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The purpose of this study was to analyze the interest conflicts and strategy evolution process of various stakeholders in the process of homestead withdrawal, to reveal which key factors can balance the interests of all parties.

The authors developed an evolutionary game theoretical framework for homestead withdrawal in Yujiang District, Jiangxi Province, China. The authors compared the dynamic process of strategy change in different situations based on system dynamics.

Compared with indirect external factors, direct economic factors, such as increasing compensation standards or increasing fines, are more likely to encourage peasants to withdraw from their homesteads. The dynamic subsidy strategy can increase the probability of peasants withdrawing from their homestead. Additionally, awarding officials with promotions can effectively encourage local governments during the process.

Previous studies have conceptualized farmers' willingness to withdraw from their homestead as a static process, ignoring the underlying dynamism. This paper analyzes the game mechanism among the stakeholders of the homestead withdrawal process from a dynamic perspective, to provide efficient suggestions regarding policymaking for homestead withdrawal.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

This paper compares the agrarian development of two indigenous communities in the highlands of Ecuador who specialize in nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAE). It brings together the peasant theory with literature on the environmental impact of globalization.

Through a comparative ethnography, based on six months of participant observation and interviewers, I illustrate the differences in production processes and explain the divergent trajectories of agrarian modernization.

I found that NTAE impacted the two communities differently: one became more ecologically sustainable and the other became more environmentally exploitative. However, neither case fits squarely within the framework of modern/traditional or peasant/capitalist. Instead of traditional environmentalism and individualistic exploitation, we see the reverse: individualistic environmentalism and traditional exploitation. That is, ecological methods are paired with individualistic competition, and environmental exploitation takes place within a system of communal solidarity.

With buyer-driven organic certification standards, global integration does not always lead to ecological degradation. For quinoa growers, traditional production practices persist not as resistance to global capitalism but as a strategy to access high-value export markets. Broccoli farmers, although exploitative of local natural resources and their own health, do so within communal institutions that buffer against individualistic risk-taking.

This comparative case presents an alternative depiction of modernization as complex and nonlinear.

Fighting the drought. Based on this idea, for almost two centuries now the Brazilian State has elaborated policies and programmes intended to stimulate rural development in the semiarid region of the country. It is this idea which has nourished the illusion that immense infrastructures need to be built to capture, store and transport large volumes of water in order to supply production activities in the region. Associated with this proposal is the attempt to reproduce the same pattern of development adopted in other Brazilian biomes, the main characteristic of which is the use of monoculture practices on large properties managed according to entrepreneurial modes of production. However the rich social experience promoted by rural worker organizations in the region has challenged this model by proposing living with the semiarid (Convivência com o Semiárido) as the guiding principle for alternative trajectories of development. Inspired by the experience of territorial development under way in the Agreste da Borborema region of Paraíba state, the chapter shows that the evolution of these new paths of development depends on revitalizing and mobilizing locally available resources, such as ecological potentials, social mechanisms for organizing labour and for producing and sharing knowledge, local forms of connecting food production to consumption and so on. The text concludes by emphasizing the need to design and implant institutional frameworks that enable a more balanced distribution of power between the State and civil society organizations, thereby allowing the latter to assume a more substantial role in identifying and managing endogenous resources that underpin self-centred development strategies.

In recent years, small farmers have been coming together more and more in networks and organizations, joining forces to resist the squeeze process that they are being subjected to in a system dominated by agribusiness. In alliance often with consumers and other actors concerned with issues of quality food, the environment, and social justice, these farmers are interested in developing alternative forms of production and consumption. These farmers, who are struggling to achieve self-reproduction and the establishment of sustainable agro-food systems, appear to be mainly concerned with the control of resources. The spread of this kind of experience evokes the issue of repeasantization. In this chapter, I use the case of the French association Réseau Semences Paysannes (RSP) to highlight some recent innovations in alternative agro-food models, as well as paths of research and rural development emerging within this framework.

The chapter seeks to reflect on the dynamics of the reconstruction of family farming and peasant agriculture in agrarian reform settlements (“assentamentos”) in Brazil, exploring the limits and potential of government food purchases from family farming, particularly the Food Acquisition Program (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos – PAA), in the creation of alternative paths of rural development. The work analyzes the different strategies through which farmers and their organizations mobilize public policy instruments and market connections, expanding their room for maneuver and agency capacity. Research was conducted in the Baixo Sul Territory of the state of Bahia, focusing the heterogeneous web of social organizations involved in the implementation of the Food Acquisition Program in this setting.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a bottom‐up perspective about the operational and policy challenges of undertaking adaptive action in water‐scarce environments of India.

A cross section of 112 small, medium and big farmers drawn from three semi‐arid villages of rural Bangalore District were surveyed to assess their dependence on natural habitats and elicit information on costs and benefits of undertaking adaptation activities. Also explored were the possible impacts of institutional financing systems and publicly funded programs on adaptation action in the study area.

Small farmers in the study zone were conservation oriented and relied on a variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats for cultivation operations. On the other hand, commercial and semi commercial farmers who practiced resource intensive cultivation systems were not conservation oriented and were reluctant to go beyond “modest” adaptation activities. Similarly loans provided by local financial institutions to support agricultural operations were designed to maximize crop yields than minimize input use. On the other hand, the conservation programs that were undertaken on common property resources though supportive of public adaptation action, had poor spill‐over effects on private adaptation.

The value of this paper lies in the interesting results it presents about a group of farmers in three semi‐arid villages of South India. The originality of the paper lies in the key policy issues it raises on climate financing in the light of ground level evidence. The paper proposes a compensation regime to incentivize adaptation.

Legitimate exploitation confers status and dignity. That is why for peasants and their ideologists it was important to discover in the so-called “universal exchange” why the “surplus value” was snatched away from them. The famous San Garabato’s Law – “buy low, sell high” – was transformed, then, on the basis of exaction of peasant labor for capital, in the hostile but justifying mechanism, by which smallholder direct producers would acquire function and meaning within the modern system of accumulation of wealth. Thus paradoxically, despoilment became raison d’être and a symbol of identity.

This paper seeks: (1) to understand householding as an economic survival strategy by viewing new, historical, evidence in light of previous work on the theme, (2) to fill gaps in the historical and anthropological literature on prewar Japanese farming villages that have resulted in an incomplete conceptualization of the household as a unit of production and consumption, and (3) to improve the overall comprehension of peasant behavior vis-à-vis questions about moral economy, ecological adaptation, and risk-taking.

The essay relies on information gleaned from a detailed 1935–1936 one-year diary of a small-scale farmer, published in 1938.

The prewar Japanese farming village was far more than a collection of households linked by sharing and reciprocal ties. It was not only a place where households as economic units of production and consumption were central, but one where individuals strived to obtain whatever they could, whenever they could. It appears that small-scale prewar Japanese farmers were as likely to take risks and to experiment in order to improve their lot as any other peasants around the world.

It adds to the understanding of prewar Japanese farming villages by presenting valuable historical data that has previously been unavailable in English. It also helps to better situate Japanese peasants in the context of global peasant culture and society, and improves understanding of developmental processes – especially in the case of 20th century Japan.

Mayan towns in the Guatemalan highlands hold periodic markets on specific days of the week. A market is attended by local townspeople, by peasants residing in the town’s hinterland, and by vendors bringing wares from other towns. This study aims to determine the effects of physical, environmental, and cultural differences on the number of vendors that are sent from one Guatemalan town to a periodic market in another.

To understand how these markets are integrated, a gravity model is developed, examining the flow of vendors from 85 towns of residence to 15 market towns. In this model, the flow of vendors from one town to another is a function not only of physical distance, but of ecological complementarities, of linguistic differences, of road access, and of demographic endowments.

Results show that traveling vendors in these periodic markets do indeed integrate Guatemala both ethnically and ecologically, serving as a place in which different ethnic groups meet and bring in products that cannot be produced locally. Results also suggest that participation in markets is part of a diversified set of activities used by rural peasants to support their households.