Adaptive Strategies in Peasant Agricultural Production

Considerable social science research has been carried out in recent years on agricultural change among peasant farmers in developing countries. This research has been noteworthy for two reasons. On the one hand, there is a trend toward joining the approaches of economic anthropology and cul­ tural ecology in the study of production processes in peasant communities. In many cases, this combination of approaches transcends the substantivist­ formalist controversy of the 19608 and moves the focus of research toward adaptive strategies and the integration of individual decisions and commu­ nity patterns. Second, research on agricultural production relates more directly than many areas of anthropology to current issues of global concern and provides relevant data to practitioners as well as to academics. With an increasing awareness of worldwide inequalities in the distribution of food and produc­ tive resources and of food shortages in some countries, attention has turned to the small farmers of the world, whose lands employ the majority of the world's people, but whose productivity is being rapidly outstripped by recent increases in population. The failure of the decade of the 19608 to ameliorate these conditions or to improve standards of living in most rural areas has led to a greater concern, both within international development agencies and within national governments, to understand the agricultural decisions of these peasant farmers.