Full Description
Peasants are a majority of the world's poor. Despite this, there has been little effort to bridge the fields of peasant and poverty studies. Peasant Poverty and Persistence in the Twenty-first Century provides a much-needed critical perspective linking three central questions: Why has peasantry, unlike other areas of non-capitalist production, persisted? Why are the vast majority of peasants poor? And how are these two questions related?
Interweaving contributions from various disciplines, the book provides a range of responses, offering new theoretical, historical and policy perspectives on this peasant 'world drama'. Scholars from both South and North argue that, in order to find the policy paths required to overcome peasants' misery, we need a seismic transformation in social thought, to which they make important contributions. They are convinced that we must build upon the peasant economy's advantages over agricultural capitalism in meeting the challenges of feeding the growing world population while sustaining the environment.
Structured to encourage debate among authors and mutual learning, Peasant Poverty and Persistence takes the reader on an intellectual journey toward understanding the peasantry.
Contents
Part I: Introducing the Book
Foreword by Meghnad Desai
Introduction - Julio Boltvinik and Susan Archer Mann
Part II: Papers
Session I: Theoretical Perspectives on Peasant Poverty and Persistence
1. Poverty and Persistence of the Peasantry. Background Paper - Julio Boltvinik
2. Rethinking Rustic Issues. Contributions to a Theory of Contemporary Peasantry - Armando Bartra
3. From Field to Fork: Labour Power, its Reproduction, and the Persistence of Peasant Poverty - Gordon Welty, Susan Mann, James Dickinson and Emily Blumenfeld
4. Baroque Modernity and Peasant Poverty in the Twenty-first Century - Luis Arizmendi
Session II: Historical and Empirical Approaches
5. Agriculture/industry, Rural/urban, Peasants/workers: Some Reflections on Poverty, Persistence and Change - Henry Bernstein
6. Employment and Rural Poverty in Mexico - Araceli Damián and Edith Pacheco
Session III: Environment, Food Crisis and Peasants
7. From the Persistence of the Peasantry in Capitalism to the Environmentalism of Indigenous Peoples and the Sustainability of Life - Enrique Leff
8. South American Peasants and Poor Farmers Facing Global Environmental Change: A Development Dilemma - Elma Montaña
9. Financialisation of the Food Sector and Peasant's Persistence - Kostas Vergopoulos
Session IV: Policy, Self-reliance and Peasant Poverty
10. The Rise and Fall of the Agrarian Welfare State: Peasants, Globalisation, and the Privatisation of Development - Farshad A. Araghi
11. Overcoming Rural Poverty from the Bottom Up - David Barkin and Blanca Lemus
Part III: Closing the Book
12. Dialogues and Debates on Peasant Poverty and Persistence: Around the Background Paper and Beyond - Julio Boltvinik
