Fortress Farming

<p><b><i>Fortress Farming</i></b><b> identifies in Indonesia's rural coffee-growing regions an alternative livelihood strategy that is reshaping relationships with land and informing Indonesia's agrarian transition.</b> Jeff Neilson presents "fortress farming" households as ones that are reluctant to embrace productivity-maximizing agriculture, even as they interact with commodity markets and powerful downstream companies. Rather, these households tenaciously maintain access to land as a last defense against insecurity in a precarious global economy, all the while actively tapping into off-farm income sources. Fortress farming confounds assumptions that the development process entails an inevitable transition away from the land and into city-based manufacturing. </p> <p>Shifting away from production to take a fuller view of rural Indonesian coffee-growing communities,<i> Fortress Farming</i> explores how and why defensive farming strategies have emerged, and what these tendencies mean for our understanding of agrarian transition in late-industrializing countries in the early twenty-first century. Neilson posits that late-industrializing countries may never undergo a full agrarian transition: In the alternative livelihood practice of fortress farming, we see a way that local social institutions can resist, or at least modify, the productive forces of capitalist agriculture.</p>