The Smallholder's Dilemma

Nearly absent from the current popular interest in food is a sense of the political and ecological implications of corporate control over agriculture and the countryside. In Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food, George Pyle expresses anger for the way that corporate agriculture and the United States government have shaped production by producing food of low quality while pushing out small-scale farmers. The logic of small-scale farming is the subject of a series of books that might be called the agrarian school of political ecology—the study of land and its control as a political process, with social as well as environmental implications. The books considered in this article consider swidden agriculture, farming for use value rather than exchange value, and the history of small-hold farmers in Europe and east Asia. All of these books speak to the independence of farmers as indistinguishable from the way they farm.