Rural Families and Income from Migration: Honduran Households in the World Economy

Abstract

Although peasants have always been linked to larger economic systems, the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the augmented incidence of migration throughout the Third World in recent decades have transformed the peasantry and made it reliant on wage work in labour markets tied to the world economy as never before. In Latin America this transformation has taken many forms, but the overwhelming direction has been towards changing subsistence farmers into wage labourers. The overall effect has been that few rural households persist independent of wage labour, while the majority combine income from resource-poor landholdings with wage earnings. The dependence on off-farm income is especially significant among smallholder farm families who derive the majority of household income from off-farm sources.