Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe: The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization

Abstract

In the preface to this innovative, theoretically rich and provocative new book, Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg remarks that “much attention was given to the peasantry during the grand transformations of the last two centuries, and many of the resulting theories centred on the peasant as an obstacle to change and, thus, as a social figure that should disappear or be actively removed” (xiii–xiv). A professor at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, one of the foremost centers worldwide of critical agrarian studies, Van der Ploeg contrasts “the manufactured invisibility” of peasants with the their striking “omnipresence”—there are now more peasants than ever before in history and they still constitute some two-fifths of humanity. The argument of The New Peasantries is straightforward, even though the exposition is complex and at times a bit convoluted (the copious flow charts often help to clarify the sometimes prolix prose, though in a number of them— as in parts of the text—it’s easier to see the trees than the forest). For heuristic purposes Van der Ploeg distinguishes peasant, entrepreneurial and large-scale corporate or capitalist modes of agriculture. The boundaries between these three ideal types are, he acknowledges, blurry, since peasants increasingly engage in market-oriented production and entrepreneurial farmers, if they succeed, do so in large measure through expanding the scale of their operations and assuming corporate forms. He points to three key processes that shape the contemporary countryside: the industrialization of agriculture; repeasantization or the retreat of non-peasants or former peasants into “defensive” or “autonomous” peasant-like forms of production oriented significantly around subsistence; and “deactivation,” which refers to the “containment” or breakdown of any of the three main modes of agriculture and its disappearance or partial or complete transformation into one of the other modes. The “peasant condition” or “principle,” as Van der Ploeg understands it, consists of various interrelated elements that permit survival in a hostile environment; these include a “self-controlled resource base, ”“ coproduction” or interaction between humans and nature, cooperative relations that allow peasants to distance themselves from monetary relations and market exchange, and an ongoing “struggle for autonomy” or “room for maneuver” that reduces dependency and aligns farming “with the interests and prospects of the… producers” (32). He is appropriately appreciative of the tremendous heterogeneity of peasant farming, noting that “the big divide between capitalist agriculture (large scale, extensive) versus peasant farming (small scale, intensive) is repeated—in a miniaturized way—within peasant farming itself” (125). Three longitudinal case studies undergird Van der Ploeg’s analysis, one in Catacaos on the northern coastal plain of Peru, another in Parma, Italy, where Parmalat milk and parmigiano-reggiano cheese are produced, and a third in the Frisian Woodlands of The Netherlands. In the Peruvian case, the 1970s agrarian reform divided large cotton plantations into cooperative