Smallholders, householders

"This timely and convincing book challenges the myth that only modern, large-scale, mechanized, scientific agriculture can provide the food needed for the world's rapidly growing population. It is a detailed and innovative analysis of the agricultural efficiency and conservation of resources practiced around the world by smallholders - farmers who practice intensive, permanent, diversified agriculture on relatively small farms in areas of dense population." "Using dozens of ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the author demonstrates that there are significant, fundamental commonalities among smallholder cultures. He argues that smallholder farming, wherever it takes place, is a viable alternative to today's dominant ideal of industrial agriculture, with its dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides." "The author critiques prevailing theories - neoclassical and socialist, Right and Left - of the evolution of agriculture and the political economy of "peasants" that consign smallholders to the status of inefficient and outmoded anachronisms with primitive technology, grueling labor, and poverty. He shows, among other th