In the context of sustainable development, we investigatefour subsistence communities, one each from India, Bolivia,Laos and Thailand,to understand the systemic interrelationsbetween the food production systems and related environ-mental pressures. In doing so, we revisit Ester Boserup’s the-ory of increasing land productivity at the expense of declin-ing labour productivity as a consequence of agricultural in-tensification. Our data confirm Boserup’s assumptions with-in the reach of traditional agriculture, but find them not toapply to hunting & gathering communities and to agricultur-al systems now increasingly dependent on fossil fuels and in-dustrial fertilizers. Instead we propose a theory of “so-ciometabolic transitions” as being more appropriate to un-derstanding transitions in land and labour productivityacross a wider range of modes of subsistence.