Across the Americas, small farmers are continuing a long tradition of sustainable agricultural practices with support from international organizations and university researchers. But these farmers face tremendous economic pressures from abroad. With cheaper food imports underselling locally produced goods and national economies stumbling under crushing foreign debt, markets for local...

The great majority of farmers in Latin America are peasants who still farm small plots of land, usually in marginal environments utilizing traditional and subsistence methods. The contribution of the 16 million peasant units to regional food security is, however, substantial. Research has shown that peasant systems, which mostly rely...

La mayoría de las estadísticas disponibles que predicen impactos climáticos sobre la agricultura campesina son aproximaciones muy burdas que no toman en cuenta la heterogeneidad de la agricultura campesina-indígena, ni la diversidad de estrategias que los campesinos han utilizado y aun utilizan para enfrentar las sequías, inundaciones, huracanes, etc. Alrededor del...

While many contemporary rural social movements once argued for increased industrial farming inputs and machinery for their members, the past few years have seen an accelerating shift toward the promotion of agroecology as an alternative to the so-called Green Revolution. In this paper we both describe this phenomenon in its...

In order to meet economy of scale demands made by large seed and agroindustrial companies, many areas of agriculture have recently evolved in ways which are incompatible with sustainable development, both in terms of damage to agroecosystems and by the continued belief in principles of land concentration and underuse. Farming...

After the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, former land owners returned to Nicaragua from the USA and began to take back their former estates, through legal and less than legal manoeuvering. This ‘agrarian counter-reform’ as it became known left many hundreds of rural people landless in its wake...