Changing Land Use, Changing Livelihoods: Smallholders Today

• Main Author: Claudia A. Radel (Ed.) (auth)
• Other Authors: Jacqueline M. Vadjunec (Ed.) (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2017
• Subjects: agroecology; adaptation; land tenure; households; forests; sustainability; vulnerability and resilience; agriculture; smallholders; land management practices; production chains; livelihoods; diversification; poverty; climate change
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

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.