How did farmers become so invisible?: Wknd interviews sociologist Maryam Aslany

Her new book, Peasants, explores how farmers are kept out of view, and out of profitable parts of supply chains.Yet they hold answers to a way forward, she says

There is a quiet war underway, and the ripple effects show up in your pantry.

How did blueberries get there? Why is chocolate fading?

At the root of these questions are so many others: What is the true role of land; where should water go; how should we best juggle our need for space, forests, cities and farms?

Over and over, as we tussle with these questions, it is the farmer who ends up with less. Less water, land, attention, revenue… certainty.

How did a role this vital become so sidelined?

For 14 years, Iranian-British sociologist Maryam Aslany, 46, has explored answers to these questions. Her research has taken her through parts of rural Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Born and raised in Iran, she first became interested in the lives and livelihoods of farmers while studying for a degree in Pune. She went on to earn a Master’s at Oxford and a PhD in economic sociology at King’s College London.

There, her doctoral thesis was on the rural middle-class in post-1991 India. “The rise of India’s middle class was predominantly understood as an urban phenomenon. I wanted to understand the role of the countryside in this narrative,” says Aslany, who is now a Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Yale University.

In the West you’re not even supposed to say “peasant” because it has become a pejorative term, she adds. “It’s a form of abuse. That’s why I chose it as the title: to provoke.”

How has this approach to farmers and farming shaped where we now stand, on food security, equity, climate? What would it take to correct course on this front?

Excerpts from an interview.

* What will it take, do you think, for agricultural labour to be considered central to the narrative of progress again?

I think the first step is visibility.

Think of the French Revolution. Much of the pressure for change came from the countryside, where peasants were demanding the destruction of feudal land relations. Peasants may not have been writing philosophical treatises, but they had political demands, political ideas and enormous historical agency. And yet we tend to remember the French Revolution as an urban event. That same exclusion of the countryside goes on to this day.

Peasants have largely dropped out of media reports, cinema, pop music, Instagram. These platforms have instead developed a giant obsession with cities.

The consequence of this neglect is that we remain oblivious to the crisis of the global peasantry, even though its symptoms are all around us, from chronic rural underinvestment and farmer suicides to land flight.

* And yet in your book, you say “the peasants will survive this crisis too”. Given the odds, what will that survival look like?

One way or another, there will always be peasants. If our complex systems start to collapse, many people will in fact have to return to it.

Peasants are also among the most ancient political groups. They have survived wars, empires, industrialisation, enormous political upheavals and repeated predictions of their disappearance. That’s because theirs is a history of constant, if forced and often despair-driven, reinvention.

I have seen first-hand the extraordinary effort farmers make to preserve their land and livelihood. They experiment with new types of crops and soil and water management; combine farming with other occupations; find new opportunities within the industrialisation of the countryside. They are creating hybrid worlds between agriculture and industry, between village and town.

I hope I am right to say they will survive this crisis too, because the struggle of peasants to hold on to their vital place and role is, in many ways, a struggle for our species.

* Is there a country today that has done a decent job of respecting the peasant?

Generally speaking, peasants are more organised in Latin America, and have better political representation there.

Around the world, though, the people who grow our food, and so much else, have been essential to the normal functioning of the global capitalist system. But they have been incorporated into that system on highly unequal terms, and are ruthlessly excluded from the revenues their work generates.

So ultimately, the peasant condition is remarkably homogeneous around the world. Debt, for instance, is endemic to small farming, wherever you go.

* Given that this is the case, why aren’t there more farmers organising, agitating?

There are far more than we realise. Often, unless the protests have an impact on cities, they don’t make headlines. The triggers are often the same too: land rights, costs of fuel and fertiliser, market prices, mining and environmental degradation.

The difficulty is that farmers are fighting from a position of enormous structural weakness. They are geographically dispersed, often have limited resources, and cannot abandon their fields for long periods without losing everything. Meanwhile, political institutions, capital, markets and media are overwhelmingly concentrated in cities.

* We have conglomerates in steel and packaged foods, even dairy. Why hasn’t there been a spate of movements to consolidate, claim space, turn food production into more of a corporatised effort?

India has maybe the world’s most successful such outcome: Amul. It’s an amazing cooperative that gives farmers ownership not only of milk processing but also of marketing and distribution. But Amul was created in very specific circumstances. It’s a product of India’s freedom struggle, when farmers occupied an important place in the political imagination.

The basic answer to why there aren’t more like it is this: usually, there are powerful interests making sure that peasants cannot capture the profitable sections of the supply chains. Chocolate is an excellent example. Ghana and the Ivory Coast have dominated cocoa production for decades, but the farmers have almost entirely failed to expand even into processing. Forget about production, marketing or retail. Most of that is controlled by European and American corporations. Peasants can’t compete with such well-funded, well-organised interests.

* How worried should we be about this tension between us in the cities, and the people and land where our food (and so much else) comes from? How worried are you?

Some of the things I saw during my research trips for this book make me very worried. Climate change is extreme and real. Agriculture faces increasingly erratic rainfall, longer dry spells and depleted groundwater. If these trends continue, large areas of farmland could become increasingly difficult to cultivate, with consequences for the farmers, and for all of us, the most obvious being food shortages.

* What gives you most hope, amid all this?

The farmers. Small farmers already possess many of the values — frugality, efficiency, respect for natural systems — that, if universalised, would place us in a much stronger situation.

The solutions to many of our problems will not come from the people who created them. They will come from a totally different kind of consciousness. That’s part of the reason I wrote this book. Farmers are not only unfairly neglected. They are also the remedy for a system grown unnatural and destructive.