The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia's persistent smallholder
By J. Rigg, A. Salamanca, Eric C. Thompson. 2016
311 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With economic progress, it was expected that smallholders would fade into history. This has been the experience in much of the global North and it was expected to occur as development proceeded in the global South. In East and Southeast Asia, however, smallholders have persisted in the face of rapid and profound social and economic transformation. This presents the core puzzle that the paper addresses: why has the farm-size transition not occurred in much of East and Southeast Asia? Why have smallholders stubbornly resisted the tide of economic history? The first half of the paper defines the smallholder and smallholding, sets out the historical evolution of smallholdings in the region, and explores the role of smallholders in national development. The second half of the paper explains the persistence of the smallholder through three explanatory lenses: the economics of smallholder farming; the role of farm policy; and the logics of smallholder-based livelihoods in a context of global integration. The paper concludes by setting out four possible rural futures for the wider East Asian countryside and smallholder.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4454ee3956cd1809eae64bcf18617d22f936f235
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Global and Planetary Change
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Unpacking Indonesia's independent oil palm smallholders : An actor-disaggregated approach to identifying environmental and social performance challenges (2017, background): “…in developing countries are involved primarily in subsistence-based production, globalization and rising global trade flows have over recent decades enabled many smallholders to participate in and benefit from more commercialized global value chains (Lee et al., 2012; Rigg et al., 2016).”
- The rapid rise of agricultural mechanization in Myanmar (2021, background): “Thailand, China), rural populations have been hollowed out by migration and are aging rapidly, in landscapes comprised mainly of small and fragmented farms (Rigg et al., 2016).”