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the maintenance of peasant coffee production in a Peruvian valley
Author(s) -
COLLINS JANE
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1984.11.3.02a00010
Subject(s) - subsistence agriculture , peasant , scarcity , agriculture , work (physics) , government (linguistics) , production (economics) , subsistence economy , geography , state (computer science) , economy , business , agricultural economics , economics , market economy , archaeology , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , engineering , macroeconomics , algorithm , computer science
For 40 years, highland cultivators of Huancané, Puno, Peru, have seasonally migrated to valleys of the eastern Andes to grow coffee, while maintaining subsistence agriculture in their home communities. They work their coffee lands extensively, despite negative ecological impacts and the scarcity of new lands. This practice reflects the high labor demands of the subsistence sector and the often‐demonstrated unwillingness of peasants to relinquish control over subsistence under insecure land tenure and market conditions. Using a modes‐of‐production approach, however, government policies and a system of state marketing cooperatives are shown to have played a major role in preventing producers from moving into full‐time coffee cultivation and to have maintained their partial integration into the market economy.