The Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize Committee of The Journal of Peasant Studies is pleased to announce that the recipient of the Prize for 2009–2010 is S. Ryan Isakson of the University of Toronto for his article entitled ‘No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question, food sovereignty and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands’, published in volume 36 number 4 (October 2010). Drawing upon an excellent set of data, but intermixing quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, Isakson's article carefully and convincingly argues that although Guatemalan peasants take advantage of market opportunities they also seek to sustain their subsistence-oriented farming practices in the face of market encroachment and so use market-derived incomes to protect peasant agriculture. In the view of the Committee, the article makes an important contribution to our understanding of the interface between marketed and subsistence farming activities in rural Guatemala, and does so in a cogent and logical argument that demonstrates both a well-rounded knowledge of a highly diverse literature but also a cautious sensitivity to empirical realities that are all too easily lost in scholarly research. It is, in this light, a very worthy winner of a prize bearing the names of Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf.
The Prize Committee consisted of three individuals: one from the Editorial Collective, one from the International Advisory Board, and one who is not a member of the JPS editorial team. The Committee considered a set of 10 nominations chosen by the editor. Having carefully read all nominations, the members of the Committee praised the selection for the excellence and range of the scholarly research that was presented to it. After due consideration, the Committee was able to establish a short list of two, before the final selection was made, unanimously.
The Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize, which comes with £1,000, is awarded once every two years for an outstanding article published in The Journal of Peasant Studies by a ‘young scholar’, defined as someone who is either a graduate student or a scholar who has held a PhD degree for no longer than four years when the article is first submitted to the journal. The Prize commemorates two long-standing and distinguished members of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Peasant Studies: the political economist Krishna Bharadwaj (1935–92) and the anthropologist Eric Wolf (1923–99).
The Committee would like to congratulate S. Ryan Isakson for winning the 2009–2010 Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize.