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But this does not mean that the small peasant farms of the developing world will, or should, consolidate into large commercial enterprises of the sort that formed in the urbanization of Europe and North America. Clearly, some peasant farms are too small to support any kind of viable agriculture, but, for the most part, economists have found that smaller farms in poor countries have higher efficiency, greater profitability, and higher employment levels than larger farms, all other things being equal (this is the opposite of the case in places like Poland).20 What they need is not size but investment: A fairly basic injection of money and basic knowledge will turn a subsistence peasant farm into a job-generating commercial farm. In fact, under-investment in agriculture is currently one of the most serious problems in the world, as the food shortages of 2008 illustrated. Change is beginning to occur—the large-scale Chinese investment in the farms of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is slowly turning that region into the breadbasket it should always have been. In most places, though, it is the ties between the village and a distant city that will provide the investments for a second Green Revolution.

For some, the Londoni remittances have served as seed money for a permanent move into more remunerative businesses. In the village of Rajnagar, I met Montaj Begum, 47, who has three siblings and two children working in London, mainly in curry restaurants. At first, their remittances allowed her 11-hectare rice farm to be fully productive for the first time in decades. Then, she realized that her lifestyle had become reliant on the remittances, and the vicissitudes of farming were not going to sustain her. She saved two years’ remittances, and she and her remaining relatives opened two shops in the village, a cell phone vendor and a window-shutter installer, and handed the farmland to a neighbor who was interested in modern farm-management techniques. “Before, our main source of income was the money from London, and we’d rely on it every month,” she says. “Now the money is coming like a gift, only on holidays, because there are six children to support in London, it’s much harder for them. But that’s okay now, because we have our own sources of income here—the businesses pay their own money, so we don’t rely on London money.”

That may be the ideal end of the village: As a place where a few people run profitable farms, many more make their living working on farms, and others prosper in the local service industry. It is how the European migration put a decidedly unromantic end to the peasant village, and we can hope it happens the same way in the world’s other two-thirds. The fate of the village rests largely in the way countries manage their major cities and in the rights and resources provided to the migrants living there. Conversely, the fate of cities and nations very often depends on the handling of villages and the people moving out of them. The badly run arrival city can turn the village into a prison; the badly run village can make the arrival city explode.

* For our purposes, peasant farming is defined as family-based agriculture in which the family is the main, and usually the only, source of labor, and in which the farm’s output serves mainly to provide for the family’s immediate nutritional and financial needs.

† Slightly less generous sums are available to women who have worked 25 years, and a reduced pension for men who have worked 55 years and agree to hand their farm to someone under 40.

‡ Tykocin, population 1,800, is better known for the pogrom of August 1941, during which local Poles, aided by occupying German soldiers, rounded up and killed 3,400 Jews, 73 percent of the town’s population. Though residents are loath to discuss it, this is likely one of the reasons why its farms are somewhat larger than the regional average.

§ Such districts remain the norm in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, especially away from coasts and major cities (north, east,