Poverty and livelihoods after full-time farming: A South-East Asian view

Abstract

Abstract: Drawing on Harold Brookfield's seminal interventions on intensification and disintensification in tropical agriculture, the paper argues that a de-linking of poverty and livelihoods in rural areas from farming and agricultural resources is occurring in rural South-East Asia. This is often driven as much by changes in lifestyles and life views than by economic and environmental imperatives. The paper proposes that farming is in the process of losing its resonance and significance for the rural poor. Emerging patterns of change in the South-East Asian countryside are used to construct a generalised framework of agrarian transition where the current trend towards pluriactivity is likely to be replaced by a mixed landscape of agrarian entrepreneurs, neopeasants and remnant smallholders. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this trajectory for understanding poverty and pro-poor interventions in the countryside.

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