Changing Land Use Changing Livelihoods: Smallholders Today

This book brings together eleven works by scholars within and beyond geography to argue the case for a continued engagement with smallholder agricultural studies. The research detailed is largely empirical and draws on a wide spectrum of mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The case studies cover a range of geographic locations including Brazil Burkina Faso South Africa Botswana Malawi Madagascar Vietnam and the USA with greatest emphasis in sub-Saharan Africa. Key themes that emerge include the structural and relative nature of smallholder as a category the dynamic reality of smallholder livelihoods the importance of smallholder farming and land-use practices to questions of environmental sustainability and the challenges of vulnerability and adaptation in contemporary human-environment systems. Overall these studies show that smallholder studies are more pertinent than ever especially in the face of finite resources and global environmental change.