Peasant farming and food securityin Brazil: an analysis throughreciprocity theory

Abstract

To associate the notion of food security to the peasantry implies thinkingalso in produce beyond peasant families; it means to redistribute or to market the production to local population. So,the peasantry "produces to live and to feed." But how to articulate a peasant production based on reciprocity with nature and solidarity among peers with a national and international market dominated and regulated by market exchange? The paper proposes, in the first part,answer this question from the fundamentals of economic anthropology, but also mobilizing more recent elements of reciprocity theory. After Mauss, Polanyi played a key role with the proposal of the concept of substantive economy and the identification of reciprocity as a way of the economy regulation alongside the exchange and redistribution. Anthropological analysis of reciprocity was completed in the years 1990/2000 by Temple extending Mauss and Levi-Strauss with the analysis of the elementary structures of reciprocity. Today, this structural analysis allows usto search in empirical field-work, the nature of the material values but also that of the affective and ethical values produced by reciprocityrelationship, of which some examples in the Brazilian rural areaare presented in thesecond part. In the third part, I wonder why an interest in the reciprocitypractices and relations in the XXI century and examine how such reciprocityrelationships are present in mixed situations, next to the relationship of commodity exchange.