Agrarian system
Encyclopedia
An agrarian system is a concept used to describe the dynamic set of economic and technological factors that affect agricultural
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

 practices. It is premised on the idea that different systems have developed depending on the natural and social conditions specific to a particular region. Political factors also have a bearing on an agrarian system due to issues such as land ownership, labour organization, and forms of cultivation.

As food security
Food security
Food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. A household is considered food-secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past...

 has become more important, mostly due to the explosive population growth
Population growth
Population growth is the change in a population over time, and can be quantified as the change in the number of individuals of any species in a population using "per unit time" for measurement....

 during the 20th century, the efficiency of agrarian systems has come under greater review
Agrarian reform
Agrarian reform can refer either, narrowly, to government-initiated or government-backed redistribution of agricultural land or, broadly, to an overall redirection of the agrarian system of the country, which often includes land reform measures. Agrarian reform can include credit measures,...

.

Types

The basis for a prevailing agrarian system may be derived from one of a number of major types, including agrarian
Agrarianism
Agrarianism has two common meanings. The first meaning refers to a social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values...

 social structure, for example, tribal
Tribe
A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...

 or ethnic divisions, feudal classes or family based systems. Farming methods such as migratory herding
Herding
Herding is the act of bringing individual animals together into a group , maintaining the group and moving the group from place to place—or any combination of those. While the layperson uses the term "herding", most individuals involved in the process term it mustering, "working stock" or...

 of livestock
Livestock
Livestock refers to one or more domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce commodities such as food, fiber and labor. The term "livestock" as used in this article does not include poultry or farmed fish; however the inclusion of these, especially poultry, within the meaning...

 are a common framework for which an agrarian system may evolve. Other important kinds of system are based on the dominant polictal ideology such as communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 or agrarian socialism
Agrarian socialism
Agrarian socialism is a socioeconomic political system which combines an agrarian way of life with socialist economic policies.When compared to standard socialist systems which are generally urban/industrial , internationally oriented, and more progressive/liberal in terms of social orientation,...

.

Regional examples

The Ottoman
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 agrarian system was based around the tapu
Tapu (Ottoman history)
In the Ottoman Empire, tapu was a permanent lease of state-owned arable land to a peasant family. The family head acquired the usufruct of the land and was able to transmit this right to his male descendants upon his death...

, which involved a permanent lease of state-owned arable land
Arable land
In geography and agriculture, arable land is land that can be used for growing crops. It includes all land under temporary crops , temporary meadows for mowing or pasture, land under market and kitchen gardens and land temporarily fallow...

 to a peasant
Peasant
A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

 family. In Haiti there was a social system
Social class in Haiti
-History:As a result of the extinction of the indigenous population by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the population of pre-independence Saint-Domingue was entirely the product of the French colonists' slaveholding policies and practices...

 based on collective labor teams, called kounbit, where farms were run by nuclear families and exchanges. This was replaced by smaller groups, called eskouad, who operated on a reciprocal basis or conducted collective labor to other peasants for a price.

See also

  • List of basic agriculture topics
  • Right to food
    Right to food
    The right to food, and its variations, is a human right derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights...

  • Social cycle theory
    Social cycle theory
    Social cycle theories are among the earliest social theories in sociology. Unlike the theory of social evolutionism, which views the evolution of society and human history as progressing in some new, unique direction, sociological cycle theory argues that events and stages of society and history...

  • Sustainable agriculture
    Sustainable agriculture
    Sustainable agriculture is the practice of farming using principles of ecology, the study of relationships between organisms and their environment...

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