Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTErnest Ludwig Feder was among the most prolific, creative and boldest of rural economists in the decades after the Second World War. Yet much of the work for which he would become most well known — on land reform, dependency and peasant agriculture, particularly in Latin America — was a comparatively late development, starting when he was almost fifty, more than two‐thirds of the way through a full and varied life that never conformed to conventional academic criteria and that came to a premature end when he was just seventy‐one. In the years since, the relevance of his work has grown, although the number of younger scholars who actually read his books and papers has declined.

This article describes the role of Malthusian thinking as a rationale for the commercial development of global agriculture at the expense of peasant-livelihood security. Focusing on the impact of the cold war, in an era of peasant insurgency, it explores how the Green Revolution reflected and reinforced the West's conviction that technological innovation, rather than more equitable systems of production, should resolve the problem of world food security said to be due to "overpopulation."

The empirical validity of traditional perspectives on poverty and under-development has been seriously challenged over the past decade. In contrast to emphasis on what were said to be disfunctional characteristics of the poor themselves, attention has been redirected towards economic and ecological factors which reveal much of the cultural repertoire of peasants and urban and rural poor to be a positive or adaptive response to limits imposed on them by the political economy of capitalism.