Tadasu Tsuruta – författare

Rethinking African Agriculture argues that rural communities in Africa are still shaped by non-agrarian factors both in livelihood strategy and social formation.

This volume renews and deepens the research on the African peasantry by offering a fresh perspective drawn from the hitherto largely unknown Japanese research on the subject. The ethnographic fieldwork focuses not only on the micro environment of the producers but also the broader historical context in which they live and work. The contributors argue that, in comparison with other regions of the world, Africa has never passed through an agrarian revolution that would effectively change the mode of production from within. Modernization efforts from the outside have fallen far short of the ambition to transform agriculture in Africa. Rural Africa is still largely a natural society characterized by "non-agrarian" features as evident in people’s livelihood, social organization, and farming systems.

This book will be of interest to social scientists and anthropologists focusing on African development, agriculture and agrarian societies,

Rethinking African Agriculture argues that rural communities in Africa are still shaped by non-agrarian factors both in livelihood strategy and social formation.

This volume renews and deepens the research on the African peasantry by offering a fresh perspective drawn from the hitherto largely unknown Japanese research on the subject. The ethnographic fieldwork focuses not only on the micro environment of the producers but also the broader historical context in which they live and work. The contributors argue that, in comparison with other regions of the world, Africa has never passed through an agrarian revolution that would effectively change the mode of production from within. Modernization efforts from the outside have fallen far short of the ambition to transform agriculture in Africa. Rural Africa is still largely a natural society characterized by "non-agrarian" features as evident in people’s livelihood, social organization, and farming systems.

This book will be of interest to social scientists and anthropologists focusing on African development, agriculture and agrarian societies,

In addition to constituting an evolving area of inquiry within the social sciences, agricultural certification, and particularly its Fair Trade and organic components, has emerged as a significant tool for promoting rural development in the global South. This book is unique for two reasons. First, in contrast to existing studies that have tended to examine Fair Trade and organic certification as independent systems, the studies presented in this book reveal their joint application within actual production settings, demonstrating the greater complexity entailed in these double certification systems through the generation of contradictions and tensions compared with single certification systems. Second, the authors, who are both Asian, reveal the realities of applying Fair Trade and organic certification systems within Asian agriculture. In doing so, they challenge the fact that most Fair Trade studies have been undertaken by Western scholars who have tended to focus on Latin American and African producers. Drawing on a wealth of grounded case studies conducted in India, Thailand, and the Philippines, this pioneering study on double certification makes a significant contribution to studies on Fair Trade and organic agriculture beyond Asia.