This article examines the re-emergence of the peasantry. It argues that farming is increasingly being restructured in a peasant-like way. This restructuring is an actively constructed response to the ...agrarian crisis that has grown out of five decades of state-induced modernisation and is currently being accelerated by the financial crisis and the generalised economic depression. Through a process of restructuring that is both multi-dimensional and multi-level farmers are reconstituting themselves into peasants (although important features of operating as peasants have never been completely absent), a process that is occurring as much in developed countries as in developing ones. At more or less the same time theoretical concepts of the peasantry and the peasant way of farming are being rediscovered and revisited. Earlier debates are highly relevant for understanding the current situation of a generalised crisis and the responses that are being triggered among farmers. The rediscovery of the peasant as theoretically meaningful concept reflects the socio-material re-emergence of the peasantry, and helps to explain the particular features of this process. The article concludes by arguing that the reconstitution of the peasantry is strategic to future world food security.
•The article discusses depeasantisation and repeasantisation as unequal but combined processes.•Social sciences contributed to the depeasantisation.•Depeasantisation and repeasantisation are far from ...outdated notions.
The concept of food sovereignty presents us with an important theoretical and practical challenge. The political economy of agriculture can only take up this gauntlet through improving its ...understanding of the processes of agricultural growth. It is very difficult to address the issue of food sovereignty without such an understanding. Developing such an understanding involves (re)combining the political economy of agriculture with the Chayanovian approach. This paper gives several explanations (all individually valid but stronger in combination) as to why peasant agriculture results in sturdy and sustainable growth and also identifies the factors that undermine this capacity. The paper also argues that peasant agriculture is far from being a remnant of the past. While different peasantries around the world are shaped and reproduced by today's capital (and more specifically by current food empires), they equally help to shape and contribute to the further unfolding of the forms of capital related to food and agriculture. It is important to understand this two-way interaction between capital and peasant agriculture as this helps to ground the concept of food sovereignty. The article argues that the capacity to produce enough food (at different levels, distinguishing different needs, and so on) needs to be an integral part of the food sovereignty discourse. It concludes by suggesting that peasant agriculture has the best potential for meeting food sovereignty largely because it has the capacity to produce (more than) sufficient good food for the growing world population and that it can do so in a way that is sustainable.
This paper discusses autonomy as a set of practices that result in the production and reproduction of resources that allow for self‐organization. We define autonomy as a social construct that refers ...to the self‐organizing capacity of people, communities, and movements. Such capacity assumes both resources and agency. In that vein, our conceptualisation implies that autonomy is a relational concept: It can only emerge when and where struggles that aim at going beyond dependency (i.e., nonautonomy) concretely exist. Autonomy is three‐pronged, involving a set of goal‐oriented activities, a distantiation from capital, and the agency of social actors. Intertwined with these levels are peasant movements that have the capacity to develop and implement a political agenda that is not overshadowed and/or dictated by external influences. The paper illustrates this intertwining with the case of the Circuito (O Circuito), a Brazilian peasant movement that has constructed and operates an extended farmers' market and which simultaneously transforms farming practices. The Circuit is the outcome of collective action and shows the potential of multilevel performance of several actors engaged in concerted actions. In the conclusion, we suggest that the Circuit represents autonomy based on commonly pooled resources as well representing a countermovement to the destructive dynamics of food empires.
This article discusses and compares the rural development processes and practices currently occurring in China, Brazil and the European Union. Although these are strongly rooted in the specificities ...of time and space, they also share important commonalities. We argue that rural development can be viewed as an evolving set of responses to market failures. A key element of these responses is that they are unfolding through the construction of new markets: a seemingly contradictory phenomenon that has, as yet, hardly been scrutinized or theoretically elaborated. We describe these newly emerging markets as ‘nested markets’ and support our argument with a careful reconsideration of the dynamics of long-established nested markets. We then extend this analysis, firstly, by arguing that the construction of such new markets occurs through a process of social struggle and, secondly, by exploring the strength of these newly emerging constellations in relation to the hegemony exerted by food empires. Our analysis puts common-pool resources, which underlie these new, nested markets, centre stage.
The Covid-19 disease is quickly developing into a deep, global and enduring politico-economic crisis that involves a rapid disarticulation of the production, processing, distribution and consumption ...of food. The badly balanced world market and the high degree of financialization of both primary agricultural production and food chains are decisive factors in this. The crisis highlights that the real economy is far too dependent on the financial economy. Financial capital operates as a paralyzing force. In this situation food sovereignty, peasant agriculture, territorial markets and agroecology emerge as indispensable ingredients for a recovery.
This article aims to unravel underlying reasons for the enigmatic outburst of farmers' fury that swept large parts of Europe in the autumn of 2019. It does so by focussing on the Netherlands where ...the upheaval was particularly striking. Farmers' resentment against 'agribashing' was a common theme in the many protests. This refers to, and simultaneously delegitimizes, all critiques of the current organization of farming and the unequal international patterns in which it is embedded. The article argues that the currently emerging farmers' movement basically represents a regressive populism. It ignores the many-sided crisis of agriculture (related to ever increasing use of nitrogen, pesticides and energy that contribute to the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity) and the politico-economic processes and unequal power relations underlying this. Although this movement creates many smoke screens, it is essentially fighting for the reproduction of the same order that makes a substantial contribution to these multiple crises. As international comparison shows, this new form of right-wing, rural populism reflects the degree to which entrepreneurial agriculture has internalized the logic of capital: it needs ongoing expansion, both for material and symbolic reasons. Peasant agriculture could provide a much needed counter-image to this. In practice, though, it is highly segmented and dispersed and is in urgent need of a new unifying device.
Institute of Oral Biology, University of Zurich, Plattenstrasse 11, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) consist of highly conserved direct ...repeats interspersed with variable spacer sequences. They can protect bacteria against invasion by foreign DNA elements. The genome sequence of Streptococcus mutans strain UA159 contains two CRISPR loci, designated CRISPR1 and CRISPR2. The aims of this study were to analyse the organization of CRISPR in further S. mutans strains and to investigate the importance of CRISPR in acquired immunity to M102-like phages. The sequences of CRISPR1 and CRISPR2 arrays were determined for 29 S. mutans strains from different persons. More than half of the CRISPR1 spacers and about 35 % of the CRISPR2 spacers showed sequence similarity with the genome sequence of M102, a virulent siphophage specific for S. mutans . Although only a few spacers matched the phage sequence completely, most of the mismatches had no effect on the amino acid sequences of the phage-encoded proteins. The results suggest that S. mutans is often attacked by M102-like bacteriophages, and that its acquisition of novel phage-derived CRISPR sequences goes along with the presence of S. mutans phages in the environment. Analysis of CRISPR1 of M102-resistant mutants of S. mutans OMZ 381 showed that some of them had acquired novel spacers, and the sequences of all but one of these matched the phage M102 genome sequence. This suggests that the acquisition of the spacers contributed to the resistance against phage infection. However, since not all resistant mutants had new spacers, and since the removal of the CRISPR1 array in one of the mutants and in wild-type strains did not lead to loss of resistance to infection by M102, the acquisition of resistance must be based on further elements as well.
Correspondence Jan R. van der Ploeg jan.vanderploeg{at}zzmk.uzh.ch
Abbreviations: CRISPR, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
A supplementary figure and six supplementary tables are available with the online version of this paper. The supplementary figure shows a comparison of part of the cas1 gene from Streptococcus mutans , Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus and Streptococcus pyogenes strains. The supplementary tables list oligonucleotides used in this study, CRISPR1 and CRISPR2 spacer sequences, sequences of the CRISPR1 and CRISPR2 repeats, and similarity of S. mutans CRISPR spacers to sequences other than those of M102.
This paper examines agroecology within Europe, its dynamics, its position within a broader politico-economic framework and its political significance. It argues that agroecology is contesting and, at ...least in some places, effectively changing the main social relations of production in today's agriculture. In this respect, it has a strategically important potential for allowing farmers to regain control over the labour process. Empirically, the paper builds on the case of the Northern Frisian Woodlands, a large territorial cooperative that, has been developing a range of agroecological practices, and (often successfully) advocating for their more widespread adoption.
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