Abstract
Chapter 2 shows that the wide diversity of agricultural forms stems from the political and social structures rooted in historical trajectories, where representations have been forged by power relations and the dissemination of technical progress. This diversity and its reasons invite us to make an effort, necessarily reductive, to define, characterize and measure family farming models, and to clarify what makes them a political and analytical category. To name the production units of the agricultural sector, several categories are mobilized by actors, all of which pertain to different professional spheres but do so in interaction with each other.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter incorporates some of the elements presented in an expert report (Bélières et al. 2013) due for publication in 2014 as part of the À savoir collection of the French Development Agency.
- 2.
We make a deliberate choice to focus the analysis on the dimension of the “organization of agricultural production.” Other approaches, discussed in Chap. 4, choose instead to focus on the multiplicity of functions that coexist with agricultural production: consumption, residence, accumulation, etc.
- 3.
As example, we refer to the naturalist novels of the nineteenth century, among them Honoré de Balzac’s The Peasantry or Émile Zola’s The Earth. Brazilian writer Jorge Amado too described class struggles in the cocoa plantation region of his native Bahia.
- 4.
According to Bergeret and Dufumier (2002), “in capitalist farms, the owners of the means of production do not work directly themselves; they only contribute the capital. These farms are often run by employed managers whose task it is to adopt production systems that maximize return on capital.”
- 5.
Thus GAEC (Common Grouping of Farms) in France, or GFA (Grouping of Agricultural Lands), which are most frequently associations formed between parents and children or between siblings.
- 6.
We refer here to studies that refer to “peasant agriculture” or “peasant” categories. These studies pertain to different schools of economics and sociology, even political sociology, and have, in particular, appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies and in the Journal of Agrarian Change.
- 7.
The reference to size in this denomination inserts this concept into a highly contextual relativism.
- 8.
- 9.
http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html, retrieved 28 January 2014.
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Bosc, PM. et al. (2015). Defining, Characterizing and Measuring Family Farming Models. In: Sourisseau, JM. (eds) Family Farming and the Worlds to Come. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9358-2_3
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