Development and Inequality: The Agrarian Question

This chapter discusses the changing place of the peasantry in the Global South and its relation to development. While the world’s urban population surpassed rural population for the first time in 2007, peasants still make up a significant part of humanity. With between 1.3 and 3 billion population, peasants are to play a central role in shaping what countries of the Global South will look like in the next decades. It is therefore essential to address the place of the peasantry in the study of social change in order to understand how development impacts society. This chapter reviews the literatures on the agrarian question, and on paths of development, from modernization theory to the sociology of development. It then discusses the impact of development dynamics on the peasantry today both at the global and local scales. While phenomena such as land grabs, northern agricul- tural subsidies, and climate change have been transforming agriculture in the Global South, and pushing peasants off their land, other factors such as semi- proletarianization, remittance transfers, and sluggish industrialization hamper the possibility of a development path similar to that followed by industrialized countries. In this context, development is largely measured through income levels. The chapter thus introduces and intervenes in the current debate on global poverty reduction, the ways in which we measure development, and the place of the peasantry in the Global South today. It examines how development is measured in the economics and sociology literatures on the rise of global middle class and the decline of global poverty. It contends that although income level is surely an important metric, development sociology allows us to observe social change in a more detailed manner by looking at dynamics in the forms of income, such as, subsistence farming, sharecropping, and wage-labor.