Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This article examines how campesinas in coastal Ecuador have navigated shifting labour roles, financial precarity and ecological degradation under Plan Tierras, a state-led land redistribution policy embedded in an extractivist model of agriculture. While Plan Tierras formally recognized women as land beneficiaries, we argue that it intensified women's burdens across blurred boundaries between productive, reproductive and ecological spaces. Building on feminist political ecology and recent debates on the labours of social reproduction, we conceptualize agrarian extractivism as a process that simultaneously depletes women's bodies, emotions and the ecological foundations of life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hacienda Las Mercedes, we show how women's everyday practices reveal the convergence of production, reproductive and ecological labour within circuits of extraction that sustain agrarian capitalism. This framework highlights the contradictions of state-led reforms that rely on women's unpaid and affective work while undermining the material and ecological conditions that sustain it. Yet, women also resist extractivist pressure through grounded, care-centred practices that sustain livelihoods and reassert campesina identities. By revisiting the foundational work of Carmen Diana Deere, this article offers a critical feminist lens on agrarian reform, calling for a transition from inclusion-based policies to reproductive and ecological justice.

This paper traces the trajectory of Carmen Diana Deere's work and provides a broad overview of her contributions to understanding the political economy of agrarian change in Latin America. The overview provides context for the groundbreaking work of scholars in this special issue and discusses how they extend Deere's work in three main areas: Conceptualizing the peasant household and its links to the capitalist economy; the role of cooperatives and markets in agrarian reform in Nicaragua and Cuba; factors contributing to, and implications of, women's land and asset ownership. The special issue papers demonstrate the importance of Deere's integration of feminist theories and methodologies into the analysis of agrarian political economy. The papers range from country case studies to comparative statistical analyses; they analyse new evidence from Ghana, India and Tanzania, as well as Cuba, Ecuador and Guatemala; use statistical evidence, qualitative data obtained through fieldwork or mixed methods; and make use of newly available individual-level time-use survey and asset-ownership data.

How are we to understand the continuing importance of small-scale village farming in a country like Turkey, which is undergoing an expanding process of industrialization and commodification in agriculture? There are two sides to this question: One concerns land use reconfiguration for commercial purposes, contraction of small-scale farmland and village resources and depeasantization and deagrarianization tendencies; the other relates to the absence of significant grassroots-based agroecological movements for reorganizing agriculture. Using official documents, statistics, ethnographic data and in-depth interviews, the paper examines this question through the empirical illustration of the small town of Güdül (Ankara, Turkey). It shows that farmers uphold their presence and create an enrichment value for their labour and food collaboratively with consumers within fluid, trust-based everyday social networks. Invocated by farmers' farming imaginaries, enrichment value creation comprises their assessments and evaluative judgements of capitalist expansion into local village farming within the state-led developmentalist fold.

The automotive industry in Mexico is sustained by a labour regime rooted in low-cost labour, made possible in part by the integration of rural workers and peasants into both the production lines and the broader processes of social reproduction of labour power. To fully grasp this relationship would require analyzing the mechanisms that enforce labour control and discipline, not only within the production process itself but also within the broader realm of social reproduction. This article examines the composition of the labour force in Tlaxcala's automotive region, focusing on the areas surrounding the Puebla-based VW and Audi assembly plants, to emphasize the essential role of workers from peasant backgrounds in maintaining conditions of super-exploitation. Displaced by neoliberal policies of dispossession and forced devaluation, these rural workers have become a key source of cheap labour for the industry. Now integrated into the workforce as part of ‘rural classes of labour,’ they rely on multiple economic activities to compensate for the industry's low wages. This dynamic illustrates how the subordinate incorporation of rural communities into the maquiladora sector is essential to maintain the labour regimes characteristic of automotive export enclaves.

The land sparing model, that is, the idea that agricultural intensification fosters environmental protection, lacks empirical validation. In Brazil, sustainable intensification through the conversion of degraded pastures into agricultural areas became a promising and widespread solution to deforestation. We investigate the mismatch between the land sparing discourse and the reality of productive and territorial strategies of large soybean producers in Brazil. We combined documental, fieldwork and secondary data from old (Mato Grosso), intermediate (Pará) and recent agricultural frontiers (Roraima). We argue that the land sparing narrative relies on a conceptual separation between modern agriculture and a land extensive ‘backward agriculture’ (on deforestation fronts). We show that many agroindustrial enterprises expand their activities from consolidated areas to agricultural frontiers, maintaining farms in both regions. For the agribusiness sector, maintaining the myth of sustainable ecological intensification is crucial to conceal its role in opening up new deforestation fronts across South America.

What model of agricultural transformation can reach the policy goals of just transformation and increased productivity in the diverse African smallholder sector? A response to this question relies on studies that examine outcomes of local agricultural investments. A significant, yet under-studied, example of these investments is small-scale public investments in irrigation. To address this gap, we analyse social differentiation and accumulation patterns arising from donor-supported public investments in irrigation in four villages in the Kilombero District, Tanzania. Participatory wealth ranking and interviews reveal that investments in small-scale smallholder irrigation fuelled a process of accumulation from ‘below’. We discuss how these investments can be considered more inclusive than ‘from above’ accumulation (from extra-local investments), while nonetheless contributing to some differentiation among smallholders. We conclude that public investments that align with smallholders' initiatives in irrigation development are more likely to contribute to policy goals of socially inclusive improved agricultural productivity.

Inspired by Carmen Diana Deere's work, we examine how planned economies, markets and communal economies interrelate to co-produce Cuba's agricultural economy. We show the variety of noncapitalist practices interrelated with and embedded in the black market and how these interactions produce diverse ethics. We build on a geographic interpretation of Karl Polanyi's substantive understanding of the economy and on geographic literature on the informal economy to offer a framework for analysing diversity within a black-market economy. Based on a case study of five agricultural cooperatives in a small rural village, we illustrate how, in Cuba, so-called ‘capitalist’ practices and profitmaking are interrelated with solidary, communal and political ethics. We conclude that understanding the heterogeneity in already existing economic relations is important for envisioning innovative economic models.

The dynamics of contemporary capitalism have empowered the role and influence of finance within the realm of agriculture. In response, agri-finance research has focused on the extension of global finance's investment chains and how parts of the agricultural sector—mainly farmland—are transformed into financial assets, where multiple sources of capital seek to make gains. To do so, scholarship on ‘finance going farming’ has directed attention to the variety of financial actors (i.e., pension, endowment and private equity funds, insurance companies and investment banks); their motives to invest; the variegated mechanisms deployed to reformat farmland and agricultural production for financial purposes; and the increasing power of shareholders to shape productive and distributive decisions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of how finance makes its way into agriculture, within agrarian studies, these processes and dynamics raise important conceptual and methodological challenges about how to centre financialization in dynamics of agrarian change. In this exchange, our contributors consider how contemporary trends in agri-finance demand us to rethink relations of production, property and power and processes of accumulation. Key questions that the forum addresses include how and to what extent is finance connected to the restructuring of capital and its modalities of accumulation in agrarian settings? What ties does financialization have to changes in labour regimes? How does it affect productive capital and its associated relations of power? This Forum is part of the 25th Anniversary Forums¹, following ‘How is climate change changing agrarian studies?’ (Paprocki et al. 2025), ‘Challenging agroecology—Promise and pitfalls for agrarian studies’ (McKay et al. 2025) and ‘What is the value of value for agrarian studies’ (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2025).

The growing hegemony of finance has been reshaping the mechanisms through which land and nature are appropriated. In global agriculture, institutional investors—such as pension funds, insurance companies, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds—have become central actors in reorganizing the circuits of accumulation by shifting the focus from production to asset valorization and the extraction of territorialized rents (Cotula 2012; Isakson 2014; Clapp and Isakson 2018). This text contributes to the debate by examining how land is increasingly treated as a financial asset through the articulation of rentier and speculative logics, suggesting that asset managers play a pivotal role as strategic intermediaries who coordinate investment flows, mediate relationships between financial investors and local actors, and embed financial rationalities into the operational logic of farming enterprises (Clapp and Isakson 2018).

Although often grouped under the label of ‘financial capital

Based on research in a montane forest region of East Java, this article shows how women's and men's work as forest subjects has changed with the changing of the forest and the politics of gendered labour on and off the forest. We examine three conjunctures in the past century when the montane forests were sequentially constituted as subsistence forests, plantation forests and remittance forests. Our narrative is guided by the notion of a locally and globally situated Plantation–Migration Nexus in each conjuncture. We explore the dynamic interplay between changing plantation regimes (labour systems, access rules and ecological composition) and modalities of human migration (circular, transnational and state-directed). Each of these moments witnessed changes in the forest combined with the gendered politics of forest access and control. These in turn resulted in changes in the definition and practice of gendered forest work, production and social reproduction, and social and power relations between forest plantation workers and managers.