A Critic Unfettered: The Legacy of Ernest Feder

Abstract

Ernest Ludwig Feder was among the most prolific, creative and boldest of rural economists in the decades after the Second World War. Yet much of the work for which he would become most well known -on land reform, dependency and peasant agriculture, particularly in Latin America -was a comparatively late development, starting when he was almost fifty, more than two-thirds of the way through a full and varied life that never conformed to conventional academic criteria and that came to a premature end when he was just seventy-one. In the years since, the relevance of his work has grown, although the number of younger scholars who actually read his books and papers has declined.

Food Sovereignty, Agroecology And Biocultural Diversity

“…Part of the answer, as Ernest Feder and others realized long ago (cf. Ross, 2011), has always been to offer smallholders more equitable access to land. But, as the case of Kenya amply demonstrates, what the Third World got was something very different: an agricultural regime that not only reduced the overall efficiency of food production, but wasted potential local resources, increasing dependence on costly imported inputs that have injured both the environment and human health (Viswanathan, 1991;Wheat, 1996) and further marginalized the peasant sector.…”

Geographies of internationalism: Radical development and critical geopolitics from the Northeast of Brazil

“…rural development became a geopolitical imperative: to stave off a "Red Revolution" it was necessary to bring about a lasting "Green Revolution"' (Nally and Taylor, 2015, p. 57). This international paternalism 'from the North' was one of the targets of De Castro, De Andrade and Santos, who first countered neo-colonialism (Mançano Fernandes and Porto-Gonçalves, 2007;Ross, 2011). Works by Mona Domosh have likewise shown how 'some of the practices that characterize American international development have their roots in the early 20th century, particularly in the American South' (Domosh, 2015, p. 17).…”