Introduction

The year 2014 was declared International Year of Family Farming by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) in recognition of its contribution to the food supply, maintenance of rural spaces and cultures, management of biodiversity and struggle to overcome poverty (^{ONU, 2012}). This fact reflects a process of recognition of the importance of the sector by the public sphere, which was paired with the revitalization of old theoretical debates regarding its productive capacity in the context of current crises (ecologic, dietary an energetic) that capitalism is undergoing at the global level.

It should be clarified that the worry about whether family farming can be efficient or not in its production dates back to the end of the 19^th century, primarily among Marxist theorists like Karl Kautsky and Vladimir Lenin. It is precisely in that time when the two important theoretical paths arose, which are part of the aim of this study: the agrarian issue (preoccupied with the tension between peasants and capitalism) and the theory of the redistributive reform of lands (as a response to the historical problem of the inefficiency of large estates, latifundio,¹ and the demands for social justice). Both currents approached questions such as: Can small-scale peasant production compete against the large capitalist production or will it disappear? Is it best to redistribute the land between a larger number of small-scale producers or to promote the concentration of land, seeking the advantages derived from scale? Essentially, it is within the framework of these two large questions that the concept of productive efficiency has been constantly used, looking for solid arguments for economic policy.

This debate is reflected in Latin America not only in the academic field, but also in the governmental spheres, to the extent that some countries like Brazil and Argentina have created a new institutional environment that tends to promote policies for the productive development of the sector and in parallel gives space to the demands from social agrarian movements that had historically been disregarded (such as the Movimiento de los Trabajadores sin Tierra in Brazil or the Movimiento Nacional Campesino Indígena in Argentina).

It should be clarified that the concept of family farming is a relatively new notion for agrarian studies, since it was coined in the middle of the 20^th century in search for a model of alternative rural development that ensures, among other aspects, the permanence of the population in the rural space and the respect for the environment (^{Salcedo, De la O and Guzmán, 2014})². In this study, the concept of family farming will be used as a broad concept that includes a diversity of actors (peasant, small farmer, tenant farmer, landless, rural workers and native peoples) and a plurality of activities (productive, extractive and services).

As can be seen, it covers a heterogeneous sector that requires taking distance from the dualist assumptions (traditional vs. modern, competitive vs. non-competitive). These simplifications overlook the varied situation in which family units produce and reproduce: “if a dualist vision is adopted, the policy proposals will also be dualistic: for some, there will be compensatory policies and for others, productive” (^{Soverna, Tsakoumagkos and Paz, 2008:11}).

Taking this into account, this article has the purpose of reconstructing the debates within agrarian studies around the productive efficiency of family farming, in order to later attempt to carry out considerations about how this has influenced the design of public policies, particularly for Latin America. The working hypothesis is that the discussion addressed is not new, that the authors who have dealt with the issue have made a polysemic use of the concepts involved, that the empirical evidence used to build the different arguments is diffuse, and that all these elements have acted in a joint way for the debate to continue to be open today.

In terms of the methodology, it is about analyzing and confronting different texts that have approached, directly or indirectly, the issue of efficiency in family farming. The selection criterion of those documents attempts to account for the continuity of the discussion from the pioneer authors that set out the theme (19^th century) until reaching the more current studies. Likewise, authors that are representative of different traditions (political, epistemological and theoretical) were chosen, both from neoclassic economy and from Marxism. Finally, another criterion used is referencing authors that secured the debate in the Latin American context.

Approaching these characteristics constitutes important material to analyze the achievements, mistakes and challenges of the public policies that promote alternatives to the models of rural development in the region.

Contributions and Limitations of the Classical Economic Theory to understand the Concept of Efficiency

The attempts to conceptualize efficiency can be tracked back to the famous study about the pin factory by Adam Smith in his book “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (¹⁷⁷⁶) or, even, some previous studies³. However, the notion that was used then was not quite differentiated from the concept of productivity, which is generally defined as the relationship between the amount of products obtained and the amount of inputs used to produce them (^{Doraio and Silmar, 2007: 14})⁴.

Although efficiency and productivity are two concepts that cooperate with one another, the measures of efficiency are considered more precise and complete than those of productivity, in the sense that they involve a comparison against an efficient frontier (^{Doraio and Simar, 2007: 15}) or, in other words, a standard of reference against which to compare the units studied.

The idea behind the studies of efficiency is to compare the real performance of a productive unit in relation to an optimal, although in general in practice there is no exhaustive knowledge about the scope in which the units studied develop, or an exact understanding of the technology or restrictions that can affect that production in particular (^{Álvarez Pinilla, 2001}).

Therefore, the most appropriate would be to compare what the productive unit does with regards to other similar units. That was precisely the proposal by ^{Farrell (1957)}, whose great contribution was to determine empirically a standard of reference -the frontier- against which to compare the units and determine if they are efficient or not. The measures of efficiency calculated in this way define what is known as relative efficiency, that is, they measure the efficiency comparing their performance with that of the “best” farms observed, which are the ones defining the efficient frontier.

It should be noted that although economists had used the concept of efficiency before, the specific studies on the theme are a relatively novel research field in economic sciences, to the degree that the studies considered pioneers in this field are those by ^{Koopmans (1951)} and ^{Debreu (1951)}, which were applied empirically by ^{Farrell (1957)}.

These works are considered pioneers since from their contributions it was recently possible to begin treating efficiency as a relative concept (which is measured in function to the real behavior of other similar units) and different from productivity.

Different types of efficiency⁵ and different methods to measure it were also suggested. Presently a whole branch of applied research can be described, on the theme in the field of economy and econometrics⁶.

However, most of the models and measurements proposed by the economic theory have shown their limitations to understand production forms that do not necessarily have a capitalist logic of functioning, as for example family farming. The latter presents a dynamic of its own that requires taking into account certain dimensions that are not commercial or quantifiable in terms of money to understand how they work.

Most of the studies about family farming maintain that one of the particularities of its production (which distinguishes it from capitalist production systems) is the configuration of a family economic unit where the work of its own members tends to be unpaid and where the limits between the production unit and the domestic unit are vague (^{Paz and Rodríguez Sperat, 2011}).

At the same time, it is farms that have a particularly commercial character (^{Schejtman, 1980}). Family farmers use the resources that nature offers them as a powerful input-product corrective and can also obtain a good part of their competitive advantage from the use they make of non-commercial social relationships (^{Shanin, 1973}; ^{Smith, 1986}, ^{Van Der Ploeg, 2006}), among other characteristics.

These elements translate into a difficulty at the time of analyzing their production style from the traditional economic categories, since within this research process there will always be aspects that can hardly be assessed appropriately from the economic point of view (^{Rodríguez Sperat, 2012}; ^{Van der Ploeg, 2013a}).

In fact, as years go by different conceptual and methodological approaches have emerged that attempt to make visible certain aspects that classical economic theory cannot observe, measure or evaluate from the ontological and epistemological assumptions of capitalism, which will be mentioned later in the development of this study.

Efficiency in theorists of agrarian issues and the Chayanov school

In his works, Karl Marx granted a systematic character both to the analysis of the agrarian structure and to the elucidation of its relationships with the rest of society (^{Murmis and Giarraca, 1999}). However, it is complex to find methodological tools in Marxist theory that allow inquiring about the methods used to obtain empirical evidence on the efficiency of agrarian production (^{Kervyn, 1987}).

In this line, in the texts by Marx, it can be observed that the words productive superiority or efficiency are used repeatedly, but always in the sense that it is assumed that capitalist exploitations are superior to peasant exploitations due to the ability of the first to incorporate large areas of production, because of the economic resources they have, and due to the possibility of using better cultivation techniques. Thus, in his works it is complex to confirm empirically the efficiency or superiority assigned to capitalist exploitations.

It was only in the decade of the 1890s that the paradigm in the agrarian issue emerged in Marxism as a differentiated field of research (^{Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009}), since the three seminal texts that originated it were written in that decade: The peasant question in France and Germany, written in 1894 by Friedrich Engels; The agrarian question, by ^{Kaustky (1899)}; and the work by Vladimir Lenin, The development of capitalism in Russia (¹⁸⁹⁹).

In Engels’ work it is argued that: “the development of a capitalist form of production in agriculture has limited the livelihood of small-scale production, and small-scale production will plummet irreversibly” (^{1950: 382}). The reason why the author made this affirmation was that European agricultural production was being unable to compete against the cheap grains produced outside Europe, which led to a slow dissolution of peasantry, since they were being dispossessed of their lands as a result of not being able to compete against imports. From his perspective, this was not happening only in England and Prussia (east of the Elba river), because these places “have large extensions of land and large-scale agriculture” (^{Engels, 1950: 381}).

For Engels, it was necessary for the European peasantry to adopt a political response to this emerging agrarian crisis. For that purpose, the proletariat, which according to him had a clear comprehension of the problems in the farmland and the city, should adopt a program that reflected the political needs of the peasants and, through it, form an alliance with farmland workers. His emphasis was set clearly on the political implications of the Agrarian Question since, in some way, the globalization of the emerging food system as a result of imperialism was undermining the peasant lifestyle in Europe and the agrarian question was a problematic about the work: “his preoccupation was not set on the theme of the emergence of agrarian capital, the rural accumulation of capital, or even on capital in general” (^{Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009: 7}).

This thematic was approached further by Kautsky and Lenin, because for both authors the forces behind the transformations identified by Engels, including the political and social transformations, were the process that was easing the emergence of the capital and, consequently, the capitalist work relations under the form of capitalist industrialization.

^{Lenin’s work (1899)} was written on the eve of the Russian revolution. The central objective of his work was directed at the performance of an analysis of the pre-revolutionary economy to demonstrate that if a capitalist regime developed within the framework of the circumstances being experienced⁷ there would be two possible pathways: “either the old landholder hacienda, linked by thousands of bonds to the right of serfdom, is conserved, transforming slowly into a purely capitalist hacienda (…) or else, the revolution breaks down the old landholder hacienda, destroying all the remains of serfdom and, in the first place, large property” (^{Lenin, 1981: 8}).

Thus, Lenin provides the foundations for the revolution and offers the standards for the organization of the new bases of the State. His works were constituted into a kind of doctrine of the Russian communist party that proposed the nationalization of land and, after a revolution, the socialization of agriculture.

In relation to his comments about peasant and capitalist production, Lenin states that the first will always be in inferior conditions compared to the second. This can be seen clearly in the next paragraph:

“It is entirely logical that the well-to-do peasant applies a considerably superior agricultural technique than the medium term (larger extension of land, more abundance of tools, available money, etc.); this translates into well-off peasants sowing more quickly, taking better advantage of favorable weather, seed falling in more humid land, performing cereal harvest on time, threshing wheat once transported to the farm, etc. Also, as is logical, the magnitude of the production expenses of agricultural products decreases (per unit of product) as the dimensions of the hacienda increase […] in this way, as the commercial production moves forward in agriculture […], this law must manifest with much more force, leading to the displacement of the medium and poor peasants by the peasant bourgeoisie” (^{Lenin, 1981: 66-68}).

Although Lenin exposes statistical data from various productive regions in Russia to substantiate his arguments (based on data from censuses and studies from other researchers), he is only limited to taking as reference the variables: number of workers, heads of working, plowing and carriage animals, dividing the values by the amount of land sown. In that way, he concludes that, with the increase in dimensions of the farm, the maintenance expenditure of the workforce, the men and the livestock decreases progressively.

At first sight, it can be seen that the data used are of general importance, without differentiating by type of crop, quality of the soil, productive zone and, what is most interesting, the results from sowing are not taken into account, but rather there is only reference to the amount of hectares farmed.

For Kautsky, also, large property was superior to small property in productive terms: “Wherever the small property dominates exclusively, it will be more difficult for large property to form, despite the first being in decadence and despite the superiority of the second” (^{Kautsky, 1899: 170}).

However, Lenin and Kautsky differed in the causes of such superiority. For the first, this originated in the ease that large-scale producers had to incorporate important surfaces to the production due to the economic resources they had at their disposal and because of the possibility of adopting better cultivation techniques. Instead, Kautsky considered that this productive superiority was not given by the techniques applied to the crop, but rather that it was exclusively due to a question of availability of capital and scale, with the resulting decrease of unitary production costs (^{Banaji, 1980}).

In Soviet Russia, the debate about the productive capacity of family farming was also addressed by an intellectual sector opposing Leninism: the organization-production school. This current of thought proposed the transformation of the organization from peasant economy with the aim of increasing agricultural production. One of the main exponents of this school was Alexander ^{Chayanov (1974)}, whose main contribution consisted in suggesting that peasant economy cannot be analyzed with the concepts of classical political economy, which is why it is necessary to create a methodology for the study of the peasant style of production.

The studies by ^{Chayanov (1974)} maintained that peasant economy is a non-capitalist form of production where, after deducting the production costs, it is not possible to determine the corresponding retribution of the factors: capital, work and land. That is, there is no profit, salary or rent to consider. Chayanov established that peasant work lacks monetary value and this served as the basis to try to develop new theoretical and methodological scaffolding for the analysis of the dynamics of peasant economy (^{Bartra, 1976}).

Based on empirical studies, the author introduces important arguments about the possible limits of extension for the domestic unit of agrarian exploitation. He suggests that it is affected by the relationship between the family’s needs for consumption and its workforce (the famous arms to mouths relation) (^{Chayanov, 1974: 78}).

He also questions the validity of the concept of profit used by classic economists for the analysis of the family agricultural exploitation and shows how a peasant farm can exist under conditions that would lead a unit of capitalist exploitation to certain ruin (^{Chayanov, 1974: 90}).

It is based on these attributes that the author maintains (in contrast with his predecessors) that peasants will not disappear within the framework of the attack from capitalism, but rather that, on the contrary, they possess qualities that will allow them to exploit the resources in a better way than capitalist producers.

In sum, concerning the productive dimension, from reading the Marxist authors it can be deduced that the productive superiority assigned to large-scale production or the prediction that peasants would disappear lacked a solid empirical basis; it is rather ideological assumptions directed at maintaining a progressive conception of history where capitalism should be imposed as a necessary and stage to overcome socialism (^{Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2016}). Chayanov, instead, contributed an important amount of empirical evidence to his arguments, although serious limitations are attributed to him at the moment of explaining the articulation between peasant economy and the capitalist system (^{Bartra, 1976}). These works, however, set the bases for intense debates, whose derivations are still relevant.

The Neoclassical authors and the efficiency of small-scale production

The current of thought of neoclassic cut is supported by the consideration of the economic stimuli to production as an essential element of interpretation (^{Astori, 1984}). Neoclassical theories had a deep impact in the neoliberal governments of Latin America during the 1980s, particularly in those in the Southern Cone (^{Jara et al., 2014}), and the studies from this current have had much influence in international institutions like the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, among others.

One of the main exponents is Theodore William Schultz, who in his book Transforming traditional agriculture (¹⁹⁶⁴) stated what should have been the bases for the transformation of peasant farming.

His work was directed at explaining the causes that produce differences in productive yields between what he calls modern agriculture and traditional agriculture. Until then, classic economists had explained the differences in productivity between different countries using only the variables capital and work, attributing the residue to technological change.

This was because traditional farmers⁸ were conceived as a stronghold of the past, linked to ancestral customs and without intent of progress (^{Schultz, 1964}). Adam Smith or David Ricardo called them “indolent by nature and wasteful by choice”; Hume even belittled the peasant population, accusing them of attitudes where: “a habit of indolence prevails naturally, most of the land is without cultivating. What is cultivated does not yield what it could because of lack of dexterity and diligence of the farmers” (^{Hume, 1955}).

However, based on the works from anthropology⁹, Schultz indicates that traditional agriculture shows traits of a consolidated economic balance, in terms of savings, investment and production, achieved through generations of farmers. For Schultz, the land, the reproducible material capital and the work at the disposal of some farmers are used with great efficiency, even with more efficiency than modern agriculture.

Regarding this scheme, then, the author develops two hypotheses that are fundamental to understand the “behavior” of traditional agriculture. The first was synthesized in the well-known phrase: “efficient, but poor” (^{Schultz, 1982: 35}), and the second is linked to the weak incentive from traditional farmers to increase production, as consequence of very low yield rates on the investment. He also points out that there was a mistake made by previous studies, because they overestimated the possibilities for production of agriculture in developing countries and, consequently, they deduced that farmers are incompetent because they produce much less than what they assumed would be easily possible.

One of the questions made about Shultz’s work lies in the univocal criterion of rationality that it uses, associated to the objective of optimizing a production function, restricting it specifically to the maximization of earnings. In general, neoclassical interpretations make an abstraction of the social context where the production process is integrated and of the structural backdrop where the agrarian problem is found. In this way, the problem is treated as if it only involved a process of resource allocation. ^{Astori (1984)} manifests it clearly by saying that there cannot be only one type of rationality; and what should be a search for the type of rationality that traditional agriculture represents becomes, for Schultz, about understanding whether it is rational or not.

On the other hand, in his work, Schultz distinguishes what he calls traditional and modern agriculture, performing a comparative analysis of the variables that explain the behavior of one and the other, although without delving into the agrarian structure of each region analyzed or contemplating the possibility of finding different styles of agricultural production that coexist in the same region or the same country.

The theory of the inverse relation and the debate about the redistributive lands reform

Facing the limitations of the theoretical constructs mentioned before, new studies emerge that attempt to contribute more solid empirical bases to the problematic. The following studies emerge in this line: Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries by ^{Berry and Cline (1979}) and the transversal study by ^{Cornia (1985)}, Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production Function: An Analysis for Fifteen Developing Countries. Both studies contribute interesting arguments about the existence of an inverse relation between the size and the productivity of farms, and had a great influence at the time (^{Dasgupta, 1993}).

^{Berry and Cline (1979)} performed a study of crossed productivity, analyzing the differences there are in the farm yields according to their size, and inquiring into the factors that explain these differences. Their analysis seeks to demonstrate that as the size of the farm increases, taking into account that workforce is abundant and land and capital are relatively scarce, there will be an inverse relation between the size and the productivity of the land.

Based on this, the authors point out that small-scale farms would be established in the ideal size for the maximization of global production, the absorption of work, and a more equitable distribution of income. Therefore, they propose a redistribution of lands to the small producers and suggest that the ways to provide better conditions of access to credit and to new technologies should be studied.

In turn, the study by ^{Cornia (1985)} was directed more specifically at obtaining empirical evidence about the existence of an inverse relation. Through an analysis of 15 developing countries, this author finds that the production per acre declines systematically in most of the countries studied, as the size of the farm increases.

Thus, ^{Cornia (1985)} mentions that due to the superiority that small-scale production shows over large-scale, a redistribution of lands will have beneficial effects in terms of growth of global production and alleviation of rural poverty. According to this author, the redistribution of land would also entail the use of resources more in agreement with the allotment of factors in developing countries, since this would increase the absorption of workforce.

Despite the huge influence that these studies had at their time, especially the one by Berry and Cline, which was taken by many as the definitive proof of the existence of an inverse relation between farm size and productivity (^{Ellis, 1988}), the conceptual and methodological approaches they used were rather questioned later. The study by ^{Dyer (2004)} sums up most of these criticisms and, because of space, they will not be developed. It should only be mentioned that the questioning they received were so important that currently there are doubts about the validity of their findings.

However, these studies, which suggest the productive superiority of the small-scale farm over the large-scale, inevitably gave rise to a debate about the convenience of applying a redistributive program of lands in favor of small-scale producers.

The discussion has been current until today, with higher or lower intensity, depending on each case and historical moment. Regardless of their ideological orientation, these discussions have taken the concept of efficiency as one of the axes of analysis, fundamentally because in all the documents that feed this debate there is the firm persuasion that small-scale family farms, in productive terms, is superior to large-scale capitalist agriculture (^{Kay, 2006}).

Change of century and revitalization of the debate on the efficiency of family farming

At the beginning of the 21^st century, ^{Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz (2002)} published a study titled Poverty and redistribution of land that was quite influential in European academia and set the bases for the theme to be debated intensively again. In their work the authors suggest redistributing the land of large landowners towards small-scale poor family producers or paid rural workers and they advise that, taking into account the different experiences of redistributive land reforms that have taken place around the world, the most successful way of doing it would be through a high degree of confiscation, since if it is carried out under a system of total or ‘market-friendly’ compensation it has a lower probability of being successful.

This article gave rise to a special edition of the Journal of Agrarian Change, published in 2004, with a series of studies presented by the principal authors of the theme who questioned both its methodological and its conceptual elements, since Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz make suggestions that are “…radical (and seductive for those scholars of development who are normally hostile towards neoclassical approximations) by proposing that rural poverty and productive efficiency will ‘simply’ improve with the redistributive reforms proposed” (^{Byres, 2004: 7}).

Its implications were so notable that in some cases they even derived into considerations from different international organizations in their periodical publications.

Recently, ^{Van der Ploeg (2013a} and ^2013b) presented two texts that have the objective of rescuing and bringing up to date the works by Chayanov, particularly those that having not been translated are not very well known in the English-speaking world. In these studies the author highlights the productive potential of peasant farming over capitalist farming and seeks to prove how this type of agriculture intrinsically constantly increases its yields. For Van der Ploeg, this happens as consequence of a process of “…constant improvement of natural and social resources that intervene in the process of agricultural work and continuous increments in the technical efficiency of the production process. The latter means that the relationship between the resources used and the production obtained is increased, that is, the input-product ratio is improved” (^{Van del Ploeg, 2013b: 6}).

In these studies the author also describes the mechanisms of intensification through the work of peasant farming and mentions that this kind of agriculture uses: “more work and more capital per object of work […]. More work is used per hectare or per animal and more tools and inputs are applied (capital in the Chayonov sense)” (^{Van der Ploeg, 2013a: 95}).

At the same time, he explains another mechanism that takes place in a parallel manner, which consists in the peasant producers correcting the limitations of the growth factors present in agricultural production with their daily work, process that the author calls fine harmony, which when successful: “…increases the technical efficiency of the production process, in which the same amount of resources are used to reach an increase in the production level” (^{Van der Ploeg, 2013a: 98}).

Although this study is one of the few in the field of current rural sociology that makes the effort of explaining the concepts of efficiency and productivity it uses, from our point of view the author does not manage to completely clarify the way in which these are applied.

On the one hand, when he attempts to define technical efficiency, he uses the concept of productivity (losing sight of the relative character of the concept of efficiency, by not considering any parameter of reference for its comparison) and, on the other, in his considerations he points out that peasant farming obtains a higher amount of production per hectare or per animal, highlighting that it achieves this by using a higher amount of work and capital per object of work. That is, his analysis of efficiency only takes into account as productive resource the objects of work (in this case, land or animals) and not work or capital.

We understand that this would not be entirely appropriate since, as has been mentioned before, the concept of efficiency implies a frontier or parameter of reference against which to compare the units studied and, at the same time, takes into consideration the combination of all the inputs that intervene in the production (in this case including work and capital, understanding the latter in the broad meaning of the term). Within this framework, we consider that, instead of speaking of technical efficiency, the appropriate would have been to use the concept of productivity per unit of land or productivity per animal.

After the works cited it is possible to find studies carried out in different parts of the world that seek to contribute empirical evidence about the higher or lower efficiency or productivity (depending on the case) of the small-scale peasant farm in relation to large-scale capitalist agriculture. Among them, it is possible to cite, for example, ^{Savastano and Scandizzo (2017)} in Ethiopia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the study by ^{Deininger et al. (2016)} about how the imperfections in the labor market explain a large part of the inverse relation in India, or a very interesting study by ^{Patnaik (2016)}, who shows that capitalist agriculture was not present throughout history nor is it now necessarily more productive than peasant agriculture, among others.

Likewise, in February 2017 there was a conference organized in Washington by the Farm Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), titled “Farm Size and Productivity: a Global Look”, where various researchers from the United States, Australia, the European Union, Ukraine, Brazil, Mexico, China, Vietnam, Africa and Bangladesh exposed the results from studies that are being done in their respective countries.

For the purposes of this article, what is interesting to highlight in this point is that in recent years the academia has not opened new fields for theoretical debate around efficiency or productivity, but instead the current preoccupation is centered mostly on contributing more empirical evidence in this regard.

The Latin American view of the debate: Efficiency, family farming and public policies

Latin American social sciences were not absent in the debate about productive efficiency of family farming. Generally, the analyses stemmed from the socioeconomic problems that the legacy of the large estates had, with their large unproductive extensions and their resistance to innovation, deficiency that attempted to be remedied through the most diverse forms of exploitation of peasants and landless indigenous people (^{Rouquié, 2000}). One of the first to perform a systematic study of these conditions was José Carlos Mariátegui. In the third of The 7 essays on Peruvian reality (Los 7 Ensayos de la Realidad Peruana, originally published in 1928), this Marxist author analyzed the mode in which the forms of territorialization of the Colony implied a set of inequalities in the access and distribution of land. From the point of view of Mariátegui, the problems of unproductivity that the farmland showed required the elimination of “feudalism”, manifested in large estates and serfdom.

Throughout the second half of the 20^th century, different paradigms of rural development disputed with one another, seeking to make a diagnosis of the situation of the farmland in the region, and designing policies directed at lifting the family farming sector out of poverty. It should be clarified that although these paradigms were not designed specifically for the sector, they had an important correlation with it.

In the study by ^{Jara et al. (2014)}, the continuities and ruptures in the arguments about productive potentialities of family farming were identified, which have underlain the public policies in the region, based on a comparative analysis between Colombia and Argentina. With this purpose, the authors recognized five rivaling paradigms of rural development that were present in Latin America: modernization, structuralism, dependency, neoliberalism and neostructuralism (Kay, 2011)¹⁰.

Transversally to the hegemony of one or another paradigm of rural development throughout the last decades, it is possible to differentiate two diagnoses around the peasantry. On the one hand, the group of “descampesinista” intellectuals who maintain that the peasant form of production is backwards, unproductive and economically inviable in the long term and that, therefore, the peasants are immersed in a process of decomposition that will end up eliminating them. On the contrary, the “campesinistas” rejected that opinion arguing that peasants are efficient in production and that, far from being eliminated, they have managed to resist and reproduce based on strategies such as unpaid family work (with the resulting decrease in production costs), non-commercialization, pluri-activity and strong community links (^{Jara, Rodríguez and Rincón, 2014}).

In sum, when reviewing agrarian studies in Latin America, the issue about the higher or lower productive efficiency of family farming is a long-dated theme, which has been treated with different levels of intensity, depending on the case. Within this framework, in a context where the importance of the sector is being reconsidered, this debate theme re-emerges constantly in the academic and political spheres.

Final commentaries

Until this point, different reasons have been developed and compared critically about the efficiency of family farming with relation to capitalist production. Opinions are varied, but in broad terms some central issues can be highlighted which deserve to be emphasized.

As a first measure it is observed that the thinking fluctuated between a generalized conviction of the productive superiority of capitalist agriculture, which, approximately in the middle of the 20^th century changed towards a recognition of family farming. On the other hand, presently a sort of divided opinion is seen where there are defenders of small-scale family production and other currents that suggest important doubts about it. Why these changes in perspective? Well, this is a great question whose answer would surely be too complex to be addressed with a paragraph. We assume that they can be related to the successive crises of capitalism, where certain limitations have been manifesting in terms of inclusion and sustainability, and which are connected to attempts to find more inclusive or sustainable development alternatives. In fact, parallel to these changes in perspective, new approaches and policies have emerged that are preoccupied with replacing these mistakes.

Another striking issue is that in the discussions addressed, it is often assumed that there are certain characteristics that are presupposed to be intrinsic to a certain style of production. For example, that all family farming is backwards, and that capitalist farming is modern. Or, more connected to the line of this study: that a specific style of production is linked to a certain degree of productive efficiency.

On the contrary, we understand that the particular characteristics and the way that each farm manages to combine and strengthen the resources they have at reach and the quality and quantity of the workforce available is what ends up being defining for their degree of efficiency. Within this framework, we believe that the appropriate action would be to move away from the dichotomous approach that assigns “productive superiority” to a specific style of production only for the fact of belonging to it: surely there will be a large number of family farmers that are efficient in their production and others that are not, and the same applies to capitalist producers.

The diligence with which efficiency was mentioned in the literature consulted is also noteworthy; however, it is observed that in most of the cases the term has been used in a polysemic way and that today, after more than 100 years since these debates began, it is complicated to speak of empirical evidence about the higher or lower productive efficiency of family farming or capitalist farming (depending on the case).

The aspects discussed in this article are useful for rural development public policies in Latin America, which are settled between the contradiction of a developmentalist, extractivist and agroexporting model, and different emerging proposals of an alternative development or alternatives to development (^{Santos, 2006}).

Although the hegemonic model of the region in the last decades has been based on the valuation of commodities and natural resources, which has allowed the states to obtain income susceptible to be used for redistributive purposes, there is a need to advance in the design of public policies which, in addition to respecting the particularities of each territory, avoid categorizing the farmers as poor-rich, productive-unproductive, small-large, traditional-modern, etc., only as consequence of their style of production.

Without a doubt, the reflections that have been presented in this work constitute open questions, since we have only managed to outline some hypotheses about an issue that requires a larger amount of empirical evidence. In this context, we believe that it is essential to advance in the study of productive experiences where rationalities are present that are not necessarily capitalist, but that could eventually contribute to the wellbeing of society in general.