield, higher income, better technology and better access to markets. Just “more” of these metrics do not necessarily tell us whether the lives built around that production have become better, whether the resources on which production depends are being sustained, or whether the benefits and costs are being distributed in ways that would be considered just and equitable. Berry was not just writing about development economics. Much of his argument inevitably leads back to a question development economics has long struggled with: what exactly counts as improvement?

When The Unsettling of America was published in 1977, American agriculture was already being transformed by industrialisation. Berry saw the farm increasingly being treated as a production unit, agriculture as an industry and food as a commodity. More than the change in farming techniques, what worried him was the growing distance between the production and the relationships that made it possible – between farmer and land, food and place, knowledge and practice, production and consumption. Almost 50 years later, that distance is hardly confined to American agriculture. In fact, it has become a pronounced feature of modern agricultural systems worldwide.

Take India for instance. Our agricultural transformation has been driven by very different historical circumstances unlike that of America. As a country that once faced severe food shortages, it is reasonable to treat increases in agricultural productivity as a success. The Green Revolution, irrigation, improved seeds, fertilisers, mechanisation and expanding markets have all played important roles in feeding millions of Indians and changing what Indian agriculture can produce. Berry does not critique or challenge this paradigm in his works. However, he asks what happens after productivity becomes the dominant language through which agricultural change is understood.

The language of quantity

A crop can produce more while requiring increasingly scarce water. Agricultural output can rise while soil fertility deteriorates. A farmer can gain access to a larger market and still have little bargaining power within it. Mechanisation can reduce drudgery and increase productivity while changing the demand for agricultural labour. A commercially successful farmer may also become increasingly dependent on a narrow set of crops, inputs or buyers. None of this makes productivity undesirable, but rather insufficient, as a description of development.

This distinction goes beyond agriculture. Development has traditionally been associated with expansion: higher incomes, greater consumption, more infrastructure, more electricity, more mobility, more technology and more choices. For people who have too little, this expansion can mean a better life. 

The problem, therefore, is not that economies grow. It is that growth can become detached from the question of what it is supposed to achieve, for whom and at what opportunity cost.  

Economics is very good at measuring things that can be represented as quantities. We count income, output, prices, employment, trade and productivity – all these measures have enormous value. They allow us to identify changes, compare places and evaluate policies. However, there are the things that do not fit easily into these measures and can gradually disappear from the economic story. 

Questions like ‘who loses when a locally adapted crop or a landrace variety disappears?’, ‘who bears the cost when groundwater falls?’ or ‘what happens to knowledge when a crop is no longer worth cultivating?’ are not outside economics. They are questions about economic change. Yet they can be difficult to accommodate when success is assessed primarily through output, income or productivity.

Berry's insistence on relationships is therefore crucial. He famously said that “eating is an agricultural act”, in his essay The Pleasures of Eating. It was his attempt to reconnect the consumer with the agricultural system – to look behind the food being consumed. 

Food does not begin at the supermarket shelf or the restaurant plate. It carries with it land, labour, farming practices, markets and decisions made much earlier in the production process. This idea has particular relevance in India, where agricultural and dietary diversity are often assumed to move together although they do not necessarily do so. A crop can disappear from cultivation while remaining present in cultural memory. A household can have access to diverse food items while losing access to diverse varieties within those foods. The field and the plate can move in different directions.

The language of limits

Berry's critique should not be mistaken for a rejection of development. The pertinent question is whether development can be understood without using the “more” element as the ultimate measure of improvement. 

For India, or any other developing country, the language of limits can be particularly uncomfortable. Development has meant escaping limits: the limits imposed by hunger, unreliable electricity, poor housing, inadequate roads, low incomes and restricted access to markets and technology. Asking people to consume less or farmers to produce less would be both unrealistic and, in many circumstances, deeply unfair. Berry's question of “enough” therefore needs to be handled carefully.

“Enough” cannot mean asking those who have too little to accept less. It cannot mean freezing agricultural communities or farming practices in the past, nor can it mean treating technological change as something inherently destructive. 

Berry’s central thesis is about the direction of growth. There is a difference between producing more food and producing more food by steadily exhausting the soil and water needed to produce it again; between integrating farmers into markets and making them dependent on markets over which they have little bargaining power; between technology that expands people's possibilities and technology that simply shifts costs onto someone else. These differences are easy to lose when development is reduced to a set of aggregate indicators. 

Berry’s ideas and his writings were a product of his American experience, but in the current times, they have a universal ring to them. 

A farm can become more productive. A market can become more efficient. An economy can become richer. But the questions remain: Productive for what? Efficient for whom? Richer for what kind of life? 

These are uncomfortable questions for the economics of development because they cannot be answered by productivity statistics alone, nor can they be answered by romanticising the past. They require us to think again and again about what development is meant to accomplish. 

Berry was not a development economist, and The Unsettling of America was not a development policy manual. Nonetheless, his works have never posed a greater relevance than in the current times. One of his questions is one that development economics has never entirely escaped: is economic expansion the same thing as improvement? 

After decades of becoming better at measuring how much economies produce, the harder task is deciding what all that production is for and ultimately, how much is “enough”.

Taniya Sah is an assistant professor of economics at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru. All views expressed are personal.

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