For several decades, transformations have been consolidated in contemporary rural societies, which have an origin related to economic restructuring, agricultural policies, the growth of road infrastructure, the increase in access to information and communication technologies, the dynamics demographic, the insufficient demand for rural and urban labor, which together have stimulated the growth of rural non-agricultural occupations, articulating with greater strength the exchanges between the countryside and the city, which have influenced the organization of production and reproduction of households. Rural families have a wide complexity in their composition, structure and disposition of resources, for which it has been possible to make visible a range of life arrangements and strategies that vary between regions, gender and generation.

The expansion of non-agricultural rural occupations and salaried agricultural work can be considered as a set of economic-labor responses of households to the agricultural crisis in which small and medium producers find themselves, who have gradually partially abandoned cultivation of family plots, as a consequence of the restriction of markets and the distribution of their products. Affecting income generation and the quality of food consumption.

Non-agricultural activities have been an inherent part of rural household reproduction. The income derived from non-agricultural activities of rural and urban origin, or from international migration have been life strategies that have been implemented to complement the expenses in agriculture and family consumption. This situation depends, among other things, on the availability of workforce, economic and non-economic resources available to them. Recently there is a consensus that income from wages has become an essential part of rural households.

Demographic transformations such as fertility decline, household size decline, persistence of emigration (depopulation), aging of producers, demographic dependency, family life cycle, labor and economic characteristics of households rural areas, place them in an unprecedented social and economic dynamic, which is considered relevant to study from different perspectives of theoretical and methodological approach.

In this thematic issue of the INTER DISCIPLINA journal, some reflections and empirical evidence will be offered about the economic-labor dynamics that rural families have adapted. Placing special emphasis on the main transformations in the socioeconomic reorganization and survival strategies of contemporary domestic units (peasant, non-peasant). It seeks to refresh the vision of the study of rural households of peasants, producers and non-producers, which have been reconfigured since the beginning of the 21st century.

Germán Quaranta’s work examines the demographic, social and productive transformations that have recently occurred in a predominantly peasant province of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. These transformations are linked to the new characteristics of the migratory processes of temporary workers and the sector of economic activity in which they are inserted, disrupting the productive and labor organization of households and shows the main changes in terms of the structure of households and their livelihoods, which refer to non-agricultural income and the participation of monetary transfers and with a lesser tendency in the decrease of the production of family plots.

Juan Romero’s text focuses on the analysis of households and rural work in Uruguay, under a context in which economic growth occurs and a later stabilization that consolidates the new forms of agricultural capitalist production, characterized by greater flexibility and productive decentralization, reshapes the characteristics of the workforce with the growth of temporary and seasonal work, the feminization of the workforce, and urbanization of rural workers. The analysis is presented through a socioeconomic stratification, which shows the main transformations in the rural environment, reaching the conclusion of an increase in multi-functional family units and an improvement in rural salaried workers.

Janett Vallejo and Saúl Moreno, under a qualitative methodology, address adaptive strategies in potato cultivation and milk production in localities in the center of Veracruz, Mexico, in which the importance of non-agricultural activities is highlighted so that it can survive agricultural production and livestock that, to a certain extent, promote identity and roots, although the future of activities is increasingly uncertain. The maintenance of the activities goes through a dilemma of adapting to international requirements or abandoning and integrating into pluriactive household activities, characterized by a greater diversity of occupations and gradual abandonment of potato cultivation and livestock.

The article by Eric Ramírez and colleagues focuses on the analysis of food trends in Mexican households in the context of the 2008 food crisis and shows how rural households are those that are in deficit conditions in their consumption as a consequence of not achieve the minimum recommended consumption for people who engage in moderate physical activity. In this work, they use the microdata from the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH), they apply a methodology to estimate kilocalories (KC) per equivalent adult (AE). The analysis developed is presented by social and residential stratification. The results show that during the food price crisis, access to certain products was restricted, showing how some households are unable to meet their minimum caloric needs, which is associated with the persistence of the deficit in household food consumption, especially in the rural ones, which puts the health conditions of its members at risk.

Raquel Breitenbach and colleagues, offer a theoretical reflection on the succession of properties for agricultural production in the international context, showing the main similarities and discrepancies according to local conditions. Situations related to the aging of the population and youth are under discussion in the text. The differences stand out regarding the economic provisioning of rural households and the similarities are related to access to agricultural family properties, academic training and emigration. The scenario shown for rural youth is not encouraging, especially in the case of women, since in most cases they do not have access to family plots, so they have fewer possibilities of planning a future in the spaces rural areas, because in the future they will not be able to access agricultural production lands, in this way, their training specializes in the urban labor market and there is a tendency to emigrate. On the other hand, some men have the perspective of staying in rural areas due to access to family properties or businesses, despite the fact that the appreciation of rural work has been lost.

Manuel Tomás González and colleagues, propose an approach to the study of rural youth between Spain and Mexico. Although they present differences related in their development processes, it is interesting to note the general similarities on the mobility conditions between both territories, in which aging and the withdrawal of life from agricultural production reconfigure the life expectancies of rural youth in both territories, there is a greater predominance in displacement to urban areas for work reasons, distancing themselves to a certain extent from agricultural production. The training of these young people, rather than promoting their permanence in their places of origin, encourages emigration as an expectation of the training acquired for the urban labor market. Only in those households where family businesses and agricultural production are located is the prospect of staying in their localities maintained.

The last article in this thematic issue is written by Hubert Carton de Grammont, who makes a methodological reflection to understand the evolution of migratory flows around the reorganization of the rural labor market under the context of the complex reorganization of global capital, in which value chains are constituted that involve the countryside and the city. These conditions have prompted major transformations in rural spaces that can be seen through the processes of mobility between rural and urban areas, in the change in the temporality and profiles of migrants and the growing multiple activity of peasant households that do not they need to migrate permanently to get a job, due to the growth of regional labor markets. Thus, rural spaces are not only currently a productive space for agriculture, but they also become a residence space for workers in the cities.