The place of pluriactivity in Brazil's agrarian reform institutions

Livelihood diversification by Brazil's peasantry has intensified as rural areas have become more integrated with the country's urban fabric and as landlessness and poverty have increased. Despite the growing awareness of pluriactivity by rural households, key agrarian institutions have not addressed this key feature of life of the people they intend to help or mobilize. This review looks at how two main agrarian institutions – the government agrarian reform institute (INCRA) and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) – avoid or are even hostile to notions of pluriactivity in their affiliated rural settlements. The paper concludes by suggesting that agrarian institutions adopt a territorial rather than sectoral approach to rural livelihoods.     

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.     

Reflexive audiovisual methodology: The emergence of “minority practices” among pluriactive stock farmers

This paper proposes a new way for sociology, through both methodology and theory, to understand the reality of social groups and their “minority practices.” It is based on an experiment that concerns a very specific category of agriculturalists called “pluriactive” stock farmers. These stock farmers, who engage in raising livestock part-time alongside another full-time job, form a minority category within the agricultural profession.We address the question of how to analyze and represent the practices of this kind of “social” group or category through participatory filmmaking. Our research shows that beyond the collaborative production and screening of the film done in close cooperation with the stock farmers themselves, a second unexpected dynamic emerged around the sequences that were cut in the final editing round. These cut sequences reveal hesitations and disagreements among the breeders about their own practices in relation to their work and to animal welfare. These hesitations are not considered weaknesses, but rather as proof of the emergence of this group of stock farmers as “practitioners”. In the realm of intervention research, the participatory film-making process is attractive because it enables the farmers to raise new questions on their own, discuss them, and eventually resolve them, while also encouraging the researchers to identify the conditions that must be met in order to achieve this fragile linkage. This process and its outcomes force us to revisit the theoretical question of what constitutes a pragmatic definition of a “practice.”     

Return of the gentleman farmer?: Conceptualising gentrification in UK agriculture

In this paper, processes of gentrification are assessed in relation to non-commercial farming: the production of agricultural commodities without the intent of earning a living. The author argues that due to the connection between residence and productive assets (particularly land) inherent in farming, agricultural gentrification represents a special case, distinct from rural and urban gentrification, where gentrification is possible from within the existing farm household. Pluriactivity of the farm household enables both economic capital accumulation and alterations in the cultural capital held. Similar to rural and urban gentrification processes, agricultural gentrification leads to landscape change. Both non-commercial farming and gentrification processes are found to have been encouraged by the state, through post-productivist polices and laws aimed at commercial agricultural producers. The author argues for further research on farmers as consumers of rural amenities, and raises questions about the environmental impacts of ‘non-commercial farming’ and the acquisition of farm land by the wealthy elite.