The global peasantry today is at an important crossroads. With much of the world well into a fourth decade of economic liberalisation, there are few localities left which are outside of the reach of globalised capitalist commodity or labour markets. Unprecedented improvements in transport and communication over recent decades have intensified this process of integration into the world economy. While capitalist industrialisation across the periphery is highly uneven, urban areas are experiencing a more dynamic trajectory of growth, with a surging service sector and the rise of a consumerist middle class. However, for the countryside, the expansion of capitalism has left in its wake a wave of monetisation, enclosure of land, rising costs of living and intensified inequalities (see Levien et al., 2018). These are paralleled by a cultural transformation, which includes a rising ambivalence towards the peasant ‘way of life’ (White, 2012). This is evident particularly amongst young people, who are increasingly in touch with the aspirations of globalised youth via the vastly improved telecommunications networks of recent decades and the social media revolution.

These economic and cultural transformations for the farming population converge with the rising ecological stresses associated with climate change. With spiralling costs of farm inputs and a depleted natural resource base, some of the gains of the ‘Green Revolution’ years are being reversed (Vaidyanathan, 2006). Agrarian stress, alongside cultural change amongst youth, has consolidated cyclical labour in the capitalist sector as a major feature of rural life (Shah and Lerche, 2020; Singh, 2007; Sugden, 2019; Zhan and Scully, 2018) – either via long-distance migration or ‘commuting’ to local towns.