Peasants and Flexible Accumulation in the Third World-Producing under Contract

the Third World Producing under Contract Michael Watts Contract production is deeply rooted in the soil of advanced capitalist agriculture but also represents an expanding and much touted mode of agro-industrial integration in the third world. In spite of the enduring nature of the classical agrarian exports such as sugar, tea, rubber and so on, the genesis of new agricultural enclaves distinguished bv technological packaging, non-equity forms of control overproduction and the relative homogenisation of agro- technologies suggests a new social basis for the 'old' international division of labour and an aggressive industrialisation of peasant agriculture. This essay argues that the rural sector in the periphery is less a terrain of independent peasant production and commodity circulation through trade