Peasants hold the key to a more sustainable future: sociologist Maryam Aslany

Both the title and subtitle of your book are provocative. In what sense do you regard peasants as the makers of the modern world, given that modernity is itself defined in opposition to the world of the peasants?

I chose this title partly to provoke readers because in the West especially, you’re not supposed to say peasants anymore. It’s a term of abuse, used when you want to call somebody backward, stupid, dim-witted. There is a long history to this. One of the founding stories of modernity is the expulsion of the peasantry — that in order to become modern, you had to get rid of the peasantry, and that with modernity, peasantry would disappear. Peasantry and progress were placed in opposition to one another.

In the Western political tradition, both the Left and the Right believed that small agriculture will be taken over by big capital and machinery. Thinkers like Adam Smith believed that small farms will give way to big land-holders, who will manage the land better. I chose this subtitle because I wanted to provoke readers who think that the peasant and modernity are opposites. For them it carries a paradox: how could a character who, in their imagination, is the opposite of modernity, be actually the maker of the modern world? I wanted to bring them face to face with their own paradox.

So each chapter in Part 2 of my book starts with the history of a crop. The chapters are designed to show how these crops have been important in making empires and modern nation states, and how the people who cultivated these crops shaped political thinking, and were instrumental in the making of revolutions. We tend to overlook all of this because we people in the city have been told that modernity means the end of peasantry.

You argue in the book that today’s global capitalism is, to a large extent, subsidised by the peasantry. In that sense, too, you could say peasants are the makers of modernity, right?

Absolutely. Supply chains start in villages. They are central to our food system. Peasants also produce a lot of raw material for industry. So they are completely incorporated into global capitalism but on very unequal terms. Sugar and chocolate are two commodities that actually made the modern world. We know the names of brands and companies, but we don’t know anything about the peasants at the centre of this. So yes, they are central to the food and economic systems but there is also another aspect that is less talked about. Due to their proximity to nature, farmers have an understanding of water, soil, and biodiversity that we in the urban areas lack, as we are removed from nature. Their knowledge, therefore, is essential for survival in the age of ecological catastrophe.

Did the industrial revolution make the destruction of the peasantry inevitable? Because both capitalist industrialisation and communist industrialisation were predicated on the destruction of the peasantry.

It is very much the template in the Western parts of the world. But the argument of my book is that it hasn’t happened elsewhere. It hasn’t happened in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. India today has the biggest peasant population in the world. So this destruction hasn’t happened – this is a central message of the book.

It is commonly believed that peasants are obsolete today for two reasons: one, small landholdings are unsustainable compared to large-scale farming; and two, urbanisation is inevitable for any country to grow and modernise. But you say both these ideas are wrong.

Two hundred and fifty years years after the Industrial Revolution, we still have 43% of the world population living in the countryside. Half of them operate on small parcels of land. So obviously, industrialisation hasn’t led to the end of the peasantry. But yes, industrial farmers have been important to feed the enormous global population. We have industrial wheat farms in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Australia that are huge. But such big farms have consequences. The first is monocropping. It kills biodiversity, the soil becomes quickly exhausted. So you need enormous quantities of fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemical inputs to keep them running, which is bad for our health.

In contrast, peasants are better managers of land. If something goes wrong with the land, big industrial farming can relocate elsewhere because they have the capital and the means, but peasant farmers do not have that option. Their existence is tied to that plot. So they truly take care of it. They take care of the fertility of the soil. They have to constantly reinvent ways to preserve water and biodiversity. They do more of crop rotation. Monocropping just never happens in small farming. So this is important to bear in mind.

As for urbanisation, yes, we thought cities are going to absorb the bulk of humanity. But where are the 3-4 billion people who still live in the countryside going to go? Can you imagine mega cities with 50 million people? I don’t think they will be sustainable. Also, not many people want to leave their land and an environment they know well and be at the mercy of an insecure informal economy in the city. It has always been a myth of modernity that industrialisation and urbanisation will finish the peasantry, but obviously it hasn’t happened.

Any particular reason why you picked these four crops — sugarcane, rice, coca and chocolate — to study?

All these are crops cultivated by small farmers, and the book is about small farmers. That’s why I didn’t want to study wheat, for example. Second, I wanted to make sure that my crops are geographically spread out. So these four cover all the three major continents that host the biggest number of peasants. I chose coca because I wanted one illegal crop, so that I could compare and contrast the conditions of a peasantry that cultivates an illicit crop with those who produce a more conventional crop.

Do peasants have a place in the world economy of the future?

In the past, a great many societies were completely agrarian in outlook. They understood that wealth mainly came from the land. But today, if we continue to think like the way we do now — as if we have no ongoing relationship with the land, and that farmers who work on the land are some sort of a relic from the past — then we will stay ignorant of the profound crisis in the countryside. And this is not their crisis, but our crisis. Many of its symptoms are all around us.

We constantly talk about inflation, food insecurity, mass migration, disruptions in the supply chain, climate change. Clearly, the solution to this crisis is not going to come from the people who have created it — it won’t come from corporations or agribusinesses. The solution is in the countryside. But farmers do not have the resources. Although they are numerically huge, they are spread across different continents. They are also politically very weak since the centres of policy making, the media, the corporations, the institutions of law are all located in urban areas.  Farmers have been continuously removed from the centres of policy making. And in a way, this is a class war between the urban and the rural factions of humanity, a very unequal war. If this continues, the crisis will continue. And it’s going to affect all of us because where is our food going to come from? How is our supply chain going to work?

But having said all this, I would still describe the peasant as humanity’s last buffer against complete climate catastrophe, because they are better managers of the soil. They have enormous knowledge that has come to them through their ancestors passed on across generations. If we don’t use this knowledge, if we continue being ignorant to it, it’s going to come back and haunt us.