Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

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.

In many agrarian societies, women come to own land, and people secure care in old age through land inheritance. The social norms guiding inheritance shape gendered, generational and class-based relations of power in rural areas, and intra-family land rights can be lost when inheritance norms shift. In Cambodia's northeastern Ratanakiri province, rapid agrarian change over the past decade—including the expansion of land grabs, cash cropping and Khmer in-migration—is transforming decision-making around inheritance. Based on a large sample of qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 2016 and 2020 with Indigenous and Khmer communities, we focus on the ways in which intergenerational and gendered obligations of care are being reconfigured as land scarcity and inequalities within rural areas become more pronounced. We argue that social norms around land inheritance are in flux, with a proliferation of diverse practices emerging including a shift from matrilineal to bilateral inheritance amongst some Indigenous families, the deferment of marriage and inheritance decisions due to a lack of land and parents taking on debt to buy land and secure care in older age. These changes are reconfiguring gendered and generational identities in relation to land and have potentially negative consequences for land-poor families, in particular, for poor Indigenous women. These changes are symptoms of a larger ‘crisis of care’ in rural communities.

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, this article analyses the gendered economy of debt among Syrian farmworkers in shawish camps, which have for decades supplied the largest and lowest paid seasonal labour force within Lebanon's food system. In turn, it traces how debt relations in these camps expanded as hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought long-term refuge in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria (2011 to present). Revisiting classic and contemporary agrarian questions of debt from a feminist social reproduction perspective, the article charts how this debt system ultimately deepened the burdens of feminized work in the fields and in the home. Emblematic of debt's ‘reproductive binds’, these camps offer broader insights into how debt reconfigures gendered and generational divisions of labour within displaced agricultural families—and how these conditions are negotiated, contested and reproduced in daily life.

The frontier of colonial Queensland was pushed northward through the second half of the 19th century by proliferating sugar plantations. The cultivation of sugar cane for these plantations rested predominantly on the shoulders of unfree, racialized Pacific Islander workers. This history reveals dialectics of cheap lives and land, as nature was produced for exchange at the commodity frontier, unfolding in crises of disease, death and exhaustion. In exploring the story of this frontier, an opportunity emerges to begin a conversation between a recent return to materialism within Australian historiography and the traditions of eco-Marxism and Black radicalism. The contention here is that this engagement represents both ‘urgent history’ and ‘truth-telling’, as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene.