Anthropology of Smallholder Agriculture in Developing Countries

The premise of this course is that small-scale agriculture, its distinctive economic character, and its ecology shape each other in important ways. This course will explore smallholder farming in the developing world through ethnographies.

It is often said that small-scale agriculture provides half of the contemporary global food supply (see for example Graeub et al 2016); in fact there are no good global statistics on small farm production, especially in the developing world (in which many nations just don’t have statistics on food production and farm size, Ricciardi et al 2018). I argue simply that small-scale agricultural food production is important to both livelihoods and food security. If this is so, then the inter-linkages between farms, economies, and ecologies are important. These inter-linkages are also complex.