ABSTRACT
An emerging farmer is a black African, who is making a real income out of commercial farming. In this chapter, the author makes a distinction between emerging farmers and the rural poor. The author's view is that programmes for the rural poor have to be very different from programmes for emerging farmers. The way he see it as a sociologist, this is fundamentally a question about the way social class works, and it becomes a question of rural development strategy. Projects that make economic sense for one class continues to fail for another class. The social position of emerging farmers is very different from that of the rural poor. They are middle class or working towards that – before they even begin their career as farmers. The key problem of most of the strategies pursued by government in much of Africa is that they are based on the idea that it is possible to turn poor rural villagers into emerging farmers.
