3.1. Agriculture

Peasants are workers of the land.They live in rural, agricultural households that have direct access to the land they work, either as common users, tenants, or smallholders.They are organized in familybonds, villagecommunities,and social groups, which we call peasantries.These bonds pool different forms of income and meet a major portion of their subsistence needs via networks of production, exchange, credit,a nd protection.Most of the time, peasantries have been ruled by other social groups thatextract asurplus either via rents,via market transfers, or through control of public power (taxation).Keyterms are (a degree of)household and local autonomy,direct access to land and labour resources,flexible strategies of income-pooling, household-based villages tructures,a nd surplus extraction outside local control.¹Differences between peasants, market-drivenfarmers, and industrial or entrepreneurial farming must be understood on ac ontinuous scale.The primacyofs ubsistence production, household labour,a nd local community relations is the main discriminating variable.As ar ule, peasant labour relations comprise am ix of activities, includings ubsistence farming,m arket production, and agricultural and non-agricultural wagel abour.P easantries are not undifferentiated social entities; they include middle and small peasant farmers, and self-employment and waged labour in combination with subsistencef arming.B ecause peasant households combine multiple income strategies, peasantries cross all categories in the taxonomyofthe Global Collaboratoryo nt he Historyo fL abour Relations,e xcept the group of 'non-working'.²Peasantries have been the largest and most important social group in human history.Until the end of the twentieth century,a gricultural work was the main profession around the world.Although employment growth in agriculture has slowed, farming remains the world'sl argest economic sector.S till more than thirty percent of the world population, about 2.5b illion people, is economicallydependent on agricultural production as asourceofincome.Agricultureemploys over 1.3billionpeople throughout the world, or close to forty percent of the global workforce.This goes  This equals Eric Wolf's 'fund of rent' that distinguishes the peasantfrom the 'primitive cultivator'.In his book Peasants (Englewood Cliffs,1 966) Wolf asserts that after ensuringt heir own survival, peasants must put anysurplus to threeuses: 1) Ceremonialfund (socialand religious activities), 2) Replacement fund (repair/replacement for future production), 3) Rent fund (payment for use of land and/or equipment).S ee also Eric Vanhaute, "Peasants,P easantries and (De)peasantization in the Capitalist World-system",i n: