The emerging role of the peasant economy at the end of the industrial age: insights from Albania

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014), by 2050 the world society will need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70 percent compared to 2010, and reach the end goal of net zero emissions before 2100. At the same time, the global food system is now responsible for up to one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (Gilbert, 2012). This means that, given the present conditions in terms of climate, demography and technology, the world society should be capable of progressing, not regressing, toward a sustainable rural economy before 2050, relying on a per capita availability of arable land, not matching the current world population distribution, which is around 0.20 hectares at present. On this premise, the present article claims that peasant agriculture oriented to family livelihood will be a key sector in the next wave of economic development. Therefore, in order to support this statement, the Albanian agriculture case study will be considered. This is because the case of Albania is a distinctive case in Europe of peasant agriculture, it being structurally oriented to family auto-consumption and local food markets. Referring to a rural economy based on peasant agriculture as a modern one seems to be a paradox. Nevertheless, climate change is pushing the ontological shift towards an agro-ecological paradigm in which an ecologically driven conception of value addressing societal reproduction rather than capital accumulation is emerging ( McMichael, 2012). Thus, the present article aims to describe the role of peasant agriculture in economic development under the constraint of climate change, applying this topic to the empirical case of Albania.