Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

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.

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.