Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This study reevaluates the perceived decline of state involvement in agriculture and examines the contradictions of state intervention within neoliberal contexts through a commodity-specific analysis of tea production in Turkey. Based on fieldwork in Rize, which produces 65% of the country's tea and plays a central role in a nation with the highest per capita tea consumption globally, the study highlights the Turkish state's contradictory approach. This approach oscillates between aligning with the interests of capital and those of petty-commodity producers, often resulting in unsustainable outcomes and abrupt policy shifts shaped by the specificities of tea as a commodity, including its perishability, seasonality and low maintenance requirements. Labour strategies add another layer of contradiction, with the state actively facilitating migrant labour supply for harvesting when possible, while at other times turning a blind eye to irregular migration and informal labour markets controlled by brokers. This dual approach suppresses production costs and supports the continuity of smallholder tea cultivation, yet increasingly reinforces reliance on precarious and fragmented labour markets. The findings contribute to broader discussions on state involvement in agriculture, highlighting how policy, commodity traits and social class dynamics interact to shape sectoral outcomes.

This article shows how the reproductive work in the households of the semi-proletarianized Swedish group termed crofters (Sw: torpare) ensured subsistence for the crofters and increased capital accumulation for large landowners. Crofters lived under partly proletarianized, partly feudal conditions and their labour organization illuminates the proletarianization during the 19th century. Through two concepts from the field of Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, Alessandra Mezzadri's ‘value theory of inclusion’ and Nancy Fraser's ‘contradictions of care’, it is shown how the landowner externalized the costs of reproductive care work to be absorbed by the crofter households. This increased labour control, and the reproductive labour of the crofter household increased the value of the land for the landowner, allowing for capital accumulation. The analysis shows a process in which the crofter institution underwent a formal subsumption of labour, keeping the forms intact but increasingly contributing to capital accumulation through the organization of reproduction.

In recent decades, the increasing international demand for shea nuts has resulted in changes to the livelihoods of women collecting and processing these nuts in West Africa. Market integration of shea nut collectors affects social dynamics as capitalist relations and significant income differences among the collectors emerge. Using survey data, we establish a typology to describe shea nut collectors, based on the financial capital that they invest in shea and their other sources of income. We show that a small group of collector-traders is able to benefit from the shea boom through the sale of shea nuts purchased from other collectors at a lower price. Conversely, a larger group of dedicated and diversified collectors are compelled to sell their nuts at a low price for their subsistence. This interdependence highlights capitalist relations, income gaps and social differentiation among the collectors. This process intersects with gendered access to ownership and income control. Our analysis challenges common assumptions about the potential of market integration to achieve win–win scenario and shows that unequal development is constitutive of such approaches. Despite the limited role of shea nut collection in household income, we argue that the social differentiation at play shares similarities with that observed for cash crops in other cases of agrarian change. We conclude by highlighting that shea nut collectors need to be perceived as a heterogeneous group, navigating the intricacies of capitalist market integration with different interests and opportunities.

The power of agro-food capital is frequently highlighted, but its internal dynamics are under-researched. This paper contributes to the understanding of agro-food capital in agrarian political economy through an analysis of milling and storage activities that intermediate grain production and consumption in South Africa. The paper shows that these activities can provide important sources of income and optionality supporting diverse accumulation strategies by a range of big business interests. Our analysis highlights that agro-food capital may not always be a coherent set of interests that is distinct from, and acts upon, other fractions of capital in the agrarian political economy. Instead, it may come to be a contested space, used to support differing accumulation strategies pursued by actors with varying interests. Such contestation may produce complex amalgamations of agricultural, industrial, financial and trading capital and contribute to variegation in trajectories of agrarian change.

Indonesia is the world's largest producer of carrageenan seaweed, the cultivation of which is dominated by household operators and is transforming livelihoods in many coastal communities. Growing demand from the global food processing sector has rapidly transformed Indonesian coastal sea space into a commoditized livelihood resource, where access is governed by emergent, and highly fluid, institutions. Through an extensive ethnographic study in two coastal villages in South Sulawesi, we show how a new property rights regime is being created through evolving institutions of access (both formal and informal) in continual feedback with the livelihood strategies pursued by individual households. The ability to benefit from access to sea space, during a price boom, emerges from within multiple strands of intersecting power relations, producing a range of livelihood outcomes. This study contributes to debates on how rural livelihood opportunities are infused by the politics of access to natural resources, thus reshaping processes of agrarian change in coastal regions.

A capitalist agrarian transformation is unfolding in northern Ghana, marked by shifts in crop types, rapid increases in farm sizes and deepening rural social differentiation. This paper investigates these dynamics through a mixed-methods approach across six farming communities in two districts, focusing on how social differentiation, accumulation, dispossession and exploitation reshape the region. Urban male capitalists, in collusion with local chiefs, drive mutual enrichment, while women and landless youth are disproportionately disadvantaged. Their land rights are increasingly eroded as powerful elites and traditional ruling families appropriate and accumulate capital at their expense. This transformation, rooted in patriarchal structures, is fuelling tensions and pockets of resistance among affected groups. The paper highlights how powerful individuals and groups can thwart often well-intentioned state-led agriculture modernization initiatives for their parochial interests. It shows how predominantly urban-based elites and power brokers frequently hijack the state's effort to reform the rural sector in the context of neoliberal capitalist economies in the Global South. It offers broader insights into social differentiation and the tensions that arise between and among the various competing group interests. Finally, it raises questions of justice across generations and gender which have broader implications for the political economy of agrarian change and structural transformation in rural northern Ghana. The implications extend beyond social cohesion, with potential impacts on biodiversity loss and climate change.

The expansion of mining in Ecuador has stirred resistance among some Indigenous peasant communities in the name of territorial rights; others have offered their land and labour to mining companies. In this and similar land grab contexts, Indigenous peasant communities are often broadly represented as natural resisters or as corrupted collaborators, which, we argue, does not account for how peasants with territorial and/or land rights weigh their options. In Napo province, we examine how peasants have adjudicated contradictory socioeconomic pressures and, in turn, opted to work with miners. We highlight the methodological and political implications of centering how local ‘participants’ in land grabs experience untenable choices or ‘double binds’ to understand the efficacy of land grabs and the obstacles to resistance.

Young people are increasingly turning away from agriculture in many parts of the global South, even where agriculture remains the backbone of livelihoods and the rural economy. This tendency among rural youth has become a critical research and public concern given that mass youth un (der)employment has emerged as a defining feature in many countries. In this paper, we interrogate and depart from the dominant narrative of the youth-agriculture disconnect by focussing on socio-economic conditions that shape diverse patterns of youth livelihood in rural areas. Our empirical evidence draws on ethnographic studies conducted in rural parts of Nepal with in-depth interviews with young people complemented by key informant interviews with local leaders and community workers who shared their experiences and local narratives of the links among youth, agriculture and migration. Findings show that youth aspiration to leave agriculture is hard to deny, although this is heavily mediated by economic status, caste and gender in rural contexts. Given the chronic livelihood insecurity and the structural barriers rooted in class, caste and gender, we find that youth from underprivileged backgrounds do not have the luxury of considering an ‘exit’ from agriculture despite their mobility aspirations. When a longer-term livelihood trajectory is considered, youth aspirations to transition out of agriculture show some degree of temporality regardless of their background, suggesting their re-engagement in agriculture later in their life.