ABSTRACT
A shifting cultivator of southern Nigeria, a Nepalese hill farmer, and a member of a Chinese production brigade may have similar cash incomes but vastly different living standards and general levels of well-being. Meanwhile, the Malaysian rubber smallholder may have a higher cash income than any of them, but he has to spend most of it to buy high-priced food. The categories themselves must be weighted to reflect their relative importance in the farmer’s local context. Both the calibration and the weighting of the 10-point scales are susceptible to distortion by subjective judgments; great care must be taken to avoid the subtle influence of the investigator’s values. The fact that most small farmers in the tropics subsist mainly or entirely outside the commercial sector. Moreover, national and international agricultural development programs regard increased commercial activity as one index of progress, and they require data on farmers’ involvement in the commercial sector for the assessment of programs which they support.
