Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.

com/abstract=2430704
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2430704
Protecting future generations
through commons
Editors: Saki Bailey, Gilda Farrell and Ugo Mattei
Trends in Social Cohesion, No. 26
Council of Europe Publishing
French edition:
Proteger /es generations futures a travers /es biens communs
ISBN 978-92-871-7706-3
The opinions expressed in this work are the responsibility of the authors
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Council of Europe, December 2013
Printed at the Council of Europe
Peasant farming: commoning through
co-production for future generations
by Luigi Russi
239

240
Introduction
The global debate on the future of agriculture is too often charac-
terised by one notable omission: peasant farming. When peasant
farmers are considered in the context of mainstream approaches,
centred on the maximisation of production through an increasing
technification of agriculture (Lang and Heasman 2004:34), they are
invariably relegated to the role of the "last of the Mohicans", bearers
of the rudiments of a "surpassed" culture (understood both as an
outlook on the world and method of cultivation) that will, sooner or
later, be wiped away.
In this chapter, I argue instead that similar mainstream accounts
completely miss the essential role of peasant farming in promoting
stewardship for the natural resource base, a role that has allowed
this mode of farming to endure in ecological symbiosis to this day
(despite the widespread technification of agriculture that was pursued
relentlessly throughout the 19th century). Most importantly, peasant
farming displays features which, in the light of the present environ-
mental crisis, seem to offer a way out of the impasse to which exten-
sive, technified agriculture has been a decisive contributor. From this
lens, therefore, peasant farming emerges as an attempt to carve out
spaces of co-production through which to promote intergenerational
justice, by helping rebalance the existing disequilibria brought about
by the productionist approach to agriculture.
I develop my argument through the following steps. First, I introduce
the concept of peasant co-production, and examine how it has been
challenged by an increasing fencing of the conditions of agricultural
239. Research Assooate, Institute for the Study of Political Economy and Law, International
University College of Tunn and M.Phil.JPhD candidate 1n International Politics, City University
London.
240. This article 1s adapted from Russi L. (2013), Hungry Capital: The Financialization of
Food. Zero Books, Winchester. The author would 11 e o ac nowledge Zero Books for
permission to reproduce sections from the book 1n this chapter.
production outside of the farm, through the role of multinationals,
but also of state apparatuses implementing forms of "blind" hier-
archical control. Secondly, I speofically look at peasant farming as a
form of resistance, or "counterwork " , through the opening of spaces
that enable the subtraction or exodus of the activity of farming from
the sum total of commodity relations. Finally, in the conclusion I
review the main points and observe how peasant co-production can
be specifically articulated as an instance of commoning for intergen-
erational justice.
Peasant farming and industrial agriculture
Ploeg (2008:23) defines the peasant condition as consisting both of an
element of resistance and an element of autonomy. In other words, it
can be characterised as both an attempt to minimise dependency rela-
tions (for example from the market), as well as a practice of building
autonomy through the creation of a resilient farm that relies mostly
on inputs that are produced internally. The two aspects are to some
extent sides of the same coin, as the building of autonomy - especially
vis-a-vis market-mediated relations - carves spaces of resistance to the
profitability calculus of economic relations, replacing that logic with
different metrics of success endogenous to the peasant world (Ploeg
2008:269), as exemplified for instance by the concept of "beautiful
farm" (Ploeg 2008: 117-8). It is within this background that the logic
of farming as co-production between man and living nature acquires
centrality as an ordering principle that lies outside of the logic of
economic profitability that hovers over the world of food production,
acting both as a limit and a first victim to the expansionism of profit-
driven relations under the pressure of a productionist paradigm.
In peasant farming, it is the relational aspect- "co-production" - that
takes primacy over the elements of "man" and "nature." Far from
being fixed entities, in fact, the latter acquire their reciprocal identities
precisely through the "ongoing interaction and mutual transforma-
tion" (Ploeg 2008:24) entailed in the process of co-production. So,
for example, in a co-production relationship "man" is moulded as a
designer of ecosystems, who deploys "common sense and craft" to
create a durable "habitat" to support human dwelling (Tudge 2007:39-
40; Carolan 2012:205). Similarly, "nature" receives meaning as a set of
"living" relationships between different ecological components (Biel
2012:5). These relationships are regarded as an aid in the struggle
for autonomy through the establishment of a resilient resource base,
rather than an obstacle to be worked around through the superimpo-
sition of engineered connections (Carolan 2012:206-7).
This relationship of co-production increasingly features as the first
victim of the inclusion of farmers into market circles (which increases
patterns of dependency), and the ensuing need to replace the metric
of peasant quality with one based purely on cost-benefit calculations
(Tudge 2007:58). Indeed, the organic nature of agricultural produc-
tivity - which lies at the core of the logic of co-production, based
as it is on the acknowledgment of and co-operation with ecological
cycles - is widely recognised as an obstacle to capitalist accumulation
(Bernstein 2001 :27). In light of this, the inclusion of rural production
within a wider web of economic relations has occurred through the
stripping away of ecological complexity mediated by a technological
effort aimed at the simplification and standardisation of agricultural
production, so as to replicate the "ideal of control" experienced in the
factory setting (Bernstein 2001 :28). Hence, technological innovation
has played a crucial role in the decline of smallholder, peasant agricul-
ture, towards "entrepreneurial" farming based on a high dependency
on markets and the ensuing internalisation of the logic of financial
costs and benefits (Goodman and Redclift 1991 :71). It was precisely
through a technification of agriculture that the latter was made less
labour-intensive (thereby freeing up labour), while simultaneously
retaining productivity despite increases in scale (so as to restructure
agriculture as the "breadbasket" of industrial centres). This techno-
logically-driven marginalisation of the peasantry has affected different
parts of the world at different times: it took hold in the Western world
by the turn of the 19th century (Goodman and Redclift 1991 :96),
whereas it proceeded in several stages, but most intensely from the
1970s with the Green Revolution, in the former colonised world
(Bernstein 2001 :35-6).
Despite the wide variety in the specifics of peasant farming across the
world, autonomy vis-a-vis market relations has been said to represent
the edge of the struggle between peasant and more "entrepreneurial"
modes of farming across the developed and the developing world
(Ploeg 2008:39, 42; Harriss 1982:22; Girelli 2011 ). In this respect, the
tendency towards establishing relations of dependency with a market
of mechanical and chemical inputs (such as fertilizers and pesticides)
and with one of agricultural commodity outputs (dominated by agri-
food corporations and retail giants) (Bernstein 2001 :28), has acted
against the peasant principle of distancing the farm from markets to
make it more resilient (Ploeg 2008: 114). The squeezing of modern
farming in a supply-chain-type relation with industrial capital - both
through the provision of chemical and mechanical inputs and the
purchase of outputs for further processing/sale - has given rise to what
has been termed the technological " treadmill" (Lang and Heasman
2004: 148). In essence, as farmers increasingly move into technology-
intensive, monocultural techniques, this allows them to increase their
production while prices are still high. However, as more farmers do the
same, prices fall, and new increases in scale and/or enhancements in
technology are necessary to stay afloat. Therefore, the costs of non-
farm inputs rise precisely because farmers respond to decreasing prices
by increasing size and using artificial inputs (Ploeg 2008: 129). One
has to add to this that, in the present day, increased concentration in
the upstream sectors further compresses the prices farmers are able
to obtain (Ward 1993:358; Lines 2008:73). The result is a squeeze on
farmer incomes, which has - in turn - called for state action to stabilise
the conditions within which market dependency could endure without
wiping out farming altogether (Ploeg 2008: 127). So, for example, the
European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a paramount example
of a scheme which was established to subsidise "industrial" agricul-
ture, so as to hold up farmers entangled in a novel ordering that would
- without these crutches - have been more fragile than peasant agri-
culture (Borgan 1969:252-60). Within the new paradigm of "mecha-
nised" agriculture, features like scale and specialisation become key,
contrary to the experience of peasant farming, where intensive (rather
than extensive) cultivation and diversity rather than monocultural
specialisation are some of the ways in which autonomy is achieved
(Rowbotham 1998: 119). This, of course, has occurred at the cost
of forgoing the need to preserve the natural resource base, leaving
unchecked a whole host of ecological problems that can be ascribed
directly to technified agriculture (Weis 2010:316; Tudge 2007: 102-4).
Additionally, the job of farming has changed drastically. On the one
hand, it has gone from a craft-based occupation to something not
much different to working on the assembly line, as farmers follow
instructions to "assemble" their industrial and chemical inputs
together in what has been called "farming by numbers" (Tudge
2007: 123). Secondly, the need to embrace increasing technological
innovation has often forced farmers into a spiral of debt (Rowbotham
1998: 114). Aside from making farming a frustrating, lonely experience
to the point of forcing some farmers to take their own lives (Laughton
2008:51 ), technification and indebtedness have also pushed aside the
quality logic of peasant farming. Instead, farmers have increasingly
internalised the calculative practices adopted in wider business circles,
with productivity having to grow by an amount suffioent to keep up
loan repayments (so that financial solvency, as opposed to ecolog-
ical soundness, has become the driver of farming decisions). Ploeg
provides a telling example of these changing trends in relation to the
choice of milking cows (Ploeg 2008: 131-2). When these are selected
only with a view to maximising milk output given the price paid for the
cow, issues such as cows' health and their breeding within the farm no
longer find any space as animals become mere "throwaway inputs, "
which can literally be milked for a few years and then replaced with
others as their productivity declines. This, of course, is possible only in
a context of calculative practices that have no way of accounting for
such factors as the increased resilience of using native breeds or farm-
raised cows (Ploeg 2008:49).
The systematic invisibility of the peasant logic within purely economic
and market relations makes it so that peasant production is regarded
as a residual by-product that will - sooner or later - be wiped away.
Peasants lose, in a rural world re-patterned after market principles, their
right to exist as peasants and the conditions for their enduring repro-
duction are curtailed through takeover of their development possibili-
ties (Ploeg 2008: 126, 129). Takeover can take a myriad possible shapes.
Some concrete examples are: forcing a market of milk quotas upon
small producers (resulting in a concentration of opportunities for milk
production upon entrepreneurial farms) (Ploeg 2008: 134), the curtail -
ment of access to crucial resources such as water supplies in Catacaos
(Peru) (Ploeg 2008:72-3), the imposition of regulatory measures that
only entrepreneurial farms are able to meet (Ploeg 2008:220). This last
case is exemplified by the standardisation of hygiene practices in rela-
tion to the processing of foodstuffs in the EU.
241
So, for example, EC
Regulation 852/2004 lays out general requirements to which premises
on which food processing takes place have to comply. The regulation
allows the competent local authorities to derogate from these general
rules, in order to accommodate the needs of local, on-farm and small-
scale production (Meulen 2009:66). However, inertia at the level of
local authorities in carving out exceptions has practically translated in
the imposition of requirements that peasant farmers can hardly meet
(Meulen 2009:67), considering the size of own production rarely makes
241 . I am grateful to Roberto Schelli no for pointing this out to me.
it worthwhile to undertake the investment needed to comply with rules
put in place with the entrepreneurial farmer in mind (Angrisano 2011).
In this respect, paradigmatic examples are the request to plaster the dry
stone walls of a room where cheese is ripened (Meulen 2009:67), as
well as the possibility of exclusion of the dwelling-house from the places
in which foodstuffs may be lawfully "processed" (where "processing"
is understood to include heating, say for making jam or tomato puree,
or ripening cheeses) (Artisan Forum 2005: 15).
This last example also illustrates how peasant farming is not simply
threatened from "the private" (for example, agrifood multinationals),
but also from "the public", as the techniques of peasant farming,
which embody ecosystem-specific relations of co-production honed
over years of experience, come to be replaced by top-down, central-
ised and hierarchical regulation (Ploeg 2008:218-20). Oddly enough,
that very regulation - rather than sheltering farming from processes of
privatisation and industrialisation - makes farming increasingly acces-
sible only to actors that are capable of complying with high demands
for standardisation through a superimposition of engineered relation-
ships over ecological feedback mechanisms.
In sum, as agriculture is streamlined to fit into a global system of
commodity relations, the set of calculative practices centred on finan-
cial cost and benefit hijack the peasant logic of farming and simulta-
neously strengthen relations of dependence to financial institutions
(such as banks), markets and agrifood corporations that erode the
space available for peasant relations to endure. Increasingly often, this
process of "monetisation" translates into chronic short-termism that-
from an ecological point of view - depletes the very resource base,
the reproduction of which is essential to the production of food in the
long run (Tudge 2007: 101-4).
Counterwork: commons as spaces of co-production
Any discussion about intergenerational justice in relation to agriculture
has to begin with a basic understanding of the second law of thermo-
dynamics. The latter states that a closed system spontaneously tends to
become more disorderly (or entropic) by eating away its internal struc-
ture, until it disintegrates. Let's explore this a bit further. First of all, a
system can be understood as a set of relationships that are organised
in such a way as to gain autonomy from a surrounding environment
(Meadows 2009: 11-2). It follows that, for a system to reproduce itself,
it is necessary for it to draw resources from that environment, and to
dissipate its waste into the same environment. It may help to think of a
biological system like a human being that needs to draw nourishment
from its environment and to dissipate waste into that environment in
order to stay alive. So long as the environment is capable of making
available resources to fuel the system's reproduction and to recycle the
latter's by-products, the system/environment relationship can be said
to work in symbiosis.
A cultivated plot can be considered as an organised set of relation-
ships that can endure in so far as a set of environmental conditions
hold (existence of adequate water supply and climatic conditions,
soil ecosystems that replenish nutrients expended in crop cultiva-
tion). So long as this symbiotic exchange between a system and its
environment exists, then there is in principle no limit to how long
that system can endure over time. However, as soon as those rela-
tionships break up (for example because the environment's ability to
support the system has been exhausted) the system will behave as
if it were closed (because of depletion of the environment it relies
upon) and will tend progressively eat up its own structure and disin-
tegrate (Biel 2011 : 166).
The progressive replacement of ecological cycles with market-medi-
ated, engineered relationships reduces precisely the ability of agricul-
ture to rely on underlying ecosystems as a consequence of the latter's
disruption, and consequently undermines the former's continuing
viability. Suffice it to think of the replacement of polycultures with
monocultures, which has in turn ushered the use of a set of imple-
ments (mechanical and chemical) that have progressively disrupted
those ecosystems of bacteria, nematodes and fungi that are necessary
for soils to naturally replenish their fertility (Biel 2012). Some have
gone as far as speaking of a veritable "imperial" colonisation of agri-
cultural practices, which are re-patterned in order to accommodate
commodity relationships that generate a profit (rather than fostering
ecological durability) (Patnaik 2011 :226).
If we understand the progressive streamlining of agriculture to fit
financial metrics of profitability as a process of "imperial" expansion
and colonisation, then peasant farming, besides being the first victim,
also emerges as the first pocket of resistance or, as has been written
in the literature, of "counterwork" (Long 2008). Counterwork can
be understood as the deployment of agency within a system, in such
a way as to challenge existing patterns and instead experiment with
new ones (Long 2008:84), a kind of "hacking" aimed at re-embed-
ding the system in the context of broader concerns for the continuing
viability of the environment that sustains it. In this respect, where the
economic system closes lines of development for peasant co-produc-
tion, new ones can be reinstated through different connections, so
that access to consumers or financing which has been "the object of
disassembling (in order to be assembled anew in accordance with the
ordering principle of Empire) is actively reconnected and re-patterned
by peasants" (Ploeg 2008:268). In this way, undesirable patterns come
to be challenged and reversed, so as to assert particular assemblages
of peasant co-production as being outside the purview of what can be
restructured for financial extraction. It is through the carving out of new
spaces for co-production that peasant farming becomes an instance of
"commoning" in opposition to increasing commodification (Holloway
2010:29-30). There are many examples of this tendency.
One I have encountered personally is Genuino Clandestino (Angrisano
2011 ), an Italian network allowing farmers to market products (such
as jam or tomato puree) that have been manufactured on the farm,
rather than on dedicated processing facilities required by the law.
Often, the investment in dedicated processing facilities is not viable
for small farmers that cannot rely on enough throughput to justify
the expenditure. Hence, although "clandestine" - as they are not
produced in legally compliant laboratories - these products are also
"genuine", as farmers are accountable to each other and to the
broader consumer community (with which they have a direct relation-
ship) for the quality of their products. Genuino Clandestino is itself
an illustration of a broader movement of solidarity-based purchase
groups, which are networks of farmers and consumers, aimed at initi-
ating direct exchanges of agricultural produce for everyday consump-
tion, providing an alternative to supermarket shopping for medium- to
low-income consumers (Brunori, Rossi and Malandrin 2011 :48). In
this respect, these build on the limitations perceived in other forms
of alternative food networks, such as fair trade, and try to improve
on the shortcomings encountered in those experiments by going one
step further and bypassing big retail to avoid co-optation (Jaffee and
Howard 2010:387-99).
Systems come to be when a degree of stability is achieved in the rela-
tionships from which they emerge. This stability of expectations about
how different elements relate to one another defines the paradigm after
which the system functions, that is a certain way of framing the world
as an "out there" entity, on which the system acts. In the current "tech-
nified" system of agricultural production, a certain view of (unidirec-
tional) causality makes ecological feedback relationships (which are so
important in peasant co-production) invisible, and consequently frames
food production as a linear input-output process that is open to engi-
neering and packaging into assets (Eisenstein 2011 :51 ). In this para-
digm, in which land and biological processes can be broken down and
sold, connections are put into place that enable us to do just that. As the
food system oversteps the limits of sustainability, however, new spaces
are opened for paradigms that are more receptive to relationships of
mutual causality, where co-production is acknowledged and respected,
rather than worked against. In this respect, an interesting effort appears
to be that of the permaculture movement. This is a movement that is
closely connected to the use of agro-ecological principles in the building
of resilient local economies, and which has led to the establishment of
the Transition Network, a global web of local communities "in transi-
tion" to a model of dwelling that is less taxing on human and ecological
resources (Hopkins 2008: 134). In permaculture, the idea is to start with
a given vision of the future and a toolbox of ecological principles to
facilitate co-production, and subsequently to backcast from that vision
and start to create new connections that will lead to the realisation
of the desired paradigm (Holmgren 2011; Biel 2012:6 ff.). Within the
Transition Movement, this approach translates into a visioning process
that hovers around a paradigm featuring a broader role for agriculture,
beyond that of mere "breadbasket" to fuel industrialisation, with new
spaces for reinstating peasant relations of co-production. A centrepiece
of this broader role is ecological stewardship, articulated through - for
example - decreased reliance on artificial inputs, as well as improve-
ment in the quality of the soil (so as to enhance its role as a carbon
sink to mitigate the problem of climate change) (Pinkerton and Hopkins
2009: 15). Starting from thi s vision, a range of initiatives are then put into
place that attempt directly to implement it. One of these is the encour-
agement of self-prov1s1on by growing food for home consumption in
private or community gardens, which enacts a form of distancing from
markets that 1s directly related to the peasant condition. In fad, organic
urban agriculture can reduce the pressure for productivity on existing
local food networ s (Pinkerton and Hopkins 2009:47, 71; Biel 2012:10),
by making cities self-sufficient to some extent. The case of Cuba's
capital Havana meeting most of its fruit and vegetable needs from self-
produdion ts often heralded as an example of the weight that urban
agriculture can exert (Pinkerton and Hopkins 2009:47; Piercy, Granger,
and Goodier 2010: 172-3). Furthermore, by disentangling food provi-
sioning from transnational networks, localised urban agriculture can also
open up new possibilities for farmers in import-dependent developing
countries to focus on meeting local demand, rather than produce for
export (Pinkerton and Hopkins 2009:22). Another interesting initiative is
community-supported agriculture (CSA), which attempts to strengthen
direct connections between farmers and the surrounding community.
This typically involves provisioning from local farmers, as well as sharing
the risk of "bad harvests" (so that payments are made despite fluc-
tuations in the size of the harvest) (Pinkerton and Hopkins 2009: 103).
This type of scheme decreases farmers' dependence on Transnational
Corporation networks (for marketing their produce) or on the finan-
cial system (because a stable income requires less reliance on loans).
As a consequence, it enables the recovery of peasant metrics of quality
(Willis 2012:27), for example by allowing experimentation with organic
methods. In fact, since these methods require a few years to build soil
fertility and increase output, they are ill-suited to generate sufficient
yields to keep up with loan repayments in the short term.
Counterwork can also be spotted in the enactment of new forms
of "conversion," as part of the peasantry's resistance to "imperial"
restructuring. What this means, according to Ploeg (2008:269-70), is
the tracing of connections that are not mediated by money (so that
they do not need effectively to be "converted" or translated in mone-
tary terms), introducing instead elements of reciprocity that manage to
mobilise resources that would otherwise go unused, were they to be
procured through monetary circuits. A case in point here is the provision
of labour for olive harvests, where neighbouring peasants help each
other in exchange for bottles of olive oil (rather than a monetary wage)
(Ploeg 2008:270). These examples - by expressing a symbolic critique of
market-mediated relations - effectively challenge the worldview behind
the patterning of the current economic system, i.e. that there are
"scarce" resources that need to be rationed through markets (Eisenstein
2011 :23). Instead, they aim to show that reciprocity and co-operation
can, contrary to the assumptions behind the logic of the market, actu-
ally enhance the wealth of a community (Tudge 2007:95-6).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have tried to provide a different story from the all-
too-common narrative of agricultural "modernisation" mediated
by increasing technological intervention aimed at reproducing the
standards of control available in a factory. Peasant farming has been
understood essentially as a mode of farming that works with - rather
than against - ecological cycles; as such, it encompasses a wide range
of agro-ecological practices present both in traditional mixed farming
as well as in more contemporary approaches, such as permaculture.
In all these instances, co-production between man and nature trans-
lates simultaneously in a distancing from markets and the building of
a resilient resource base that makes the practice of farming as little
dependent on outside inputs as possible. Peasant farming has been
steadily undermined in the last century from the advancement of
industrial or technified agriculture, which relies on market-mediated
relationships to override ecological constraints. The paramount illus-
tration of this is the extensive monoculture (something which does not
occur in nature), which is sustained through ample use of mechanical
and chemical implements that systematically disrupt those ecological
feedback relationships that allow agricultural production to endure
over time. The streamlining of agriculture is further accentuated by
the standardisation imposed by state apparatuses, that disregards the
need for farming practices to be adapted to local ecologies.
At the same time, with the emergence of visible cracks in this agricul-
tural paradigm, as a consequence of environmental disarray (global
warming caused by C0
2
emissions to which industrial agriculture has
greatly contributed to, depletion of soil quality), peasant farming is
starting to receive the attention it deserves. Instances of peasant-inspired
counterwork are virtually as varied as there are peasants, and only a
few examples have been reviewed in the chapter: from the promotion
of intensive, organic agriculture in cities by the Transition Movement in
England to the opening of alternative markets to disentangle peasants
from the demands for standardisation posed by state regulation or big
distributors in Italy, down to the enactment of reciprocity-based trans-
actions that challenge the expansion of market-mediated relationships
even as a cultural phenomenon. The renewal of peasant relationships
in the face of the environmental disarray of technified agriculture is
a form of resistance that promises to put stewardship for the natural
resource base back at the centre. In this respect, it plays a crucial role in
creating a food system that 1s durable and resilient, where it no longer
is necessary to undertake grabs of land in order to make up for the
shortfall of fertility in soil depleted by decades of mechanisation (Biel
2012), and where agriculture manages to integrate symbiotically with
the natural ecosystem in whi ch it is practised, rather than giving rise to
open-air laboratori es that oust those very ecological relationships that
have made agriculture possible unt il now. This is why a new story of
food as co-production can make a difference. This story should actu-
ally have many different versions, depending on the particular set of
micro-conditions in which food production takes place. The struggle
for food sovereignty, understood precisely as the development of as
many different stories of food as there are local natural and human
ecologies (Forum for Food Sovereignty 2007; La Via Campesina 1996),
is therefore an important part of the work needed to restore peasant
co-production to the central role it deserves for bringing about a food
system that manages to take care of the needs of future generations.
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