Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective provides the first multicountry, inter-disciplinary analysis of the single most important social and economic formation in the Asian countryside: the smallholder. Based on ten core country chapters, the volume describes and explains the persistence, transformations, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across East and Southeast Asia. As well as providing a source book for scholars working on agrarian change in the region, it also engages with a number of key current areas of debate, including: the nature and direction of the agrarian transition in Asia, and its distinctiveness vis à vis transitions in the global North; the persistence of the smallholder notwithstanding deep and rapid structural change; and the question of the efficiency and productivity of smallholder-based farming set against concerns over global and national food security.

Eric C. Thompson is an anthropologist whose research spans Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. He is the author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia and co-editor of Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices. Jamie Gillen is a human geographer of Southeast Asia, focusing on Vietnam. He is the author of Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam and his current work is on the rural dimensions of Southeast Asian cities. Jonathan Rigg is a professor of human geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on questions of agrarian, livelihood and environmental change in Southeast and South Asia and he has undertaken fieldwork in Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. Jonathan has authored more than 100 papers and ten books and is currently researching extreme weather and outdoor work in Vietnam and completing a book on longitudinal change in rural Thailand.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Placing the Asian Smallholder Chapter 2 Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic Land Tenure Chapter 3 Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics and Development? Chapter 4 Japan: Politically Powerful, yet Precarious Chapter 5 Laos: From Subsistence to Market Integration Chapter 6 Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture Chapter 7 Philippines: Persistent Poverty, Precarity, and Ineffective Policy Chapter 8 Singapore: Persistence and Prosperity on the Urban Fringe Chapter 9 Thailand: The Political Economy of Post-Peasantry Agriculture Chapter 10 Vietnam: Dismantling and Resurgence of Smallholder Agriculture Chapter 11 Conclusion: Asian Smallholder Futures