Peasant Poverty and Persistence in the Twenty-First Century: Theories, Debates, Realities and Policies (International Studies in Poverty Research)

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. First Part: Introducing the book; Foreword; 1. Persistence of peasantry: a problem for theory or history?; 2. Abstract and concrete labour; 3. Peasant labour; Conclusion; References; Introduction; 1. The origins and contents of this book; 2. On the definition of poverty and the low reliability of rural poverty data; 3. Situating this volume in the history of peasant studies; 4. Conceptualising the peasantry or the 'awkward class'; 5. Contributions of the authors; Notes 8. Obstacles to capitalist agriculture: the Mann-Dickinson thesis9. Marx and his vision of agriculture; 10. Marx's theory of value disregards discontinuous labour processes; 11. Towards a valid theory of value for discontinuous work processes; 12. Towards a general theory of value; 13. Subsidies and poverty in peasant economies; Notes; References; 2. Rethinking rustic issues: contributions to a theory of contemporary peasantry; 1. Introduction; 2. Peasants and technology: creating the milpa (maize mixed field); 3. Peasants and economy: the return of differential rent 4. The place of peasants in the development model: 'bimodal agriculture' again?5. The peasant in his labyrinth: a polemic; Notes; References; 3. From field to fork: labour power, its reproduction, and the persistence of peasant poverty; 1. Introduction; 2. Problems with Boltvinik's analysis of peasant poverty; 3. The production and reproduction of labour power; 4. The invisibility of domestic labour in theory and practice; 5. Women and global development; 6. Impure capitalism and its peculiar forms of production; 7. The informal sector and global poverty 8. Farm subsidies: a perishable, no longer ripe idea9. What is to be done?; Notes; References; 4. Baroque modernity and peasant poverty in the twenty-first century; 1. Epochal crisis of capitalism and peasant poverty; 2. The controversy over peasant poverty within capitalism; 3. The specific formal subsumption of agricultural labour by capital, and seasonal time wages; 4. Cynical or bruta An innovative study of the ways in which peasants across the global South are persisting and resisting in the face of neoliberal capitalism and environmental degradation.