African farm trajectories and the sub-continental food crisis

This is a study of farm dynamics in eight African countries, drawing on a sample of more than 3000 farm households. It deals mainly with food crops and in detail with maize and makes a longitudinal analysis by systematically comparing current conditions with those obtaining when the farm was set up under its present management. From the study emerges an overall picture of inadequately exploited production potentials where farmers’ commercial energies are driven towards other food crops than grains, especially vegetables for urban markets. Commercial incentives in food grain production favour small groups of well-placed and usually male farmers, while, the lack of seed-fertiliser technology and commercial incentives means that smallholders devote their energies to other crops or to non-farm sources of income

Barriers Broken. Production Relations and Agrarian Change in South India

This book studies agrarian change and the factors which have the potential to control and direct the course of such change. Hence it deals with a fundamental issue which has a direct bearing on poverty. Based on a survey of 367 agrarian households in South India, this book systematically compares two major ecotypes in Indian agriculture: rainfed cultivation and irrigated agriculture. The authors link this ecological analysis to class relations, technology, and patterns of agriarian change, especially after the Green Revolution. They then go on to compare land and labour relations, class structures, credit and usurious relations, and agricultural productivity in these two ecotypes

Women and Social Change in Rural Tamil Nadu

One of the most significant social changes over the past 25 years in Tamil Nadu is the entry of women into the local political bodies of Gram Panchayat and Panchayat Samithi through a 33 % reservation system. Simultaneously, women are now to a large extent organised in Self-Help Groups, through which at least some of them can access loans either for small entrepreneurship or simply for smaller emergency/consumption loans. An important background to this is the increased participation of women in the non-agricultural labour market. In this article we report from a 25 year panel study of 213 agrarian households in six villages in Karur and Tiruchirapalli districts