Economic analysis of peasant family farms: Agricultural intensification, cost-accounting, and sharecropping in Andean peasant communities
This research is motivated by the conditions under which an agricultural surplus can be produced and sustained in nations (LDC's) that are characterized, grosso modo, by a static agricultural technology and rapid growth in demand for agricultural products. Even though peasant family farms comprise as much as seventy percent of the population in many developing countries, there is still no serious attempt to uncover peasant responses to their growing integration into the national economy at the micro level of their allocation of family labor and other owned resources. This research seizes that micro level and highlights the importance of the interrelationship between subsistence and surplus production among peasant family farms. It incorporates into the economic analysis of peasant household agricultural production a basic characteristic of peasant family farms: their partial engagement in imperfect markets. The data for this study was collected during 1984-1986 in two valleys of the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes, Tulumayo (central sierra near the Mantaro valley and the city of Huancayo), and Paucartambo (southern sierra near the city of Cusco).
History, Latin American, Economics, Agricultural, Economics, History
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign