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This chapter examines changes in smallholder agriculture in terms of processes of de-agrarianization in a rapidly changing regional economy of Costa Rica long characterized by small-scale commercial coffee farming.

The study is based on multiple periods (1990–1991, 1993, 2006, 2010–2012) of ethnographic research on household economic strategies among farming families in two districts in the canton of Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica.

Though occupational multiplicity and non-farm-based livelihoods are on the rise, smallholder agriculture continues to play a substantial role in the livelihood strategies of both young and old and in the regional economy, not in spite of these trends, but because an expanding business sector and an increase in non-farm employment opportunities are creating a demand for agricultural produce and providing new opportunities for smallholders to diversify agricultural production, stabilize their incomes and maintain a significant presence in the regional economy. Specific historic conditions and state policies have been important factors in shaping rural economic change, livelihood strategies and smallholder agriculture in this region.

Sample sizes are relatively small and some data on children’s economic activities were obtained second hand from siblings and/or parents.

This research has implications for policy makers, planners and social activists interested in agrarian change.

This research provides an important longitudinal lens on the economic strategies of farming households, processes of de-agrarianization and the persistence of small-scale family farmers in today’s world.

The chapter identifies key components of the new patterns of farming and rural livelihoods emerging in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By the beginning of the millennium, most rural areas of Latin America had become integrated into global agricultural commodity networks that curtail the opportunities for small-scale, family-based farming and result in two predominant types of production, the corporate large-scale enterprise suited to oils seeds and their derivatives, cattle or vegetables for processing and the smaller commercially oriented farm producing market garden products, fruits and wine. Both types of farms often form part of commodity networks organized by domestic intermediaries, large-scale supermarket chains, such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, and foreign food marketers. In addition to the multiplication of external commercial linkages, high levels of urbanization have increasingly blurred the distinction between the rural and the urban. Off-farm work, including international labor migration, is now an important source of rural livelihoods. This context means that research needs to address the multiple interfaces that now connect the different types of rural inhabitants with a wide range of external actors.

This concluding chapter presents a transversal reading of some key elements of Mediterranean agriculture and its pathways of transformation, in part under the lens of main theoretical paradigms, where, as the first section discuss, it has had a peripheral character. In this regard, the chapter tackles the impure nature (where allegedly productivist and non-productivist dynamics coalesce) of some agricultural pathways, at both the farm and the territorial levels. As it is discussed later, this relates to the role played by policies and the way Mediterranean decision-makers mediate EU regulations. Subsequently, three interwoven dimensions of the recent evolution of Mediterranean agriculture are analysed: the dynamics of family farming and the role played by family networks, the position of migrants in the evolution of agriculture and some hypothesis and clues about the implications of the current economic crisis for Southern farming systems. In the two last sections, the chapter ends discussing the theoretical and policy challenges posed by Mediterranean small-scale farming systems.

A series of changes have taken place over the past 20 years that have transformed the face of rural Greece. At the heart of these changes have been the rural farm household and the European agricultural and rural development policies.The processes of de-agriculturalization and rural restructuring in the early 1990s have been accompanied by ‘rurbanization’ and socio-economic integration of rural populations. These interrelated processes have internally transformed the rural areas, thus forming a ‘new rurality’ characterized by contraction of agriculture, expansion of tourism and construction, increased pluriactivity, increased employment of international migrant labour and the reorganization of farm family labour and operation. However, in the environment of economic crisis, the conditions of the ‘new rurality’ have been affected by falling incomes, contraction of public services and by a ‘back to the land’ movement. This ‘reverse mobility’ has the elements of both modernity and tradition: engagement with new methods of organization and work and rediscovery of traditional crops, products and cultures.The chapter will discuss the characteristics and dynamics of the changing physiognomy of rural Greece in the past 20 years focusing upon three paths: the de-agriculturalization of the countryside, the perplexity of rural mobilities and rural resilience during the economic crisis. The chapter moves from a theoretical analysis of these paths to a detailed account of secondary sources on the transformation of agriculture and the countryside in Greece before it discusses the implications of the crisis upon the population movements and the ‘rediscovery’ of the economic, social and cultural values of rurality.

Developing new markets for small producers has been a major focus of research and development in many parts of the world. Too frequently, the ways in which existing production and market systems constrain producer possibilities has been ignored. This study examines how existing systems have affected coffee farmers in Costa Rica and Panama as they attempt to enter the elite coffee market, which promises higher prices for premium production. In the past 50 years, Costa Rica had created a system quite favorable to small producers in the world coffee market, while Panama had done little. Yet today, the Costa Rican system has proven to be a barrier to entering the highest levels of the coffee market, while the Panamanian system has produced coffees that are currently among the best in the world. The shifting ways in which production and marketing systems connect with world markets and elite taste suggest the necessity of greater sensitivity to how existing systems affect what farmers can and will decide to do.

Agricultural and fishery disasters are rather obscure emergency management research topics. However, the Food and Agriculture Sector is one of only 16 critical infrastructure sectors included in the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, and the sector is a vital component of the United States economy. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and severity of agricultural and fishery disasters, the Food and Agricultural Sector must adapt to and cope with unprecedented levels of risk. This chapter provides an overview of federal agricultural and fishery disaster policy and explores whether such policies are consistent with Jerroleman’s (2019)principles of just recovery.

Over the past 50 years, neoclassical, free-market capitalism has vanquished all challengers as the development paradigm. The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe coupled with China’s turn down the capitalist road has left the door open for the unfettered spread of capitalism around the world. Today, traditional communities and local economies are being woven into global circuits of mass production and consumption. As more and more aspects of community life are commodified, local residents are transformed from citizens who have an active role in the civic life of their towns and village into consumers whose main goal in life is to keep the global engine of accumulation running. In the West, life is increasingly lived at work and the shopping mall. Home is a place to park the car, watch television and sleep.

This chapter contrasts the representation of Third World farmers in Fair Trade marketing campaigns with data drawn from long-term fieldwork involving cocoa producers in Ghana and evidence provided by older anthropological monographs on these communities. In doing so, it practically illustrates the disparity between global assumptions and local perspectives on production and consumption. The key contention underlying this chapter is that the representation of producers as needy, helpless, and disgruntled with multinational corporations is deeply problematic. Such a representation reveals a significant and somewhat concerning discrepancy between the lives of farmers and the narratives displayed in Western campaigns for trade justice. By using fieldwork data and earlier anthropological literature showing the determination, ingenuity, and far-sighted strategies of cocoa farmers in Ghana, this chapter demonstrates that producers in the Third World are not the passive and helpless individuals they are sometimes portrayed as.

Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.