Terry Leahy (2015 – first written 2011)
Below is the opening paragraphs for “What is a farmer?” by Terry Leahy.
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A problem of terminology often comes up when we are discussing rural development in Africa. I find it arising whenever I try to make a distinction between emerging farmers and the rural poor. My view is that programs for the rural poor have to be very different from programs for emerging farmers. This almost always upsets people and they usually throw their hands in the air and go, well who is a farmer, that is a very difficult question here.
The way I see it as a sociologist, this is fundamentally a question about social class and the description of the way social class works here. It becomes a question of agricultural economics or of rural development strategy because projects that make economic sense for one class are stupid for another class. People in different classes are in really different economic situations and it is not just an economic matter. Class is also a matter of culture and of what sociologists call “cultural capital”, meaning that it is a set of cultural dispositions that, like monetary capital, enable you to get things done. This cultural capital is often referred to by economists as “human capacity”; recognized and economically useful skills coming out of some kind of education, formal or informal.
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