Includes bibliographical references

Acknowledgments -- Introductory -- Introduction / Arif Dirlik and Roxann Prazniak -- The "end of the peasant" scenario : dream and nightmare / Alexander Woodside -- The return of the peasant : possible? desirable? / Immanuel Wallerstein -- The People's Republic of China -- History, capitalism, and the making of the postsocialist Chinese peasant / Alexander Day -- China experience, comparative advantage, and the rural reconstruction experiment / Wen Tiejun, Dong Xiaodan, Liu Xiangbo and Lau Kin Chi -- The political economy of spatial inequality in China / Wang Shaoguang -- Reserve the land for family farming : on the use of farmland and the future of the peasantry in China / Dong Zhenghua -- Awaiting urbanization : urban village redevelopment in coastal urban China / Leslie Shieh -- Public regulation of private relations : changing conditions of property regulation in China / Pitman B. Potter -- Tricontinental perspectives -- Primitive accumulation and the peasantry in the present era of neo-liberalism with reference to the Indian experience / Utsa Patnaik -- Peasants in Indonesia and the politics of (peri)-urbanization / Abidin Kusno -- Land occupations and land reform in Zimbabwe : toward the national democratic revolution / Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros -- Polycultures of the mind : the "end" of the peasant and the birth of agroecology / Alejandro Rojas -- Community capacity and challenges of Ecuoadorian agrarian farmer organizations for generating alternatives to pesticide use : a case study / Fabio Cabarcas -- Epilogue -- Drawing lessons from the 2008 food crisis / Jomo Kwame Sundaram.