Review

Reviewed Work(s): The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an
Era of Empire and Globalization by Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg
Review by: Marc Edelman
Source: Human Ecology, Vol. 39, No. 1, Studies of the Subak: New Directions, New
Challenges (FEBRUARY 2011), pp. 111-113
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41474589
Accessed: 12-09-2016 07:18 UTC

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Hum Ecol (2011) 39:111-113
DOI 1 0. 1 007/s 1 0745-0 1 0-9372-9

Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe: The New Peasantries: Struggles

for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire
and Globalization
London and Sterling, VA: EARTHSCAN, 2009. xx + 356 pp., maps, photographs, tables

Marc Edelman

Published online: 12 January 2011

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

In the preface to this innovative, theoretically rich and that shape the contemporary countryside: the
processes
industrialization of agriculture; repeasantization or the
provocative new book, Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg remarks
that "much attention was given to the peasantry during theof non-peasants or former peasants into "defensive"
retreat
grand transformations of the last two centuries, and
ormany
"autonomous" peasant-like forms of production oriented
of the resulting theories centred on the peasant as an
significantly around subsistence; and "deactivation," which
obstacle to change and, thus, as a social figure thatrefers
shouldto the "containment" or breakdown of any of the
threeatmain modes of agriculture and its disappearance or
disappear or be actively removed" (xiii-xiv). A professor
Wageningen University in The Netherlands, onepartial
of theor complete transformation into one of the other
modes.
foremost centers worldwide of critical agrarian studies, Van
The
der Ploeg contrasts "the manufactured invisibility" of"peasant condition" or "principle," as Van der
Ploeg
peasants with the their striking "omnipresence" - there understands it, consists of various interrelated
are
elements
now more peasants than ever before in history and they still that permit survival in a hostile environment;
constitute some two-fifths of humanity. these include a "self-controlled resource base," "co-
The argument of The New Peasantries is straightfor- production" or interaction between humans and nature,
ward, even though the exposition is complex and at cooperative
times a relations that allow peasants to distance
bit convoluted (the copious flow charts often help tothemselves
clarify from monetary relations and market
the sometimes prolix prose, though in a number of exchange,
them - and an ongoing "struggle for autonomy" or
"room
as in parts of the text - it's easier to see the trees than for maneuver" that reduces dependency and aligns
the
farming "with the interests and prospects of the...
forest). For heuristic purposes Van der Ploeg distinguishes
peasant, entrepreneurial and large-scale corporate or producers"
capi- (32). He is appropriately appreciative of the
talist modes of agriculture. The boundaries between these
tremendous heterogeneity of peasant farming, noting that
three ideal types are, he acknowledges, blurry,"the since
big divide between capitalist agriculture (large scale,
extensive) versus peasant farming (small scale, intensive)
peasants increasingly engage in market-oriented production
and entrepreneurial farmers, if they succeed, do so in is repeated
large - in a miniaturized way - within peasant
measure through expanding the scale of their operations farming itself' (125).
and assuming corporate forms. He points to threeThree key longitudinal case studies undergird Van der
Ploeg 's analysis, one in Catacaos on the northern
coastal plain of Peru, another in Parma, Italy, where
M. Edelman (El) Parmalat milk and parmigiano-reggiano cheese are
Hunter College and the Graduate Center,
produced, and a third in the Frisian Woodlands of The
City University of New York,
New York, NY, USA Netherlands. In the Peruvian case, the 1970s agrarian
e-mail: medelman@hunter.cuny.edu reform divided large cotton plantations into cooperative

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 112 Hum Ecol (2011) 39:111-113

farms, resulting in
hectares - a large dramatically
extension in the intensively cultivated
landholding, growth
Dutch countryside. in the are
expansion of Van der Ploeg is one a small number ofrising
irrigation, contempo- in
"an impressive rary process of
researchers who, like this reviewer labour-d
(Edelman 1999,
(60). Community 205-207),organization
have called attention to processes of repeasan- perm
of water, credit, tization, which he suggests "is, in essence,and
inputs a modern mach
theless, since the mid-1990s the state divided the expression of the fight for autonomy and survival in a
cooperatives into individually owned parcels and dis-context of deprivation and dependency " (7, original
banded the agrarian development bank. These measures italics). His arguments about repeasantization are devel-
led to a "repeasantization" characterized by increasedoped at much greater length and with more detail and
efforts to maintain autonomy in the face of the market,empirical data than those of any other scholar who has
to augment non-money forms of obtaining inputs and addressed this phenomenon. In Europe, in particular, he
labor, and to increase both subsistence production andmaintains that repeasantization is "massive and wide-
non-farm income. spread" (178), a "far-reaching shift" (155) that combines
Van der Ploeg's Parma study is the most remarkable "old" activities (e.g., milking cows, growing vegetables)
of the three cases, and the most persuasive as regards his with new ones (e.g., direct marketing, landscape man-
argument that "Empire" - incarnated here by the Parmalat agement, on-farm processing). Importantly, he links this
corporation - never produces value but simply reorgan- part of his analysis to the much more widely discussed
izes production processes in order to appropriate value phenomenon of "pluriactivity," sometimes also termed
produced by others. Concretely, he describes how Parma "the new rurality" (Kay 2008). But in contrast to the
dairy farmers, who historically produced milk for cheese many other scholars of agrarian change who suggest that
and only received payment after the cheese had aged for pluriactivity is a sign of the disappearance of the
18 months, assented to providing "consumption milk" to peasantry, Van der Ploeg indicates that it is frequently
Parmalat and to receiving payment after 180 days, an associated with wellbeing and with efforts to generate
arrangement that would have been unacceptable to dairy non-farm income for investment in farming. Similarly, he
farmers anywhere else in Europe. This delayed payment argues that repeasantization could be "a politically and
system gave Parmalat a huge fund of working capital - economically appropriate way out of underdevelopment
really others' capital. Van der Ploeg details how Parmalat in many developing world countries" (54). Frequently, it
built a major world food conglomerate in large part involves minimizing monetary costs and, in a reprise of
through creative financing schemes and impression age-old peasant practices, it is also associated with crop
management that allowed it to garner increased market diversification that reduces economic and environmental
share and attract investors, fueling a speculative bubble risks. Multifunctional farms that emerge from processes
that eventually burst. Probably the most shocking piece of repeasantization, Van der Ploeg suggests, also generate
of the story is how following Parmalat's crash, the new networks that thicken social capital and deepen the
corporation reemerged with a product called " latte fresco development process.
blu " ("blue milk") engineered from low-quality Polish and The only significant disappointment in this otherwise
Ukrainian milk, which it then represented as high quality fine work is the author's constant invocation of "Empire" as
fresh milk and sold at a high profit margin in the Italian a catchall category with immense agentive power that
market. explains everything from powerful producers appropriating
The Netherlands case study reports on a striking irrigation water and land to their construction of barbed
process of "peasant-driven rural development" that began wire fences to the Dutch state's regulations about manure.
with an inventory of local assets (a manure surplus, Enlarging on the analysis in Hardt and Negri's (2000)
abundant forest) and led to the introduction new small- influential but turgid tome Empire , Van der Ploeg maintains
scale bio-waste energy generation technologies. This that for "Empire" capital is relatively unimportant, since its
permitted the study village to become a supplier of bio- main objective is to reorganize production processes and
gas, heat, and electricity to local and national networks. seize existing or potential wealth "according to its own
These new sources of livelihood were, however, inte- logic" (71). This "ordering principle" (262) of "Empire"
grally connected to farming and served to bolster and somehow reshapes social relations, economies and land-
sustain the autonomy of rural households. Van der Ploeg scapes. The problem with this, as with all overly capacious
also provides a very useful account of efforts to "scale categories, is that it includes too much and explains too
up" the autonomy of the peasant household via the little. It renders the complexity and the contingency of
formation of territorial cooperatives among some 900 actually existing social relations obscure or even invisible
members operating in an area of approximately 50,000 and thus unavailable for political analysis and action. Even

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HumEcol (2011) 39:111-113 113

so, Van der References

Ploeg's discussion of re
richly detailed catalog of the dive
gems that the peasants of the early
Edelman, M. (1999). Peasants against globalization: rural social
employ to increasemovements in Costa Rica. Stanford University Press, Stanford,of
their odds s
in the Calif.
countryside. Few, if any, oth
agrarian Hardt, M., and Negri,
studies A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press,
tradition have
Cambridge, Mass.
ranging and convincing analysis
Kay, Cristobal. 2008. Reflections on Latin American rural studies in the
trends affecting contemporary
neoliberal globalization period: a new rurality? Development & pea
and developing worlds.
Change 39, no. 6 (November): 915-943.

Springer

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