Peasant Household Economy Research Articles

Cooperage as an Occupation of Novgorod’s Peasants in the Post-reform Years

It is common knowledge that harsh climate, the predominance of poor soils, a short growing season, and low crop yield in Novgorod Governorate did not allow peasants to provide themselves with everything they needed only through agricultural labour. Therefore, the Novgorod peasants were forced to look for additional sources of income: leaving the village to work or engaging in different occupations. In particular, cooperage was widely popular in the peasant economy, which was determined by the availability of the necessary raw materials in the form of extensive forests in all the counties of the governorate. The article examines the state of cooperage as an occupation among the peasants of Novgorod Governorate in the second half of the 19th — early 20th century based on archival and published sources and literature. Primarily, attention is given to the analysis of the role of the occupation within the peasant economy. The stable nature of production of coopers’ goods was due to the widespread nature of nail-making and fishing industries among peasants, as well as due to an increase in the number of creameries in landowners’ estates. Thus, various products of coopers were used — mainly as containers. There is no doubt that the steady demand for coopers’ products from the local rural population played a significant role in the formation and development of the cooperage industry. The paper gives a brief description of the tools used by peasant coopers and notes the emergence of an artel as a form of occupational organization. The article shows peasants’ growing dependence on raw materials from landowners and timber producers due to the sharp decrease in allotted timber because of the intensive felling of trees by peasants. With the decline in allotted timber, coopers increasingly bought wood harvested in neighboring state-owned, appanage, or landowner forests. As a result, the raw material dependence of the workers engaged in the cooperage trade on the owners of the forest and the buyers of their products grew. The paper concludes that at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries cooperage in Novgorod Governorate still held a meaningful place in the peasant household economy, acquiring an increasingly pronounced commercial character.

The Birth of the Annual Grafting Pear: Peasant Household Economy and Agricultural Technology Innovation in Dongshi, Taiwan

This article discusses the relationship between the contemporary Taiwanese peasant household economy and agricultural technology innovation, taking the economic development process involving the Dongshi annual grafting pear as an example. The “annual grafting pear” is the result of a fruit cultivation model pioneered by the peasants of Dongshi in order to overcome the constraint of climate. Temperate pears have a high market value, but raising them in a subtropical region comes at the cost of a several fold increase in labor. Although the government’s local agricultural extension station generally believes that growing annual grafting pears is not in line with the trend of modern agricultural development, peasants have stuck with this labor-intensive fruit cultivation model. Today, annual grafting pears have become the mainstay of Taiwan’s pear industry. Combining participant observation, oral history, and ethnography, this article analyzes the tensions between household consumption needs and labor self-exploitation. It argues that the peasant family economy does not operate according to a purely capitalistic business logic, and that Dongshi’s grassroots agricultural technology innovation will move in the direction of labor-intensifying diversified crops rather than labor-saving single crops. This direction of development is a response to Taiwan’s agricultural crisis, the urban-rural relationship, and the market structure. The birth of annual grafting pears as a product of the collective creation of the peasants in Dongshi reflects a situation common in Taiwan’s rural areas and helps us to rethink the “hidden agricultural revolution” and urban-rural relationships in East Asian industrialized societies.

Meningkatkan Efisiensi dan Profitabilitas pada Usaha Tani Bawang Merah di Kabupaten Brebes

Onion Agriculture has benefited farmers, but the benefits are very small ascompared with production costs that have been published. This is consistent with the results of research Rosyadi (2009) which states that the level of profit is not sufficient to meet the needs of peasant household economy. Or in other words, onion farm in the location of the study did not provide significant benefits for the economy of peasant households. To solve the problems encountered, partner activities and implementation team agreed that this method is appropriate is the format of training and consultancy services “Implementation of Working Capital Management At the Onion Farm.” Indicators of success of this activity can be seen from some important things that are revealed through in-depth interview participants. Based on in-depth interview is known that onion farmers to understand the importance of working capital management and practice how to manage working capital well, efficiently and effectively. IbM event has implications for government policy for the district soon realized: (a) the availability of new varieties that productive, adaptive and resistant to pests or diseases, (b) availability of production technology and management of quality seeds, the concept of quality assurance and standardization as the first step to build a national seed industry a strong and independent, (c) Availability of environmentally friendly agricultural technologies and efficient by utilizing local resources in an optimal and sustained to produce horticultural products are the opportunities and open to the emergence of a modern and efficient industrial facilities in various regions, (d ) The availability of pest or disease control technology based on the use of natural enemies and reducing synthetic pesticides as low as possible, (e) The availability of postharvest technology for efficient packaging, conservation of fresh quality, product diversification is associated with increased value-added horticultural industry. So the activity is generally considered a success based on in-depth interviews that reveal some things about: (i) working capital management with a good, efficient and effective, (ii) pass the cost efficiency of production, (iii) allocating cash and stock in order to maintain the sustainability of agricultural onion, ( iv) understand and can do proper financial planning and benefits of capital budgeting and (v) increase the working capital of onion farming.

Statistics and ‘sufficiency’: toward an intellectual history of Russia's rural crisis

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis.

Les Paysans, le marché et l'État en Anatolie au XVIesècle

Les recherches récentes consacrées à l'agriculture ottomane suggèrent que l'ouverture sur le marché de l'économie rurale ne s'est pas accompagnée d'une concentration des terres ou de la formation de grandes propriétés. Elles montrent également qu'il n'y aurait pas eu de tendance générale à l'expropriation des paysans et à leur transformation en travailleurs serfs ou salariés sur de grands domaines. Au contraire, dans une large mesure, la production destinée au marché proviendrait de petites parcelles cultivées par des paysans libres. Dans cette étude, j'examinerai principalement de quelle façon l'économie rurale ottomane au nord de l'Anatolie centrale a réagi face à une demande croissante des villes et à une augmentation de la population au XVIesiècle.

China: The new inheritance law and the peasant household

The new Chinese inheritance law gives men and women equal inheritance rights. This article argues, however, that the stability of the peasant household economy would be threatened by any interference with the custom of patrilineal inheritance, and that it is therefore unlikely that this clause will be implemented in the countryside.

Patriarchy in the Transition to Capitalism: Central Peru, 1830-1950

In the last twenty-five years, the persistent survival of peasant forms of production and the prominence of peasants in processes of political transformation have, in many parts of the Third World, resuscitated familiar debates about the role of peasantries in the transition to capitalism. At bottom, the main issue is the peasant household economy: how culturally or economically unique is it? What theoretical significance should be attributed to ongoing and seemingly quite viable forms of peasant household production? Some scholars argue that the peasantry is disappearing and that the primary class contradiction in the Latin American countryside is increasingly between an agrarian bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat; these writers tend to consider household production an insignificant percentage of overall agricultural production, marginal at best in reproducing the peasantry, and ultimately subordinate to the logic of capitalist production.' Other analysts believe that peasant economy and culture still constitute a viable alternative to proletarianization in many Third World areas; they tend to view peasant household production as a form that has significantly undercut the process of capitalist transformation in the countryside.2 The more I have become involved in considering the issues surrounding the peasantry and the transition to capitalism in Latin America-particularly in my work on the central highlands of Peru-the more I have become convinced that the debate will never be resolved simply through a class analysis. Because authors on both sides of the debate have focused almost exclusively on class dynamics, they have been completely unable to understand the complex nature of the household economy, something that only emerges once the household is considered from a feminist per

The Peasant Household Economy and Decollectivization in China

The Peasant Household Economy and Decollectivization in China

The Peasant Household Economy and Decollectivization in China

A critical problem of the people's commune system was the inability to resolve the free rider problem within the framework of collective agriculture. The appeal of household production to both the State and peasants has been the dramatic increase in agricultural productivity and household income. Unlike collective farming, household production minimizes the free rider dilemma. Decollectivization and the expansion of rural markets has brought about significant socio-economic changes in the Chinese countryside, some unintended by State reformers. These unintended consequences of decollectivization, however, threaten to undermine the social goals of the Chinese Communist Party.

Gender and Class in the Transition to Capitalism

In the last 20 years, the persistence of peasant forms of production and the prominent participation of peasants in processes of political transformation have, in many parts of the Third World, resuscitated familiar debates about the role of peasantries in the transition to capitalism. The works of V. I. Lenin (1974a) and A. V. Chayanov (1966) on the Russian peasantry have provided the framework for the recent debates in Latin America and elsewhere over the disappearance or survival of peasant production, the viability of a political or economic via campesina (Redclift, 1980), and the cultural or economic uniqueness of the peasant household economy. These debates are ongoing and extremely complex, with every gradation between the Leninist and Chayanovian poles well represented; clearly they defy accurate summary. ' But whether one looks at the original debates about the Russian peasantry or the more recent permutations, the crucial issue is not the existence of peasant household productionsomething on which most authors agree-but rather the significance that should be attributed to it. On one side, scholars associated with the Leninist position tend to argue that the peasantry as such is disappearing, the primary class contradiction in the countryside being increasingly be-

Dynamics of the Peasant Household Economy: Labor Recruitment and Allocation in an Upland Philippine Community

Research on traditional agricultural household production has burgeoned in the decades since the work of A. V. Chayanov has been published in the West. Unfortunately, much of this research has focused on the role of domestic labor sources in rural household production levels and has ignored the importance of nondomestic labor as well as other factors which affect production decisions. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the importance of domestic and of nondomestic labor sources in subsistence and commercial production in forty-two households in an upland Philippine community. Further, the paper focuses on several other factors affecting peasant production levels, which must also be better understood if anthropologists are to make a significant contribution to the development of traditional agricultural economic systems.