Rural development : theories of peasant economy and agrarian change

In the last decade 'Rural Development' has acquired a central role in the theory and practice of development. In the late 1960s there was a wave of optimism about food supplies and about the prospects for agricultural development in Third World countries, as a result of the introduction of new high-yielding varieties of the major foodgrains, in the so-called 'green revolution. This optimism rapidly gave way in the 1970s to concern both about the long-term trends of food production in many countries, and especially to concern about the persistence and the deepening of rural poverty. It was in this context that a 'new strategy for development was fostered, especially by the World Bank. This strategy was deliber ately aimed at the problem of poverty, and emphasized rural development as a broad and comprehensive process, rather than the goal simply of increasing production'. It has given rise to a very large number of development projects in the rural areas of much of the Third World. At the same time the research infrastructure which produced the green revolution technology has been expanded and there is now a network of internationally staffed and funded research institutes, covering a wide range of crops and aimed at raising the productivity of agriculture in diverse environments.

Over the same period there has been mounting scholarly and political interest in the study of peasant economies and societies, reflected in the publication of new journals and books, and responding both to the problems which gave birth to the new strategy and to its results.

The aim of this collection of readings is to give an introduction to analyses of agrarian systems, and of the processes of change within them, and to the reasoning (and the ideologies) on which policies for rural development have been based. It is critical, explicitly or implicitly, of a great deal that has been done in the name of rural development, and of the understandings on which projects and plans, and even research programmes, have been founded. The book draws almost entirely on the recent literature of peasant studies, and it marks, perhaps, the differences of emphasis and of understanding which have developed since the publication in 1971 of Teodor Shanin's reader on Peasants and Peasant Societies (Penguin).