AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT
STUDY GUIDE: CRITICAL TERMS

Agrarian reform - deliberate attempt to reorganize and transform existing agrarian systems with intent to improve distribution of agricultural incomes and thus foster rural development. May involve securing tenure rights to individual farmers, transfer of land away from small class of powerful landowners to tenants who actually till land, appropriation of large estates for establishing new settlement farms, and instituting irrigation schemes.

Agrarian system - pattern of land distribution, ownership and management, also the social and institutional structure of the agrarian economy. Includes physical environment (soils, precipitation, vegetation), behavioral environment (perception of ecosystem), operational milieu (culture, values, institutions, political system, technology level, land tenure).

Cash crops - crops produced entirely for the market (e.g. coffee, tea, cocoa, cotton, rubber, jute, wheat and oil palm)

Commodification or Commoditization - the increasing production of goods and services for the market (e.g. peanuts in Senegal).

Conditions of poverty - poverty proper (lack of income), physical weakness (due to sickness or undernutrition), isolation (physically or socially peripheral due to lack of access, etc), vulnerability (to emergencies or contingencies), powerlessness (within existing political, social and economic structures)

Gender division of labor - socially defined allocation of tasks between men and women in peasant households

Green Revolution - the production revolution in grains associated with the scientific discovery of new hybrid seed varieties of wheat, rice, and corn which resulted in high farm yields. But such seeds are dependent upon expensive inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and above all require adequate water.

Integrated rural development - broad array of rural development activities including provision of social and physical infrastructure, development of rural non-farm activities and small farmer aids to accelerate and sustain development in the rural areas.

Land reform - reorganization of landholding and tenure structures.

Latifundios - very large landholdings in the Latin American agrarian system, capable of providing employment for over 12 people each and owned by a small group of landlords.

Malnutrition - state of ill health resulting from inadequate or improper diet and usually measured in terms of average daily protein consumption. Lack of protein, vitamins and essential nutrients.

Minifundios - landholdings in Latin America considered too small to provide adequate employment for a single family.

Moneylender - in Asia, a person who lends money at higher than market interest rates to peasant farmers to meet their needs for seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. Activities of moneylenders are often unscrupulous and can help to accentuate landlessness among the poor.

Petty commodity production - distinctive form of production in capitalism that combines capital and labor within small, typically ‘household’ or ‘family’ enterprises.

Plantation agriculture - cash crops (esp rubber, oil palm, tea, coffee) grown on larger estates or smallholdings owned by private sector firms, individual families, or government. Form of agricultural industrialization which requires varying amounts of capital investment and large labor supply.

Productive activities of rural peasants - production for direct use in household (food processing, husking of grain, etc), non-farm income earning on farm (handicraft production), work on household farm (land prep, weeding, harvesting) and off-farm wage labor both farm (harvesting coffee) and non-farm (trishaw driver or factory worker).

Reproductive activities of rural peasants - daily maintenance of the household: cooking, sweeping, collecting firewood and water (Senegal), mending and washing clothes. These may be differentiated by biological (childbearing), generational (socialization and education of children), and daily (cooking, collecting water).

Residual poverty - views poverty as a consequence of ‘being left out’ of the processes of development. Assume trickle down brings growth to everyone so that there are more opportunities to earn income. Action is to target rural poor and integrate them into markets and get them to devote their resources and energy to producing goods for sale (commoditization).

Relational poverty - this approach investigates the causes of rural poverty in terms of social relations of production and reproduction of property and power. Asks are some people poor because others are rich and vice versa.

Shifting cultivation - peasant agricultural practice in Africa, Latin America and Asia where land is tilled by a family until a time when its’ fertility is exhausted. Following this the family will move to a new area leaving the old land to regain its’ fertility. Sometimes referred to as swidden or chena.

Subsistence farming - farming in which crop production, stock rearing, etc is mainly for the family’s “own consumption” and is characterized by low productivity, risk and uncertainty.

Undernutrition - lack of calories in the daily diet of peasant families

Wet padi or sawah cultivation - rice planted and grown in a flooded field either through irrigation or natural flooding yielding natural fertilizer and continuous high yields capable of supporting high-density populations.