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COPYRIGHT 2005 Royal Geographical Society
Introduction
In the last few decades the rural space in Israel and its socio-economic components have steadily changed. The changes are attributed to long-term trends and processes common to many developed economies, such as a tremendous increase in the efficiency and intensity of production, the decline of agricultural employment, and the suburbanization of the countryside. The Moshav, a type of family farm-based settlement, has been a prime example of these changes. The transformation of the occupation pattern in farming households, through the adoption of a strategy of pluriactivity based on both agricultural and non-agricultural sources of income, has become a common development. The decline in agricultural employment has been partly compensated for by the penetration of non-agricultural land uses and increased commuting to urban centres of employment. At the same time, movement of people from urban areas to the Moshav, partly motivated by the relaxation of land policies, has brought about major changes in the demographic composition of rural areas and the settlement patterns themselves.
The currently evolving occupational structure of the Moshav communities, especially among the second-generation households, raises questions about their future as agricultural settlements. By second generation, we mean the relatively younger households in the Moshav, in which the head of the household is no more than 40 years old. In most cases, their parents were settled in the Moshav by national authorities; in some cases, their grandparents were the first to be settled on the land, and operated a family farm. This group has shown a greater tendency to disassociate itself from agriculture in favour of non-agricultural income-generating activities, both inside and outside the settlement. Bearing that in mind, this paper has two major aims: to identify major patterns of economic activity and income sources among second-generation Moshav households; and to assess their future attitudes towards farming activities and choosing pluriactivity as a livelihood strategy. Before discussing the major issues of this paper, some theoretical background regarding rural occupational change and pluriactivity, in general, and the nature of the Moshav and the changes it has undergone in recent years, in particular, is reviewed.
Farm diversification and pluriactivity
The analysis of occupational changes in the rural areas of developed economies emphasizes, among other processes, the diversification of income sources among farming households. This diversification may be the result of developing new activities within the farm, or the combination of farm-based and external sources of income. Both patterns represent the emergence of pluriactivity as a common strategy for farmers to reduce their reliance on agricultural production as the major source of income. Diversification, and more broadly, pluriactivity, as well as the underlying reasons for choosing this strategy, have long been discussed in the literature (Ilbery 1987; Gasson 1988; Fuller 1990; McInerney and Turner 1991; Evans and Ilbery 1993; Grossman 1993; Marsden 1998; Bryden and Bollman 2000; McNally 2001; Sofer 2001). A synthesis of these sources proposes that the main causes of this trend are the following.
1 Deteriorating terms of trade for the agricultural sector, expressed in the rising cost of inputs and the relative fall in the price of outputs, a process culminating in declining net income from agriculture.
2 Increased efficiency of the agricultural sector and productivity per unit of input, resulting in reduced demand for labour, coupled with burgeoning food surpluses.
3 A decline in the relative importance of agriculture as a source of income, leading to a search for alternative uses of idle farm premises.
4 Heightened receptivity among farming households to alternative sources of income, as a result of the acquisition of vocational training and higher education.
5 Improvements in the transportation infrastructure and technological changes that have enhanced the relative advantages offered by rural locations as sites for non-agricultural activities, and have facilitated the access and commuting of rural residents to urban-based employment.
6 Counter-urbanization and suburbanization, which have brought about changes in the demographic and occupational profiles of agricultural settlements.
7 Government intervention that circumscribes agricultural activities and change in land uses, but also offers state sponsorship to develop alternative sources of income in response to changing economic conditions.
Altogether, the economic rationale for diversifying income sources is to deploy household resources--land, labour, capital, and skills--in ways other than agricultural production, in order to generate income that is higher than that earned in their present use. The deployment of resources may take the form of diverting a household's skilled labour into high-earning activities while replacing it with a less expensive contracted agricultural labour force. Alternatively, it may be achieved by diverting part of the land and premises into non-agricultural activities, while cultivating other parts of the land, and by diverting a share of the household labour time to non-agricultural activities.
It is commonly accepted among scholars that ensuring family continuity in farming is becoming more difficult all the time, and that succession in farming is more likely to be achieved on economically successful farms. According to Potter and Lobley (1996), succession is both a cause and an effect of a farm's current economic status, providing the incentive to develop the business over long periods, as well as the necessary labour, skills, and entrepreneurial energy to carry plans through. These essentially motivational influences operate more strongly on some farms than others and seem to have an impact on the structural differentiation of the farming community. Correspondingly, mechanization and other modern developments are significant for the persistence of the successors as a farming unit in Finland (Abrahams 1991). In the Norwegian case, there is a tendency towards transformation from farming as an occupation which the older generation were obliged to carry on, to farming as one option among many for the current generation (Villa 1999). A wider view of Western Europe reveals that, within the succession process, off-farm work and participation in other farm-based enterprises are becoming frequent occupations among women in farming families. This pattern is at present a distinct form of pluriactivity among such families, with an emerging trend towards husbands being occupied full-time on-farm and wives off-farm (Blanc and MacKinnon 1990). Despite the discussion raised so far, the theoretical and empirical discussion regarding young farming households in developing economies and their occupational characteristics is relatively limited. It is therefore assumed here that, although their distinctiveness may be obscured, their occupation structure tends to follow the pluriactivity pattern, perhaps even more often than the previous generation. Thus a short discussion of the major characteristics of this phenomenon is warranted.
The literature on pluriactivity suggests that the shift towards this strategy has been accelerated in recent years. Location and the distance of the farm from an urban hub of employment have an influence on the specific pattern of pluriactivity (Marsden et al. 1989; Edmond et al. 1993; Bowler et al. 1996; Eikeland and Lie 1999; Sofer 2001). In peripheral regions characterized by small-farm production, one finds a significant degree of pluriactivity accompanied by low levels of income and little labour mobility. One outstanding feature of this process is the farming household's entry into the tourist industry, particularly in sparsely populated areas (Campagne et al. 1990; Evans and Ilbery 1992; Edmond et al. 1993). By comparison, for more than a decade, the dominant feature of London's rural fringe, particularly in the south, has been the penetration of non-agriculture-related small businesses run from redundant farm buildings. Some of these businesses originated outside the rural settlements, including urban localities, but later relocated to these sites, although a large proportion were founded within the villages themselves (Short 1995). Generally, in Western Europe, a main feature of the fringe of metropolitan areas is off-farm wage labour as an important source of income, and the rising portion of women occupied in such work (Jervell 1999). In these areas, pluriactivity represents a stage in the sector's capitalist development; farming is exhibiting clear tendencies toward capital accumulation alongside growing disengagement from agriculture as its economic base (Marsden et al. 1986; Campagne et al. 1990).
Discussing gender relations, in many cases the farm is managed as a business enterprise in which the husband is engaged on the farm and the wife tends to work off...
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