The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century

Since the start of my career the focus of my scholarly research has been what has been defined as the “agrarian question”. This question is concerned with understanding the processes by which capitalism does or does not enter into small-scale peasant agriculture and transforms it into more commercially oriented entrepreneurial modes of farming, and the impact of such process on the livelihoods of small-scale peasant farmers and the ecologies that shape the landscapes in which they work. My own efforts in this field has been on the ways in which gender relations within households between women and men shape the intrahousehold distribution of resources, work and income and how these relations shape and are shaped by small-scale peasant farm production and changes taking place within farming. I believe that the agrarian question remains a critical concern for those interested in global human inequality because more people than ever before make their homes in rural areas and the countryside forms the epicenter of global poverty. I propose to use a Stellenbosch Fellowship to write a short user-friendly “state of the art” book on the agrarian question based upon an earlier two-part survey article and recent developments in the field.