Semi‐Subsistence Farming: An Elusive Concept Posing Thorny Policy Questions

The massive expansion of semi‐subsistence farming in the European Union after the Eastern enlargements poses a real challenge to rural development. The problems of semi‐subsistence farms are low cash incomes and incidence of poverty, sub‐optimal use of land and labour, a lack of capital and poor contribution to rural growth. However, they play an important welfare function in some rural areas in Europe; they manage more than 11 million ha of agricultural land and deliver ecosystem services. The Common Agricultural Policy will have to accommodate this now widespread production system, through existing or new policy packages. Particularly important is support for commercialisation to incentivise and smooth the transition to commercial agriculture, and agri‐environmental payments to compensate the semi‐subsistence farmers for the provision of ecosystem services.     

The economic role of Russia's subsistence agriculture in the transition process

In this article, we analyze the role of subsistence‐oriented agriculture in Russia in the 1990s. We start out by discussing the diverging economic effects of the growth of subsistence agriculture in Russia since the transition process started. The quantitative analysis of this sector's role is carried out by means of an applied computable general equilibrium (CGE) model applying a 1994 social accounting matrix (SAM) as base year data. The novelty of the article is to disaggregate primary agricultural production not by products but by farm types, which enables us to distinguish their institutional and economic characteristics. The model also explicitly differentiates between marketed and subsistence consumption or formal and informal marketing activities of agricultural producers. We simulate two ex post and two ex ante experiments. The results of the first backward‐looking experiment highlight that Russia's subsistence agriculture was an important buffer against further agricultural output declines during transition and, hence, against food insecurity. A simulation, which looks into the effects of a devaluation of the Russian ruble, shows that the financial crisis should have increased the relative competitiveness particularly of large‐scale crop farms versus small‐scale farms. Two forward‐looking experiments indicate that efficiency enhancing institutional change would benefit both large‐scale and small‐scale farms. However, within small‐scale agriculture, a shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture would take place.     

An analysis of industrial–agricultural interactions: a case study in Pakistan

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between Pakistan's industrial and agricultural sectors. Pakistan was chosen because of its status of a semi‐industrialized country with heavy dependence on the agricultural sector. The relationship between cotton production and industrial growth is also evaluated due to the prominence of this crop in Pakistani agriculture. The results indicate that these sectors are complementary, yet industry tends to benefit more from agricultural growth than vice versa. The timing of this information is critical, as Pakistan's policy makers now face major agricultural policy reforms in their quest for continued industrial development.     

The Ties Made in the Harvest: Nicaraguan Farm‐worker Networks in Costa Rica's Agricultural Exports

Traditional and nontraditional export agriculture expansion dramatically changed the social and economic landscapes in the global south. An examination of one aspect of south–south international migration, Nicaraguan migrant economic integration into Costa Rica's export agriculture sector, reveals how production systems in the traditional and nontraditional agricultural sectors shape migrant social networks in distinct ways in the global south and its significance for both migrant workers and the agricultural sectors they work in. The rapid expansion of nontraditional export agriculture – the essence of agricultural development in Costa Rica – depends on the traditional crop production structure of coffee farms. The experiences of Nicaraguan migrant workers and their social ties to each other in nontraditional export agriculture and the coffee farms in Costa Rica demonstrate how different production structures call for distinct fragile and conflicted social networks ties between migrants. The economic integration of migrant workers relies on opportunistic and weak ties that are both gendered and contradictory.     

Valuing Traits of Indigenous Cows in Central Ethiopia

This research aimed at identifying and estimating the relative weight assigned to the preferred traits of indigenous cow population in the most dominant crop–livestock mixed production system in Central Ethiopia. A choice experiment approach was employed to elicit the preferences and a random parameters logit model was used to estimate the relative importance of the preferred attributes of indigenous cows. The results show that fertility, disease resistance and calf vigour traits are at least as important as milk. The location the cows are brought from is also an important attribute for buyers. Results from the simulation on the influence of changes in attribute levels showed that fertility and disease resistance affect preferences more than other traits. The findings suggest that the smallholder community in this part of Ethiopia depends on semi‐subsistence agriculture and so livestock development interventions should focus on a multitude of reproductive and adaptive traits that stabilise the herd structure rather than focusing on traits that are only important for commercial purposes.     

Who is resilient in Africa’s Green Revolution? Sustainable intensification and Climate Smart Agriculture in Rwanda

Under the banner of a "New Green Revolution for Africa," agricultural intensification programs aim to make smallholder agriculture more productive as well as "climate smart". As with Green Revolutions in Asia and Mexico, agricultural innovations (hybrid seeds, agronomic engineering, market linkages,and increased use of fertilizer and pesticides) are promoted as essential catalysts of agriculture-led economic growth. Intensification programs are now frequently linked to Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), which attempts to build resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing crop yields. This article considers who and what is resilient in Africa’s Green Revolution. We report on a multi-season study of smallholder food producers' experiences with Rwanda’s Crop Intensification Program (CIP) and related policies that aim to commercialize subsistence agriculture while implementing CSA. . We suggest that there are fundamental limits to the climate resilience afforded by CSA and development efforts rooted in Green Revolution thinking. Our findings illustrate that such efforts foreground technology and management adjustments in ways that have reduced smallholder resilience by inhibiting sovereignty over land use, decreasing livelihood flexibility, and constricting resource access. We put forth that rural development policies could better promote climate-resilient livelihoods through: 1) adaptive governance that enables smallholder land use decision-making; 2) support for smallholder food producers’ existing agro-ecological strategies of intensification; 3) participatory approaches to visualize and correct for inequalities in local processes of social-ecological resilence Such considerations are paramount for meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and building climate-resilient food systems.     

Preface

The paper examines the main issues surrounding distributional effects in the domains of natural resource management and land policies, agricultural technology and research policies, agricultural market and trade policies, and consumer‐oriented policies, including standards, subsidies, and labeling. Agriculture is drifting into an ever more drastic bifurcation at a global level and within many countries. Correcting that bifurcation will require large investments in rural areas and rural people, in institutions, and in information and biological technologies accessible by the poor in the world's smallholder sector. Large and growing national and international inequalities related to agriculture and rural areas threaten peace, growth, and sustainable development.     

Agricultural Wage Rates Under Forced and Free Labour: Pre-1944 and Post-1954 Guatemala

From 1871 to 1944 liberal trade and foreign investment policies were combined with illiberal labour coercion to create a classic export economy based on coffee plantations. The substantial reallocation of labour from the subsistence-oriented peasant economy to the coffee sector is associated with a sustained reduction in the agricultural wage rate. Throughout the forced labour period the wage was below a subsistence level, made possible by rural workers' access to land for their own subsistence production. The post-1954 free labour period is associated with a once-and-for-all doubling of the real wage to a subsistence level, consistent with the emergence in this period of a sizeable landless rural labour force. In the free labour era, the commercial agricultural sector has grown in 'classical' fashion, drawing on labour at a virtually constant, subsistence wage.     

Risk preference and optimal enterprise combinations in Kahuro division of Murang'a district, Kenya

Financing smallholder farming has been one of the major concerns of Kenya's agricultural development efforts. Many credit programs have evolved over the years but with dismal performance. In a study that sought to find the best way to finance smallholder agriculture, it became necessary to analyze and document, in the first place, the farmers' preferred enterprise patterns. Any financial innovations would hence address the preferred patterns. Of particular interest was the effect of risk preference on such patterns, which had been ignored in many previous farm management studies. Murang'a district was chosen as a typical smallholder district. Sample farmers, obtained through cluster sampling, were visited and structured questionnaires administered to cover farm events and physical resources of short rains 1995 to long rains 1996. This formed a basis for formulating the farm patterns. A quadratic programming model was used to analyze observed farm plans. The model incorporates farmers' risk preferences, revenue fluctuations, and resource and subsistence restrictions. The results showed that: (1) changes in risk preference do affect the optimal crop combinations; (2) the typical cropping pattern is rational as the farmer meets both food and cash under modest variability of income; (3) insisting on producing most subsistence food requirements by the farmers reduces efficiency and limits the feasible plans.     

Property rights reform to support China’s rural ‐ urban integration: household‐level evidence from the Chengdu experiment

In 2008, as part of a national experiment, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. Results from a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the National Statistics Bureau's regular household survey suggest that the reforms increased consumption and income, in particular for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation. Local labour supply increased with the young shifting towards agriculture and the old towards off‐farm employment. The reforms also contributed to higher agricultural yields and profits through three channels, namely: (i) greater rental market activity that transferred land to more productive producers; (ii) substitution of purchased inputs for labour; and (iii) a shift out of grains towards vegetables, corn, and oilseeds all of which offer higher levels of profitability. All of these findings are consistent with the notion that, without reforms, imperfections in factor markets undermined investment and functioning of land and labour markets, preventing high‐value peri‐urban land from being used most effectively and reducing job creation.     

农业生产托管推进小农生产现代化的逻辑创新

[目的]“大国小农”是我国的基本国情、农情,未来我国农业现代化的难点是如何实现小农户生产经营现代化。针对现阶段小农户发展现代农业面临的“谁来种地”“如何种好地”“种地如何赚钱”等问题提出改进措施,从而为进一步丰富农业生产托管实践路径提供借鉴。[方法]文章采用理论研究、实证研究和案例研究相结合的方法,从推进生产托管服务主体联合、推动小农户组织化、满足农户个性化生产经营需求、健全小农户与市场主体的利益联结机制、建立农业生产托管的风险分担机制等五个方面,系统梳理农业生产托管推进小农生产现代化的逻辑创新。[结果]农业生产托管一定程度上起到了将小农户引入现代农业发展轨道的作用,提高了农业生产效率,同时也巩固了农户家庭经营的主体地位,没有将小农户排斥在现代农业发展的轨道之外。[结论]提出灵活推进各种规模化经营模式、提升小农户组织化程度、培育农业生产托管供需市场等改进措施。     

Socio‐economic differentiation from a class‐analytic perspective: The case of smallholder tree‐crop farmers in Limpopo,South Africa

South African agrarian policy aims to integrate smallholder tree‐crop farmers into high‐end value chains with growth and employment potential, generally neglecting socio‐economic differentiation amongst them. This paper aims to analyse socio‐economic differentiation amongst tree‐crop farmers in Vhembe District, Limpopo, using a class‐based analysis based on livelihood diversification and accumulation. Cluster analysis of survey data and semi‐structured interviews reveals that most tree‐crop farmers engage in petty commodity production, internally differentiated by their combination of income sources and livelihood strategies. Farmers' ability to engage in accumulation and upward class mobility is generally severely constrained by limited access to capital. Agricultural diversification offers livelihood potential but limited possibility for accumulation, whereas salaried nonfarm work offers more promising prospects for accumulation but limited livelihood opportunities. A minority demonstrated characteristics of small‐scale capitalist farmers, internally differentiated by their reliance on salaried employment or agricultural production. The findings challenge the notion of an undifferentiated class of market‐oriented smallholders.     

The politics of the forest frontier: Negotiating between conservation,development, and indigenous rights in Cross River State,Nigeria

Nigeria's once thriving plantation economy has suffered under decades of state neglect and political and civil turmoil. Since Nigeria's return to civilian rule in 1999, in a bid to modernize its ailing agricultural economy, most of its defunct plantations were privatized and large new areas of land were allocated to ‘high-capacity’ agricultural investors. This paper explores the local tensions associated with this policy shift in Cross River State, which, due to its favorable agro-ecological conditions and investment climate, has become one of Nigeria's premier agricultural investment destinations. It shows how the state's increasing reliance on the private sector as an impetus for rural transformation is, paradoxically, crowding out smallholder production systems and creating new avenues for rent capture by political and customary elites. Moreover, as Nigeria's most biodiverse and forested state, the rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier into forest buffer zones is threatening to undermine many of the state's conservation initiatives and valuable common pool resources. The paper goes on to explain why and how private sector interests in Cross River State are increasingly being prioritized over natural resource protection, indigenous rights over the commons, and smallholder production systems.     

New evidence regarding the effects of contract farming on agricultural labor use

Contractual agreements between smallholder farmers and agribusiness companies have gained in importance in many developing countries. While productivity and income effects of contracting in the small farm sector were analyzed in many previous studies, labor market and employment effects are not yet well understood. This is an important research gap, especially against the background of continued population growth and structural transformation. Here, we investigate the effects of two types of contractual agreements between large international processing companies and smallholder farmers on agricultural labor use, household labor allocation, and hired labor demand in Ghana's palm oil sector. We use cross‐sectional survey data and a willingness‐to‐pay approach to control for unobserved heterogeneity between farmers with and without contracts. We find that agricultural labor intensity is substantially reduced through the contracts, because contracting in Ghana is associated with the adoption of labor‐saving procedures and technologies. Simple marketing contracts lead to reallocation of the saved household labor to off‐farm employment, whereas resource‐providing contracts lead to a stronger reallocation of labor within the farming enterprise. Household labor is more affected by labor savings than hired labor.     

Labour-saving technologies in smallholder agriculture: An economy-wide model with field operations

Labour-saving technologies are relevant for agricultural development. Yet, as this study shows, they are poorly integrated into agricultural production functions of economy-wide models. We report a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which explicitly incorporating field operations (e.g. land preparation, weeding or harvesting) in the context of smallholder agriculture. The field operations approach allows to model technological trade-offs in organic and conventional production systems at various stages of the agricultural production process. Simulating a structural change scenario, we compare the performance of the field operations approach with published benchmark production structures by assessing how they replicate empirically observed changes in land and agrochemical use. This benchmark analysis shows that incorporating field operations replicates the observed empirical changes most accurately and allows for more realistic modelling of labour-saving technologies. We use the field operations model to investigate three policy options to mitigate labour shortages in the agricultural sector of Bhutan. Permitting the employment of Indian workers in agriculture has the highest short-term potential in this respect. We find that subsidising agricultural machinery hiring services and removing import tariffs on agrochemical inputs are found to be less effective. Further options for model developments, such as combining field operations and labour market seasonality, are highlighted.     

Subsistence Agriculture in Transition Economies: Its Roles and Determinants

This paper discusses some beneficial effects of subsistence agriculture with emphasis on transition countries. Micro‐economic models of subsistence agriculture are reviewed and a two‐stage decision model, combining risk aversion and transaction costs explanations for subsistence is developed. The role of subsistence agriculture is addressed in a static comparison to a purely commercial agriculture. We argue that subsistence can play a stabilising role and have beneficial impacts on the agricultural sector when the resources it employs are unwanted by the commercial sector. The exact conditions under which the latter is true are analysed in a static general equilibrium framework. Employing the concept of the subsistence level of consumption, the paper demonstrates that these static effects can be valid in a dynamic perspective, provided additional conditions are met. Policy recommendations with regard to agricultural commercialisation are presented. These explicitly rely upon assumptions about the orientation of subsistence farmers. The lack of current research into this important behavioural feature of farmers in transition countries requires urgent action. There is urgent need for more research into the motivation, objectives and behaviour of subsistence farmers in rural economies of countries in transition.     

Experiencing primitive accumulation as alienation: Mangrove forest privatization,enclosures and the everyday adaptation of bodies to capital in rural Senegal

This paper examines primitive accumulation by studying changes in fishermen and mollusc collectors' labour before and after the privatization of 1,800 hectares of mangrove forest in rural Senegal through the creation of a tourism‐oriented protected area. Locating this privatization within a broader context of capital's enclosures, the paper shows a process of depeasantization, labour intensification (via the multiplication of petty commodity production activities and proletarianization) and changing socioecological relations. This is a process where enclosures continuously alienate workers by separating them not necessarily from the land, but, more generally, from the conditions of their labour even when these are already commodified. As workers cope with alienation, they encounter it anew, contributing to capital's survival through their search for money and other commodities (i.e., means of production and subsistence). Workers' everyday adaptations to capital, and hence alienation, need to become central in future research on primitive accumulation and agrarian change.     

Supermarket Expansion in Turkey: Shifting Relations of Food Provisioning

This paper examines the shifting relations of food provisioning in Turkey as small producers are increasingly integrated into commercialized agri‐food supply chains led by supermarkets. Turkey's entry into a customs union with the European Union and a World Bank–imposed policy measure adopted during the 2001 economic crisis have greatly facilitated the process of market intensification in Turkish agriculture. There are two sides to this process: one concerns the historical centrality of small‐scale production directed towards local–regional consumers; the other relates to the dominant role played by supermarkets in changing the conditions of subsistence. The restructuring of wholesale markets and the privatization of formerly state‐led agricultural co‐operatives and producers' unions have been crucial for the expansion of supermarkets into agri‐food relationships. The competitive growth of Islamically oriented small and medium‐sized capital groups alongside large retailers is further deepening the commodification process in food relationships.     

Economic development and the role of agricultural technology

In earlier debates on economic development, the agricultural sector's role was somewhat controversial. While dualistic models highlighted the importance of agriculture, the mainstream literature placed a greater emphasis on the creation of a modern industrial sector. Soon agriculture disappeared from the mainstream development literature to re‐emerge recently with a variety of multiple‐sector growth models emphasizing the key role of agriculture and specifically technology in agriculture. This article is an empirical cross‐country analysis of agricultural technology's role in economic development. Specifically, the hypothesis being tested is whether improvements in agricultural technology have a significant impact on long‐run economic growth. The results indicate that agricultural modernization has a positive effect on both measures of economic growth and human development.     

The Current State of the Russian Agricultural Sector

Russia's agriculture produces around 3.7 per cent of the country's GDP, employs 9.2 per cent of the national workforce and contributes around 6 per cent of the country's exports. The sector has shown remarkable resilience in the face of wider economic turbulence. Self‐sufficiency rates for the main agricultural commodities are relatively high. Agricultural exports have grown very significantly since 2000 especially for wheat and meslin (wheat and rye mixture). Meat production has been growing steadily, particularly in the poultry and pork sectors. Whilst the agri‐food sector has great potential to play an even more prominent role in Russia's economy, it suffers from relatively low productivity and an outdated technological base. The main drive for efficiency has come mainly from the relatively large‐scale agricultural firms, who generated more than half of the total value of agricultural output in 2016. Foreign policy instability, including economic sanctions, the devaluation of the national currency and declining economic growth have weakened the sector and caused an increase in the prices of imported goods and equipment. At the same time Russian products have replaced high value‐added imports and Russia's agricultural producers are expanding into new markets.