Small commodity production is generally conceived as a category of house? hold enterprise which combines the ownership of means of production (land, implements, livestock, etc), with on-farm familial labour, in order to produce commodities to meet subsistence needs. Although the household unit operates and reproduces itself within capitalism, it is argued that this form of production is distinguished from the capitalist enterprise by its capacity to mobilise, allocate and control internal resources, such as labour and goods, using informal mechanisms based on domestic relations and kinship networks. While the drive to retain and reproduce the household unit and its ownership of property may involve off-farm participation in wage labour markets, this need not signify that the family enterprise is under the threat of imminent dissolution, for such activities may postpone proleterianisation or form part of a household strategy of accumulation. These have been some of the arguments advanced in recent contributions towards a theory of 'small commodity production' (Friedmann, 1978,1979, 1986a, b; Gibbon and Neocosmos, 1985; Goodman and Redclift, 1985), which have all generally conceptualised small-scale farming as being inte? grated into the capitalist mode of production. Yet while small farmers may be so integrated, and may be able to successfully compete and survive in the marketplace, the internal organisation of small family farms retains characteristics that are not shared by the capitalist enterprise, such as the absence of a structural requirement to attain a surplus product and a set return on investment capital. Another feature of the small commodity producing farming unit is that while the market obviously plays an important role in determining the household's production strategy (i.e. over the choice of particular crops to cultivate, etc), and although the main objective of smallholders is to remain in the market, these considerations are conditioned by the more fundamental aim of meeting reproduction needs and preserving the family property?even if, at the limit, this means withdrawing from commodity production. This is a key difference from the capitalist enterprise, whose performance in the market depends on profitability alone. For small farmers, recourse to alternative sources of income?such as wage labour?may strengthen, rather than weaken, a household's commodity production capability in subsequent