Political Economy of an Agrarian Frontier

In the 1990s I initiated field research on agrarian change in southern Costa Rica. This was part of a larger project, along with colleagues Robert Carmack and Timothy Gage, examining the interplay of demographic factors, farming strategies, and political dynamics and their impact upon the deteriorating environment of the canton of Buenos Aires. In the past 30 years Buenos Aires has experienced rapidly accelerating rates of deforestation, erosion, and soil deterioration; expansion of large-scale cattle ranching and capital-intensive plantation systems; increasing dependency upon externally-controlled export markets; and increasing polarization between wealthy operators of large farms and small-scale subsistence farmers and a landless peasantry, with an apparent diminution of the agrarian middle class.

My ethnographic research emphasizes the ways that rural stratification is interpreted through colloquial categories of farm scale with their associated meanings regarding life and livelihood on small-, medium-, and large-scale enterprises. Profiles of farming behavior and attitudes for each of these classes were constructed by documenting patterns of land use, seasonal scheduling of activities, daily time allocation for male and female farm heads, and agrarian ethos for a sample of farm families across the canton. A striking element was the profound extremes in agricultural production, social organization of work, and ethos that divided rural society in the context of a national culture evoking notions of egalitarian agrarian democracy. Preliminary analyses suggested that the medium-scale (10-40 to 100 hectares) and large (over 100 hectares) landowners had somewhat uncertain futures due to tensions between developmental cycles of the farm enterprises and family units combined with declining soil fertility and volatile markets. The smallholder farms (less than 10-12 hectares), with their intensive, diversified land use, fine-tuning of micro-ecology, and timely use of family labor, rental and sharecrooping arrangements, appeared to offer better propsects as enduring enterprises over time.

Read more about it:

Jarvenpa, Robert. 1994a Extremes of Scale: Agroecological Variation, Society, and Ethos in Buenos Aires, Costa Rica. Anthropos 89:493-515.

Jarvenpa, Robert. 1994b Extremos de Escala: Ideas Sobre la Variacion Agroecologica de Buenos Aires. In: Soplos de Viento en Buenos Aires: La Antropologia de un Canton Brunca de Costa Rica. Robert Carmack, ed., pp. 51-79. San Jose: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica.