Cain and Abel

INTRODUCTION:  Abel and Cain give the original contrast between good and evil.  Abel obeyed God and was accepted of Him.  Cain came up with a better idea and displeased God.  But instead of getting things right, Cain took matters into his own hands and murdered his own brother.  This world is still divided into those who submit to God’s plan and those who are determined to do things their own way.  This lesson teaches obedience and the importance of doing things God’s way.

the Hebrews were farmers (Cain), and nomadic herders (Abel). It was the conflict between these two groups of people that inspired the story of Cain and Abel. See Bible Murders. 

Farming was also important in New Testament times. Jesus talked often about the land and its products in his teachings, showing he was familiar with farming techniques. Matthew 13, for example, contains four farmingparables.  

THE ECONOMICS OF CAIN AND ABEL: AGRO-PASTORAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE SAHEL by Rogier van den Brink* Daniel W. Bromley** Jean-Paul Chavas** The complementarity of the economic systems of nomads and farmers is often overshadowed by the conflicts inherent in the competition over the control of land. The conflict is one of property rights. A dynamic programming model of the West African Sahel is presented that simulates the emergence of a dual economy based on the comparative advantage of the farmer and the pastoralist. The model illustrates that exclusive private property rights have no claim to optimality. The analysis of risk in an intertemporal framework suggests the optimality of another type of property right--the right to flexible adjustment typically claimed by the pastoralist. Multiple property regimes provide optimal settings for farmers and pastoralists.

 the quarrel arose at Earth's division between the brothers, in which all land fell to Cain, but all birds, beasts and creeping things to Abel. They agreed that neither should have any claim on the other's possessions. As soon as this pact had been concluded Cain, who was tilling a field, told Abel to move his flocks way. When Abel replied that they would not harm the tillage, Cain caught up a weapon and ran in vengeful pursuit across mountain and valley, until he overtook and killed him [Graves and Patai, 1964: 91]. We draw on the story of Cain and Abel to focus attention on the differing property rights regimes inherent in sedentary agriculture and in pastoralism. This perspective is necessary in light of the recent rather widespread belief among development experts that private--individualized--and exclusive title to land in Africa is the sine qua non of improved economic performance [Feder and Noronha, 1987; Feder and Feeny, 1991]. This new perspective is also timely given the recent developments in property rights theory, particularly with respect to land uses at the extensive margin [Bromley, 1992, 1991, 1989; Bromley and Cernea, 1989; National Academy of Sciences, 1986; Larson and Bromley, 1990; McCay and Acheson, 1987]. Finally, this perspective strongly amplifies the recent developments in the field of rangeland management suggesting the need for more flexible strategies of natural resource use [Cousins, 1992; Behnke and Scoones, 1991]. The conflict between Cain--the farmer--and Abel--the herder--should be understood as one of property rights. In agriculture as well as livestock production, property rights emerge to secure income streams generated by production activities. The nature of the income stream, then, may affect the type of property right that is likely to be established. The crucial difference between sedentary farming and nomadic livestock production is that they differ in ability to react ex post to temporal uncertainty; in other words, they differ in flexibility.i Unfortunately, property rights essential for livestock production in the Sahel have been eroded by a long history of conflicts. More recently, a number of state interventions that expropriated pastoralists of 3 property rights crucial to their economic systems have clearly favored farmers over pastoralists in the allocation of private property rights. These changes have created general uncertainty over property rights to natural resources, thereby inducing a de facto open access situation. The resulting tragedy of open access, induced by public policy, has substantially increased the costs of running the pastoralist economy (i.e. its transaction costs) and adversely affected the pastoralists' ability to overcome periods of drought. Ever since the publication of Sen's [1981] seminal essay on the relation between famines and Entitlements, the implications of the loss of property rights to the Sahelian nomads need no further elaboration. In this paper we develop the case for property regimes as instrumental variables in development policy, and we show that highly diverse and variable agricultural ecosystems demand property regimes that allow quick human response to new exigencies. We establish the microeconomic relationship between environmental variability, choice of technique, and property rights in a dynamic, partial equilibrium context. We demonstrate the importance of flexibility as an optimal strategic response of individuals faced with input uncertainty and develop a model simulating a dual economy that arises as the result of rational choice by individuals faced with temporal uncertainty. Such rational choice includes the choice of optimal property rights regimes which allow capture of the income streams of techniques appropriate for a particular agroecosystem. The model, while in the vein of Demsetz [1967], does not lead us to conclude that exclusive private (individualized) property rights in land are necessarily optimal. Given spatio-temporal risk, other types of property regimes may be more appropriate. Over-exploitation of natural resources in the Sahel has often been associated with the introduction of techniques that allowed for a more intensive use of a given range without the formulation of the type of property rights regimes that could regulate and coordinate such use. As development policies reassess the role livestock in Africa and elsewhere, it is essential that programs be formulated with clarity and coherence so as to avoid the mistakes of the past when "private" or "group" ranches were regarded as the solution to pastoralist "problems." In the second section of the paper we develop a theoretical model of the dual economy of Cain--the farmer--and Abel--the nomad. The Biblical parallel is used to emphasize both urgency and universality of the problem. The model simulates a dual economy based on the comparative advantages of two different 4 production techniques faced with environmental uncertainty. An economic theory of optimal production techniques and property rights is developed in a context of dynamic risk. In the third section we use the model to describe the agro-pastoral production system of the West African Sahel. In the fourth section we touch upon policy issues, both in a historical as well as in a current framework. 2. A DYNAMIC MODEL OF AGRO-PASTORAL PRODUCTION Economists have generated an extensive literature on the effects of risk and uncertainty on economic decision making. However, risk is commonly modeled as if it were "timeless." The formulation of the problem in terms of timeless risk precludes the theory to investigate important economic behavior such as learning and the use of adaptive strategies--dynamic decisions influenced by new information that becomes available over time. Once we introduce temporal risk, a wider variety of economic behavior under risk can be modeled.ii If economic institutions are a response to risk of various types, it seems logical not to restrict analytical attention to only one type of risk. In other words, the recognition that risk is not timeless, but changes over time, is important for the analysis of economic behavior and institutions in general, and property rights in particular. If a farmer puts up a fence around his fields and establishes an exclusive property right to the land, he reduces the risk that others may claim the field, and he assures himself of the full benefits of any investments he would care to undertake in his fields. He establishes ex ante certainty to the exclusive use of the land. The higher and the more certain the income stream he can derive from the exploitation of his field, the more he will be willing to pay for the "fence," i.e., the exclusive property right. However, where there is ex post uncertainty there is a positive economic value attached to the capacity to adjust ex post. Thus, the ex ante certainty that a nomadic pastoralist would acquire by fencing his range in a situation of extremely variable rainfall, and with a limited potential to improve the productivity of the range, does not represent high economic value. The nomad, then, might not be interested in an exclusive property right to a particular field. He might be more interested in establishing a property right that would enable him to ex post adjust to temporal uncertainty. In particular, he would value property rights that assured him spatial mobility