Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution. Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till. Agrarianism should not be viewed as (...) a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development. The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy. (shrink)

Semiotic mechanisms involving sacred natural sites – or areas of land or water with special spiritual significance – that have been focal points in agrarian vernacular religion have been transformed in modern Estonian culture. Some sites have accrued new significance as national monuments or tourist attractions and the dominant way of conceptualizing these sites has changed.Sacred natural sites should not be presumed to represent pristine nature. Rather, they are products of complex culture-nature interactions as they have been formed in the (...) course of traditional land management as well as different semiotic practices, including ritual and conservationist ones. The existence of sites encompassed by the term defies and blurs the rigid distinction between nature and culture.Individual sacred natural sites and categories of such sites can act as signifiers for a variety of different signifieds concurrently, acting as confluences of different sign systems and thus exemplifying the creolization of these systems as well as bringing about the hybridization of different landscape traditions in certain loci.Estonian literary culture has adopted motifs and narratives that define sacred natural sites more readily from other literary traditions than from the Estonian vernacular tradition; in turn, the vernacular tradition has also adopted and assimilated literary Romantic motifs. (shrink)

Many public debates about the societal significance and impact of agriculture are usefully framed by Paul Thompson’s distinction between the “agrarian” and the “industrial vision.” The key argument of the present paper is that the ongoing debate between these visions goes beyond academic philosophy and has direct effects on the political economy of agriculture by influencing the scope of rent-seeking activities that are undertaken primarily in the name of the agrarian vision. The existence of rent-seeking activities is shown to reflect (...) the fact that the agrarian vision is not universally supported, which is certainly true of the industrial vision as well. The key argument of the present paper is that these two philosophical visions of agriculture are not radically incongruent. Rather, they share a common ground within which they are even mutually supportive. If agricultural policy making is oriented toward this common ground, it may reduce overall dissatisfaction with the resulting institutional regime of agricultural production. Such an agricultural policy may also stimulate the emergence of new business practices that not only enable efficient agricultural production but also minimize negative ecological impact and preserve cultural landscapes. (shrink)

The trajectory of the public discourse on agriculture in the twentieth century presents an interesting pattern:shortly after World War II, the manner in which farming and farmers were discussed underwent a profound shift. This rhetorical change is revealed by comparing the current debate on farmland preservation with a tradition of agricultural discourse that came before, known as “agrarianism.” While agrarian writers conceived of farming as a rewarding life, a public good, and a source of moral virtue, current writers on farmland (...) preservation speak of farming almost entirely in utilitarian terms describing its productive capacity and its economic returns. Proponents of farmland preservation use essentially the same underlying framework as critics of preservation:n “economic utilitarian” paradigm that purports to eschew normative values and evaluate land use decisions based on economic criteria only. I argue that, despite their good intentions, farmland preservationists are doomed to piecemeal victories at best, because their arguments, which rely on a utilitarian justification and disregard the agrarian ethic, are inadequate. Without expanding its focus beyond farmland to encompass farming and farmers, the movement risks losing both integrity and effectiveness. (shrink)

Despite increasing attention to the sensors, drones, robots, and apps permeating agri-food systems, little attention has been paid to social media, perhaps the most ubiquitous digital technology in rural areas globally. This article draws on analysis of farming groups on Myanmar Facebook to posit social media as appropriated agritech: a generic technology incorporated into existing circuits of economic and social exchange that becomes a site of agrarian innovation. Through analysis of an original archive of popular posts collected from Myanmar-language Facebook (...) pages and groups related to agriculture, I explore the ways that farmers, traders, agronomists and agricultural companies use social media to further agrarian commerce and knowledge. These activities evidence that farmers use Facebook not only to exchange market or planting information, but also to interact in ways structured by existing social, political and economic relations. More broadly, my analysis builds on insights from STS and postcolonial computing to disrupt assumptions about the totalizing power of digital technologies and affirm the relevance of social media to agriculture, while inviting new research into the surprising, ambiguous relationships between small farmers and big tech. (shrink)

Recently, growing numbers of interns, apprentices, and volunteers are being recruited to work seasonally on ecologically oriented and organic farms across the global north. To date, there has been very little research examining these emergent forms of non-waged work. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between non-waged agricultural work and the economic circumstances of small- to medium-size farms and the non-economic ambitions of farm operators. We do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers’ responses to two surveys (...) we conducted of farmers using non-waged workers in Ontario, Canada. We situate our analysis within debates on the agrarian question, which we contend requires an account for both the economic and non-economic dimensions of new forms of non-waged work on farms. We suggest that many ecologically oriented farm operators are struggling financially and report low gross on-farm revenues and personal incomes. We argue that in addition to relying on off-farm incomes and self-exploitation, many farms are managing to persist in a challenging economic climate through their use of intern, apprentice, and volunteer labor. However, we also suggest that the growth of non-waged work on farms is not simply being driven by economic processes but also a series of non-economic relationships focused on non-institutional farmer training, the pursuit of sustainability, and social movement building. We suggest, the “economic” and “non-economic” dimensions of internships, apprenticeships, and forms of volunteerism sit uneasily alongside of one another, generating questions about the politics, ethics, and sustainability of non-waged work and ecological farming. (shrink)

A collection of specially commissioned papers which apply new analytical methods to the dtudy of the institutions, their origin, maintenance, and adaptation, which play such an important role in agrarian relations and rural development.

The world is really feeling the heat, not only in the form of climate change, but because of fuming farmers’ unrest. Farmers’ suicides have become a common way of expressing their anger and anxiety as no one is there to take heed to their problems. This research paper tries to examine the in-depth analysis of the great agrarian crisis in India and how it was completely mistaken in understanding the real cause. With the comparative studies of the two villages of (...) India, with a completely different technological, economical and cultural background, a deep observation was made possible in finding out that, it is the growing alienation of farmers with new agricultural technologies and the collapsing local natural resource base, which will further uproot the farmers and aggravate the great Indian agrarian crisis. Traditional agricultural knowledge and practices immensely contribute in preserving the identity of farm community and gives them a feeling of pride, which is vital for the reviving and resurrection of farmers’ dignity in India. Agriculture preserves the Indianness of India, and uprooting of farmers is analogous to uprooting our own identity. (shrink)

For most of the twentieth century, nature conservation activities were connected to the protection of agrarian landscapes. During the late 1980s, the introduction of the concept of ‘new wilderness’ offered new opportunities for ecologists, but at the same time produced conflicts with traditional nature and landscape conservation. At the heart of the conflict were different visions of the relation between nature and society, sometimes resulting in a polarised debate, with opposing Arcadian and wilderness visions. In this paper, the new wilderness (...) will be described from a landscape perspective, envisioning these wildernesses as a phase in the long history of human influences on landscapes and as part of a landscape that is complex and multi-layered. Some examples will show how a sectoral approach to nature leads to projects in which opportunities to integrate the new wilderness into a wider context of landscape and society are missed. In the final part, a prospect will be shown in which (new) wilderness is seen as part of a layered landscape. (shrink)

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that (...) compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations. (shrink)

In this article we investigate how Latino immigrant farmers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States navigate United States Department of Agriculture programs, which necessitate standardizing farming practices and an acceptance of bureaucracy for participation. We show how Latino immigrant farmers’ agrarian norms and practices are at odds with the state’s requirement for agrarian standardization. This interview-based study builds on existing historical analyses of farmers of color in the United States, and the ways in which their farming practices and (...) racialized identities are often unseen by and illegible to the state. This disjuncture leads to the increased racial exclusion of immigrant farmers from USDA opportunities. Such exclusions impede the transition to a “new era of civil rights,” as has been proclaimed by USDA leadership. Although efforts to address institutionalized racism on a national level may be genuine, they have failed to acknowledge this schism between rural Latino immigrants and the state, thereby inhibiting a meaningful transition in the fields, and continuing a legacy of unequal access to agrarian opportunities for non-white immigrant farmers. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to return to the genesis of the American agrarian myth in the eighteenth century, as a path to investigate the origins of the American national identity. This will be done by means of a comprehensive reassessment of St. John de Crèvecoeur, the Norman noble whose name is bound to the success of Letters from an American Farmer. His work contains the origins of the agrarian ideal as a peculiarly American phenomenon, prior to independence and (...) before Republican ideology placed agrarian democracy at its foundations, making the project of agrarian development and democratic participation inseparable one from another. A Frenchman who became American and then, after 25 years, French again, Crèvecoeur represents an ideal lens through which to analyse the hitherto insufficiently explored contribution of French economic culture to the creation of American national identity. As a multi-faceted figure whose richness has been dominated by his image as the author of a best-selling autobiographical novel, Crèvecoeur is here also seen as an agronomist who was no stranger to physiocracy and as a diplomat and French intellectual who always felt profoundly American. It was precisely this attachment to the land, seen as fundamental to the vision of a new and distinct form of peaceful cohabitation and democratic partnership, that became a political theme and an economic development project of the new nation and, as such, was a main plank of the agrarian ideology of Thomas Jefferson's Republicans. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian EconomyDaniel J. GargolaDennis P. Kehoe. Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv 1 269 pp. Cloth, $42.50, £29.95 (UK, Europe).This book is more than an investigation into an aspect of Roman law and legal thought. At the very beginning, Dennis Kehoe clearly identifies his goal: “My (...) purpose in this study is to clarify the basic relationships characterizing the agrarian economy of the early Roman Empire by analyzing the economic mentality that guided upper-class Romans in managing their wealth. My conviction is that the type of agrarian planning based on upper-class conceptions of investment and profit played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman economy as a whole.... In this study, I propose to address this problem by analyzing the assumptions that the Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian and in other classical sources made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. I base my analysis on the legal sources because, as I shall demonstrate, they offer a more comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans than we can gain from other types of evidence, including literary evidence, documentary papyri, and inscriptions” (vii).The author’s awareness of the problems in using legal evidence to shed light on larger issues and his openness about his own assumptions and about the limitations of the methods and the sources he has chosen to employ are among the work’s great strengths. In marked contrast with some other investigations of such matters, Kehoe does not assume that laws provide a simple, straightforward, and transparent entry into the structure and organization of economy and society. The work opens with an examination of the legal sources as evidence. Their condition offers one problem. The writings of the late Republican and early Imperial jurists are preserved largely in relatively brief citations included in the great collections of the sixth-century a.d.: Justinian’s Digest and Code. As Kehoe notes, this presents a major problem for investigators: to what extent do these passages represent the original—that is, was obsolete material removed systematically, and were the passages adjusted to fit the compilers’ concerns? Following authorities such as M. Kaser and F. Wieacker, the author takes an optimistic view of the matter, suggesting that “contemporary scholarship is justified in moving away from the suspicion that the Digest is so thoroughly interpolated that the opinions of the classical jurists can only be recovered after exhaustive reconstruction of the texts” (9). While accepting the possibility of interpolation in individual cases, he has based his study on the “belief that the existing collections of legal texts do allow us to trace the thinking, in particular the economic thinking, of the classical Roman legal authorities” (10).Having declared his intention to regard the citations as reasonably accurate reflections of their originals, Kehoe then turns to a more central question: the extent to which juristic writings reflect actual conditions. One school of [End Page 323] thought, represented by scholars such as Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens, Ga., 1995]), suggests that Roman jurists operated within a system of traditional representations, maintained as if fossilized long after the conditions that had given rise to them had changed, and that legal writers largely wrote about internal problems in interpretation that had arisen within this system. The jurists, then, did not address problems of their own day, nor were they interested in adapting the law to new circumstances, and their opinions need bear little resemblance to actual arrangements in their own time and place. Others, however, are more convinced of the timeliness of Roman legal writing. Scholars such as B. W. Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome [Princeton 1980]) and S. D. Martin (The Roman Jurists and the Organization of Private Building in the Late Republic and Early Empire [Brussels 1989]) maintain that Roman jurists consciously and directly addressed in their writings the social and economic concerns of their contemporaries in the governing elite.Once again, Kehoe takes care to situate... (shrink)

The development of factor markets has opened Chinese agriculture for the penetration of capitalism. This new round of rural transformation—China’s agrarian transition— raises the agrarian question in the Chinese context. This study investigates how capitalist forms and relations of production transform agricultural production and the peasantry class in rural China. The authors identify six forms of nonpeasant agricultural production, compare the labor regimes and direct producers’ socioeconomic statuses across these forms, and evaluate the role of China’s land-rights institution in shaping (...) these forms. The empirical investigation presents three main findings: Peasant differentiation : capitalist forms of agricultural production differentiate peasants into a variety of new class positions. Market-based stratification: producers in capitalist agriculture are primarily stratified by their positions in labor and land markets; their socioeconomic statuses are linked with their varying degrees of proletarianization. Institutional mediation: rural China’s dual-track land system plays a crucial role in shaping the diverse and unique forms of capitalist production. (shrink)

New entrant policy, literature, and research offers an important angle for exploring where dominant agrarianism is reproduced and contested. As new entrants seek access to land, finance, and expertise, their credibility is filtered through a cultural and policy environment that favors some farming models over others. Thus, seemingly apolitical policy tools geared at getting new people into farming may carry implicit norms of who these individuals should be, how they should farm, and what their values should entail. A normative gaze (...) of farming often masks the financial, cultural, labor relation, and land tenure dimensions that are the underlying drivers of agrarian change. This paper applies social reproduction theory to explore a diversity of social labor processes that new entrant farmers practice to arrive at the point of agricultural production. Interviews with new entrant and successor farmers in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) are presented first, followed by an analysis of new entrant policy instruments over the last two decades in Scotland. We find that new entrant policy fails to engage with a crisis of social reproduction in the food system because of a commitment to agrarian ideals of the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial farmer. By inviting newcomers into a dynamic of increasing precarious and uncompensated labor, very often by way of family relations, new entrant policy may act as a form of “predatory inclusion.” We argue that to be successful in reproducing the agricultural sector, new entrant farmer policy must be first a policy at attending to relations in the social sphere. Recognizing and supporting the diversified strategies farmers take on to assemble land for production would not only drive more just policy, but set the conditions for a more adaptive food system. (shrink)

Agricultural modernisation is a longstanding goal of China’s Party-state. Since the early 2000s, it has pursued this goal through policies designed to facilitate land consolidation and support the expansion of large agricultural enterprises – ‘New Agricultural Operators’ (NAOs). In this paper we explore the effect of these policies on the livelihoods of a cohort of smallholder orange growers in the mountainous regions of Hubei province and the local political economy. An analysis of data from a 2019 survey of 266 households (...) and interviews with villagers, agribusiness executives, cooperative leaders, and government officials, we find smallholder farmers are earning good incomes as independent commodity producers, withstanding attempts by local officials at land consolidation, and bypassing NAOs to self-determine their own modes of production and exchange. Our results speak to the ongoing debate about the future of smallholder farming in China, identify the strengths and limitations of recent state-centric analyses of agrarian transition, and re-iterate the pitfalls of the central government’s agricultural modernisation agenda. (shrink)

This paper argues that existing food security and food sovereignty approaches are inadequate to fully understand contradictory human development, nutrition, and productivity trends in Nepalese small-scale agriculture. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we developed a new food wellbeing approach that combines insights from food security, food sovereignty, and social wellbeing perspectives. We used the approach to frame 65 semi-structured interviews in a cluster of villages in Kaski district in the mid-hills of Nepal on various aspects of food security, (...) agriculture, off-farm livelihood opportunities, and women’s wellbeing. Our results indicate that context-specific subjective and social relational factors highlighted by the food wellbeing approach are key to understanding a paradox of increased food security, yet decreasing sustainability of small-scale agriculture. Increased levels of male out-migration and opportunities for local off-farm work have increased local capacity to purchase food. The positive consequences for food security are indicated by evidence that households with non-farm income sources had better food sufficiency, absorption capacity, nutritional quality, and stability of food supply. These off-farm employment opportunities have also led to the greater involvement of low caste groups and women in small-scale agriculture. This has been empowering for both groups and led to an increase in wellbeing, particularly for those women who have become de facto heads of household. Yet, small landholdings, persistent patterns of unequal and absentee land ownership, sharecropping, women’s overwork, and the aspirations of low caste farmers and women away from agriculture are simultaneously driving the erosion of local small-scale agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western CivilizationPaul A. RaheVictor Davis Hanson. The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. New York: The Free Press, 1995. xvi 1 541 pp. Cloth, $28 (US), $38 (Can.).On the back flap of the dust jacket of this volume, one finds a photograph of its author. He is not represented in the (...) customary manner—as an urbane sophisticate attired in jacket and tie, leaning against a bookcase or sitting at a desk, his hair carefully combed, his beard immaculately trimmed. Instead, he stands slouched before a weathered, wooden structure. He is adorned with sunglasses and jeans; his hair is unkempt, even wind-blown; he sports a mustache and appears to be unshaved; his sleeves are rolled up; his shirttails hang out and they appear to be soiled. We can infer that the shirt’s owner is himself unwashed. Victor Davis Hanson wants us to see him less as a professor of Greek than as a rube—akin to the “dour husbandmen, ‘their facial expressions like sour vinegar’” (403) celebrated by Aristophanes (Eccl. 289–92).This is as it should be, for among classicists Hanson is sui generis, and his is no ordinary scholarly work. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and teaches Greek at California State University at Fresno. But that is the least of it—for, with his brothers and a cousin, he has long operated a family farm in the southern San Joaquin Valley. He knows more about agriculture of the sort practiced by the ancient Hellenes than anyone now alive, and he has devoted his career as a scholar to making sense of classical Greek civilization in light of that knowledge. Everything that he has previously published—in articles and book chapters, in his splendid dissertation Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (Pisa 1983), and in his provocative monograph The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York 1989)—grew out of an attempt to make a whole of his divided life. The same can now be said for the book under review, which is nothing less than a masterpiece.Hanson makes no mention of Antonio Gramsci or even Karl Marx; and from the down-to-earth, resolutely empirical tone of his book, one can easily infer that he would have little patience with the elaborate theoretical posturings of either. But this notwithstanding, he can perhaps best be characterized as a heterodox Marxist. Put simply, he claims that late in the Dark Ages, Greek husbandmen invented a mode of production theretofore unknown and that in accord with the dictates of that mode of production, they elaborated the way of life and the institutions and practices that we commonly recognize as distinctively “Western.” The mode of production that Hanson has in mind is diversified farming [End Page 459] conducted in accord with the dictates of a primitive but nonetheless well-elaborated agronomy by slaveowning, resident proprietors.In the first part of his book Hanson surveys the archaeological and the literary evidence for early Greek settlement patterns and early Greek life; he examines with care the implications of what is said and of what is left unsaid in the last book of Homer’s Odyssey and in Hesiod’s Works and Days; and he draws together from the remaining literature every snippet of evidence pertinent to understanding what it was like to be a farmer in classical Hellas. At every point he is sensitive to information conveyed in the surviving evidence that city slickers, such as myself, inevitably overlook; and slowly, inexorably, piecing together fragments gleaned from a thousand sources, he builds up a persuasive picture of a transformation in agricultural technique more profound in its implications for human life than the Industrial Revolution.In the second part of his book Hanson traces the logic of ancient Greek constitutionalism and the otherwise inexplicable protocols of hoplite warfare to the special needs and peculiar outlook of agriculturalists eking out a livelihood from diversified farming and standing in need of protection for their property and their way of life against predators domestic and foreign. Finally... (shrink)

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and (...) increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we (...) seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture. (shrink)

Globalization offers a mix of new trajectories for agriculture, livelihoods, resource use, and environmental conservation. The papers in this issue share elements that advance our understanding of these new trajectories. The shared elements suggest an approach that places stress on: (i) the common ground of theoretical concepts (local-global interactions), methodologies (case study design), and analytical frameworks (spatio-temporal emphasis); (ii) farm-level economic diversification and the dynamics of agricultural intensification-disintensification; (iii) the pervasive role of agricultural as well as environmental institutions, organizations, and (...) governance issues; (iv) the ‹agency of nature’ that blends the roles of non-human organisms and the cultural and social practices of people both at the local scale and beyond; (v) the framing of sustainability initiatives and outcomes through the perspective of historical change; (vi)␣spatial environmental dynamics of the ‹new geographics of environmental conservation’ that impact agriculture, food production, and resource management; and (vii) successful and promising policies, projects, and developments mapping out possible spaces of hope for agricultural sustainability, aquitable development, and food security. The adoption and application of these elements is successful also in avoiding the tendency toward just-so accounts or overly simplified stories of agrarian and environment successes amid the often grim realities of globalization and its impacts. (shrink)

Populism is described in this volume as an umbrella term covering a number of commonly seen political phenomena, i.e. ‘American populism, Russian Narodniki, European agrarian movements, and Argenti...

The current global ecological crises have, inter alia, led to an upsurge in massive migrations, food crises, diseases, pandemics, increased conflict and war especially in African societies. Most of those affected are the small farmers in rural communities who depend on agriculture. This crisis has not only raised concerns about the extent of the damage humans and human activities are causing to the natural environment but has also ignited discussions about the urgent necessity for a change in human behavior and (...) our obligations towards a new agrarian philosophy. In this chapter, I argue that Henry Odera Oruka’s Parental Earth Ethics could be adopted as a new principle of global justice and for grounding global environmental ethics. This principle invites us towards rethinking ecological fairness and global justice. Specifically, I opine that Oruka’s Parental Earth Ethics could be a veritable resource in our search for: (i) promoting global justice in the use and equal distribution of wealth and world resources for the common good and security of all, and (ii) global environmental ethics. It is basically driven by the ethical principle of the human minimum, which ought to inspire us humans to be more ethically and politically responsible in their use and distribution of world resources for the good and security of all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 132-139 [Access article in PDF] Environmentalism: A Global History, by Ramachandra Guha. New York: Longman, 161 pp, includes Bibliographic Essay and Index. Softcover, ISBN 0-321-01169-4. This short but wide-ranging book is a global survey of the history of environmental thought by one of the people most responsible for broadening environmental discussions to include recognition of post-colonial societies. The overall goal of this introductory (...) textbook is to explain multiple environmental discourses from Brazil, the United States, China, India, the Soviet Union, and Africa, and then to situate them as complimentary components of a global socially oriented environmental discursive framework.With that said, it is always difficult to evaluate an introductory textbook. In this case, much of what is covered represents well-worn ground for the environmental scholar. The thesis that emerges is less about a new set of environmental proposals and more about how we ought to understand the history of ideas that informs the development of policy and what ideas ought to be taught in the classroom. Since this book is designed as a textbook, much of my commentary stems from a consideration of how it might work in the classroom. [End Page 132]As an educator regularly teaching courses in environmental thought, ethics, planning, and policy, I have often wondered why so few texts exist on the global history of environmental thought. Guha's work represents an attempt to bridge this gap in the literature. Despite Guha's admirable intentions, I am hesitant to endorse this work as an introductory textbook on the global history of environmental thought for one important reason: Guha's methodology leads to the omission of important components of the global history of environmental thought. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty of this type of project. The very title of this work signals perhaps an impossible project, given the 145 pages of text set aside for the task. Guha does cover a number of subjects well, and some are welcome additions to the discussion of the history of environmental thought. Overall though, the topics not covered work to neutralize what is accomplished by the topics that are covered. Consider first what Guha does include.The book is divided into two parts, each focusing on a wave of environmental thought. In the first part, there are four chapters and an afterword. In the initial chapter, Guha argues that a more social and international environmentalism can be a spur to "human reflection and human action," and not just a "scientific study of the state of nature or a balance sheet of the impact of human beings on the earth" (p. 3). While it is common to divide the environmental movement into waves (usually three or four), Guha chooses to delineate only one major shift and thus only two waves of environmentalism. The first wave is comprised of what Guha calls a "period of pioneering and prophecy" and an initial reaction to industrialization; the second wave is comprised of the more socially oriented responses that have emerged in recent decades (p. 3). There are good reasons for delineating more waves, but Guha's project is generally well-served by the two-wave distinction.Guha divides the first wave into three varieties distinguished by their different guiding ideologies—back-to-the-land, scientific conservation, wilderness idea—which are treated respectively in chapters two, three, and four. What I found most compelling about Guha's varieties are some of the figures he chose to include. For example, in chapter two Guha offers a treatment of the back-to-the-land ideology that concurrently condemned excessive industrialization and espoused a commitment to agrarian and pastoral values. From William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Clare, Edward Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, [End Page 133] Henry David Thoreau, William Morris, and Octavia Hill, to Gandhi and the Nazis, Guha's range here is impressive. While I do have reservations about how convincing it is to link Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Gandhi according to a largely generic and nondescript agrarian ideal that he claims... (shrink)

A primary contribution of this essay is to provide a survey of the human and environmental impacts of livestock production. We will find that the mass consumption of animals is a primary reason why humans are hungry, fat, or sick and is a leading cause behind the depletion and pollution of waterways, the degradation and deforestation of the land, the extinction of species, and the warming of the planet. Recognizing these harms, this essay will consider various solutions being proposed to (...) “shrink” livestock’s long shadow, including proposed “technical” or “market” solutions, a transition to “new agrarian” methods, and a vegetarian or vegan diet. Though important and morally relevant qualitative differences exist between industrial and non-industrial methods, this essay will conclude that, given the present and projected size of the human population, the morality and sustainability of one’s diet are inversely related to the proportion of animals and animal products one consumes. (shrink)

The critical studies in the Sociology of Agriculture can be generally divided into four questions: Agrarian, Environmental, Food, and Emancipatory. While the four questions overlap and all address social justice concerns, there is a chronological sequence to the studies. In this presidential address presented at the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food in Society held in June 2008 in New Orleans, LA, I provide an overview of the four (...) questions and call for researchers and activists in agrifood studies to engage as public social scientists to bring about a more just and equitable agrifood system. (shrink)

Summary New scientific work on the ancient landscapes of Germany and Britain makes it very likely that the Roman decision to abandon attempts to conquer Germany as far as the Elbe, most clearly expressed by Tiberius in 16 AD, was strongly influenced by perceptions of the heavily wooded landscape of that region. There were other reasons too: the concern of emperors to hinder potential rivals; the sheer difficulty of advancing to the Elbe; and the increasing concern of the emperor and (...) his advisers for the fiscal effects of this and other potential conquests. But what is new is that the evidence of arboreal and non-arboreal pollen shows that Germany was a less attractive target than agrarian England. (shrink)

The processes of state formation in the agrarian states of Southeast Asia lend themselves to fruitful comparative analysis using Eliasian concepts. However, in the difficult physical environment of a region endowed with plentiful land relative to population, the control of labour was more important than control of territory, as demonstrated by the cases of Siam and Java. Moreover, the religious, ceremonial and symbolic significance of kingship remained very important even when the coercive power of the centre was weak. Courts made (...) absolutist claims, but their dominance depended on symbolic power and on complex intrigues and networks of patronage. Elias is useful to analyse these endogenous processes of state formation. However, the modern states of the region were forged by colonialism, nationalist movements and the more recent technocratic developmentalist programmes of authoritarian elites. Rapid economic transformation and industrialization have brought new classes and new tensions to test the adequacy of state structures, now far removed from the elite territorial competition of the past. (shrink)

As an environmental philosopher I had long been aware of dilemmas between animal ethics and ecological ethics, but now, as the manager of my own biodiversity reserve, I was facing these dilemmas in a more gut-wrenching and complex form than I had ever encountered in the classroom. Pressured by environmental authorities to cull kangaroos on my property, in the name of ecological ethics, I started thinking about the very meaning of ethics, its origins in the evolution of society and its (...) material and metaphysical presuppositions. Two different conceptions of the normative root of society emerged, the deontic conception, appropriate within the material and metaphysical framework of hunter-gatherer societies, and the axial conception, appropriate within the framework of ’civilization’, viz the agrarian societies that evolved into the urban-industrial formations of the modern era. The axial conception, based on empathy, aligned with our modern conception of ethics, and underlay our contemporary sense of animal ethics. ’Ecological ethics’, on the other hand, seemed to be obscurely underpinned by the deontic conception, and was not ethical at all in the axial sense, and was moreover mismatched, normatively speaking, with the material and metaphysical realities of modern societies. A different set of practices from those currently prescribed by environmental authorities needs to be devised to meet both the ethical and ecological requirements of our contemporary natural environment. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the culturological analysis of the new model of the subject in the twenty first century. The methodology of work is based on the wave theory of social development. Modern society enters the state of the "fourth wave". The fourth wave comes in place of the agrarian, industrial and informational societies. This wave is called "new Industrialization" in contemporary economic context. The modern economy needs the revival of the industrial sector with the support of the national (...) state. New industrialization is countering the global control and fragmentation of the world. The national state is changing its concept from unitary to glocal and multi-polar. Consciousness of citizens should also change. The subject of the fourth wave is a cultural nomad. He makes travels to the global world and switches cultural codes in different contexts. The term "altermodern" is the word of curatorial practice of "zero". It means the nomadic consciousness, the ability to cultural wanderings. Nomadic consciousness is based on the model of transculture. Trans-national and trans-cultural view is a synchronization in the human minds of different cultural worlds. Man is at the point of their collision, belongs to all the worlds and does not apply to any one. It accumulates in its consciousness projections of different cultures, their possible alternatives and development. Nomadism, transculture and altermodern - is the gap between globalization and antiglobalism. Globalism causes unification of cultures. Anti-globalism leads to a revenge of fundamentalism and ethnic isolation. Nomadic consciousness of the altmodern balances between the universal and particular principles of human existence. Opposition to ideology is a distinctive feature of transcultural altmodern. The fourth wave is characterized by total radicalization of the world as a result of the revival of the neoliberalism of the right-wing dictatorships on the territory of the Third World countries. "The doctrine of shock" is the source of the formation of neo-totalitarianism. Art liberates him. Psychoanalysis is a means of liberation from ideologies. The procedure for dismissal is based on art therapy in the aesthetic cluster. Altermodern is an era of increasing role of artists in shaping the consciousness of a cultural subject. Art-galleries of the world use techniques of psychoanalytic work with the public. They provide rearrangement of the subject in the direction of an open dynamic consciousness without boundaries and prejudices. (shrink)

Amidst broad debates about the “New Green Revolution” in Africa, input-intensive agriculture is on the rise in some parts of Africa. This paper examines the underlying drivers of the recent and rapid adoption of herbicides and genetically modified seeds in the Burkina Faso cotton sector. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Houndé region, this article contends that economic and cultural dynamics—often considered separately in analyses of technology adoption—have co-produced a self-reinforcing technological treadmill. On the one hand, male (...) farmers seek to increase cotton production in response to an economic squeeze. At the same time, broader cultural shifts toward individualism have created labor shortages as a result of families splitting apart, parents putting their children in school, and some women and young men refusing to provide free labor. Male cotton farmers thus increase production by turning to labor-saving inputs like herbicides, but these inputs create more debt, further locking farmers into intensive production. This article thus expands on the classic concept of the technological treadmill, demonstrating how economic and cultural processes intersect within a process of agrarian change to drive labor-saving agricultural technology adoption in the Burkinabè cotton sector. This expanded treadmill concept illuminates the complex dynamics compelling farmers’ choices to opt into input-intensive agriculture, and also helps explain rising farmer differentiation, as poorer farmers struggle to stay afloat and wealthier farmers expand. (shrink)

The challenge of pursuing sustainability in agriculture is often viewed as mainly or wholly technical in nature, requiring the reform of farming methods and the development and adoption of alternative technologies. Likewise, the purpose of sustainability is frequently cast in utilitarian terms, as a means of protecting a valuable resource (i.e., soil) and of satisfying market demands for healthy, tasty food. Paul B. Thompson has argued that the embrace of these views by many in the consumer/environmental movement enables easy co-optation (...) by agribusiness. It also reflects a critical weakness in this movement: a lack of commitment to philosophical principles that depart from the utilitarian premises of the industrial model of agriculture. This paper draws on the writings of Thomas Berry and Liberty Hyde Bailey to identify the philosophical principles of what we call planetary agrarianism. From the perspective of planetary agrarianism, the pursuit of sustainability is a broad and challenging moral, educational, and political task. Berry helps us see that it is fundamentally a project of worldview transition, which requires a new cultural narrative that must rival, in form and appeal, the mythic power of the utilitarian industrial vision. Liberty Hyde Bailey, author of The Holy Earth (1915) and a leader in the land-grant education and nature-study movements, took up the project of worldview transition in his life work. While in some ways dated and flawed, Bailey’s writings are a valuable source of guidance for developing and pursuing a viable philosophy of agriculture for the 21st century. (shrink)

Western Kenya has been a labour-exporting region for over a century, with many households straddling both rural and urban contexts. While the spatial separation of migrants from their rural places of origin represented the first tangible metabolic rift within Kenyan agricultural production systems, that rift is being reshaped as rural families engage in new forms of interconnection with migrant members (“multilocationality”). These changes appear to be driven by the ongoing crisis of agrarian livelihoods and are supported by the advent of (...) cellphone communication and mobile money transfer technologies. Interviews and ethnographic data collected in a western Kenyan community and amongst its out-migrants reveal the role of cellphones in mediating social, financial, and knowledge flows within multilocational households. The increased ease of communicating and sending money is associated with less frequent physical movements between rural and urban settings, with commensurate disruptions in the acquisition and development of agro-ecological knowledge, and a shifting burden of agricultural labour. Gender relations are also put under further stress: migrant men remain (or believe they have remained) involved in rural affairs but appear to be using cellphone technologies to reinvent their household roles, replacing previously social or labour contributions with financial ones and by asserting claims over the on-farm decision-making of rural households previously considered female-headed. (shrink)

This article explores a community garden in the Northern Central Coast of California, founded and cultivated by Triqui and Mixteco peoples native to Oaxaca, Mexico. The practices depicted in this case study contrast with common agroecological discourses, which assume native people’s agricultural techniques are consistently static and place-based. Rather than choose cultivation techniques based on an abstract notion of indigenous tradition, participants utilize the most appropriate practices for their new environment. Garden participants combine agricultural practices developed in Oaxaca with those (...) learned while working on California farms. Through the process of community gardening, immigrants find a new interpretation of their own shifting indigenous identity, based on culinary and agrarian practices in a new place. Additionally, they form solidarities between historic ethnic divides of Triqui and Mixteco, based on newfound commonalities in the garden. This case study provides an important example of the current articulation, construction, and deployment of indigeneity in the context of migration and agriculture, and its implications for immigrant opportunities and futures. (shrink)

We view agrobiodiversity as a social-ecological phenomenon and, therefore, an example of nature–gender relations within agrarian change, including social, economic, political and technical changes in agriculture and rural areas. As a result of the industrialization of agriculture, nature–gender relations in the field of agrobiodiversity have become characterized by separation processes such as conservation versus use or subsistence versus commodity production. We argue that the sustainable development paradigm, as currently implemented in European Common Agricultural Policy through the concept of multifunctionality, does (...) not necessarily overcome separation tendencies and lead towards integration, despite its claim to bring together different ecological, economic and social needs. In our paper we critically reflect this observation and develop a theory-based analytical framework at the interface of nature and gender relations. For analytical purposes we distinguish between three different agrarian structures and focus on the development of two separation tendencies within them and their effects on agrobiodiversity. Concerning nature, we discuss the effects of separating agrobiodiversity conservation and use. With regard to gender, we discuss the separation of subsistence and commodity production. Against this background, we claim for new rural economic rationalities characterized by processes whose qualitative, material and value dimensions maintain agrobiodiversity. (shrink)

The relevance of the study has two sides — individual and general. In its essential aspect, it is the development of achievements of predecessors by consistently taking into account the latest data on trends and changes in the interconnected spheres of education, economics and culture. In the individual aspect, it is about improving the professional means of improving the efficiency of teaching foreign languages in order to form students with a high level of linguistic-professional competence. Public relevance is the goal (...) of educating young people in a new patriotic direction, because today, due to various global influences, the classical principles of life in the agrarian system, created in recent centuries, or in the industrial society, are devalued due to various global influences. The purpose of the study in a broad sense was to highlight the causes and consequences of the European religious Reformation as the main factor in accelerating the movement of the whole of Western Europe to the position of the world leader that previously belonged to China. We see precis e tasks in the integrated analysis on the basis of the latest discoveries of many humanities and exact sciences in the educational, economic and cultural systems of Germany and other successful European states. On this basis, we hope to fulfill the public task which is to make significant proposals in the plans and practice of higher education reform in Ukraine. The methodology of the study relies on the best classical means, on the principle of historicism and the continuity of the connection between the material and the ideal, a modern multidisciplinary approach. For the highest effectiveness of the research, we will use the latest scientific data and recommendations of the innovators who collect and use these data. The results of the study mostly follow from the mentioned new discoveries. They testify that in ancientt history, in the role of locomotives of civilizational progress in the western part of Eurasia, direct descendants of the inventors of agriculture acted, among which the especially great contribution belongs to the ancestors of Ukrainians from the territories of Trypillya and the Great Trypillya. It is indicated that during the existence of the Great Trypillya, future German farmers acquainted themselves with the technologies of the Great Trypillya, so the German language, through borrowed words, became part of the Indo-European family. It is noted that after the collapse of the Great Trypillya, the Germans and Slavs became neighbors along the meridian Elbe. In the age of steppe invasions, future Ukrainians and Germanic tribes did not get in contact, and the influence of the Roman Empire was mostly experienced by western lands. Emphasis was placed on the evolution of ideological, religious and other paradigms in the territory of Germany after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, which determined the development of the nation for the next hundreds of years. The religious and philosophical paradigmatic origins of those unique features of culture and education that during the nineteenth century were emphasized. brought Germany to the position of the scientific and technological leader of the world. The high role of German neo-humanism and the Berlin Research University were noted. In the final section, special attention is paid to religious issues and to the destructive impact on social and other processes in the German immigration flows of Islamists. The conclusions focus on the competition of several important paradigms in the education of modern Germany and the proposals made to incorporate German experience in legislation and the use of the Bologna process. An important caution is made regarding the choice of Germany's strategy for the development of the scientific and educational complex 'within the framework of the Lisbon project. This country has become a world leader not only in alternative energy, but also in the implementation of the fourth industrial revolution. We consider an example of this leadership like the regular world conferences in Davos, which involve the majority of influential politicians and economists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican RomeT. Corey BrennanGargola, D. J. Lands, Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. x 1 270 pp. Cloth, $43.95. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)“Nothing could have contributed more to the safety, strength and profit of (...) the state.” Thus Niccolò Machiavelli (Disc. II 6), one of the first of a long line of moderns to expatiate on the phenomenon of Roman Republican colonization. The latest (at time of writing) is D. J. G[argola], with his learned Lands, Laws, & Gods, which has its origins in the author’s 1989 University of North Carolina dissertation. The book takes as its general subject not just Republican colonization but also another well-trod area of Roman public policy—the agrarian legislation that distributed state land and regulated its use—as well as the religious and technical aspects of Roman land definition.Can we really expect much new on these traditional topics? Perhaps not, [End Page 143] especially now that we have Dieter Flach’s Römische Agrargeschichte (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 3.9, Munich 1990)—a masterly synthesis that G. oddly has missed. Yet G. independently manages to come up with a work of value. The bulk of G.’s book (chapters 2–7) consists of detailed reconstructions, especially from the evidence of Livy 21–45 (not much used by Flach), of how colonies were established, viritane plots assigned, and land sold or leased in the mid-Republic. Here G. has sifted through a small mountain of difficult evidence (and bibliography) of widely varying worth and succeeded in shaping a coherent narrative. He has a keen eye for technical and conventional language, and sound judgment on the limits of applying evidence from the various Gromatici (none of whom were writing much before the second century a.d.) to the Republican situation. In short, G. in these pages has crafted a reliable and readable English language work of reference on all sorts of res agrariae.The emphasis in chapters 2–7 is not so much on evolution in the administration of agrarian and colonial legislation—G. argues (somewhat provocatively) that there was not much development of institutions within this period—but on creating a composite picture of how things worked. G. realizes “the result is necessarily an idealized portrait,” in which the system appears more regular than it perhaps was (10–11). One additional trouble, however, is that this approach sometimes flattens potentially significant details. Take for instance the two commissions of colonial IIIviri created under a lex Aelia of late 194 (Liv. 34.53.1–2), one of which went on to found Copia (193), the other Valentia (192). Now, the reported terms of this law provided that the commissioners hold imperium—quite striking, though G. misses that detail—for three years (i.e., 193–91) to colonize the ‘ager Thurinus’ and the ‘Bruttii’ respectively. G. is over-optimistic in calling these territories “stable, long pacified regions” (63). If so, why the imperium? One possible explanation. The territorial parameters placed on each of these commissions (especially ‘the Bruttii’) were quite loose. Those IIIviri may have been expected to take wide-ranging measures to strengthen Roman control over dissidents in this area (cf. App. Hann. 61.252–53), even after they established their colonies. (Note that each of these commissions completed their ostensible tasks before their triennium expired.) If true, how many other colonial commissions were like these?It is only in chapters 8 and 9, where G. surveys agrarian programs from the Gracchi to the end of the Republic, that we see an attempt to show real development. The Gracchi in their agrarian legislation sought to achieve broader effects than any of their predecessors, argues G. in chapter 8, and so introduced agrarian laws that “ended the rigid separation of categories found in mid-Republican legislation” (176). Consider the lex Sempronia agraria of 133, which, in its final form, established IIIviri a(gris) i(udicandis) a(dsignandis) to settle coloni on public land taken from illegal possessores. In this law... (shrink)

Critical food scholars have long noted that much of local food discourse in the US is underwritten by a deeply regressive agrarian imaginary that valorizes “small family farms” while erasing historical legacies of racism. In this paper, I examine one influential expression of the agrarian imaginary that I call the fantasy of “real food,” and illustrate how that discourse contributes to ongoing exclusions in farmers markets. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I explain how the fantasy of real food positions white middle-class (...) consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a romantic narrative of loss and recovery, in which their enlightened consumption practices precipitate the return of authentic social relations and connections to nature. I then trace the influence of this fantasy through a reading of selected popular media, and illustrate how the racist, classist, and patriarchal antipathies of the agrarian imaginary find legitimate expression in an alternate form as affectively charged moral and aesthetic commitments. Finally, I show how this fantasy logic makes both the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of farmers appear not only reasonable but morally righteous. I conclude by arguing that we cannot rely on the reflexivity of the privileged to deliver justice, no matter how well-meaning they may be, and suggest that we need new imaginaries and new narratives to guide our politics of consumption. (shrink)

The article examines and analyzes the market of oilseeds, which is a variety and a hybrid of sunflower, rape, soybean. It is determined that selection and seed production play an important role in improving the efficiency of the domestic agrarian sector. The domestic seed industry has the potential for growth, which can be realized only through a scientific approach and specialization in the production of seeds. It is established that there are quite significant differences between the stages of seed creation (...) and priorities in state scientific institutions and private seed companies. Differences are due to strategic development plans and the financial mechanism of operational activities. Prospects are the need for fundamental changes aimed at strengthening the organizational and scientific provision of the industry, identifying new priorities for the development of the seed industry to create the final product in the form of selection innovation. (shrink)

WORK AS IMPROVEMENT - HUSBANDRY, HOUSEKEEPING AND CAPITALISM IN 16TH ANN 17TH CENTURY ENGLANDThis article traces the development of a new attitude to work as improvement in early modern England. By focusing on agricultural manuals from the period, the author shows how the attitude to work as improvement developed as a response by yeomen and gentleman farmers to their increasing subjection to market imperatives. In contrast to the ethics of housekeeping, which stressed the good maintenance and ordering of the ‘house’ (...) in the broadest sense as the primary aim of social and economic activities, the new idea of improvement focused on activities directed at the market. This idea established new distinctions between good and bad work, and it created new criteria for valorizing different types of agricultural activities. The constant drive to measure the value of agricultural work in terms of market price, and to continually raise productivity and efficiency and make use of the latest techniques and inventions became pivotal for these agricultural writers. The idea of work as improvement had a wide range of new moral, cultural and political dimensions, all of which consolidated into a more coherent ideology of improvement by the late 16th century. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a typology of ‘non-commercial’ approaches to farming, based on a survey of a representative sample of farmers in Scotland, United Kingdom. In total, 395 farmers indicated that they do not seek to make a profit on their farms. We estimate that these non-commercial approaches to farming are utilised on at least 13% of agricultural land in Scotland. As such, non-commercial farming is not a marginal practice, nor are NCF limited to small-scale ‘hobby’ farms: NCF exist (...) across the scale of agricultural holding sizes and are operated by a wide range of socio-demographic cohorts. We identify 6 types of NCF: agricultural residences, specialist smallholdings, horsiculture holdings, mixed smallholdings, amenity mixed farms, and large farms or estates. These types were differentiated primarily by the scale of farm size, presence of diversification activities and types of animal present. The analysis demonstrates a number of emergent patterns of land management: de facto land abandonment, transition towards ‘horsiculture’, and management differences between retiring and new entrant NCF. We argue that the types identified reflect a number of intersecting issues in contemporary agrarian transitions, particularly the aging farmer population; generational renewal; and gendered implications of agricultural restructuring. (shrink)

The author reviews some archival documents and materials of Pavlo P. Skoropadskyi, Hetman of the Ukrainian state, his personal memoirs and executive decisions on foreign policy issues over a period of April-December 1918. Pavlo Skoropadskyi's stand as to building the state and his commitment to the pro-Russian vector are demonstrated. Some examples of practical steps taken by Pavlo Skoropadskyi's government to gain understanding with the Entente countries after Germany and Austria-Hungary lost the war are given. Based on its organizational structure, (...) the type of the Hetman state is defined. An example of rapport with new temporary state formations on the Don and Kuban Rivers is given. The paper describes radical and prompt actions of the Hetman government, taken to draw the Crimea under the dominion of Ukraine. The fallacy of the pro-Russian line of policy of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi in the context of the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation is pointed out. The ambiguous course of Ukraine is exemplified by the formation of its Armed Forces, Cabinet of Ministers and delaying in the implementation of the agrarian reform. The attitude of Pavlo Skoropadskyi to the Ukrainians and the Galicians is demonstrated through specific references to his statements. The paper shows some practical steps in opening embassy missions and consular agencies in European countries, which point to the efforts of the Cabinet of Ministers to win international recognition and authority for the Ukrainian state. A situational geopolitical change of the diplomatic relations is demonstrated by the example of Romania. The main causes of the anti-Hetman uprising are defined as the lack of a negotiation process with representatives of socialist and democratic forces of Ukraine, incapability to enlist the support of rural masses and inferior moods in respect of Russia. (shrink)

The promotion of conservation agriculture for smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa is subject to ongoing scholarly and public debate regarding the evidence-base and the agenda-setting power of involved stakeholders. We undertake a political analysis of CA in Zambia that combines a qualitative case study of a flagship CA initiative with a quantitative analysis of a nationally representative dataset on agricultural practices. This analysis moves from an investigation of the knowledge politics to a study of how the political agendas of the actors (...) involved are shaping agrarian practices. From its initial focus on CA as soil conservation and sustainable agriculture, the framing of the initiative has evolved to accommodate shifting trends in the policy arena. In tandem with the increased focus on climate adaptation, we see an increased emphasis on private sector-led modernisation. The initiative has shifted its target group from the poorest smallholders to prospective commercial farmers, and has forged connections between its farmer-to-farmer extension network and private input suppliers and service providers. The link between CA and input intensification is reflected in national statistics as a significantly higher usage of herbicides, pesticides and mineral fertilizer on fields under CA tillage compared to other fields. We argue that the environmental and participation agendas are used to buttress CA as an environmentally and socially sustainable agricultural development strategy, while the prevailing practice is the result of a common vision for a private sector-led agricultural development shared between the implementing organisation, the donor and international organisations promoting a new green revolution in Africa. (shrink)

The study presented is the result of a field survey conducted in Latvia in 1991. The brief of this research was to trace the role of the ‘private’ farm sector that has begun to emerge in the wake of the transition from a central-command to a market-oriented economy. Thus a look at the legislative acts embodying the agrarian reform is ccompanied by an analysis of the recent developments in local production systems. The study of ‘production systems’, or that part of (...) economic analysis that comes under the rubric of ‘farm systems’, was employed here for the first time to analyze a Soviet-type economic system in transition. The first and second sections, which focus on the historical evolution of Latvia's agriculture and the economics underpinning it, range in compass from the ‘first’ agrarian reform to collectivization and on to the present situation. This is followed by a look at the current, or ‘third’, land reform initiative (section 3), particular emphasis being accorded the emergence of new production structures and the problems posed by the transformation of the old ones (sections 4 and 5). The next section includes a discussion of the links between the farms of the socialized sector and of the nascent private one (section 6). The concluding remarks provide a recapitulation of the study's main findings. (shrink)

The relevance of the research topic. After the World War II the leaders and intellectuals of the world were forced to look for new principles and methods of management. New theories for analysis of complex systems appeared. The D. Meadows’ group from the Club of Rome and other analysts discovered the fact of the deepening humanity in an irreversible and deadly crisis. Up to now, economists and politicians have not offered a way to guarantee rescue. However, there is a consensus (...) that hopes can be linked to the development of education and science in the world. The phrase “internationalization of higher education ” is used more and more often, and the number of scientific works is growing rapidly. However, in our opinion, the phenomenon of IHE is perceived superficially because of inattention to the latest scientific achievements, which are not followed by humanities scholars. This caused our interest and stimulated the desire to prove that global process of IHE started in accordance with the laws of the evolution of industrial production. The purpose of our study is to apply the theory of analysis of very large systems to the phenomena of kinds and variants internationalization to obtain the most probable scenarios for human progress. The task of the study is seen in the critical analysis of the trend we noted in the process of training the PhD-level professional in space and time and transforming the figure of a young worker from a national to an international “product” of the systems of education and training. The methodology of the research was dictated by the chosen goal and tasks under the pressure of the grandiose object – a complex of educational systems in a globalized planet environment. This is due to the use of the means of many sciences, theories of systemic research and a multidisciplinary approach in the conditions of global evolutionism. The results of the study in their essence, are still based on historical methods, in conjunction with the achievements of young sciences – synergetics, theories of complex systems, and others. An original table was created to match the agrarian, industrial and informational societies – those within which the system of higher education had been developed. The direction of its characterization has proven that the autonomy of universities has been diminished at present, the size of the whole system and its orientation towards political and economic demands have increased. It is indicated at the time when the high school began to lose its national character and to acquire features of internationality. It is noted that this coincided with the growth of the volume and impact of globalization and its study mainly within the humanities. The widespread representation of the interaction in higher education with the influences of globalization and internationalization, the basic definitions and differentiation, etc. is presented. The newest data on internationalization within the universities and far beyond them in state and interstate institutions are presented. The conclusions and recommendations formulated and proved the main hypothesis of our study and its main result. It consists in the fact that the higher school in general began to reproduce the path of industry with its variant of internationalization – a combination of products of many countries. We argue that in higher education the division of time and space of educational programs, institutions, places of internship, etc. began. Instead of ensuring PhD competences within a single state, basic schooling is found to be more profitable in one place, the profile secondary is in the other, the baccalaureate or master’s program in the country “A”, postgraduate study somewhere in “B”, the final professional development in the best world’s centers of MBA or some other training in London or Harvard. From this follows the following conclusion: Ukraine’s resources are already inadequate for the preparation of national personnel of the highest world quality. Such a “product” has already become international. (shrink)