Classes, Citizenship and Inequality

5

Peasants, Farmers and Professionals

Hermann Schwengel and Boike Rehbein

If a new term arises out of a professional debate, this may either indicate the strength of rhetorical effort, or structural change waiting for expression in the social sciences. Talk about global agro-food systems leads us to the suspicion that a major global change in agriculture is in the making. Certainly, agriculture in former colonial societies is being restructured and agriculture in the global core is hardly sustainable any more. Just as surely, this has implications for social structure. But what exactly are these implications?

This chapter argues that we are witnessing the second major shift of the place that agriculture occupies in the global division of work. ...