Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage-point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change. Building on the contributions comprising this collection, we argue that the study of agrarian change through social reproduction enables us to de-invisibilise processes of life-making behind agrarian transformations in three distinct ways. First, the lens of social reproduction enables us to better grasp the regeneration of ‘classes of labour’ in rural areas; gender processes of de-agrarianisation and their implications for livelihoods; and centre reproductive labour within and beyond the household - across spaces and temporalities - as central to life in the countryside. Secondly, this lens also allows us to complicate the land question beyond productivist readings, explore its significance for life in rural settings, and multiply the agrarian questions of our times, whose histories and trajectories must grapple with debates on economic justice. Finally, the study of the social reproduction of agrarian change also provides us with a novel vantage point to read the formation and reorganisation of complex global geographies of the rural, their relation to crises of social reproduction and the ability to redraw the urban–rural divide. All contributions in this issue insightfully advance debates on methods in social reproduction analysis. The study of the agrarian lifeworlds analysed here also contributes significantly to social reproduction debates. It challenges rigid dichotomies between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’. It problematises the households as a unit of analysis and sets land as central to planetary debates on crises of social reproduction and their resolution.

In the Gang Canal region of Rajasthan, the cropping pattern changed from a labour intensive crop, cotton, to a mechanized crop, cluster beans. The shift in cropping pattern not only displaced workers from farm wage work but also brought changes in labour hiring contracts with large scale conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece-rate contracts. Drawing on a primary survey in a village from Gang Canal region, the paper examines the change in the agrarian relations in rural Rajasthan by analysing the emerging development in the rural labour relations. For piece-rate work in farm wage work in some parts of Rajasthan, the wage rate is unilaterally decided by the landlords and large capitalist farmers and is denoted as the ‘village rate’. The manual workers have negligible bargaining power vis-à-vis the village rate. The conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece-rate contracts has enhanced the duration of working day that involves a rise in the rate of surplus value. Access and availability of low wage labour facilitates the accumulation of capital. With the limited availability of employment in the non-farm sector (in both public and private sectors), workers are compelled to sell their labour power at wages that do not exceed the level of subsistence. The paper concludes with a brief examination of continuum of coercion and varied degree of unfreedom among worker in the village.

Wildlife invasion into farmlands is emerging as an acute problem in the Himalayas, threatening farm-based livelihood systems of smallholder rural communities. The problem is severe in the areas where successful forest restoration has been achieved by community forestry programmes alongside massive outmigration. Such evolving dynamics have created new conceptual and empirical discourses on conservation, nature-society relations and human-wildlife interactions, as some wild animals have become pests for farming communities. Consequently, the historical co-existence and relationships between subsistence communities and local ecosystems have been destabilized. By mobilizing the concepts of forest transition and agrarian transition, we explore these new and emerging relationships between the growing wildlife problem and deteriorating people's livelihood by examining the nature, extent and drivers of the new human-wildlife interactions and provide critical insights towards effectiveness of current policies and practical responses.

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.