A reliance on root crops, and in particular the potato, can insulate states as well as stateless peoples against the predations of war and appropriation.

While a grain-growing population whose granaries and crops were confiscated or destroyed had no choice but to scatter or starve, a tuber-growing peasantry could move back immediately after the military danger had passed and dig up their staple, a meal at a time.

Farmers may polycrop in order to avoid labor bottlenecks at planting and at harvest. Growing many different crops is also an obvious way to spread risks and improve food security. Cultivators can reduce the danger of going hungry if they sow, instead of only one or two cultivars, crops of long and short maturity, crops that are drought resistant and those that do well under wetter conditions, crops with different patterns of resistance to pests and diseases, crops that can be stored in the ground with little loss (such as cassava), and crops that mature in the "hungry time”before other crops are gathered. Finally, and perhaps most important, each of these crops is embedded in a distinctive set of social relations. Different members of the household are likely to have different rights and responsibilities with respect to each crop. The planting regimen, in other words, is a reflection of social relations, ritual needs, and culinary tastes; it is not just a production strategy that a profit-maximizing entrepreneur took straight out of the pages of a text in neoclassical economics.

To take West African indigenous farming systems as an example, colonial agricultural specialists encountered what seemed to them to be an astonishingly diverse regime of polycropping, with as many as four crops (not to mention subspecies) in the same field simultaneously. The visual effect, to Western eyes, was one of sloppiness and disorder. Given their visual codification of modern agricultural practice, most specialists knew, without further empirical investigation, that the apparent disorder of the crops was a symptom of backward techniques; it failed the visual test of scientific agriculture. Campaigns to replace polyculture with pure-stand planting were pushed with equal fervor by colonial officials and, after independence, by their local successors.