THEORIZING THE PEASANTRIES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY - Routledge

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THEORIZING THE PEASANTRIES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In this chapter I aim to discuss the strength of the peasant farm and, more generally, the peasant economy in today's world. Confronted with tough competition on harsh global markets, the demolition of agricultural policies and a seemingly general neglect and disdain, it is hard to imagine how peasant farms are surviving: yet they are, and sometimes thriving.

I develop this chapter in five steps. First I compare entrepreneurial and peasant farming from a Chayanovian perspective, discussing contrasting aspects of the two that are almost completely ignored by the standard neo-classical approach. There is irony in this, for the Chayanovian approach was developed to highlight the nature of peasant agriculture, not to analyse entrepreneurial agriculture. However, if we examine entrepreneurial farming through the prism of a Chayanovian point of view, the major weaknesses of this particular, and seemingly powerful, mode of farming become self-evident. The same discussion highlights the main strength of the peasant mode of farming, although it is one that is hidden and not easily discerned from the outside. This strength is deeply embedded inside the peasant farm: that contains a particular and unique model for producing an income.

Second, I will discuss how peasant farms are tied together through many relations of mutual support. These go beyond the well-known and welldocumented forms of cooperation, such as joint processing, marketing or acquisition of inputs) and can, to use a term coined by Veronique Lucas, be described as `cooperation-in-farm-work' (Lucas et al., forthcoming). This multifaceted phenomenon operates with, and through, a `closed wallet' system (to use a phrase that is well known to Dutch farmers) in which reciprocity plays a central role (Sabourin, 2009 and 2011). Cooperation-in-farm-work is a form of barter, it is something that one does not pay for and thus it is under the radar of all official statistics. Formally it does not exist. It is not seen or recognized by the state or the major expert systems. It is hidden. It is further camouflaged by the tendency of major agricultural economic theories to represent the farm as a single enterprise with clear boundaries, which only has vertical links with other enterprises through market relations. The opposite is true, especially, as I will argue, in the peasant poles of agriculture.

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Third, I will discuss another reservoir of informal and non-commoditized relations: the household, the family and nature of gender relations. I will focus especially on the role of women in the peasant farm. Their presence, role and contribution provide one of the main hidden forces that explain peasant agriculture's survival and success in today's world.

Fourth, I will pay attention to the larger rural economy, showing that different economic actors, sectors and activities are tied together within a `rural web' as Flaminia Ventura, Terry Marsden and others have been arguing (Marsden and Ploeg, 2008; Milone and Ventura, 2010). This rural web produces synergies that, in turn, can provide strong support for individual economic activities ? notably those of peasant farms developing in new, and often multifunctional, ways (see Chapter 4).

Fifth, I will return to the social logic already mentioned in Chapter 3: the non-economic drivers of farm development. I will indicate how this social logic is currently changing and strengthening peasant agriculture. By doing so I will return to Chayanov's seminal work (Chayanov, 1924, 1966, 1988), which identified the main balances that the peasant farm and the peasant family constantly seek to equilibrate. These `non-economic' drivers take many concrete forms as e.g. the desire to `construct a foundation for the next generation' as Chinese peasants say, or to build a `beautiful farm' in European terminology. But equally they may reside in the emancipatory aspirations contained in, and represented by, rural social movements. Such non-economic drivers, of whatever nature, compose a social logic (Shanin, 1990) that, through the many balances set within the peasant farm (see Figure 1.4 for an illustration), provide a framework for the organization and development of agricultural production. It is a framework that is aligned with the needs, possibilities, interests and prospects of the farming family. Or at least, better aligned with social and ecological needs than would be the case in its absence. The equilibration of the different balances allows the farm, its operation and its development to be attuned to the social logic of peasant families, communities and movements. It helps to correct, or even to transcend, the `dull forces' of the market. Here we witness the contemporary relevance of the balances discussed by Chayanov, more than a century ago.

Together, the distinctive model for generating income, cooperation-infarm-work, women's roles, the rural web and social logic can be understood as a rhizome (Deleuze and Guatari, 1997) that supports peasant farms and explains their continuity. They also offer important building blocks for a critical theory that radically departs from mainstream approaches, which has the potential to clarify the invisible and explain what would otherwise remain inexplicable. Such a critical theory will show that peasant agriculture that is only partially integrated in the markets (because it uses extended non-commodity circuits and sources) better meets society's needs than an agriculture that is completely market-integrated ? and by doing so it highlights the role of peasants in the twenty-first century and the need to ensure that their demands are met.

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Peasant agriculture: a distinctive mode for generating income

Following the Chayanovian approach, I have argued (especially in Chapter 1 of this book) that there is no capital within peasant agriculture. There might be capital goods (even plenty), but capital-as-relation is absent in peasant production. This does not exclude, of course, the very real possibility that peasant agriculture is subordinated to external capital groups. Nor does it exclude capital-as-relation from entering farming and becoming a material and cognitive reality ? thus transforming peasant agriculture into entrepreneurial agriculture. In this section I will examine these possibilities. The Chayanovian approach is a good instrument for doing so ? especially if we ask: what happens to `labour income'?

There is a range of mechanisms through which capital can become an important, if not the main, axis in agriculture. Dependency on external credit is one of these. Such dependency might arise after prolonged impoverishment. If a continued squeeze on agriculture results in the erosion, and finally destruction, of the autonomous resource base (implying that a relatively autonomous and historically guaranteed reproduction, as illustrated in Figure 2.4, becomes impossible), recourse to credit might be the only option. The need to finance relatively expensive technologies (often of the `Green Revolution' type), heavy taxation, repeatedly bad harvests and/or programmes that aim at the modernization of agriculture might all result in a similar shift.

Whatever the reasons, the appearance of credit on the farm ledger introduces relations and dynamics into the heart of peasant agriculture that are alien to it. These include the need to ensure that a fixed amount of money (redemptions) is channelled to the outside agency (the bank or moneylender) concerned in this newly established relationship. In peasant agriculture (as I argued in Chapter 1), the capital goods have already been paid for ? now, with the introduction of credit, they still need to be paid for. They carry the claim of value that has to be transferred to outside agencies. The amount to be paid does not depend on the outcome of the process of production, on the success of that year's harvest ? it is predetermined, non-negotiable and outside the scope of any balancing within the peasant farm. Beyond the capital to be repaid there is also the interest: the remuneration for the capital used. Once again this remuneration is assessed beforehand and is non-negotiable. This means that the once-undivided (and indivisible) `labour income' of the farm now has to be separated into two parts: the repayment of, and remuneration for, the credit obtained (representing a flow from the farm to bank or moneylender) and, second, the remaining labour income. In synthesis, while capital does not exist within peasant agriculture, in entrepreneurial agriculture it becomes a material reality: an unneglectable and non-negotiable claim on labour income. And the more entrepreneurial agriculture becomes, the larger this part becomes.

In much of today's world credit has become a part of everyday life and financialization is now a major feature of the economy (Clapp, 2014; Rabobank Group, 2012; Ryan Isakson, 2014). For many a world without access to credit

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seems unthinkable. In peasant agriculture, however, credit represents a major rupture. The more so since it brings a major risk ? the possible loss of the farm if the redemption and interest payments cannot be met ? and (the beginning of) a shift in the centre of decision-making. It is no longer the peasant family itself that decides on what to grow, how to grow it, and what to do with the value produced. Instead, the bank or moneylender has a say in all this1 and the peasant family has to make sure its decisions are in line with this newly introduced rationale.

The introduction of credit into peasant agriculture also brings important changes in the social organization of time. In many parts of the world, peasants do not sell their harvest in one go, but prefer to sell smaller quantities over an extended period. This allows them to bet on better prices (usually, prices are at their lowest at and immediately after harvesting time it) and for maintaining a reserve that might, if needed, help to bridge a bad year. The last remnants are only sold when the signs are that the coming harvest will be fine. Formal credit deeply reshuffles this pattern: it introduces a new calendar that stipulates that repayment is made immediately after the harvest ? which implies that the whole production (or at least a large part of it) has to be sold at the point in time when prices are probably at their lowest. The obligation to sell also affects the bargaining position of the peasant family vis-?-vis the traders: the latter know that the former have to sell. All this has an especially huge impact in the Global South where most credit channelled towards agriculture is short-term credit: covering just one cycle and it is mainly meant just to finance the acquisition of non-factor inputs (seeds, fertilizer etc.).

All these changes impact strongly on both the symbolic and the material organization of the process of production (see e.g. Ploeg, 1990: ch. 3). While credit is often promoted as offering new opportunities to farmers (theoretically such a possibility should not to be excluded), in practice it often introduces major risks and despair.2

The consequences that come with the entrance of capital into peasant agriculture may seem to be unavoidable. However, when comparing formal credit with informal loans, the specificity of capital-as-relation comes to the fore. There are many different forms of informal credit, but they all show the principle of risk sharing. That is that the remuneration of `capital' is conditional ? it critically depends on the production realized. If the harvest fails, both the `capital' and the peasant side take their share of the loss and an agreement is made to restart in the next cycle. This is structurally different from formal credit, which unilaterally allocates the risk to the peasant's side, and where losses can often end up with the sale of the farm (Gates, 1993).

Credit is not restricted to a one-time shift: to the first loans obtained by the peasant farm. Indebtedness is an insidious and ongoing process, the logical outcome of which (as with highly modernized entrepreneurial agriculture) ends up with farming being nearly wholly financialized. It is a process that deepens

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dependency and that fundamentally redefines decision-making. Farming thus primarily becomes, as discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, a financial operation aimed at remunerating the capital invested into it. The conversion of natural resources into food is only secondary to this. In short, agricultural production is organized so as to meet the required return on invested capital.

New technologies that enter the farm are often financed with medium- or long-term credit. Thus, new stables, new machinery, etc., start to embody capitalas-relation. Due to the underlying credit relations, they represent capital within the farm. They are the carriers of fixed and precisely demarcated value flows that channel a strictly defined (and often growing) part of the wealth produced on the farm to outside entities.3 They equally carry a specific calendar (that relates to depreciation and renewal) as well as all kinds of new dependency relations. A noteworthy example is robotized milking. This comes with the obligation to establish service contracts with the provider of this technology, a veto on the use of spare parts other than those provided by the company, a formal prohibition in communicating with third parties on any malfunctioning of the robots, etc. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are another example: the seeds come with the obligation to acquire and apply glyphosate (commercially known as Roundup). All this evidently translates in additional value flows leaving the farm and in farmers being increasingly subordinated to external commands.

Further transfers of riches and the reduction of the room for manoeuvre also follow on from the repatterning of production that stems from huge investments (especially when these are financed through credit). Such investments introduce a strong pressure towards specialization and this means the farm becomes dependent on one market (and more often than not on just one company). In the case of dairy production, for instance, this means that all milk is delivered to one dairy cooperative. Often this is even formalized in contracts that bind producers to their cooperative. For example, in the Netherlands such contracts specify that all milk is to be delivered to the dairy cooperative. The farmer is not allowed, say, to use part of the milk for on-farm cheese making in order to sell the produce directly to the customers. It is a case of all your milk, or no milk whatsoever: these are the only two possibilities allowed. This evidently makes experimenting with on-farm processing and a step-by-step development of direct selling (see Chapter 4) impossible to consider. In this, and a myriad of similar ways, producers are literally tied to external capital groups, weakening their bargaining position and makes for additional value flows leaving the farm.

More generally speaking: the appearance of capital as a real category within the farm translates, through different mechanisms, into the farm being subjected to sharpened forms of unequal exchange between the farm and outside capital groups. This partly occurs through the associated transaction costs and the inequitable distribution of the risks involved. Typically, it is the farms who must bear

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the transaction costs (related to suddenly emerging cattle diseases, heavy rain the bankruptcy of trading partners, or whatever) and who are obliged to carry all of the risks (especially those related with market volatility).4

Taken together this means that capital appears within the farm as a set of given and non-negotiable value claims that are to be satisfied through the operation of the farm. As a consequence, the income that remains for the farmer increasingly becomes that which is left over: the residue, that which is left over after capital's different claims are paid.

When farming is structured in a peasant-like way, production is organized so as to obtain a value added (VA), or, as Chayanov would put it, a labour income that is as high as possible in both absolute and relative terms (VA in relation to gross value of production: VA/GVP) (given the different balances that are taken into account). In entrepreneurial farming VA/GVP is lower than in peasant farming (due to the high levels of acquired inputs) and in addition VA can no longer be equated to labour income. First the different claims of capital (related to financial costs, expensive technology and reduced bargaining power) need to be satisfied and only then, can the farmer remunerate him or herself. To use a farming metaphor, the farmer is reduced to the weak piglet (or the runt) of the litter; the one who gets to suckle on the sow's last teat, after the others have drank their fill.

In his discussion of the difference between peasant and entrepreneurial agriculture, Siebren Miedema (1991) used a different metaphor to describe the impact of high debt levels: a sailing ship that can (or cannot) fall back on an engine. He argued that peasant agriculture can, if needed, go against the winds and currents, for it has its own, independent, engine (i.e. the farm's own capital goods and savings). This gives the ship the possibility to choose and follow its own trajectory. Entrepreneurial agriculture, on the other hand, only has sails, and therefore is constrained to follow the winds (or to be adrift and lacking direction when there are no winds). In more analytical terms: the highly indebted, entrepreneurial farm has to follow the script written by others, while the peasant farm can set its own course.

When it comes to income levels, the value added (or labour income) is central in peasant farming; it is central in structuring the process of production. In entrepreneurial farming family income comes last: it is residual. This explains why peasant agriculture often generates better incomes than entrepreneurial agriculture (as shown in e.g. Tables 3.3, 4.1, 4.2 and 7.2). The two are distinctively different ways of producing an income. If this is not taken into account, the differences in income often remain highly enigmatic (or go unnoticed). However, the main institutions that surround agriculture (such as farm accountancy techniques, agricultural colleges, research, agricultural policies, etc.) fail to recognize this difference.

The peasant farm is, in this respect, the antipode of the entrepreneurial farm. It is able to produce a satisfactory income where the entrepreneurial farm finds

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it much harder to do so. This is the hidden strength of the peasant farm: it has a unique model for generating income that fundamentally differs from that of entrepreneurial farms. As such it can operate in situations where the entrepreneurial farm cannot maintain itself and it is able to face circumstances that oblige the entrepreneurial farms to deactivate or to close down.

As discussed in the previous chapter (see Figure 8.1), out of every 100 euros spent in the year 2000 for food by Italian consumers, 68.40 euros stayed in the food industries and distribution channels and 6.00 euros were used to pay for import of agricultural products (ISMEA, 2012). Hence the remaining `farm share' was 25.60 euros. That is, from every 100 euros spend for food, 25.60 arrived, in the end, at farm level. From these, 7.10 euros were used to pay for the inputs needed on the farm. Hence, all that ultimately remained was a value added of 18.50 euro. In 2009, when agricultural prices were low, the remaining value added dropped to as low as 12.70 euros.

However, as shown in Figure 9.1 (also derived from ISMEA, 2012), capital costs, i.e. the outbound flow of value took 5.40 euros (in 2009 this had risen to 6.10 euros) and labour costs (for paid labour) also had to be deducted. Thus a net `farm income' remained (in 2000) of 7.60 euros (out of every 100 spent on food). In 2009 this was as low as 1.50 euros.

This shows two things. Through the shifts discussed throughout this book, farm income has not only become a residual category ? it also became a minor share of the total value of food. Second, the very low share in 2009 shows the consequences of being at the end of the chain (at `the last teat'). Whatever adverse conditions emerge are transferred towards this last link: the seemingly strong, but in reality highly dependent, entrepreneur.

2009 1.50 4.20

2000 7.60

0

4

Farm income

6.10

Farm share 20.10

4.50

Inputs used in farm process 7.40 5.40

Inputs used in farm process 7.10

Farm share 25.60

8

12 Euro 16

20

24

28

Labour cost Capital cost

Figure 9.1 The distribution of the `farm share' in Italy Source: ISMEA (2012).

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Cooperation-in-farm-work

As strong and skilled a person might be, he or she alone will not be able to bring down a flock of sheep from the mountain meadows to the valley (Rebanks, 2015). Working together with others is a condition sine qua non to get the job done. The same applies for bringing back milking cows that have escaped from their pasture, for silage making, for getting an overview of available sires and their qualities. For these and many other farm tasks cooperation is essential.

Figure 9.2 refers to a series of farms located in and around a village in Bretagne in France. It shows, departing from the farm of Karl, a young farmer who recently started farming, the many ties between the different farms ? ties based on mutual help and the non-commodified exchange of machinery, inputs (such as seeds, manure) and knowledge. Through such local linkages Karl is linked to at least some 42 other farmers (see Figure 9.2) Similar ties have existed for many years and have partly been institutionalized in CUMAs ? associations for the common use of machinery (see Box 9.1). But the many relations that tie farms and farmers together are not just a legacy of the past. They are continuously reproduced and some are even constructed anew. Farms cannot, in practice, be operated without such local cooperation (see also Gezelius, 2014). It is not cooperation located outside the farm (as in cooperatives for acquiring inputs or for processing products) and it neither is it `horizontal' cooperation as in a production cooperative (in which land, labour and capital are put together). Instead, it is, as Veronique Lucas refers to it: "cooperation-in-farm work located in different farms that keep operating as single units" (Lucas et al., forthcoming).

Karl recently started farming and often asks his neighbour for assistance

With three other farmers he co-owns three tractors, they exchange labour and produce together a mixture of grains for cattle feeding

On its turn this group of three is inserted in a local Cuma that owns and manages 50 different machines

Within this Cuma their are smaller groups that co-own hydraulic machinery for lifting heavy loads

. . . Some even co-manage herds of cattle A farmers' association that contracts part-time workers

The Departmental Cuma is used for assistance with seeding and harvesting of maize

Figure 9.2 Cooperation-in-farm-work Source: derived from Thomas et al. (2015).

Cuma

Cuma

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