front cover of Civic Agriculture
Civic Agriculture
Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community
Thomas A. Lyson
University Press of New England, 2004
While the American agricultural and food systems follow a decades-old path of industrialization and globalization, a counter trend has appeared toward localizing some agricultural and food production. Thomas A. Lyson, a scholar-practitioner in the field of community-based food systems, calls this rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production civic agriculture because these activities are tightly linked to a community’s social and economic development. Civic agriculture embraces innovative ways to produce, process, and distribute food, and it represents a sustainable alternative to the socially, economically, and environmentally destructive practices associated with conventional large-scale agriculture. Farmers’ markets, community gardens, and community-supported agriculture are all forms of civic agriculture. Lyson describes how, in the course of a hundred years, a small-scale, diversified system of farming became an industrialized system of production and also how this industrialized system has gone global. He argues that farming in the United States was modernized by employing the same techniques and strategies that transformed the manufacturing sector from a system of craft production to one of mass production. Viewing agriculture as just another industrial sector led to transformations in both the production and the processing of food. As small farmers and food processors were forced to expand, merge with larger operations, or go out of business, they became increasingly disconnected from the surrounding communities. Lyson enumerates the shortcomings of the current agriculture and food systems as they relate to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. He then introduces the concept of community problem solving and offers empirical evidence and concrete examples to show that a re-localization of the food production system is underway.
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front cover of Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change
Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change
Experiences from Rural Latin America
Edited by Marcela Vásquez-León, Brian J. Burke, and Timothy J. Finan
University of Arizona Press

Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition.

The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities.

The stories in Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment.

Contributors:


Luis Barros
Brian J. Burke
Charles Cox
Luis Alberto Cuéllar Gómez
Miguel Ricardo Dávila Ladrón de Guevara
Elisa Echagüe
Timothy J. Finan
Andrés González Aguilera
Sonia Carolina López Cerón
Joana Laura Marinho Nogueira
João Nicédio Alves Nogueira
Jessica Piekielek
María Isabel Ramírez Anaya
Rodrigo F. Rentería-Valencia
Lilliana Andrea Ruiz Marín
Marcela Vásquez-León

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front cover of The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions
A Comparative Study of Post-Socialist Hungary and Bulgaria
Mieke Meurs
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions studies the unexpectedly slow and uneven growth of private agriculture in postsocialist East-Central Europe. Comparing developments in Hungary and Bulgaria, Mieke Meurs offers an explanation for this slow growth and examines its implications for efficiency and income distribution in postsocialist agriculture.
With the collapse of the state socialist regimes in East-Central Europe, it was widely expected that collectivized agriculture would quickly be remade in the glowing image of China--a patchwork of small, privately run farms yielding rapid increases in output and incomes. However, the European experience has been quite different; while socialist collective farms have disappeared, collective forms of organization have persisted, and private farming has been slow to emerge. Meurs argues that an understanding of the causes of the slow emergence of private farming is essential to effective policy intervention in agriculture. This book contributes to such an understanding through analyzing variations in farm organization and rural market development and comparing agricultural restructuring in Hungary and Bulgaria.
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions is unique in its combination of original survey data, published data on land use, and published historical data. It also tests two institutionalist explanations for the pace and direction of change in agricultural organization. This book will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, scholars working in the area of rural development in emerging countries, and anyone with an interest in transitional economics.
Mieke Meurs is Associate Professor of Economics, American University.
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front cover of Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru
Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru
Edited by Norman Long and Bryan R. Roberts
University of Texas Press, 1978

This book brings together the research into regional development and social change carried out in highland Peru by a team of British and Latin American social anthropologists and sociologists. The area studied—the Mantaro Valley of central Peru—is one of the most densely populated and economically differentiated of highland zones; it is also notable for its community-based forms of cooperation and its high level of peasant political activity.

The book presents a series of case studies that examine cooperative forms of organization in relation to developments in the regional economy and to changes in national policy. The analysis attempts to avoid interpreting local processes merely as responses to externally initiated change. It stresses instead the need to consider the interplay of local and national forces, because local groups and processes themselves affect the pattern of regional and national development. The case studies cover a range of political and economic topics, from peasant movements to the achievements and shortcomings of government-sponsored agricultural and manufacturing cooperatives. The concluding chapter, by the editors, explores the theoretical implications of these studies.

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front cover of Persistent Progressives
Persistent Progressives
The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union
John F. Freeman
University Press of Colorado, 2015
Persistent Progressives tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union’s evolution from an early movement against monopolists and wholesalers to a regional trailblazer for agriculture ideologies built on social democracy, the family farmer, and cooperative enterprises. As a continuing advocate for saving the family farm, the Farmers Union legacy provides a unique window into the transformation of the agriculture and rural communities in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Using data spanning decades, author John Freeman covers the founding of the RMFU in 1907 until the present, demonstrating how members continually sought to control the means of production and marketing by forming cooperatives, providing consumer services, and engaging in politics. Powering this evolution was a group of “practical idealists”—the Farmers Union leaders and titular persistent progressives who shaped the organization’s growth and expansion. Initiated by Jim Patton, who brought the organization out of its oppositional roots and into its cooperative advocacy, the RMFU passed to John Stencel and then David Carter, joining hands with agricultural conservationists and small organic producers along the way to carry the torch for progressive agrarianism in today’s urbanized world. Shaken but undeterred by some notable failures, its leadership remains convinced of the efficacy of cooperatives as a means to achieve justice for all.

Discussing the broader social, economic, political, and environmental issues related to farming, ranching, and urbanization, Persistent Progressives seamlessly blends regional history with ongoing issues of agricultural and economic development.
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front cover of Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
Enrique Mayer
Duke University Press, 2009
Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas.

Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.

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front cover of Where the Dove Calls
Where the Dove Calls
The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1988
Thomas Sheridan's study of the municipio of Cucurpe, Sonora, offers new insight into the ability of peasants to respond to ecological and political change. In order to survive as small rancher-farmers, the Cucurpeños battle aridity and one another in a society characterized by sharp economic inequality and long-standing conflict over the distribution of land and water.

Sheridan has written an ethnography of resource control, one that weds the approaches of political economy and cultural ecology in order to focus upon both the external linkages and internal adaptations that shape three peasant corporate communities. He examines the ecological and economic constraints which scarce and necessary resources place upon households in Cucurpe, and then investigates why many such households have formed corporate communities to insure their access to resources beyond their control. Finally, he identifies the class differences that exist within the corporate communities as well as between members of those organizations and the private ranchers who surround them.

Where the Dove Calls (the meaning of "Cucurpe" in the language of the Opata Indians), an important contribution to peasant studies, reveals the household as the basic unit of Cucurpe society. By viewing Cucurpe's corporate communities as organizations of fiercely independent domestic units rather than as expressions of communal solidarity, Sheridan shows that peasants are among the exploiters as well as the exploited. Cucurpe¤os struggle to maintain the autonomy of their households even as they join together to protect corporate grazing lands and irrigation water. Any attempt to weaken or destroy that independence is met with opposition that ranges from passive resistance to violence.
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