Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

China's nascent role in the global agrifood regime manifests itself in varied ways across the world, including in the rising spread of Chinese agricultural inputs in foreign markets. This article examines the character and dynamics of a Chinese seed company in Tajikistan, a country in which China's influence has grown substantially since the early 2010s. Focussing on Tajikistan's politicized cotton sector, I analyse the multiscalar and multiactor processes involved in the promotion of Chinese cotton seed and illuminate that Chinese seed breeders strategically tapped into Chinese state funds for their commercial seed business. However, Tajik actors as well as socio-economic, technical, and political factors have played a crucial role in mediating the Chinese presence and the commodification of seed. I contend that Tajik farmers' seed selection is not significantly influenced by, what could be called, grand politics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that, while the Chinese state plays a central role in the globalization of seed companies, the materialization of state capital has been shaped by private actors, who operate according to capitalist rationality.

Food systems—and the interplay between food production, marketisation and access—are constituent elements of the social reproduction of life. Using a social reproduction framework, this paper problematises the ontological, epistemological and methodological premises of food system studies in agrarian change. Based on primary data collected during multiple rounds of fieldwork in rural Uzbekistan and adopting mixed methods, it offers a triple contribution. First, it assesses the inequalities of food security and dietary diversity among different classes of farmers and agrarian wage workers. Along these lines, it argues that individualised food security indicators do not unveil the systemic determinants that explain unequal patterns of social reproduction through nutrition during processes of agrarian marketisation. To move beyond individual-based theorisations, it extends the investigation to state policies, market drivers and gender norms in relation to food knowledge, provision, affordability and availability. In so doing, it unpacks the contradictions that explain the uneven conditions of social reproduction of (and through) food. Finally, by investigating the modalities of access and availability of ultra-processed food in rural areas, it reflects on the tensions between the capitalist global food system and its interaction with the logics of state-led development to maintain the social reproduction of rural life.

This paper adopts a novel Social Reproduction feminist approach to re-evaluate the Soviet experience of industrialization within the context of global research on primitive accumulation. I analyse the first Five-Year Plan as a unique process of ‘primitive Soviet accumulation,’ focusing on the Zhenotdel collectivization campaign and the often-overlooked role of Zhenotdel peasant women delegates [krestyanki delegatki]. The study explores their involvement in peasant women's revolts against collectivization, emphasizing the significance of these events for the Zhenotdel's emancipatory programme in the village. Considering class as a social relation to the conditions of life's reproduction, I demonstrate: (1) how primitive Soviet accumulation reshaped the gendered metabolic relationship between land and labour during the first Five-Year Plan and (2) yet, the allocation of surplus into the expanded Soviet state apparatus laid the foundation for the distinctive Soviet mother–worker gender contract and social citizenship model.

The paper explores how beneficiaries of South Africa's land reform programme attempt to navigate the contradictory dynamics of production and social reproduction in collectively owned agricultural enterprises. The Mphuzanyoni Communal Property Association in KwaZulu-Natal province farms with commercial beef herds and the Mayime Cooperative in the Eastern Cape province is engaged in a joint venture dairy farming scheme in partnership with an agribusiness firm. Severe tensions are evident between the social reproduction of households and the requirements of simple or expanded reproduction of agricultural enterprises. Bernstein's concept of competing ‘funds’ is used to examine struggles over production and reproduction on the farms, in which members of socially differentiated households contest divergent visions for the collective enterprises. Conflicts centre on how labour and capital should be mobilised, how income and other benefits in kind should be distributed to households and whether or not income should be invested for purposes of simple or expanded reproduction of the enterprise. Challenges of governance are rooted in these conflicts rather than in group ownership as a form of property right.

This article elaborates the connections between women's roles in household and community social reproduction and their leadership in resistance against land dispossession. Drawing on interviews with women land activists in two rural provinces, situated in south and central Cambodia, it examines the beliefs and processes of meaning-making underpinning women's activism against state-sanctioned land acquisitions through an examination of the symbols, discourses and imaginaries of land, home and social reproductive labour that embed their struggles. It argues that rural women's resistance makes visible gendered moral economies—moored to agrarian social relations and shaped by the modalities of social reproduction—that legitimate contestation against state-sanctioned land dispossession.

The Covid-19 lockdown in India in March 2020 revealed the presence of Adivasi communities in the marine fishing industry of Goa, a coastal state in India. While the migration for work of Adivasi communities from the central regions of the country is well recorded, their movement across geographies of the forest and the coast is relatively unknown. Working with initial data collected during the lockdown, interviews conducted after the pandemic and using secondary materials, the paper sought to understand the social and material conditions in the forest and the coastal regions that shape this movement. Centring the waged relation of Adivasi workers opened the door to thinking about the marine fishing sector in India as a capitalist industry, while paying attention to social reproduction highlighted how the coastal and forest regions are spatially linked through their movement and labour. This highlights that the coasts and forests are going through distinct processes of capitalist intensification and expansion. Making connections between ecological appropriation, historical processes of resource extraction and marginalization, the paper finds that the extraction of fish resources in Goa is made productive through the hierarchization and differentiation of Adivasi workers. It reveals how the social relations of identity and caste mediate access to and define conditions of work at sea.

In the past few decades, there has been a renewed interest by feminist scholars in social reproduction. Global South scholars have argued that in agrarian societies of the global South that are marked by a high prevalence of surplus population, social reproduction is largely the responsibility of households, facilitated through unpaid gendered labour that is mostly performed by women. In this article, I draw from the Mhlopheni case of former labour tenants who were evicted and later re-claimed their land in South Africa to demonstrate the centrality of land in social reproduction. I argue that three processes are important and aid social reproduction: (i) land redistribution to the dispossessed, (ii) socially embedded tenure arrangements and (iii) unpaid gendered labour within households which is largely performed by women. These three processes reinforce each other. It is not just land that is crucial for social reproduction, but how that land is used, controlled, accessed and held, and the gendered labour required to turn resources into consumable goods that enable people to live. To support my argument, I draw on empirical evidence collected between 2020 and 2022 where I conducted 56 in-depth interviews, four focus group discussions and a survey of 32 households.

The paper underscores the need to reconsider the ontological separation between processes of production and reproduction in the context of agrarian-urban interlinkages. It synthesizes ‘value theory of inclusion’ with a notion of ‘unfair bargaining power’ to offer a new understanding of processes of agrarian change in the context of Pakistan. Expansion of the agrarian–urban frontier, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary agrarian change in Pakistan, constitutes a crucial yet undertheorized site of value extraction. The paper shows that contemporary processes of capital accumulation rely on the swift conversion of agricultural land into commercial real estate, manifested in the form of gated housing enclaves. This process, on the one hand, accelerates the devalourization of small-farm-based production, and on the other hand, it allows affluent residents of gated housing enclaves to extract gendered surplus labour in the form of domestic workers from the growing pool of ‘classes of labour’. In short, the expansion of agrarian–urban frontier is predicated on devalourization of agrarian livelihoods and exploitation of women's labour.

Much of the existing debate on social reproduction focuses on capitalist social relations or is framed around the distinction between the Global North and Global South. Using China, whose unique post-1949 developmental trajectory embraces both elements of socialism and capitalism, this article aims to breakdown the dichotomy between capitalism and other economic systems and instead draw attention to the ways in which households, the state and market are interdependent. Drawing upon an ethnography conducted in two rural villages and three-generational life history data, this article explores how the organization of reproductive work evolved in rural families against the backdrop of wider political and economic transformations since 1949. Through an examination of the inter-linkages between productive and reproductive activities across three generations, it reveals that unpaid reproductive work, performed unambiguously by women, has been central to China's economic modernization in both the Mao and Post-Mao eras. The organization of this reproductive work among women inside the households of each generation since 1949 is influenced by a combination of factors including the patrilocal and patrilineal kinship system, the social welfare context and the economic processes of a particular era. While confirming existing scholarship on migration and agrarian change, by revealing the household as a site of gendered and intergenerational negotiation, this article disputes a linear generational power shift in agrarian transformations.