Paper short abstract:

The paper talks about the perils of extractive agriculture and how it is affecting local ecology leading to poor livelihood generation for the majority of cultivators. It calls for a de-centralized approach to development planning sensitive to the local socio-ecological conditions and needs.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to examine the capitalist development of agriculture and the persistence of agricultural petty production in India. It is based on fieldwork conducted in 2018 in two villages in South India, which have been previously studied in 1993-95.

With the advent of the green revolution, agriculture in the study villages got incorporated into the circuits of capitalist production. Though green revolution technologies had a positive effect on farmers in the initial years, the long-run consequences of this on the petty producer-dominated agriculture scenario is seen to be less desirable especially by adversely affecting the local ecology. Ecological degradation is found to be an important contributor to the agrarian crisis that the villages have been undergoing for more than a decade. This evolving crisis has made agriculture unprofitable with a higher effect on the petty producers.

However, despite the heavy odds faced in crop production, the petty producers in the study villages are still surviving. The study finds that the working of social institutions has a great role in keeping petty production afloat. On the whole, the agrarian capitalist transformation underway in contemporary India is ecologically and socially embedded. While ecological embeddedness puts limits to sustainable livelihood generation in the sector, the social embeddedness of the village economies and lack of gainful alternative employment ensure that petty production goes more or less unfettered even amidst distress.