Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This article examines the legacy of war on environmental policy, contributing to recent literature on the linkages between armed violence, conservation, rural livelihoods and global value chains. It argues that environmental norms reshape agricultural practices, but also the means by which people claim control over land and labour. Using the case of cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire, this paper examines the impact of ‘zero-deforestation’ policies on the country's last agricultural frontier: its western forestlands, where migration and deforestation have driven the development of the cocoa economy for years. The region is now feeling the effects of global trade policies such as the European Deforestation-Free Regulation (EUDR), competition for the last remaining forests and social fault lines inherited from the war. This article traces the origins of the zero-deforestation policy, its national and local impact and its implications for social struggles over the control of land and labour.

Cuba stands out among Latin American nations for its efforts to institutionalize food sovereignty (FS) through the promotion of alternative small-scale farming, making it a prime case study for this model. This paper examines the extent to which Cuba has institutionalized FS and the factors driving this process from an agrarian political economy perspective. Public policies, sustainable practices and key actors—including a ‘partner state’—have advanced agroecology as a core strategy to reduce food imports since the early 1990s. However, other entities, such as the military enterprise Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), may be seen as obstacles to this strategy. Whilst these struggles and tensions are not unique to Cuba, the island stands out for its decisive steps in institutionalizing FS. Cuba has achieved significant ‘pockets’ or ‘spaces’ of FS, despite lacking a fully consolidated domestic food system.

Turkey's Community Development Program (CDP), implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, has remained a largely underexplored subject in the global history of rural community development schemes. Based on detailed archival research, this article shows that the programme's central goal was to mobilize the labour and financial resources of the villagers to carry out rapid infrastructure construction. Turkish policymakers hoped that such mobilization could help achieve a high level of rural development far beyond what could be achieved by relying solely on government spending and might also allow the allocation of more resources to urban industrialization. Despite its initial promise, the CDP was unable to effectively mobilize the countryside due to a combination of structural, political, and bureaucratic challenges, including unequal land distribution, intense electoral competition, and inadequate administrative coordination. However, the CDP was not entirely inconsequential. It played a modest role in the commercialization and capitalist transformation of Turkish agriculture.

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.