7 - Farming families in a changing world

Summary

As I noted in my introductory chapter, it is probable that a majority of the world's working population still engages in agricultural production upon family farms. Of course, both the numbers and the regional distribution of such farms have changed dramatically in the last century or so, as too has the extent to which farming families are dependent on the produce of their holdings for their livelihood. These changes have arisen partly through commercial and industrial expansion in Europe and elsewhere, and also – at least temporarily – in the wake of collectivisation and other economic experiments in countries such as China, the USSR and Tanzania. If reports of the demise of Socialism in the late 1980s have not been, as Mark Twain put it of his own case, ‘an exaggeration’, it is probable that forms of family farming will arise again out of the ashes of the kolkhoz and of ujamaa. At the same time it is possible that the development of ‘green’ consciousness in some of the more industrialised areas of Europe may do something to regenerate the family farm there also, if only on a minor scale.

However this may be, anthropological research into such farming within modern Europe may easily appear to be an odd if not a self-indulgent exercise.