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Peasant Farming

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics
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Synonyms

Agrarian question; Agrarianism; Emancipation of the peasantry; Enclosure of the commons; Feeding the world; Food sovereignty; Identity; La via campesina; Peasant economics; Peasantry; Small-holder; Social struggle; Subsistence-oriented farming

Introduction

Defining peasant farming is a contentious undertaking, because it has vastly different meanings depending on how it is used and by whom. These different usages are often tied up in deeper ethical questions about the livelihoods of a large subset, if not the entirety, of the human population. Although for some, peasant farming is associated with underdevelopment and misery, for others it means the future. The least common denominator of the divergent definitions is that peasant farming is the cultivation of land for the main purpose to subsist on its products.

Peasant farming cannot be fathomed without understanding the people that are engaged in it. There are two ways to think about what defines the peasantry. One is a...

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Correspondence to Johann Strube .

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Strube, J. (2019). Peasant Farming. In: Kaplan, D.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1179-9_600

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