And then there’s cocoa, from the Ivory Coast and from Ghana. It’s Ghana in particular that shocks, for every bean grown by the peasant must be sold to Cocobod, the government run cocoa control organisation which regulates the low prices. — AA Image

What a great topic, and what a necessary one! Maryam Aslany brings the reader face-to-face with a single fact: that peasants, including small farmers and landless labourers, have provided the foundation for cultures and civilisations. Over most of the populated world, except perhaps for those living in extreme conditions, peasants have enabled granaries, which, in turn, enabled civilisations.

Having done that, she asks two questions in one: What does civilisation owe to the peasant, and what does it give the peasant? Peasants, as Aslany defines them, still constitute a quarter of the population of the world. Industrialisation hasn’t eliminated the need for peasants but has instead pushed them out of the consciousness of society.

The beginning of her work occurred during the 18 months of fieldwork in two villages in Maharashtra that she did as part of her PhD in economic sociology. This book studies, besides sugarcane farming and its associated processes in Maharashtra, three crops: rice in Cambodia/Kampuchea, coca in Peru, and cocoa in Ghana. The patterns are similar: In practically every case, the producer gets the smallest percentage profit. More to the point: In every case, the peasant, as the link between civilisation and Mother Earth, is being pushed to the limit of their endurance. Four key issues arise in this framework: ownership, labour, control and vulnerability. Peasants provide all the labour, sometimes have nominal ownership, suffer all the vulnerability, and have no control...

Sugarcane in India, to start with. The Dutch started on it in their Southeast Asian colonies. Competitor Britain converted its Caribbean possessions into sugar plantations. Whole peasant populations were optimised for this one prized crop that contributed to British world dominance. After World War 2 came decolonisation, and the Indian State continued to keep control over sugar using the very methods that the British had used in their colonies. The cultivators got nothing, but a few sugar barons — the likes of Sharad Pawar, once himself a peasant, for example — prospered.

In Kampuchea, the Mekong gains 15 metres in depth, and floods the lake, the area of which increases from 2,500 to 15,000 square kilometres, during the rains. This annual flooding provides the basis for some 2,000 varieties of rice grown, grown in three harvests every single year: a crop takes barely three months to mature, and planting is done only days after harvesting. This the heartland of rice, where, again, the peasant scratches a subsistence living.

Coca is special, and even more harrowing than the other three because it’s illegal, and even more so because growing coca leaves the land unfit for anything else for long periods.

And then there’s cocoa, from the Ivory Coast and from Ghana. It’s Ghana in particular that shocks, for every bean grown by the peasant must be sold to Cocobod, the government run cocoa control organisation which regulates the low prices.

Aslany’s arguments on exploitation are compelling. The only niggle: Aslany’s view of governance systems is born of relatively wealthy environments. Do poorer countries have the same rule of law? Which is why they are the seat of armed revolutions.


Peasants: Makers of the Modern World

By Maryam Aslani

Bloomsbury

pp. 352; Rs 799

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