The smallholder farmer: The role of social factors in explaining rural continuity in a changing world

Abstract

Smallholders maintain a tenacious grip of their lands in the rural global South despite processes of capitalisation and market reform. This is historically and theoretically surprising. In explaining this juxtaposition of resilience in the context of rural transformation, we use our combined experiences over several decades of rural development research in 13 countries across Africa, Asia and

Latin America to make the case for the social dimensions of smallholder life to explain this surprising continuity in the contemporary agrarian world. How and why smallholder farms and farming persist, what this means for theorisations of agrarian change, and implications for policy making are the concerns of this paper.

We focus on the ‘social’ factors – broadly defined – that underpin the continuing salience and value of land, the countryside, and farming across the rural global South. We are not the first to note and explore these issues individually. Our paper’s contribution lies in the consolidation and structuring of insights from this earlier literature, including our own findings, into five distinct but interwoven themes: (i) the rural as a retreat or redoubt during times of crisis; (ii) the value of land beyond its economic contribution to livelihoods; (iii) the continuing role and significance of subsistence agricultural production in households that, in other respects, seem thoroughly commoditized; (iv) the place of the rural as a site of – and for –

reproductive labour and care; and (v) rural areas as desirable places to live and, in particular, to raise children.

We use these themes to make a case for the power of the social - not as exceptional or unusual but as normal in the shaping of the rural and, by implication, also the urban. We argue that the rural functions and looks the way it does due to these social factors. Moreover, the power of the social importantly crosscuts a variety of contexts and conditions. In their detail, each of our cases reveals a different

constellation of social factors, but we draw these together, jigsaw-like, to make a broader case. The tendency to pay attention to economic and political forces, and to view the social as either contextual frame or background noise, means that it is characteristically underplayed and devalued, even discounted. Here we start from – and with – these social factors, which paves the way for a very different

analysis and understanding of rural smallholder farmers’ persistence in a changing world.