The Dynamics of Rural Poverty : Case Studies from a District in Southern Ethiopia

Dakar, CODESRIA, 1992, 70 p., ISSN 0850-2633

The framework we have chosen for the study attempts to provide a systemic picture of peasant society's struggle for existence. The resource flow system's approach regards everyday forms of peasant survival as essential to the understanding of the socio-economic condition and potential of rural society. The flow of resources among peasant households, and between peasant households and outsiders, goes on all the time, and in each case, some lose and others gain. On the other hand, the peasant household itself is both a production and consumption unit, and what it produces, allocates and consumes constitutes on a micro level a resource flow system, also involving losses and gains.