Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This article studies the connections between lessor landowners, land grabbing and land financialization in contemporary capital accumulation. Drawing upon extensive empirical research conducted in Uruguay, which combined database analysis and in-depth interviews, the paper provides key insights to understand why land leasing has become a central strategy of ground rent appropriation among different types of landowners at the beginning of the 21st century. Our main results show that the leasing strategy is a combination of tenant-capitalists' expansion, social differentiation and demographic processes of the small landowning capitals displaced from production that rent out their lands, the process of land financialization through large institutional investors, which deploy a land banking strategy, and the optimization of land exploitation among landowner-capitalists. Moreover, our results highlight the importance of prioritising the study of landowners as a class in itself and the different forms of ground rent appropriation.

Agribusiness expansion is usually framed around two competing narratives. On the one hand, advocates present it as a promising vehicle to modernise agriculture and integrate small farmers into global value chains. On the other hand, critics denounce it as a top-down corporate assault to monopolise agriculture and dispossess peasants of land. Despite their differences, these contrasting narratives tend to share a reductionistic capital-centric bias as they are mainly focused on the alleged benefits/dangers of the ‘arrival’ of agribusiness corporate capital. Although simplistic, these narratives have been politically effective in shaping the public debate and thus should be exposed to critical challenge. Drawing on my ethnographic research in eastern lowland Bolivia, I show how both narratives fail to capture the complexity of an actually existing agribusiness structure. My grounded analysis of the process of agrarian change focuses on the changing labour dynamics among campesinos who have striven to become prosperous soy producers. Faced with bleak prospects and structural insecurity, they have been articulating a political practice around the notion of precarity. I argue that this emerging politics from below deserves more attention as an important terrain of political struggles of classes of labour.

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war have demonstrated that the neoliberal system is unstable during global crises. In times of crisis, exporter countries adopt protectionist policies in the form of export restrictions to safeguard their local food supply and curb inflation. Consequently, low-income countries might find themselves unable to access essential food products. In this regard, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war has gradually increased export restrictions, causing severe food supply disruptions. In particular, import-dependent countries cannot access essential food products and face famine. To this point, this study explores the vulnerabilities of neoliberalism when exporter countries turn to protectionism. Moreover, it asks whether food sovereignty and self-sufficiency could act as a safeguard for import-dependent states against such vulnerabilities. In doing so, the study aims to contribute to the literature by linking protectionism with export restrictions, diverging from the more common association of protectionism with solely import restrictions.

Martinez Salinas, J.A. (2024), Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia's oil palm zone. By Tania Murray Li, Pujo Semedi, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2021. pp. 256. $26.95 (pb); $102.95 (hb). ISBN: 9781478014959, 9781478013990. J Agrar Change, 24: e12575. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12575

In this article, the surname of one of the authors of the reviewed book is repeatedly misspelt. Instead of ‘Semejo’, it should read ‘Semedi’ in all instances.

We apologize for this error.

The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage-point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change. Building on the contributions comprising this collection, we argue that the study of agrarian change through social reproduction enables us to de-invisibilise processes of life-making behind agrarian transformations in three distinct ways. First, the lens of social reproduction enables us to better grasp the regeneration of ‘classes of labour’ in rural areas; gender processes of de-agrarianisation and their implications for livelihoods; and centre reproductive labour within and beyond the household - across spaces and temporalities - as central to life in the countryside. Secondly, this lens also allows us to complicate the land question beyond productivist readings, explore its significance for life in rural settings, and multiply the agrarian questions of our times, whose histories and trajectories must grapple with debates on economic justice. Finally, the study of the social reproduction of agrarian change also provides us with a novel vantage point to read the formation and reorganisation of complex global geographies of the rural, their relation to crises of social reproduction and the ability to redraw the urban–rural divide. All contributions in this issue insightfully advance debates on methods in social reproduction analysis. The study of the agrarian lifeworlds analysed here also contributes significantly to social reproduction debates. It challenges rigid dichotomies between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’. It problematises the households as a unit of analysis and sets land as central to planetary debates on crises of social reproduction and their resolution.

In the Gang Canal region of Rajasthan, the cropping pattern changed from a labour intensive crop, cotton, to a mechanized crop, cluster beans. The shift in cropping pattern not only displaced workers from farm wage work but also brought changes in labour hiring contracts with large scale conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece-rate contracts. Drawing on a primary survey in a village from Gang Canal region, the paper examines the change in the agrarian relations in rural Rajasthan by analysing the emerging development in the rural labour relations. For piece-rate work in farm wage work in some parts of Rajasthan, the wage rate is unilaterally decided by the landlords and large capitalist farmers and is denoted as the ‘village rate’. The manual workers have negligible bargaining power vis-à-vis the village rate. The conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece-rate contracts has enhanced the duration of working day that involves a rise in the rate of surplus value. Access and availability of low wage labour facilitates the accumulation of capital. With the limited availability of employment in the non-farm sector (in both public and private sectors), workers are compelled to sell their labour power at wages that do not exceed the level of subsistence. The paper concludes with a brief examination of continuum of coercion and varied degree of unfreedom among worker in the village.

Wildlife invasion into farmlands is emerging as an acute problem in the Himalayas, threatening farm-based livelihood systems of smallholder rural communities. The problem is severe in the areas where successful forest restoration has been achieved by community forestry programmes alongside massive outmigration. Such evolving dynamics have created new conceptual and empirical discourses on conservation, nature-society relations and human-wildlife interactions, as some wild animals have become pests for farming communities. Consequently, the historical co-existence and relationships between subsistence communities and local ecosystems have been destabilized. By mobilizing the concepts of forest transition and agrarian transition, we explore these new and emerging relationships between the growing wildlife problem and deteriorating people's livelihood by examining the nature, extent and drivers of the new human-wildlife interactions and provide critical insights towards effectiveness of current policies and practical responses.