Persistence as a family matter. Family relationships, succession and gender in agriculture and livestock farms in Buenos Aires SouthWest area (1987-2007)Dossier: The place of the family in Argentina's agricultural production (1960-2008)

Abstract

The persistence of family farms in Agentina's Pampas in the last twenty years has been explained taking into account economic and productive matters. This kind of emphasis is coherent with the increasing importance of scale and capitalization required to stay in business that characterizes the current stage of agrarian capitalism. However, the very nature of this type of production units, the role family plays inside them, makes it necessary to look into subjective and cultural aspects also, in order to find more accurate and complex ways to analyse the paths to persistence. In this paper, using the data provided by interviews with ten agrifamilies of SouthWest Buenos Aires province's states Puán and Saavedra, we analyse the role relations between parents and children, gender and personal aspirations and expectations play in fundamental processes such as succession and in the construction and support of familial and productive strategies that have given this families the chance of staying active and producing in the last two decades.