Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

In recent decades, prominent development organizations have promoted market inclusion and agricultural value chain integration as pathways to rural prosperity in the Global South. Focusing upon the experiences of Indigenous Kaqchikel peasants in Guatemala's horticultural export sector, this paper offers a cautionary tale. Drawing upon Carmen Diana Deere's pioneering work on the political economy of agrarian change, I examine how mechanisms of surplus transfer have been reconfigured and intensified through the incorporation of peasants into export markets for fresh fruits and vegetables. Fusing Deere's framework with insights from the political ecology literature on climate change adaptation, I show how development initiatives that promise inclusion and poverty alleviation can, paradoxically, deepen socio-economic inequality and environmental vulnerability. Guatemala has emerged as a prominent exporter of horticultural products and the sector generates substantial profits and foreign exchange. Yet the historical marginalization of Kaqchikel farmers means that they are often adversely incorporated into agricultural value chains. Their integration into exploitative market relations has produced mounting debts and deepening environmental precarity. The result is a stark example of immiserizing growth.

This article provides a reflective overview of Indonesian agrarian history, contemporary agrarian dynamics and the growing field of Indonesian agrarian studies. By charting the evolution of the field and highlighting landmark studies, it traces the work and influence of both foreign researchers and the lesser known tradition of agrarian political economy by Indonesian scholars. In doing so, it highlights compelling themes within the political economy of agrarian Indonesia that are engaged in the contributions to the Special Issue on Labour and Land in Indonesia. These include the changing and diverse composition of class relations and their impact on social differentiation; the gendered and generational relationships linking household reproduction to rural and migratory labour; the expansion of plantations and agrarian extractivism; and the increasing bureaucratisation and militarisation of Indonesian rural life. As the individual contributions to the special issue make clear, these areas of research remain central to both the past and future of Indonesian agrarian studies.

So-called surplus populations have repeatedly been the focus of critical analyses in recent years. This refers to a large social group that comprises most of the population in the Global South and is characterised by the fact that it is not integrated into the capitalist mode of production to any relevant extent through wage labour. The consequence is that these surplus populations must reproduce themselves largely outside of capitalist relations of production in a strict sense. This article addresses two research gaps. First, the debate on surplus populations has so far focused mainly on Asian or African contexts and has hardly been related to Latin America; second, this debate on surplus populations has not been linked to the large number of socio-ecological conflicts surrounding their social reproduction in this region. This article shows that this perspective is extremely insightful and illustrates this by looking at the conflict between the forestry industry and the indigenous Mapuche in southern Chile.

Strengthening women's property rights is on the policy agenda. Rich detailed analyses abound, discussing how agrarian change, including commercialization of land or land titling programmes, affect women's property rights within a particular context. In this comparative paper, we examine national-level institutional factors across 45 low- and middle-income countries. We combine individual-level land ownership data with indicators about the structure of the economy, land markets, work and education, gender equality, property rights, social norms, marital property rights and inheritance and political voice. We find no evidence that economic growth is associated with lower gender land gaps. However, the indicators that proxy for greater gender equality in the labour force, educational attainment and legal and social norms are all associated with a lower gender gap in landownership, suggesting that national-level institutions can play an important role in supporting women's land rights.

From colonial times to the present, the Indonesian state has continuously attempted to re-organise nature, technology and relations of production by establishing large-scale food monocrop farming or “food estates”. As Indonesian food production has largely been based on petty commodity production by small farmers, including a minority of petty capitalists and a large majority of marginal farmers, we ask why food estate initiatives have been persistently reproduced in different times and places despite a century-long history of failure of such projects. As we show through historical and contemporary examples of food estate programmes, the Indonesian “outer islands” have been the main sites of accelerated corporate land grabbing and coercion in both wage labour and contract farming labour regimes. We argue that the persistence of food estate visions and initiatives can be understood as an enduring colonialism, structured through the idealisation of modern industrial agriculture, the view of small farmers as ‘racialised others’, backward and inferior and the systematic denial of customary land rights. This is made possible by the integration of corporate agribusiness in the state's food self-sufficiency project, producing labour regimes sustained by the state coercion as evidenced by the increasing military involvement in food estate projects.

Examining two distinct types of resistance, this study explores how local inequalities in land and power have shaped and differentiated the political reactions of West Papuans in the face of dispossession. The first type involves overt struggle against dispossession. Two cases of indigenous communities resisting the expansion of plantations shed light on how alliances between indigenous landholders, local state actors and environmental NGOs can create a political opportunity structure that bolsters the demands of resistance groups. The second type, a less-studied response to dispossession, demonstrates how terms of inclusion shape the strategies of landholding groups demanding to be incorporated into contract arrangements. This study relies on primary materials collected during fieldwork in West Papua since 2019, combined with secondary data.

Based on fieldwork in a village I call Lone Teak in East Java, Indonesia, this paper examines emerging patterns of class differentiation and distributive politics. The history of Lone Teak's landholding structure reveals long-term patterns of inequality. However, since widespread deforestation during 1998–2002, new dynamics emerged. Many households have accessed local state forestland for farming and more attainable state capital has underwritten the expansion of their agricultural production. With greater access to forestland and capital, lower classes have experienced upward social mobility, whereas landowning middle classes struggle to maintain, let alone move beyond their existing position. These state-induced developments have produced a differentiated nostalgia for former President Suharto's era (1966–1998). This nostalgia reflects a response to losses and expectations for better opportunities to accumulate, not a desire for returning to authoritarian rule.

This article investigates proletarian precarity among female factory workers in the interplay of factory and family dynamics in Indonesia’s Javanese heartland. These women workers are part of semiproletarian households that combine income from a mix of precarious work and self-employment within the rural–urban nexus, which encompasses rural villages and the towns and cities to which their inhabitants regularly commute for work. Their connection with land and agricultural activities, along with rural-based networks, subsidizes part of the cost of labour reproduction in labour-intensive industry in middle-sized cities, while shaping their negotiation of patriarchy and capitalist accumulation. Female factory workers’ everyday navigation of the productive and reproductive spheres is often disregarded by traditional agrarian and labour movements. The analysis also points to the inherent contradictions within their experiences, where attempts to negotiate subordination often (inadvertently) reproduce existing power relations.

The mainstreaming of sustainability standards in agrifood industries has often been accompanied by adverse distributional outcomes. While powerful lead firms in global value chains obtain reputational benefits and premiums, costs and risks are transferred to suppliers. Yet, we still know little about how producers resist this form of green capital accumulation and with what results. In this paper, I draw on a comparative study of Chilean wine and farmed salmon to contrast a sector with globally fragmented sustainability standardisation (wine) with one in which standards are globally homogenised (salmon). I show how in both industries, green capital accumulation is characterised by power struggles over capturing value through standards, and from differentiated forms of sustainability efforts. I highlight how, by exercising control through standards, powerful actors externalise costs and risks, while by exercising control through intangible assets they appropriate value from other actors’ differentiated sustainability efforts.