Changing Land Use, Changing Livelihoods : Smallholders Today

This book brings together eleven works by scholars within and beyond geography, to argue the case for a continued engagement with smallholder agricultural studies. The research detailed is largely empirical and draws on a wide spectrum of mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The case studies cover a range of geographic locations, including Brazil, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Madagascar, Vietnam, and the USA, with greatest emphasis in sub-Saharan Africa. Key themes that emerge include the structural and relative nature of "smallholder" as a category, the dynamic reality of smallholder livelihoods, the importance of smallholder farming and land-use practices to questions of environmental sustainability, and the challenges of vulnerability and adaptation in contemporary human-environment systems. Overall these studies show that smallholder studies are more pertinent than ever, especially in the face of finite resources and global environmental change.