Analysis of the peasants’ livelihood strategies in the Paute basin of Ecuador

Raúl Vanegas,Fabrice Demoulin,Sabine Henry,Guido Ruivenkamp

doi:10.18537/mskn.11.02.07

Raúl Vanegas, Fabrice Demoulin + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.18537/mskn.11.02.07

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Abstract

The article analyses the livelihood of peasant farmers in the rural area of three parishes in the Paute basin in Ecuador. First, the article presents the gathered empirical data of the study sites, respectively the Pichacay in the Santa Ana parish, Caldera in the Javier Loyola parish, and Llavircay in the Rivera parish. Applying the Chayanovian and van der Ploeg interpretation frames, three types of peasant households could be distinguished, based upon their specific organizational forms of producing and reproducing their livelihoods. The article concludes that a more in-depth analysis is needed in the peasant’s art of farming, particularly in their core balance of being conditioned by and linked to as well as resistant to the capitalist economy.

Highlights

The small-scale farming households may make up a small proportion of the world’s population, the peasantry still constitutes nearly two-fifths of humanity (Weiss, 2007, cited by van der Ploeg, 2018)
This article provides an insight into the different types of peasant livelihoods present in three rural communities of the Paute basin (Ecuador), a topic little addressed in Ecuador or Latin America
By analyzing first-hand collected and census data, three types of peasant households could be distinguished based upon their specific organizational forms of producing and reproducing their livelihoods

Summary

Introduction

The small-scale farming households (i.e., the peasantry) may make up a small proportion of the world’s population, the peasantry still constitutes nearly two-fifths of humanity (Weiss, 2007, cited by van der Ploeg, 2018). This implies that around 2.2 billion agrarian household members are living, producing, consuming, and struggling to maintain their livelihoods built upon a peasant way of farming. Three different modes of farming can be discerned: a peasant, an entrepreneurial, and a largescale corporate (or capitalist) mode of farming. Large-scale corporate (or capitalist) farming is characterized by a going toward the countryside, leading to an increase of more than 400.000 newly created peasant farms, covering an area of 32 million hectares (van der Ploeg, 2013)

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