Resilience and peasant economy: A case study in the Colombian Andes
Abstract
Resilience thinking has emerged as an important tool to understand and analyse social ecological systems, however there are still few analyses of the economic dimension of resilience of small-scale peasant production. To enhance the understating of resilience of these systems, social and agronomic factors such as ecosystem services, production intensification, economic feasibility or the role of institutions should be added. The aim of this research was to perform a complete analysis of the economy of peasant farms as part of resilience, comparing ecological and conventional farms. A mix method approach was employed, including twenty semi-structured interviews and four questionnaires to assess the economic composition and viability of the farms as well as contextual factors. The ecological (agroforestry-based) farms showed lower economic performance than conventional farms. However, biodiversity and diversity of income-generation strategies favour flexibility and self-consumption in the ecological farms. We identified three strategies that could boost resilience at farm level: substitution of external inputs, particularly animal feed; water management; and collective actions. In contrast, factors like land size, capital scarcity and fluctuations of the coffee market limit resilience.
Keywords: Resilience, Peasants, Ecological agriculture, Economic viability, Social-ecological systems, Colombia.
Additional Files
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain their copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of their work, which will be simultaneously subject to the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which allows third parties to share the work provided that the author and the journal's first publication are acknowledged.
b. Authors may enter into other non-exclusive licensing agreements for the distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., depositing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this journal is acknowledged.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to disseminate their work via the Internet (e.g. in institutional digital archives or on their website), which may lead to interesting exchanges and increase citations of the published work. (See The effect of open access).
