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Capacity for work in the tropics
394
Book Reviews
extent to which experimentation p e r se can provide the information necessary for making judgements about the feasibility, stability or ease of transference of proposed technical solutions. Despite this, the booklet should be useful as a training document for planning courses, as it supplies useful guidelines for the factors to be included in an experimental program. The planning of research is an area that increasingly demands attention, and on-farm experimentation is a key element in the research strategy of many institutions engaged in agricultural development in the tropics and elsewhere. P. K. Thornton Capacity for Work in the Tropics. Society for Human Biology Symposium No. 26. Edited by K. J. Collins & D. F. Roberts. Cambridge University Press, 1988. 297 pp. ISBN 0 521309 352. Price: £25 (hardback). The title of this book is intriguing, and the Society for the Study of Human Biology has published the proceedings of a number of good symposia. Set against this record, the contents of this particular volume are disappointing, perhaps because the expectations of those engaged in the application of the findings towards the development process are raised too much. For the information encompassed by the topic 'capacity for work' is crucial to understanding the peasant's way of life, that of the plantation worker, and latterly that of the burgeoning urban population which supplies the labour force to industry. The disappointment is not generated by the section headings, which collect together papers on the following: measurement of working capacity; functional consequences of malnutrition; growth, stature and muscular efficiency; ethnic and socio-cultural differences in working capacity; energy expenditure and endemic disease; and research models in tropical ecosystems. The first clue is in the preface, in which the reader is informed that the meeting at which the papers were presented was held in 1984 but published in 1988. How different from biotechnology symposia, where proceedings are generally published within two or three months of the meeting. The second clue is in the frequency of apologies for lack of data, missing results and other shortcomings of the statistical methods used. For example, Spurr admits that estimates of the number of chronically undernourished people in the world may be inaccurate by a factor of 2, while Shephard points out that 'This method [referring to a dietary survey method] has yielded improably low estimates... '.
Book Reviews
395
For those students of human physiology in the tropics requiring background information at aerobic capacity, the papers are useful. Similarly, the aid worker may understand something of the twin burdens of malnutrition and disease: the book provides an insight into the wealth of information at the London School of Hygiene where so much of the research into this area started. There is much food for thought in some of the papers, but insufficient to dispel or balance the general criticisms of the book.
W. R. Stanton The Ecology of lntercropping. By John Vandermeer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. 237 pp. ISBN 0 521 34592 8. Price: £30.00. About 20 years ago, I read Levin's paper in The American Naturalist which (among other things) introduced to the literature Dr Seuss's rhyme about Nutches, who lived in Nitches. The point was that complete overlap in the resource utilization spectra of Nutches, together with a short supply of resources, seemed to portend dire consequences for the unfortunate Nutch population. And now that I come to think of it, quite a while has passed since I last saw a Nutch. The same rhyme appears early on in Vandermeer's book (albeit with a typographical error in the attribution). We already know, from a large body of empirical evidence, that it is possible to grow two crops simultaneously on the same field and obtain a yield that could only have been achieved on a larger area of land had the same two crops been grown in separate monocultures. The competitive production principle is the idea that successful intercrops are those where the species involved, unlike Nutches, have disjunct niches. For example, it may be that the success of many legume-cereal intercrops arises from the small degree of overlap in their patterns of nitrogen utilization, the legume relying on its symbiotic root nodule bacteria to fix atmospheric nitrogen while the cereal depends on a supply of mineral nitrogen from the soil. Alternatively, however, the intercrop advantage may occur because nitrogen fixed in legume roots is somehow made available to the cereal. The latter case is an example of the facilitative production principle. The competitive and facilitative production principles are the scaffolding which Vandermeer uses to erect a theoretical framework for the analysis of intercrop performance. A mixture of ecological theory and agricultural experience is used to analyse the partitioning of light, soil water and
Book Reviews
extent to which experimentation p e r se can provide the information necessary for making judgements about the feasibility, stability or ease of transference of proposed technical solutions. Despite this, the booklet should be useful as a training document for planning courses, as it supplies useful guidelines for the factors to be included in an experimental program. The planning of research is an area that increasingly demands attention, and on-farm experimentation is a key element in the research strategy of many institutions engaged in agricultural development in the tropics and elsewhere. P. K. Thornton Capacity for Work in the Tropics. Society for Human Biology Symposium No. 26. Edited by K. J. Collins & D. F. Roberts. Cambridge University Press, 1988. 297 pp. ISBN 0 521309 352. Price: £25 (hardback). The title of this book is intriguing, and the Society for the Study of Human Biology has published the proceedings of a number of good symposia. Set against this record, the contents of this particular volume are disappointing, perhaps because the expectations of those engaged in the application of the findings towards the development process are raised too much. For the information encompassed by the topic 'capacity for work' is crucial to understanding the peasant's way of life, that of the plantation worker, and latterly that of the burgeoning urban population which supplies the labour force to industry. The disappointment is not generated by the section headings, which collect together papers on the following: measurement of working capacity; functional consequences of malnutrition; growth, stature and muscular efficiency; ethnic and socio-cultural differences in working capacity; energy expenditure and endemic disease; and research models in tropical ecosystems. The first clue is in the preface, in which the reader is informed that the meeting at which the papers were presented was held in 1984 but published in 1988. How different from biotechnology symposia, where proceedings are generally published within two or three months of the meeting. The second clue is in the frequency of apologies for lack of data, missing results and other shortcomings of the statistical methods used. For example, Spurr admits that estimates of the number of chronically undernourished people in the world may be inaccurate by a factor of 2, while Shephard points out that 'This method [referring to a dietary survey method] has yielded improably low estimates... '.
Book Reviews
395
For those students of human physiology in the tropics requiring background information at aerobic capacity, the papers are useful. Similarly, the aid worker may understand something of the twin burdens of malnutrition and disease: the book provides an insight into the wealth of information at the London School of Hygiene where so much of the research into this area started. There is much food for thought in some of the papers, but insufficient to dispel or balance the general criticisms of the book.
W. R. Stanton The Ecology of lntercropping. By John Vandermeer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. 237 pp. ISBN 0 521 34592 8. Price: £30.00. About 20 years ago, I read Levin's paper in The American Naturalist which (among other things) introduced to the literature Dr Seuss's rhyme about Nutches, who lived in Nitches. The point was that complete overlap in the resource utilization spectra of Nutches, together with a short supply of resources, seemed to portend dire consequences for the unfortunate Nutch population. And now that I come to think of it, quite a while has passed since I last saw a Nutch. The same rhyme appears early on in Vandermeer's book (albeit with a typographical error in the attribution). We already know, from a large body of empirical evidence, that it is possible to grow two crops simultaneously on the same field and obtain a yield that could only have been achieved on a larger area of land had the same two crops been grown in separate monocultures. The competitive production principle is the idea that successful intercrops are those where the species involved, unlike Nutches, have disjunct niches. For example, it may be that the success of many legume-cereal intercrops arises from the small degree of overlap in their patterns of nitrogen utilization, the legume relying on its symbiotic root nodule bacteria to fix atmospheric nitrogen while the cereal depends on a supply of mineral nitrogen from the soil. Alternatively, however, the intercrop advantage may occur because nitrogen fixed in legume roots is somehow made available to the cereal. The latter case is an example of the facilitative production principle. The competitive and facilitative production principles are the scaffolding which Vandermeer uses to erect a theoretical framework for the analysis of intercrop performance. A mixture of ecological theory and agricultural experience is used to analyse the partitioning of light, soil water and