The New Peasantries

Rural Development in Times of Globalization

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351628501
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ländliche Soziologie

When first published in 2008, The New Peasantries revolutionized our ways of thinking of what constitutes the peasantry and repeasantization. It showed how a new era of empire and globalization was creating new forms of peasantry.

This new edition is thoroughly revised, with a reorganization of chapters and several new chapters added. It includes a new chapter on China, based on the author's extensive fieldwork there, and much more information on Brazil. It integrates and critically reviews the many publications on peasants, peasantries and peasant modes of agricultural production published in recent years. The theoretical discussion is enriched with more attention to the seminal work of Chayanov. Greater attention is also paid to the construction of new markets – a theme that will remain a major issue in the coming decade. It combines and integrates different bodies of literature: the rich traditions of peasant studies, development and rural sociology, neo-institutional economics and debates on empire and globalization.

The original book has been used in several international postgraduate courses. The experience and feedback thus obtained has been used to simplify the structure of the book and make it more accessible as a textbook for students.

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PEASANTS AND PEASANT AGRICULTURE

Basic concepts and data

Today, at the dawn of the Third Millennium, there are far more peasants in the world than ever before in human history. In absolute numbers, even the most conservative estimates suggest that there are between 500 and 560 million peasant farms in today’s world, and this number is continually increasing (Lattre-Gasquet etal., 2014; Lowder etal., 2016). If we assume that the average peasant farm is composed of a couple and two children who are involved in working the land that makes for 2 to 2.2 billion peasants. While the peasantry may make up a smaller proportion of the world’s population than in the past, “small-farm households still constitute nearly two-fifths of humanity” (Weis, 2007: 25).

In a world that seems to be convinced that peasants are disappearing, and where some doubt their very existence, this is an uncomfortable and uneasy truth. This is even more the case if we look at the everyday notions about peasants and even those that can be found in academia: why is so much of humanity stuck in what are generally deemed to be economically and socially marginal activities? And why do we still, on occasion, see these men and women taking to the streets to claim recognition and their rights?

For many centuries, the peasantry has been omnipresent. Its existence was self-evident. In today’s world, they and their raison d’être are little understood, and this seems to be a defining element of peasants and peasant agriculture. Agrarian science has developed an institutionalized myopia towards peasant agriculture, which is beyond its self-imposed horizon of relevance. Even the rich, but highly divided, tradition of peasant studies (which itself is definitely located outside of mainstream science) has not been able to resolve the many dilemmas and unknowns surrounding the peasantry.

Peasants, peasant agriculture and peasantries are notions that easily slip under the radar of agricultural and economic statistics and that contemporary mindsets, perceptions, interpretations, theorizing and representations find it hard to frame. Scientists, including social scientists, normally strive to eliminate ambiguity from their thinking. This makes it harder to understand the concept of the peasantry for, in many respects, it is an ambiguous, if not contradictory, concept. The peasantry face and suffer subordination and oppression but at the same time resist them. There is subjection and disobedience. Their humility goes hand in hand with the longing for freedom. The sublime and the grotesque are closely interwoven in peasants’ daily lives, in which seemingly unchanging routines can be interspersed with sudden revolts (as beautifully shown in Bertolucci’s masterpiece Novecento). Then there is the notion of ‘progress’ that structures much contemporary thinking. Peasants are often seen as the antithesis of modernity and are often represented as the embodiment of backwardness and poverty, which in turn is seen a self-afflicted sin. This leads to repeated claims of the need to provide alternatives to being a peasant (and to peasant agriculture), although there is never much clarity on what activities or industries would sop up the millions of displaced peasantry (Collier and Dercon, 2013). In short, the peasantry is viewed as being peripheral, a remnant of the past. So how can the continued and growing presence of the peasantry in today’s world be explained?

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World agriculture can be said to consist of three component elements, or constellations (see Figure 1.1) that are different, but interrelated. The first constellation is peasant agriculture, which is basically built upon the sustained use of ecological capital and is oriented to defending and improving peasant livelihoods. Multifunctionality is often a central feature of peasant agriculture and labour is primarily provided by the family (or mobilized from within the rural community through relations of reciprocity). The land and other means of production are owned by the family. Production is partly market-oriented but also partly oriented to the reproduction of the farm unit and the family.

The second constellation can be characterized as entrepreneurial agriculture. It is mainly (though not exclusively) built upon financial and industrial capital (embodied in credit, industrial inputs and technologies) and ongoing expansion, primarily through scale-enlargement, is a crucial and necessary feature. Production is highly specialized and completely oriented to markets. Entrepreneurial farmers are highly market-dependent (both for inputs and outputs), which is in stark contrast to peasants who generally try to distantiate their farming practices from markets through a multitude of often ingenious mechanisms. Entrepreneurial farming often emerges from state-driven programmes designed to ‘modernize’ agriculture. It entails a partial industrialization of the labour process, which many entrepreneurial farmers wholeheartedly embrace in their search to maximize throughput.

The third constellation can be described as large-scale corporate (or capitalist) farming. Once widespread throughout the world, it almost disappeared (largely due to the many land reform processes that swept the world over the past 200 years), but is now re-emerging almost everywhere under the aegis of the agro-export model. The current wave of land-grabbing is resulting in the formation of, often, very large capitalist farms. In today’s world, the corporate farming sector is taking the shape of an extensive web of mobile farm enterprises, willing to locate from one country to another, in which the labour force exclusively consists of salaried (or piece-rate) workers. Production is guided by the objective of profit maximalization. When soils or aquifers are exhausted, or labour becomes too expensive, the enterprises move on to new locations. These farms are increasingly setting a template for large segments of food and agricultural markets, although the extent of their influence differs greatly between different sectors and countries.

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It is often thought that scale is the main differentiating feature between these three constellations. Peasant agriculture is made up of tiny and vulnerable production units, which are of marginal relevance. At the other end of the scale there is corporate farming: large, strong and important or this, at least, is the general assumption. Entrepreneurial farmers sit somewhere between these two extremes. If an entrepreneurial farmer is successful, he or she might, one day, join the ranks of corporate farmers – which is precisely what some of them dream of.

There are, undoubtedly, empirical correlations between the scale of a farming operation and these different modes of farming. However, the essence of the differences between them lies elsewhere: it lies in the different ways in which they mould their social and material resources and their interrelations with others. Peasants, for instance, create fields and breed cows that differ from those created and bred by entrepreneurs or corporate farmers. There is also a key difference in the mode of construction. In addition, peasants view the process of production differently to the other two categories, just as they relate to the outside world in a different way. In short the peasant mode of farming differs from those of corporate farmers and entrepreneurs in many respects. This is precisely what makes peasants so distinctively different.

Throughout this book I aim to show how these different modes of patterning deeply affect the magnitude of value added, its distribution, as well as the nature, quality and sustainability of the production processes and the amount and quality of the food produced.

Figure 1.1 Different, yet interlinked, modes of farming

Source: original material by author.

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Although there are many differences between the three constellations, there are no clear-cut lines of demarcation. There are interfaces between each group where there is considerable overlap and ambiguity and the ‘borderlines’ are often crossed through complex moves backwards and forwards. Several of these border crossings (e.g. from a peasant to entrepreneurial farmer or vice versa) will be discussed at some length in this book. The ‘outer borders’ of the constellations are similarly far from sharp or clear. Peasant farming contains a wide range of shades and nuances, which can range from pluriactivity to the situation of the landless and the many urban workers who cultivate plots for self-consumption. Industrial entrepreneurs might also invest in agriculture (and vice versa), thus making themselves into a kind of ‘hybrid’ capitalist farmer. These borderlands contain many ambiguities and can be the source of much confusion.

These three agrarian constellations also pattern their interconnections with society at large in different ways. We can, however, distinguish two dominant patterns. One pattern is centred on the construction and reproduction of short and decentralized circuits (also referred to as territorial and/or peasant markets) that link the production and consumption of food, and more generally, farming and regional society through relations of proximity. The other, highly centralized pattern, consists of large food processing and trading companies that increasingly operate on a global scale. Later on in this book I will refer to such companies as food empires: large, oligopolistic networks that increasingly control the production, processing, distribution and consumption of food.

Peasant agriculture is a multi-dimensional, multi-actor and multi-level constellation that is in constant flux. Because peasant agriculture is multi-dimensional it is often theoretically represented in different, if not conflicting, ways. The different representations often focus on different sets of dimensions, which is inherent to scientific endeavour especially when trying to depict complex realities and this contributes to the existing confusion. Consequently, peasant studies faces the important challenge of developing more comprehensive and rigorous definitions of peasant farming that can dispel at least some of these ambiguities. The multi-actor nature of peasant agriculture brings heterogeneity and contestation: this reflects the repeated need to negotiate how farming is to be developed, how the benefits and costs are to be distributed and how peasant farming is translated into contrasting images and folk-concepts. The multi-level nature of peasant agriculture gives rise to a myriad of mechanisms for relating to the world economy, multiple processes of accumulation and centres of power. It also gives rise to the need for peasants themselves to create overarching institutions in order to link with the outside world, and to protect themselves from, often hostile, environments. These equilibrating institutions (Scott, 1976) may be formally or informally constituted and can include peasant communities, territorial cooperatives, nested markets, field laboratories, seed banks, new mechanisms for knowledge sharing, peasant movements and more. Peasant agriculture is in a state of permanent flux and is highly dynamic. It is a process through time (Shanin, 1990) and can develop in different directions. At some points, as I will show throughout this book, there might be forceful processes of re-peasantization and sometimes painful, processes of de-peasantization. Sometimes this can occur simultaneously in the same place.

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The dynamics of peasant agriculture partly stem from its internal characteristics (which I will describe in detail in the following chapters). They are also generated by changes in the politico-economic context. Peasants, wherever located, now face food empires that exert a multiple impact. The resulting contradictions are reshaping the world’s peasantries. At the same time they are being reshaped by changes at the level of everyday life (such as widespread access to mobile telephony and information technology). The way in which peasants once defined themselves was straightforward: ‘I work the land in order to live from the land’. Now, many peasants, both in the Global North and in the Global South ‘work elsewhere in order to be able, in the near future, to live from the land’. The immediacies of time and place have been torn apart: peasant life, more than ever is rife with complexities and apparent contradictions.

In short, peasant agriculture is a highly complex and contested reality, which is often difficult to understand. Nonetheless, it is also a reality that is alive and kicking, sturdy and persistent and re-emerging where it has previously disappeared. Above all, it offers much promise for the future and is of great benefit for mankind.

Peasant studies: a critique

There is a rich and varied tradition of peasant studies (well-documented and interesting overviews can be found in Bernstein and Byres, 2001; Sevilla Guzman, 2006; and more generally Buttel, 2001). Yet, despite its many accomplishments, I consider the output of this multifaceted tradition does not fully explain the contradictions, potentials, constraints and complexities surrounding peasantries today.

One can identify six shortcomings in the available literature. First, it separates the world into two parts and then applies different theories and concepts to each: one set of theories and concepts for the developed centre and one for the underdeveloped periphery. This gives rise to highly contrasting images: of different worlds inhabited by different people, a Global South swarming with peasants and a Global North that barely remembers them. The borderline between the two is that of being ‘developed’ or ‘underdeveloped’. In line with this the main body of peasant studies has presented peasants as a “hindrance to development” (see Byres, 1991); an obstacle to industrialization as “the route-way from backwardness” (Harriss, 1982). Thus, the peasantry was seen as omnipresent in the underdeveloped parts of the globe and these two characteristics were often taken as synonymous. As Ellis (1993: 3) wrote: “peasant populations occupy the margins of the modern world economy” (i...