Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

The tropical region of Hopelchén, southeastern Mexico, is a place of high contrasts in terms of the agricultural intensity of production systems and landscape configuration: It presents enormous areas of conserved forest and at the same time the highest rate of deforestation in Mexico. The consequences of agricultural intensification in this region are the subject of our research. We surveyed 80 farmers, whom we grouped into seven types, and developed an index of agricultural intensity based on sowing intensity, frequency of pesticide application and frequency of tractor use. We evaluated the economic potential and added value for farmers, such as food security and self-sufficiency, as well as bee diversity in the agricultural intensification gradient. Our results show that agricultural intensification generates higher added value, but not economic potential, and does not necessarily lead to higher food security. However, it does negatively affect bee diversity and pollination potential, which compromises the sustainable development of the region.

This article contributes to the wider debates on the impacts and outcomes of state efforts to create agrarian capitalists in land reform and agriculture in most countries of the global South. Specifically, this article presents empirical evidence on South Africa's State Land Lease and Disposal Policy (SLLDP) and analyses emerging accumulation dynamics in land redistribution. The evidence presented demonstrates that most of the SLLDP farm beneficiaries are capitalists from non-agrarian sectors who increasingly see land reform as the new frontier for accumulation with significant opportunities to access state land and production support. Other agrarian capitalists leverage political influence and accumulate through privileged access to public resources. In contrast, accumulation from below through the reinvestment of farming proceeds remains constrained. Promoting a small segment of already wealthy capitalists greatly limits the potential of land reform to transform social relations in property in favour of historically marginalised social classes.

Efforts to decentre/decolonize our understanding of capitalist development in the Global South call for more complex and differentiated categories of work that acknowledge the significance of both non-waged and reproductive labour. These categories would allow us to more clearly ‘see’ the varying intersections of gender, class and caste within this world of work. Even as the literature on work in the Global South acknowledges the importance of forms of non-waged work, there is still more work to be done to sufficiently incorporate the labour of social reproduction. In this paper, which emerges from an effort to apply a feminist social reproduction lens in the field, we propose understanding work through four conceptual dyads: waged productive labour, non-waged productive labour, waged reproductive labour and non-waged reproductive labour. Through an in-depth description of three specific cases from a time-use survey we conducted in rural Punjab, India, we argue not only that all four dyads are required to encompass the world of work but also that this more expansive conceptualization can help us produce richer analyses of the intersections of class, caste and gender.

Mainstream economics argues that value chains provide farmers better prices and incomes, thus aiding development. However, this study contradicts this consensus, revealing that the value chain generates the status of petty commodity producers for farmers. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the value chain keeps downstream actors, such as merchants, processors, wholesalers, and retailers, in a powerful position against farmers. The study delves into these phenomena by considering the historical relationship between the market, the commodification of agriculture, the state, the interconnection of markets, the value chain, and neoliberalism. This research focuses on the political economy of groundnut input–output markets in Turkey through value chain analysis. Based on thorough primary field research, the paper demonstrates that the functioning of the value chain strengthens the position of downstream actors against farmers. Additionally, it shows that the value chain creates interlinking between farmers and merchants and makes small farmers the most disadvantaged actor. Moreover, the study highlights that groundnut production costs have risen at a higher rate than incomes under neoliberal policies. Finally, the article demonstrates that mechanization in groundnut farming, while increasing productivity by meeting the chain demands, fails to significantly improve farmers' incomes and profits due to the impact of neoliberal policies on other input costs.

Digital technologies are reshaping the landscape of agriculture. In 2021, around 10% of agricultural products in China were distributed through the Internet. As small farmers are traditionally subsumed by commercial capital in the sphere of circulation, this article investigates what difference online marketing has made to this relationship. Using qualitative data collected from a county in China, we examine the experiences of small farmer e-tailers. We find that agricultural e-commerce provides them with an alternative marketing channel and a larger customer base, increases the efficiency of product distribution and allows them to retain a greater share of the value they produce. However, while extant literature suggests that agricultural e-commerce has increased farmers' autonomy and income, we find that small farmers' vertical expansion into e-commerce by becoming agricultural e-tailers fails to alleviate their subsumption by commercial capital and subjects them to more oppressive forms of commercial capital in three ways. First, small farmer e-tailers are controlled by agricultural e-commerce platforms, as their transactions rely on these platforms that are quasi-monopolies in China. Second, these e-tailers are increasingly exploited by platforms and other cybermediaries whom they are forced to pay for Internet traffic. Finally, small farmers are being excluded from being e-tailers as platforms are becoming e-tailers and they cannot compete with corporate e-tailers.

The pandemic lays bare the centrality of social reproduction in upholding global commodity networks. Capitalism's reliance on gendered and racialized systems of social reproduction has deepened structural contradictions and socio-economic divides across agro-export sectors and agrarian communities. We analyse how COVID-19 policies and responses in Ecuador and Chile are reshaping systems of social and labour protection in feminized agro-export sectors. We integrate labour regime and gender regime frameworks, showing how they are (1) co-constituted via global forces, national policies, institutional pressures and local practices; (2) intertwined in neoliberal and social-democratic development models; and (3) forged through control, consent and resistance. We analyse national legal frameworks and policy responses to COVID-19, as well as industry, union and worker reactions, illustrating how ‘neutral’ policies have gendered outcomes, (re)creating false binaries between production and reproduction and paid and unpaid work. We find that the pandemic has reshaped gendered labour regimes in agro-exports: in Ecuador, undermining the fragile commitment to a social-democratic gendered labour regime and in Chile, strengthening social-democratic supports and promises of a more equitable gendered labour regime. In both cases, states and firms have neglected to include social reproduction in the ‘costs’ of development, thus threatening national development models grounded in the exploitation of cheap female labour in agro-export sectors.

This paper highlights the relevance of Marxian class analysis to understand the changing nature of agrarian classes under capital-intensive agriculture. It is a methodological exercise that builds on Patnaik's labour exploitation index (E-criterion) in three major respects to construct a new index, namely, the Modified Labour Exploitation Index (MEI), to differentiate peasant classes. First and most important, it incorporates the role of mechanisation, which, so far, has been ignored in the methodological attempts to differentiate within the peasantry. Second, it underscores the importance of non-agricultural (and non-rural) bases of simple reproduction in the countryside by incorporating hired-out labour by agricultural households to the non-agricultural sector into the classification criteria. Finally, it makes surplus labour exploited through land leasing empirically testable by using Marx's differential and absolute rent to differentiate between subsistence and commercial leasing. The new index is then empirically tested using primary data collected from rural Haryana, India. The paper argues that MEI is an effective criterion for understanding changing class dynamics, the shifting modes of the livelihood of the poor peasantry and the largely hidden accumulation processes in agrarian societies.

The energy-dense part of the neoliberal diet and obesity made for an explosive combination upon the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy-dense foods lie at the root of comorbidities associated with complications of the COVID-19 pandemic: overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so forth. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated the causal impact of overweight and obesity on more severe or lethal infections. Focusing on the case of Mexico, I will show that inequality strongly conditions what people can eat, so the issue is not simply a matter of personal choice or responsibility. My argument is twofold: (1) Mexico enjoyed its own ‘traditional’ diets through the mid-1980s, which included widely accessible fruits and vegetables. But (2) the neoliberal turn in the form of trade liberalization and deepening inequality caused a substantial reshaping of the diet in favour of energy-dense foods with lower nutritional value. The energy-dense segment of ‘the neoliberal diet’ has turned a large portion of Mexicans into a vulnerable population. But this is a class-differentiated diet with its healthy and nutritious components increasingly less accessible to the working classes. Recovering healthy diets in Mexico will require the recuperation of food sovereignty through the regeneration of its countryside and its peasantry. Agroecological methods of food production will also be needed to alleviate the climate change emergency.

This paper studies the connections between the expansion of mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing and agrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of commodity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from mining through speculative land deals with mining companies. They act as ‘land brokers’ for the mining firms, helping them to overcome a significant barrier to land accumulation through the de facto abolition of landed property. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion of coal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. To develop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and historical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative land dispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed for studying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participation in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms applied to (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded that with high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels, the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a process of agrarian change through land speculation that is articulated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re-strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolution of peasant agriculture.