Deep Roots

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Image: Irvin Jethro Velas

Water spinach farming in the Philippines

development and political environment, family farms in

China seem to be experiencing more acute differentiation at

present. From the official explanation and national survey

criteria, the ‘family farm’ politically promoted by the Chinese

Government falls into the category of a capitalized family

farm in terms of four features:

• possession of large-scale farmland obtained through

land transfer (with payment and formal contract), and

equipped with large- to middle-sized machinery

• primarily using family labour and combining short-

term hired labour for productive utilization

• the household as the accounting unit, with the

orientated of profit maximization

• continuously expanding production through capital

accumulation in order to achieve optimal scale for

profit maximization.

Although the form of ‘family production’ is formally

retained (as the utilization of family labour prevails), capi-

talized family farming is essentially different in its linkage

to family and the rural community, and can no longer be

characterized by the concept, ‘family farming’.

Given the differentiation of family farming in reality,

efforts to conceptualize it should trace back to the point of

departure for such differentiation, which is peasant agri-

culture. In academic writing and practice, the terms ‘family

farming’ and ‘peasant agriculture’ are often conflated and

interchangeably used. This is particularly the case in Asia

and the Pacific. Before the advent of agrarian commodi-

fication and capitalization, family farming could indeed

be equivalent to peasant agriculture. In the long history

of Asian agriculture, family farming has displayed the

features of peasant agriculture due to the centrality of the

family in agricultural production and its embeddedness in

local society. Subsistence predominated the logic of family

farming. Applying political economic analysis, the develop-

ment of family farming, taking China as an example, can

take different directions. Synthesizing from the political

economic aspect, family farming could be seen as family-

based farming activities that primarily rely on allocated

egional

erspectives