Pluriactivity in the Moshav:: family farming in Israel

In the past several years, pluriactivity has become quite widespread among moshav farming households, especially those located within Metropolitan Tel Aviv's rural fringe. Agricultural income has been on the decline and other sources of income have appeared. This paper has a threefold aim: To identify major patterns of income sources among Moshav's households; to explain the underlying causes for choosing pluriactivity as an income-producing strategy; and to explain the reasons for the specific choice of pluriactivity patterns adopted.An analysis of the activities of moshavim¹ located in the Sharon Region indicates that the further the moshav from the metropolitan area, the greater the role of agriculture in total family income. Within a pluriactivity strategy, the main additional sources of income are wage employment and small business activity, carried out either on or off the moshav. The main factors stimulating the increase in pluriactivity are the decline in agricultural income and the desire to take advantage of vocational training. This trend is supported by other factors, such as the availability of premises for alternative uses as well as the ease of operating a business from the home.The divergence in pluriactivity patterns may indicate that the frequency of mixing agriculture with other income sources may be a temporary option adopted by households for which agriculture has been a mainstay. Those households may shift away from agriculture in the short or mid-term. We would argue that at present, for the majority of those no longer devoted solely to agriculture, pluriactivity is also aimed at helping to sustain agricultural activity. In such cases, farmers utilise the resources acquired from non-agricultural employment for investment in agriculture, including the upgrading of equipment and other assets.     

Reframing agrarian citizenship: Land,life and power in Brazil

This paper investigates the changing relationship between land, citizenship, and power in Brazil, where land-related policies have historically served to situate political and economic rights in the hands of an elite land-owning minority. In response, contemporary grassroots movements in Brazil, including the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) advocate the substantive transformation of what I develop here as a new form of “agrarian citizenship”, in which political participation, local food production, and environmental stewardship redefine the ongoing constitution of the relationship between land, state, and rural society. Based on extensive interviews, participant observation and document analysis from 2004–2006, this ethnographic study examines the contours of how changing notions of agrarian citizenship are negotiated among members of a growing body of social groups demanding land redistribution and reasserting agrarian culture in Brazil. By developing and enacting new forms of political participation that involve the transformation of personal and collective values and practices, rural activists such as the MST envision the redistribution of land as a material right, but also view the transformation of the land-society relation as an equally public responsibility.     

Social Capital,Organic Agriculture,and Sustainable Livelihood Security: Rethinking Agrarian Change in Mexico*

Abstract This paper explores the relevance of extra local market linkages and local‐level social capital to sustainable livelihood outcomes in two agrarian communities on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Contextualized by the specificity of Mexico's transition from state‐directed rural development to neoliberally‐guided rural development in the 1990s, findings suggest that market linkages can intersect with pre‐existing social capital to both create new and destroy preexisting social capital, thus shaping the direction of development and inequality outcomes. The nature of a community's social fabric is often a result of long‐standing historical legacies. In the communities presented, the quantity and quality of social capital was intricately connected to their history of state‐sponsored or market agriculture; the nature of local institutions, with particular emphasis on the formation and evolution of the ejido; and the access to and availability of natural resources, namely land and water, which are both intricately connected to market access options. Moving beyond a simple demonstration that social capital matters, this analysis explores the complex and dynamic interaction between local‐level social capital and extralocal market linkages. In doing so, it contributes to the larger debate on how the historical legacy of populist reforms and the social and political institutions created during state populism have nuanced the trajectory of neoliberal development in Mexico.     

Three agricultural regions of France: Three types of pluriactivity

In France, the new Common Agricultural Policy will have different regional impacts. There are three types of regions based on agricultural development. The first type is where farms are able to carry on a modernization process; the second type where farms are threatened in spite of their modernization, and the third type where farms are unable to be modernized. These three types of regions are represented in France by Picardy, Languedoc and Savoy. Each region is developing a particular form of pluriactivity in accordance with its own agricultural development. Picardy is setting up a business pluriactivity which uses agricultural resources to increase non-agricultural activities. Languedoc undergoes a rural development pluriactivity by using non-agricultural resources for its modernization. Savoy represents a rural pluriactivity of survival, in which the close combination between agricultural and non-agricultural activities permits the maintenance of rural many-faceted businesses.The three kinds of pluriactivity are very unlike. They show that, in France, agricultural development will in future be linked to rural development to a far greater extent.     

Whither the lender of last resort?: The rise and fall of public farm credit in Australia and New Zealand

Public farm financial institutions were established in 20th Century Australia and New Zealand to facilitate agricultural and rural economic development. This arrangement reflected agriculture's economic importance, and rural society's political importance to both countries until the early 1980s. With both countries’ adoption of monetarist principles (including financial deregulation and the drive for smaller government) from the mid-1980s these public farm credit providers were seen to distort the allocation of farm credit and to be an inefficient use of public resources. Deregulation would, according to its many proponents, remove these distortions and create a free market for farm credit which would deliver the most appropriate loan packages for both countries’ farm sectors. The extensive literature on the New Zealand experience of farm sector restructuring and primary research into the South Australian farm crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s show that the commercialisation and/or abolition of public farm credit providers in both countries has fundamentally restructured the farm credit market but failed to address many farm families’ demand for concessional, long-term finance. The research also demonstrates the continuing need for local and regional case studies of the impacts of and responses to major institutional restructuring that are both theoretically informed and scale sensitive as a means to building a genuinely international literature on contemporary rural and agrarian change.     

Rethinking the changing structures of rural local government – State power,rural politics and local political strategies?

There is a notable absence in contemporary rural studies – of both a theoretical and empirical nature – concerning the changing nature of rural local government. Despite the scale and significance of successive rounds of local government reorganisation in the UK, very little has been written on this topic from a rural perspective. Instead research on local political change has tended to concentrate on local governance and local partnerships – on the extra-governmental aspects of the governance system – rather than on local government itself. In contrast, this paper draws upon strategic-relational state theory to explore the changing structures and institutions of rural local government, and analyse how these can be related to the changing state strategies of those groups which are politically powerful in rural areas. In this respect, the paper draws on current and previous rounds of local government reorganisation to illustrate how new objects of governance, new state strategies and new hegemonic projects are emerging as a consequence of such restructuring processes.     

Pluriactivity in rural Norway

This article relates the results of a study carried out on the roles and functions of pluriactivity in rural Norway. The study sought to define the effect on pluriactivity of the integration of rural areas into urban labour markets, international systems of production, and the changes in the sectoral mix in rural areas. The analysis is based on three types of data: a list of enterprises from the national register of economic units, the central register of employed workers, and information from local informants in the sample municipalities. The article concludes that the rate of pluriactivity among the rural population depends on the way in which economic sectors are classified. A further finding is that pluriactivity is an important feature of rural Norway, but is still mainly associated with agricultural enterprise. A final conclusion is that pluriactivity has other characteristics in larger labour markets than in smaller labour markets in rural areas due to the urban influence on the former.     

Community,Ethnicity, and Class in a Changing Rural California Town*

Abstract This study investigates how community is constructed, maintained, and contested among diverse residents of a rural town in California's Central Valley. Drawing on observations, interviews, and archival material, I examine the way in which ethnicity and class play a significant role in recasting how community is organized and interpreted by Mexicans and long‐term white residents. In my field site, Mexicans have long been involved in (in)formal community‐making, yet long‐term white residents perceive a “loss of community” because social relations are no longer structured around an agrarian culture that at one time reinforced ties through volunteerism and interaction in local mainstream institutions. This article demonstrates the continual significance of place and interaction in defining community, but suggests that immigrants develop communities of need aimed at providing important social, emotional, and political support absent in mainstream society. Finally, this study also speaks of the competition for representation and respectability among rural residents developing a sense of belonging. “Community” is never simply the recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity but a categorical identity that is premised on various forms of exclusion and constructions of otherness     

Against the norm: the transitional symbiosis of ‘grassroots clientelism’ and ‘rural citizenship’

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expression of backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question of how clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines the particulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelism and exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron‐client relationships with citizenship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post‐dictatorship consolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of traditional brokerage‐based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the political parties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Comparative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows how Thessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects to socially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played by a dynamic state bureaucracy.     

Resurrected pigs,dyed foxes and beloved cows: Religious diversity and nostalgia for socialism in rural Poland

The aim of my paper is to discuss the phenomenon of nostalgia for socialism in rural Poland. More precisely, I discuss how experiences of rurality and diverse religious beliefs intertwine with nostalgia. Depicting the memories of socialism, shared with me by the inhabitants of a multi-religious rural commune in Southern Poland, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which day-to-day experiences of rural life as well as religious diversity contribute to shaping people's remembrances. In order to do so, I describe both the present situation and the historical experiences of the inhabitants of the commune. I introduce representatives of different Christian communities – Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Orthodox and Pentecostals – and, by presenting their life stories, I address the issue of how villagers' religious creeds interrelate with the memories and (re)evaluation of the socialist past. My aim here is twofold. Firstly I aim to deconstruct the nostalgia for socialism, showing its complexity and proving that this nostalgia means in fact longing for very concrete experiences of rural life. Secondly, I argue that the study of various religious beliefs and practices is very important for a fuller interpretation of nostalgic discourses and responses to postsocialist transformations.     

Coming out and coming back: Rural gay migration and the city

This research focuses on the complex meaning and role of the city in American and French rural gay men’s imaginary and life experience. It explores how gay men who grew up in the country build their sense of self through back-and-forth movement from rural to urban spaces. Therefore, it questions traditional gay migration studies, which have often equated gay migration and rural–urban migration, positing a unidirectional pattern. After contextualizing rural male homosexuality, this paper presents four life itineraries which highlight the central role the city has for rural gay men when exploring their same-sex desires and attractions. Based on the analysis of their life narratives, we show that for most of them, their coming out, their first same-sex experience, and coming to terms with their sexuality happens “far from home” in a city or a college town. However, this research suggests that the city has a more ambivalent role for rural gay men. While the city exists as a space of social practices where alternative sexualities can be experienced and explored, at the same time for many rural gay men the city remains substantially unattractive. In their view, the perceived “effeminizing power” of the city questions and challenges their attraction for this space. Therefore, the experience of the city becomes both liberating and disciplinary – liberating because it allows the exploration of their same-sex desires and attractions, disciplinary because it (re)presents a gay identity in which they find no resonance. Thus this research indicates that rural gay migration to the urban spaces, which is key to identity formation, includes not only departure to the city but also a necessary return to the country to maintain rural gay men’s understanding of themselves.     

It's not who you know,it's how you know them: Who exchanges what with whom?

Reciprocity – doing for others if they have done for you – is a key way people mobilize resources to deal with daily life and seize opportunities. In principle, reciprocity (the Golden Rule) is a universal norm. In practice, it is variable. Personal networks rarely operate as solidarities and as such, people cannot count on all the members of their networks to provide help all the time. Rather, social support comes uncertainly from a variety of ties in networks. This paper uses survey research to understand the variable and contingent nature of reciprocity and inquires about the kinds of resources exchanged between people. We investigate the extent to which interpersonal ties, network characteristics, and people's personal characteristics (e.g., gender) affect the nature of reciprocal relationships. The evidence is extraordinarily clear on one subject – giving support is strongly associated with getting it. Analyses show that getting support from network members is the key to East Yorkers reciprocating – usually in kind but sometimes with other forms of support.     

Multiple business ownership in the farm sector: assessing the enterprise and employment contributions of farmers in Cambridgeshire

Multiple business ownership has become an important theme within the small firms research literature. While early studies emphasised its role in reducing business risk, more recently portfolio entrepreneurship has been recognised as an important growth strategy, particularly in sectors where economies of scale can be achieved at a relatively low level. Research studies specifically examining multiple business ownership are still scarce, but the parallels between portfolio entrepreneurship in non-farm sectors and farm pluriactivity have been noted. Although pluriactivity has been subject to extensive investigation in recent years, analysis has generally focused on farm-centred diversification, rather than the wider entrepreneurial activities of the farmer. Using a survey of nearly 300 farm owners in Cambridgeshire, this exploratory study analyses the incidence of portfolio entrepreneurship in the farm sector and assesses its contribution to enterprise and employment creation. The results demonstrate that a core of farmers have multiple business interests and that these additional business activities make a substantial contribution to both numbers of enterprises and employment creation. While previous studies of pluriactivity have generally used the farm business as the main unit of analysis, it is argued that including the wider business activities of the farm owner enables a more precise estimation of the total contribution of farmers to rural economic development.     

Producing Postman Pat: The popular cultural construction of idyllic rurality

This paper concerns the popular cultural representation of English rurality. It focuses upon Postman Pat, a popular cultural phenomenon which has come to be routinely cited as exemplary and iconic of contemporary imaginings of the English countryside as idyllic. The idea that Anglocentric popular culture (re)produces this sort of ‘rural idyll’ – and that these idylls are particularly laden with cultural and ideological baggage – has been well rehearsed. However, this paper considers a question which has too often been overlooked or taken for granted: how, exactly – and I mean literally, actually, in detail, in practice – does this sort of idyllic rurality come to be constructed? Through conversations with two key figures in the creation of Postman Pat, the paper begins to develop an understanding of some of the everyday, banal, nitty gritty practices, decisions and encounters which must be understood as fundamentally part of the production of (this) ‘rural idyll’.     

A movement of ‘subsidized capitalists’? The multi-level influence of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in India

This paper investigates the relationship between the state and India's rural informal sector by focusing on the collective mobilizations of middle-sized agricultural producers in Western Uttar Pradesh. These cultivators are involved in an economic sector which is at the same time capitalist, largely informal but also, to some extent, state-regulated. Through their mobilizations organized by the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), they have attempted to influence state regulation of agricultural markets, obtaining increased input subsidies and better procurement prices for their produce, and thus an increase in the rates of return and profitability of their farming activity. The paper conceptualizes the modality of production of these farmers as ‘subsidized capitalism’, alluding to the self-employed and self-funded producers with holdings large enough to support a pair of bullocks defined as ‘bullock capitalists’ by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (1987), while denoting the crucial role of public subsidies in preserving this faction of informal agrarian capitalism. The paper also points to the ambivalent relationship between the ‘subsidized capitalists’ of Western Uttar Pradesh and the state: although they seek protection from the central government in the context of globalization, they confront and contest local state institutions by deploying collective strategies to distort local regulations of agricultural markets.     

Enhancing community capacity: Roles of perceived bonding and bridging social capital and public relations in community building

This study examined whether two types of perceived social capital – bonding and bridging – can affect individuals’ belief in community capacity in the context of a corporate community relations program to develop rural areas in South Korea. The results of the study's Web survey showed that perceived community capacity to resolve problems was significantly affected by their perception of both bonding and bridging social capital. The findings suggest that social capital serves as a mechanism that can foster community capacity through norms of interaction, reciprocity, and trust as aspects of civil society.     

Grandchildren's perspectives on grandparents in rural New Zealand

Within studies of ageing, rurality and family relations, the prevalent “point of view” is based on the perspectives of adults, particularly older people themselves. However, taking seriously the reciprocal nature of kinship relations also challenges researchers to find ways to explore younger people's views and experiences of intergenerational ties. The study on which this paper is based addressed this challenge, by considering the dynamics of ageing in rural families through the lens of young people's experience. In the South Island of New Zealand, Area Schools serve families in rural regions specifically defined in terms of a catchment area based on distance from any other state school. This research study selected five (from 16) of these schools, and invited the classes of Year 7 and 8 students to take part in a classroom activity, led by the researcher with support from the class teacher. The activity involved a total of 98 young people (aged 11–13) in written completion of a survey which outlined their relationships and contacts with the people they know as grandparents, along with basic demographics of their own age, gender, family and household situation, and length of attendance at the school. From this survey, information was derived about 380 grandparents (of whom 73 were no longer alive), the nature and frequency of their contacts, and the types of activities they shared with these grandchildren. Around 40 percent of the students have daily or weekly contact with a grandparent, one third “regularly do things together”, and one fifth say they have “a special relationship” with a grandparent. By controlling the age group of the grandchild, and focussing on rural families, this study adds insights and detail to a growing body of research interest in understanding the roles and contributions made by grandparents to New Zealand families, in particular those in rural communities.     

Why Did the Communists Win or Lose? A Comparative Analysis of the Revolutionary Civil Wars in Russia,Finland, Spain,and China

According to classic interpretations of the communist revolutions, political mobilization of peasantry was critical for the success of the revolutionary forces. This article, which reexamines the experience of civil wars in Russia, Finland, Spain, and China, argues that peasants’ contribution to the revolutions in Russia and later in China became possible under two historical conditions: breakdown of state authorities during the mass mobilization wars and existence of an unresolved agrarian problem in the countryside. Neither of these conditions alone, as the experience of other countries has shown, was sufficient for a success of the revolutionaries. The Spanish civil war of 1936–1939, for instance, was not preceded by a major international war. Because institutions of the traditional social order had not been undermined by war, Franco was able to defeat the Popular Front government, despite the peasants’ support of the revolution. In the Finnish civil war of 1918, which broke out in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, state institutions did not collapse completely and the peasantry was divided in their responses to the revolution; the rural smallholders, for example, aligned with the Mannerheim's White army, not with the urban revolutionaries.     

Exploring the Rural-Agrarian Linkages of Human Trafficking: A Study of the Indian Punjab

This article explores the rural-agrarian linkages of human trafficking in the Indian Punjab. The study argues that ongoing agrarian crises, high risk-taking ability of some agrarian castes and low level of education in rural areas are fuelling the illicit business of human trafficking of Punjabis to foreign green pastures. Rural-agrarian communities are the main victims of the traffickers' exploitation. The study has wider policy implications as it suggests policy-makers should formulate a comprehensive policy framework for rural areas of Punjab to ensure the “3P” paradigm – prevention, protection and prosecution – of human trafficking.