Agrarian Political Economy

Henry Bernstein, University of London, London, UK; and China Agricultural University, Beijing, China
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Agrarian political economy in its current sense originated in the 1960s, although it has longer intellectual antecedents. It
can be defined as investigation of “the social relations and dynamics of production and reproduction, property and
power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary”. Its substantive research
and debates have centered on the class dynamics and gender dynamics of (1) precapitalist agrarian formations in
different parts of the world; (2) paths of agrarian change in transitions to capitalism in the now-developed countries; (3)
agrarian change in experiences of colonialism; and (4) subsequent processes of change in the moment of (state-led)
‘developmentalism’ following political independence and the current moment of market-driven (‘neoliberal’)
globalization.

Agrarian political economy in its contemporary usage origi-
nated in the 1960s. It is defined by The Journal of Agrarian
Change as investigation of “the social relations and dynamics of
production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian
formations and their processes of change, both historical and
contemporary”.
Its antecedents as a field of study are the classical political
economy of eighteenth century England, Scotland, and France,
centered on issues of agrarian capitalism according to David
McNally’s potent ‘reinterpretation’ (1983), and the scattered
writings of Marx and Engels on capitalist agriculture. Of
particular note among the latter is Marx’s account of ‘primitive
accumulation’: the process by which the conditions of capi-
talism were established first in the English countryside through
the dispossession of peasants (to become proletarians or wage
workers), the conversion of land to a commodity, and of
farming to market-oriented production, hence investment to
make profit (Marx, 1976). Other intellectual antecedents
available to ‘rediscovery’ by agrarian political economy also
included the great debates from the 1880s among “Russia’s
leading economists, statisticians, sociologists, and agricultural
experts.[who] provided the richest analytical literature we
have on the peasant economy of any country in the period
since the Industrial Revolution” (Thorner, 1966: xii), not least
Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964, first pub-
lished 1899) and Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy
(1966, first published 1925); Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian
Question (1988, the first full English translation of a book
published in 1899); as well as the work of earlier radical
intellectuals from Latin America and colonial Asia and Africa.
Agrarian political economy quickly became a lively, diverse,
and contentious field of study and debate across a wide terrain:
from the functioning of household farm production in
different places at different times (Bernstein, 2010) thru the
place of agriculture in different paths of (national) economic
development in modern history (Friedmann and McMichael,
1989; Byres, 1991, 1996) to its place in the formation and
development of a capitalist world economy (Wallerstein, 1974;
Friedmann, 1978, 1982; Schwartz, 2000). The diversity of the
field is, in various parts, an effect of (1) its interdisciplinary
character, encompassing important contributions from
Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Law, Political
Science, and Sociology; (2) the applications, and clashes, of
different paradigms within and across such disciplines; (3) the
wide range of its historical and contemporary concerns; and (4)
differences between scholars committed to the methods of
materialist (Marxist) political economy. Because of such
diversity of objects of study and approaches, historical periods,
and interpretations, it is possible only to select and illustrate
briefly some of the areas encompassed by agrarian political
economy in its dynamic recent career, with this review limited
to the anglophone academy.
A Founding Moment
One major stimulus, and an enduring preoccupation, was the
effort to understand better the problems and prospects of
economic and social development of poorer countries (only
recently independent of colonial rule in most of Asia and
Africa), in which “the peasant is a very essential factor of the
population, production and political power” as Engels (1970:
457) had remarked of France and Germany some 80 years
earlier.
A second and connected factor, in addition to its intrinsic
interest, was the commitment to exploring and testing the
possible contributions to such understanding of knowledge of
(1) precapitalist agrarian formations in different parts of the
world; (2) paths of agrarian change in transitions to capitalism
in the now-developed countries; and (3) the dynamics of
agrarian change in Latin American, Asian, and African experi-
ences of colonialism, and their legacies for subsequent
processes of development and underdevelopment (Bernstein
and Byres, 2001).
Key works in the ‘founding moment’ were Eric Wolf’s text-
book on Peasants (1966) and his Peasant Wars of the Twentieth
Century (1969); Barrington Moore Jr.’s The Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the
Modern World (1967); the first English translation of a major
work by the great Russian scholar A.V. Chayanov, The Theory of
Peasant Economy (1966); major historical studies of the Russian
peasantry before and following the Bolshevik revolution by

456 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.10110-2

Lewin (1968) and Shanin (1973); and the first of a series of
influential studies by James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the
Peasant (1976). Wolf, Barrington Moore Jr., and Scott pursued
new questions beyond the mostly European focus of ‘classic’
Marxism. Wolf’s work was informed by his studies of Mexico,
and Latin America and the Caribbean more widely, and his
book on peasant wars comprised case studies of Mexico, Rus-
sia, China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba. Barrington Moore’s
great comparative study of the centrality of agrarian class
struggle to different paths of state formation in the modern
world encompassed the ‘classic’ European instances of England
and France, plus the USA, and Japan, China, and India (further
informed by his interest in the historical trajectories of Prussia/
Germany and Russia/USSR). Scott’s main region of fieldwork is
Southeast Asia.
Wolf (1966) and Shanin (1973) were especially relevant to
consideration of peasant social structure, Barrington Moore
and Scott to peasants and politics (as was Wolf, 1969; Shanin,
1973), and Chayanov (1966) to the nature and logic of peasant
agriculture. The distinctiveness of Chayanov’s model consisted
in its combination of a claim for peasant economy as a general
(and generic) ‘type’ of economy, and staking that claim on
a marginalist analysis of the behavior of the peasant household
as a unitary farming enterprise, especially in terms of the
‘demographic cycle’ of generational reproduction.
What was missing from Chayanov’s model of peasant
economy, as from other forerunners of contemporary agrarian
political economy, was any consideration of gender relations
within farming households, and indeed how gender relations
affect who owns what (notably but not exclusively land), who
does what (divisions of labor within household farming), who
gets what (divisions of the fruits of labor), what they do with it
(various reproduction costs), and who decides such matters.
These kinds of issues, and the significance of very different
social forms of rural households and of the different ways in
which they manage production and reproduction, were
impressed on the attention of agrarian political economy by
the impact of new feminist scholarship in the social sciences
(Young et al., 1981; Kandiyoti, 1985; Agarwal, 1994; Razavi,
2003). ‘Gender-blind’ notions of the farm household,
whether as a unit of ‘utility maximization’ as in Chayanov or
established in other theoretical traditions (for example, petty
commodity production in Marx and Lenin), were no longer
tenable, and the gender as well as class differentiation of
farmers (and the interconnections of gender and class) was
gradually incorporated in agrarian political economy, if
unevenly so.
Important institutional expressions of the field of agrarian
political economy as it emerged and consolidated include,
notably, the ‘Peasants Seminar’ of the University of London
convened by Terence J. Byres from 1972 to 1989, which led to
the founding of the Journal of Peasant Studies in 1973 (Byres,
2001); the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University estab-
lished by James C. Scott in 1991; the founding of the Journal of
Agrarian Change in 2001; more recently the Initiatives in Critical
Agrarian Studies program at the Institute of Social Studies in The
Hague, the Netherlands, established by Saturnino M. Borras Jr.;
and the new journals Review of Agrarian Studies (from 2011)
and Agrarian South; Journal of Political Economy (from 2012)
based in India.
Agrarian Political Economy 457
Historical Explorations
Precapitalist Agrarian Formations
This can only be illustrated briefly from a vast literature on
agrarian civilizations before capitalism. Whether the character-
istics of European feudalism were found in other regions of the
world, and especially South Asia, was addressed in a collection
edited by Byres and Mukhia (1985), and also impacted on
debate of ‘tributary modes of production’ to characterize the
great agrarian civilizations of the East (Haldon, 1993; Banaji,
2010). Bray (1986) argued that the historic rice economies of
East and Southeast Asia suggest a model of development
of contemporary relevance very different from standard views of
‘modern’ agriculture derived from Western Europe and North
America, and centered on highly capitalized farming. Debate of
a transition to feudalism in Europe has been further stimulated
by the magnum opus of Wickham (2005), subject to critique by
Banaji (2010), also the author of a major materialist study of
agrarian change in late antiquity (Banaji, 2001).
Part of the interest of such works of scholarship is how they
employ key concepts and methods of political economy con-
cerning class analysis and state formation to investigate agrarian
pasts, and also how their findings bear on the conditions in which
agrarian capitalism emerged and developed – or failed to do so.
Transitions to Capitalism
Schematically, there are two approaches in Marxist and Marx-
isant debate of the origin of capitalism (both of which can
claim support from Marx’s writings). One locates it in the
formation of a ‘world system’ from the fifteenth or sixteenth
centuries. The other approach centers on the transition from
feudalism to capitalism in Northwest Europe from the four-
teenth century or so, with the search for the ‘prime mover’ in
the transition revisited in a seminal essay by Brenner (1976;
Aston and Philpin, 1985; Wood, 2002).
Brenner explained the initial emergence of capitalist
farming as a specific and conjunctural outcome of class struggle
between (feudal) lords and peasants in England in contrast to
France and Germany. Once established, however, capitalist
agriculture – with its competitive compulsions of ‘market
dependence’ – both paved the way for England’s subsequent
‘first industrial revolution’ in the late eighteenth century, and
generated systemic effects elsewhere. For Brenner, only
capitalism was able to generate “a process of self-sustaining
economic development characterized by rising labor
productivity in agriculture” that overcame two obstacles that
had confronted all previous agrarian civilizations: the long-
term tendency of population to outrun food supply and the
inability of urban population, and nonagricultural labor, to
grow beyond a highly limited proportion of total population
(Brenner, 2001: 171–172). Brenner’s theoretical approach
continues both to inspire other historical studies (e.g., Post
2011, on the agrarian origins of US capitalism) and to draw
trenchant criticism (e.g., Heller, 2011).
Colonial Experiences
The colonial projects of European countries, and their various
places, timings, impulses, and forms – in Latin America, Asia,
458 Agrarian Political Economy
and Africa from the late fifteenth to the twentieth centuries –
involved controlling and (re)organizing the labor of the
colonial subjects of agrarian societies (including importing
African labor to supply slave plantations in the Americas, and
indentured labor from South Asia and China for sugar
plantations around the world). This required intervening in
their institutions and practices of land allocation and use,
sometimes destroying them, sometimes modifying them. In
effect, the making of colonial economies involved the
breaking and remaking of precolonial modes of peasant
subsistence and of landlordism, rent, and tribute (in agrarian
class societies), with various effects, unintended as well as
intended.
This then is another vast and diverse historical terrain,
explored by agrarian political economy with respect to the
formation of new frontiers and forms of agriculture linked to
different phases, and mutations, of world markets that
supplied an industrializing Europe and North America. Key
foci of such research are (1) forms of agricultural production in
the colonies, and (2) the labor regimes they deployed. The
former ranged in scale from the haciendas of temperate Latin
America and the later settler farms of east, central, and southern
Africa and ‘industrial plantations’ of South and Southeast Asia,
and tropical Latin America, to reconfigurations of peasant
farming to produce crops for export and for new domestic
markets, and to supply labor to plantations, settler estates, and
mines. In some cases, indigenous landed or other economically
and politically powerful classes were able to establish profit-
able locations for themselves within the agrarian economies of
colonial capitalism. Various labor regimes deployed, and
sometimes combined, slavery, indentured, and other forms of
coerced labor (as noted), especially seasonal wage labor of
various degrees of ‘freedom’, and peasant labor both in
household farming and employed in other kinds of enterprise,
agricultural and nonagricultural like the regional migrant labor
system of the South African mines (Bernstein, 2010).
Much debate in agrarian political economy concerns the
precise social character and effects of farming shaped by colo-
nial rule, especially how and how much it became capitalist, or
represented various amalgams or ‘articulations’ of capitalist
and precapitalist elements, involving a set of issues that are
continuing concerns. These center on questions concerning the
‘persistence’ or ‘survival’ of peasant production and commu-
nity, and whether this can be explained as beneficial to capi-
talism in some way (e.g., by lowering costs of both agricultural
commodities and rural migrant labor) or by the resilience of
peasant ‘resistance’ to market integration (‘commodification’)
and the states that promoted it during colonialism and since.
Also much explored and debated is the question of class
differentiation of the peasantry, tabled by Lenin (1964) in late
nineteenth century Russia to extend, in effect, Marx’s account of
primitive accumulation in England and its peasant disposses-
sion through enclosure of land as private property. Lenin’s
model proposed a tendency to dissolution of the peasantry into
rich peasants engaged in expanded reproduction, accumulating
land and capital to become emergent capitalist farmers;
a diminishing number of middle peasants able to maintain
simple reproduction; and poor peasants unable to reproduce
themselves through their own farming, hence subject to
proletarianization, the condition of ‘free’ landless workers in
Marx’s ironic use of the term, that is, ‘freed’ from access to
means of production, hence free to work for wages or otherwise
starve. Interestingly, a prominent (non-Marxist) scholar of
colonialism, possibly influenced by agrarian political
economy, argued that classes of rich peasants/emergent capi-
talist farmers were key to the political settlement of indepen-
dence from colonial rule in much of Asia and Africa (Low,
1996).
Such issues carry forward to, and connect with, a third
central theme: the effects of the extremely diverse forms of
agrarian economy and producers created by varied colonial
experiences for the ambitions and projects of ‘national devel-
opment’ that marked the moment of political independence in
Asia and Africa from the 1940s, with echoes of the significantly
earlier period of independence in most of Latin America.
Development and Underdevelopment (1950s–70s)
The newly independent countries of Asia and Africa emerged
from colonialism still largely agrarian societies but now
committed to ‘national development’, as were most Latin
American countries which were generally more industrialized.
Modernizing agriculture was usually a central element of ideas
about ‘national development’, if often subordinated to the
desire for industrialization, seen as the principal economic
basis of prosperity, modernity, and sovereignty. Giving it
priority could mean substituting domestic grain production
with cheap wheat imports from the USA (Friedmann, 1990), or
‘postponing’ agricultural modernization until the development
of national industry could provide farmers with modern
inputs, the dominant view in India for the first 20 years of
independence before the ‘Green Revolution’ was launched.
During the peak period of ‘developmentalism’ – the pursuit
of state-led development – from the 1950s to 1970s, a wide
range of policy measures was adopted and applied by
governments in the South to ‘modernize’ their agriculture.
Agricultural policy was also used to try to resolve some of the
social tensions and contradictions inherited from their
colonial histories, no less in Latin America than in Asia and
Africa. Thus, for example, land reforms, of very different
kinds, were widespread in this period, as was government-
imposed resettlement of rural populations (a familiar
colonial practice), for example, in parts of Africa and
Southeast Asia. The ‘integrated rural development programs’
of the 1970s, a comprehensive ‘package’ of education and
health as well as economic services to the countryside, was
promoted especially strongly by the World Bank and USAID
(the US Agency for International Development), which some
interpreted as their response to the success of a peasant-based
and communist-led war of national liberation in Vietnam.
In this period, agricultural and more broadly rural devel-
opment policies exhibited a lot of institutional variety and
frequent ‘paradigm shifts’ or, more simply, changing fashions,
as they do today. Despite their variety, policies and programs
of modernization shared a core logic: promoting a more
productive agriculture based in deepening commodity rela-
tions, whether through ‘smallholder’ development or larger
scale farming, public and private. This was often pursued
by governments in the South in ‘partnership’ with the

World Bank, bilateral aid donors, notably the USA, Britain,
and France, and private agribusiness capital (national and
international), all of which supplied designs for
modernization.
‘More productive’ addresses the technical conditions of
farming, through improved varieties and cultivation methods,
and greater fertilizer use, together with ‘soft’ credit and tech-
nical advice to farmers (extension services). This was typically
done on a crop basis, whether for export crops or food crops,
most famously the Green Revolution from the 1960s and its
high yielding variety (HYV) seeds of the ‘big three’ grains of
wheat, rice, and corn (or maize, the original ‘Green Revolution’
crop in the USA). The ‘package’ combined HYV seeds with
fertilizers, requiring substantial irrigation to produce larger
harvests.
‘Deepening commodity relations’ involves greater integra-
tion of farmers in markets, in which they specialize in
producing particular commodities for sale, as well as buying
and using greater quantities of means of production (‘modern’
inputs) and means of consumption, which often include food.
It is difficult to generalize about the effects of agricultural
modernization efforts during the moment of ‘devel-
opmentalism’, because of the variety of policy measures, of
their technical and institutional ‘packages’ and of government
capacities in delivering them; and the even greater variety of
ecological conditions and types of farming to which they were
applied. In fact, assessing the impact of policies – a sizable
profession in itself – is always challenging, because
agricultural ‘performance’ is affected by many other factors
too, from weather to the effects of macroeconomic policies
(for example, and notably, concerning exchange rates of
currencies and interest rates), to the vagaries of markets and
prices, locally and internationally.
Agrarian political economy engaged with, and contributed
to, the analysis of agrarian change and its policy debates in the
moment of ‘developmentalism’. This partly drew from research
on precapitalist agrarian formations in the South, paths of
agrarian transition in now-developed countries, and colonial
experiences of agrarian change and policies to promote it, all of
which could be relevant to consideration whether capitalist
agrarian transition was occurring and, if so, whether it was
complete. Debate of agrarian change in the early decades of
independence in Asia and Africa also highlighted a central
tension between, on one side, those for whom modernization
was a necessary component of agricultural growth, and its role
in economic development more widely, requiring “peasant
elimination” (Kitching, 2001) and, on the other side, “taking
the part of peasants”, in Williams’ succinct expression (1976).
This resonates a tradition of agrarian populism as long as the
histories of capitalist agriculture and industrialization
(Kitching, 1982). Agrarian populism declares the virtues of
peasant or family farmers and identifies with their struggles
against those who threaten their reproduction and well-being,
from merchants and banks, capitalist landed property, agrarian
capital and agribusiness, to projects of state-led ‘national
development’ centered on industrialization, in all their
capitalist, nationalist, and socialist variants, of which the
Soviet collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s was
the most potent landmark. Its modern versions draw on the
legacy of Chayanov, himself a victim of Stalin’s purges,
Agrarian Political Economy 459
whose vision of a future ‘peasant utopia’ combined
household farming with cooperation to achieve economies of
scale (Bernstein, 2009, and references therein).
This historic, indeed almost constitutive, tension in agrarian
political economy is expressed in debates over, for example, the
character and effects of land reforms that claim to redistribute
‘land to the tiller’ (e.g., de Janvry, 1981; Byres, 2004); the
political obstacles to taxation of capitalist farmers and rich
peasants to generate an accumulation fund for industrializa-
tion (‘rural bias’ or at least class bias; e.g., Mitra, 1977); and in
opposition to the latter the argument of ‘urban bias’ as the
principal barrier to stronger growth by smallholder farmers,
hence overcoming rural poverty (Lipton, 1977). In turn this
was criticized as a (neo)populist ‘myth’ by Byres (1979). These
kinds of questions, and attendant disagreements, carried over,
and have intensified if anything, as the moment of state-led
‘developmentalism’ gave way to the ‘neoliberalism’ of
market-driven doctrines and practices of development in the
context of globalization since the 1970s (see below).
Anti-Imperialism and Transitions to Socialism
Two of the defining global moments of the 1960s and early
1970s, the founding moment of contemporary agrarian polit-
ical economy, were the Vietnamese war of national liberation
(the stimulus to Wolf, 1969) and the ‘Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution’ and its aftermath in China.
Are there socialist alternatives to capitalist agriculture
(including the contributions of agriculture to industrializa-
tion)? Curiously, while Russia from the last quarter of the
nineteenth century to Stalin’s sudden and dramatic collectivi-
zation of peasants remains a topic of intense interest in agrarian
political economy, it has had little to say about the long period
of Soviet agriculture from the 1930s to early 1990s. While there
was once a keen interest in China’s communes as an ‘alterna-
tive’ to both capitalism and Soviet state socialism, this withered
with the dismantling of the communes from the 1970s. Most
work on China since then has come from agricultural
economics and anthropology rather than from agrarian polit-
ical economy. Recent exceptions include characterizations of
current agrarian change in China as “agrarian capitalism with
Chinese characteristics” (Zhang and Donaldson, 2008) and
“capitalization without proletarianization” (Huang et al.,
2012).
Globalization and Development (1970s Onward)
This is another immensely wide-ranging area of research and
both academic and public debate, which often contains
impassioned positions that are far ahead of empirical
knowledge and its judicious assessment. A list of highly
topical issues concerning globalization and agrarian change
includes:
1. trade liberalization, shifts in global trade patterns of agri-
cultural commodities and associated battles within and
around the World Trade Organization (WTO);
2. the effects on world market prices, especially for food, of
futures trading in agricultural commodities, that is,
460 Agrarian Political Economy
speculation spurred by financial firms (banks, hedge
funds, etc.);
3. the removal of subsidies and other forms of support to
small farmers in the South as ‘austerity’ measures required
by neoliberalism, together with reduction of government
and aid budgets for most farming in the South;
4. the increasing concentration of global corporations in
both agricultural input and output industries, marked by
mergers and acquisitions and the economic power of fewer
corporations commanding larger market shares;
5. new organizational technologies deployed by these
corporations along commodity chains from farming thru
processing and manufacturing to retail distribution, e.g.,
the ‘supermarket revolution’ in the global sourcing of food
and market shares of food sales, now extending to some
parts of the South;
6. the combination of these organizational technologies with
corporate economic power to shape and constrain the
‘choices’ of farmers and consumers;
7. the push by corporations to patent intellectual property
rights in genetic plant material, under the provisions of
WTO on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights, and what its critics term ‘biopiracy’;
8. the technical frontier of engineering plant and animal
genetic material (GMOs or genetically modified organ-
isms) that, together with specialized monoculture,
contributes to the loss of biodiversity;
9. the profit frontier of biofuel production, dominated by
agribusiness corporations supported by public subsidies in
the USA and Europe, and its effects for world grain
production for human consumption, as well as for so-
called land grabbing in the South by corporations, finan-
cial firms, and the sovereign wealth funds of particular
countries (in the Gulf, China, and elsewhere), an example
of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003) as, in
effect a new wave of ‘primitive accumulation’;
10. the health consequences, including rising levels of toxic
chemicals in ‘industrially’ grown and processed foods,
nutritional deficiencies of ‘fast food’, the growth of obesity
and related illness together with continuing hunger and
malnutrition in parts of the South;
11. the environmental costs of all the above, including levels
of energy use and their carbon emissions, in the
continuing ‘industrialization’ of food farming, processing,
and sales; for example, the distances over which food is
trucked, shipped, and air-freighted from producer to
consumer; and
12. connected issues of the sustainability or otherwise of the
current global food system and its continued growth.
How do these topical concerns connect with, or depart from,
the concerns of the ‘classic’ agrarian question (in Kautsky’s term,
1988) concerning the origins of capitalism and its subsequent
spread, principally in Western and Eastern Europe? While
modern agrarian political economy extended the geographical
and historical scope of its research, as noted, in investigating
agrarian change in the once colonial and now-independent
countries of the South it initially followed the model of the
‘classics’. This usually implied an ‘internalist’ focus on the growth
(or ‘blocking’) of agrarian capitalism (Bernstein, 1996) in the
countrysides and rural class structures of individual countries:
what was happening with agricultural production? Was agrarian
capitalism developing? How, and how much? Was agriculture
contributing to industrialization or not? These are the kinds of
questions that informed Lenin’s (1964) study of Russia in the
late nineteenth century, and that were transposed, for example,
to India (see the Indian ‘modes of production’ debate of the
1960s and 1970s collected in Patnaik, 1990). Ironically, while
colonialism – and the world economy of which it was part –
provided an essential international dimension to arguments of
the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in the South,
including ‘exploitation’ of its peasantries, with political
independence attention was often much more focused on the
social landscapes ‘internal’ to its rural areas.
A ‘world system’ approach at least signaled the importance
of the international dimension and its effects for farming and
farmers in the South (and indeed the North). Its most signifi-
cant expression is Friedmann’s theorization of ‘international
food regimes’ (IFRs) and her analysis of the two principal IFRs
to date in the history of modern world capitalism: the first from
the 1870s to1914, and the second from the 1940s to 1970s,
with debate whether a third IFR has emerged in the context of
globalization since the 1970s. Friedmann and McMichael
(1989) outlined a global division of labor in agricultural
production and trade that they argue was established from the
last third of the nineteenth century.
If ‘internalist’ and ‘world system’ perspectives ran in parallel
for some decades it seems more difficult to keep them separate
now with the reshaping of the world agricultural and food
economy in the period of globalization, indicated by the
themes listed above and the challenges they present to agrarian
political economy in the second decade of the twenty-first
century.
Corporate Power and Technology
Of the list of 12 themes above, no fewer than seven directly
concern corporate agribusiness (the first, and fourth to ninth)
and the other themes are often connected by its critics with
global corporate power and its technologies and business
strategies – material, organizational, and symbolic (e.g.,
branding of food commodities). The dangers of corporate
power are also closely associated with growing awareness of,
and concern with, environmental sustainability as well as
social justice.
Ecology
Environmental sustainability has become a major concern in
recent decades, generating new fields of ecological economics
and political ecology. The former is centered on ‘the unavoidable
clash’ between economy, not least the industrialization of
farming, and the environment (Martinez-Alier, 2002: ix). This
has had a major impact on agrarian political economy, if
unevenly so (as in the case of feminist scholarship earlier, noted
above). A major landmark in this respect is the remarkable
project of Jason W. Moore to construct a materialist theory and
history of capitalism as ‘world ecology’ (e.g., Moore, 2010).

The idea of the industrialization of farming draws attention
to the growing energy use of highly modernized agriculture
(mechanization and ‘chemicalization’) and its “accelerating
biophysical contradictions” (Weiss, 2010). For Martinez-Alier
(2002), as for many others, the solution is to be sought
through political ecology: study of the environmentally more
friendly, energy ‘efficient’, practices of small-scale farmers
(albeit at much lower levels of labor productivity). The
‘environmentalism of the poor’ is proposed as the alternative
to the destructive technologies and practices of large-scale,
highly capitalized agriculture – comprising food (and
biofuel) processing and distribution as well as farming –
characteristic of North America, much of Western Europe,
Australia, and large agricultural exporters in the South like
Argentina and Brazil.
In short, in present circumstances of globalization and its
discontents, not least the concern with environmental
sustainability, the long-standing tension between advocates of
large- and small-scale farming (‘taking the part of peasants’) is
as pertinent as ever and as highly charged as in the past.
Contributions to this ongoing debate include arguments for
taking an ‘actor’s perspective’ to understand and appreciate
better the beliefs and practices of small farmers (Long, 2001),
and that ‘new peasantries’ are emerging, in Europe as well as
in the South, who can successfully negotiate their integration
with markets and choices of technology from a commitment
to ‘autonomy’ (van der Ploeg, 2008).
Fates of the ‘Peasant’/Small Farmer (Once More)
All this suggests that for champions of ‘new peasantries’, small
farmers have not been ‘eliminated’ by global capitalism but can
continue to adapt and to thrive, if typically in constrained
circumstances, and, as noted, that they provide the key to any
prospects of ‘agrarian futures’ that are sustainable environ-
mentally as well as more socially just. Moreover, these kinds of
claims inform the politics of a range of new agrarian social
movements that mobilize regionally, nationally, and in several
cases transnationally, of which the best-known example is La
Vía Campesina (‘the peasant way’), which originated in Central
America (Borras et al., 2008).
Critics suggest that such claims continue to embody
a romantic (populist) vision, that (1) their use of a unitary
category of ‘small farmers’/‘peasants’ obscures profound class
and gender differentiation and inequality in the countryside;
(2) many of those described as ‘small farmers’ in fact gain most
of their livelihood from wage work, often as migrants (e.g.,
60% plus of rural people in India are unable to reproduce
themselves from their own farming); (3) this reinforces the
need to examine agrarian change in the South today in terms of
key rural–urban linkages, and agricultural–industrial linkages
too (as in the North); (4) that small farmers using relatively
simple technologies are unable to feed the rest of the world’s
population, now so much larger than in past eras of ‘peasant’
societies and now more than 50% urban.
See also: Agriculture, Economics of; Agroecology and
Agricultural Change; Alternative Food Movements; Colonialism,
Agrarian Political Economy 461
Anthropology of; Colonization and Colonialism, History of;
Food Security and ‘Green Revolution’; Imperialism, History of;
Peasantry in the Twenty-First Century; Peasants and Rural
Societies in History (Agricultural History); Peasants in
Anthropology; Rural Sociology; Sustainable Agriculture; World
Systems Theory.
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Relevant Websites
http://www.sagepub.in/browse/journal.asp?Journalid¼93&Subject_Name¼
&SubSubjectName¼&mode¼1 – Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.
http://www.future-agricultures.org/ – Future Agriculture Consortium.
http://www.iss.nl/research/networks_and_projects/critical_agrarian_studies_icas/ –
Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies, Institute of social studies, The Hague.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1471–0366/issues – Journal of
Agrarian Change.
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjps20/current – Journal of Peasant Studies.
http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/real/ashome.html – Program in Agrarian Studies,
Yale University.
http://www.ras.org.in/ – Review of Agrarian Studies.