This is a revised and expanded edition of a popular textbook on the economics of farm households in developing countries. The second edition retains the same building blocks designed to explore household decision-making in a social context. Key topics are efficiency, risk, time allocation, gender, agrarian contracts, farm size and technological change. For these and other topics, household economic behaviour represents the outcome of social interactions within the household, and market interactions outside the household. A new chapter on the environment combines exposition of economic tools not previously covered in the book with examination of household and community decision-making in relation to environmental resources.
Originally published in 1982, this book provides an important set of basic materials for students of rural development. Key papers have been chosen and arranged, and the editor has provided a general introduction and passages that link the papers, alerting the student to rival theoretical interpretations and to regional parallels and contrasts. The book provides a basis for the analysis of the processes that make rural societies and economies what they are and substantially determine the changes that take place within them. The papers help the reader to understand the nature of the phenomena with which rural development has to deal, and in doing so to begin to evaluate the interventions of agencies and planners.
Textbook (essays) on economic theories (agricultural economy) relating to agrarian reform and rural development in developing countries - discusses relations between agrarian change, population growth and poverty, considers farm size, land tenure and colonialism, and includes case studies concerning capitalists in Colombia, agricultural production conditions in India, rural employment in Java (Indonesia), regional level labour markets for sugar cane plantation workers in Peru, social class phenomena in Tanzania, etc. Bibliographys.
This book, first published in 1939, was originally conceived as an investigation of peasant farming in Europe written in the years of the agricultural depression of the nineteen-thirties. It shows an immense contrast between the well-capitalized commercial peasant farming of Western Europe and the poor subsistence farming of the remotest parts of Eastern Europe; and between these two extremes a wide range of variation in standards of living and farming efficiency.
Agriculture and Forestry Division, Volume 2: Agrarian Development in Peasant Economies: Some Lessons from Kenya tackles various areas of concerns in agriculture in the context of peasant economy. The title provides examples from the Kenyan agrarian development policies. The text first covers concern in improving agricultural production, and then proceeds to tackling post-war Kenya. Next, the selection talks about Kenyan agrarian revolution, along with the economics and features of peasant agriculture. The sixth chapter discusses government and agrarian development, while the seventh chapter de ...
The work of A. V. Chayanov is today drawing more attention among Western scholars than ever before. Largely ignored in his native Russia because they differed from Marxist-Leninist theory, and neglected in the West for more than forty years, Chayanov's sophisticated theories were at last published in English in 1966. That trenchant is reprinted in this Wisconsin paperback edition, which includes a new introduction by the sociologist Teodor Shanin, of the University of Manchester, one of the world's leading Chayanov scholars. The Wisconsin edition will be essential reading for political scientists, anthropologists, and all whose interests include peasant studies, Third World development, and women's studies. "The past two decades have seen the emergence of a whole new field called 'peasant studies' and, along with those of Karl Marx, Chayanov's ideas have been central to its development. . . . The publishers are to be commended for re-issuing the book with both old and new introductions and making it available as an affordable paperback for students. The work is a classic."--Times Higher Education Supplement
In 2007, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population lived in cities. However, on a global scale, poverty overwhelmingly retains a rural face. This book assembles an unparalleled group of internationally-eminent scholars in the field of rural development and social change in order to explore historical and contemporary processes of agrarian change and transformation and their consequent impact upon the livelihoods, poverty and well-being of those who live in the countryside. The book provides a critical analysis of the extent to which rural development trajectories have in the past and are now promoting a change in rural production processes, the accumulation of rural resources, and shifts in rural politics, and the implications of such trajectories for peasant livelihoods and rural workers in an era of globalization. Peasants and Globalization thus explores continuity and change in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, from its early formulation in the late 19th century to the continuing relevance it has in our times, including chapters from Terence Byres, Amiya Bagchi, Ellen Wood, Farshad Araghi, Henry Bernstein, Saturnino M Borras, Ray Kiely, Michael Watts and Philip McMichael. Collectively, the contributors argue that neoliberal social and economic policies have, in deepening the market imperative governing the contemporary world food system, not only failed to tackle to underlying causes of rural poverty but have indeed deepened the agrarian crisis currently confronting the livelihoods of peasant farmers and rural workers. This crisis does not go unchallenged, as rural social movements have emerged, for the first time, on a transnational scale. Confronting development policies that are unable to reduce, let alone eliminate, rural poverty, transnational rural social movements are attempting to construct a more just future for the world’s farmers and rural workers.
In large parts of the developing world, peasant to industrial worker and rural to urban transition is a huge question mark on the face of the political economies of these societies. In India alone, nearly seventy percent of its 1.2 billion population lives in rural areas dependent on agriculture and allied activities. Though the context is different, the magnitude of the transition is similar in present day China. In many parts of Latin America and Africa, this transition is incomplete. Rural populations continue to persist, even in the times of globalisation – a so called shrinking world – and the digital age. In the context of developing countries in general and India in particular, it is difficult to find this transition in the lines of European history. Hence, the main concern of this book is with the large, independent self-cultivating peasantry and the agriculture-associated, non-landowning peasantry. In the present and in these contexts, the process of the growth of towns, merchandise, cities and industry, does not occur in a sequence of succession – characteristic to European development – owing to colonial backdrops and historical specificities. Whatever urbanisation happens in these countries, too, does not seem to be inclusive and facilitative of the rural to urban transition. The variance with the European context also appears to be the reason for the often observed non-absorption of the peasantry. These large differences across spatial, historical and structural contexts also indicate that one should consider the processes in non-Euro-centric terms. The processes of the transformation from agrarian to non-agrarian society – rural to urban societies, therefore – are inevitably plural in nature and, while retaining their specificities, push us into considering the point that the European model, or the English model, of transition is only one important variant of the possible modes of transition to capitalism, which necessitates close empirical study and a considered generalization; a point illuminated by the diversities that characterise European history itself. However, we need to urgently address this problem, as overwhelmingly large sections of the developing world not only persist in rural bewilderment, but they also aspire to urban modernity, as does the rest of the world. This book is written with a certain empathy towards rural societies, that they too, while transcending the ascriptive particularities and backwardness, should access all the benefits of civilised urban modernity; that the increasingly globalising humanity can offer and, yes, bask in the ‘bright lights of the city’.
At no time in this century has there been such global uncertainty concerning the future stability of food and farm. While many Third World countries are unable to produce an adequate food supply for their inhabitants, the future of family farms in industrialized countries is jeopardized because food is overly abundant there.
