India, Sept. 18 -- This quarter of humanity administers the vast majority of the world's 600 million farms and produces one-third of all food.

In our desire to become modern, we wrote this largest and most essential of populations out of the world story. How was this even possible? Because the 'psychodrama' of modernity gave us an enormous need to divorce ourselves from the peasant, and so we developed a number of compelling - if unexamined - stories about her demise. Two of these stories are particularly widespread: many of the readers of this book will already have recited them in their heads. The first is that industry must take over agriculture; the second that cities must absorb everyone from the countryside.

We became used to thin...