Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This article investigates a counterintuitive occurrence whereby indigenous Toba women in Pandumaan and Sipituhuta, North Sumatra, Indonesia, retained significant grievances despite successfully challenging a landgrab in their community. Juxtaposing ethnography, labour time records and interviews with soil sampling, the article explains how continued soil depletion and river erosion following the failed land grab correlate with women's increased and undercompensated labour time. In addition to these postconflict ecological damages, women's increased labour burden also reflected patriarchal expectations for female labour to help rebuild the village economy. Together, these factors fuelled the women's postconflict grievances despite community success in recovering lost land. By focusing on the relationship between environmental change and gendered agrarian relations, the article concludes by emphasising the necessity of a socioecological remedy based upon a rehabilitative framework for the reparation for social and environmental problems that are often left unaddressed in the aftermath of land conflicts.

When, how and why does farming become capitalist? This question has long shaped debates in agrarian studies and economic history. Although traditional analyses emphasize market dependency and competitive pressures, this paper argues for a shift in focus towards the diverse strategies of reproduction that farmers have employed in different historical contexts. Rather than searching for common capitalist behaviours, we should examine what made farmers different as they transitioned to capitalism. This approach is illustrated through the case of Denmark, where farmers from the late 19th century pioneered a unique strategy of cooperative organization to transition into capitalist agriculture. We introduce the concept of ‘organizational accumulation’ to describe this process, in which cooperative networks enabled farmers to strongly influence key aspects of production, processing and trade. By foregrounding organizational accumulation, this paper offers a new perspective on how capitalist farming emerges—and how its trajectories vary across time and place.

If we heed the calls of fisher movements, coastal communities and environmentalists worldwide a striking picture emerges: the ocean is being claimed, carved up and commodified at an unprecedented scale. This symposium, comprising four contributions and an introductory essay, debates this ongoing capitalist capture of the oceans in the Blue Economy era, tracing historical legacies, legal architectures, geopolitical motives and underlying class dynamics that animate the broader phenomenon of ocean grabbing. While the ‘blue hype’ of the past decade has framed ocean grabbing as a novel phenomenon, the introduction sets the stage by challenging such anachronisms, situating contemporary enclosures within a long history of maritime territorialisation and resource appropriation. Drawing on agrarian political economy, it foregrounds how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has not only enabled but institutionalised ocean grabs, folding vast marine spaces into global circuits of capital accumulation. The four contributions that follow unpack these and related dynamics across different geographies and themes, including distant-water fishing, militarised law enforcement and the entwinement of conservation and extraction. They reveal how capitalist expansion at sea advances not only through brute dispossession. More often it occurs via subtle legal innovation, ecological narratives, piecemeal technocratic reconfigurations of territorial control and class differentiation across geographical scales. By re-examining the evolution and distinctiveness of oceanic relations of property and production, the symposium offers fresh insight into the shifting balances of capital and power in the governance of the global ocean and arising opportunities for resistance.

Small-scale fisheries constitute a vital source of food for millions of people, despite facing increasing marginalisation. Food sovereignty is a global social movement that calls attention to the marginalisation of small-scale food producers in capitalist, corporate-controlled food systems. This paper develops a food sovereign approach to understanding issues affecting small-scale fisheries' aquatic food systems. Using qualitative empirical data, it focuses on women post-harvest workers and the industrial trawling sector in Ghana. Industrial trawling has engendered marine degradation through overfishing, causing a reliance on buying imported and trawler-caught fish, due to a lack of accessible and affordable fish from the small-scale sector. The adverse ecological consequences of marine capitalist overexploitation are a key driver in creating the cyclical conditions for capitalist market dependency in Ghanaian fisheries. Examining how marine capitalist overexploitation propels market dependency can help illuminate the complexities of moving towards aquatic food sovereignty in the contemporary world.

The Jevons paradox describes how increased efficiency in the use of a resource can paradoxically increase rather than reduce its overall consumption. In agricultural systems, efficiency is confounded by a broad range of economic, ecological, social and evolutionary factors. Agriculture is a particularly elastic kind of production: Efficiencies in one input can lead to an increased consumption of other inputs as well as changes to system outputs. Furthermore, policy, market forces and farmer decisions shape the cultural notion of efficiency across the agricultural landscape. This paper expands the Jevons paradox to consider not just how increased efficiencies induce greater resource consumption in other parts of agrarian systems but also how that consumption entrenches capitalist monoculture. Genetically modified (GM) crops are a technology with the theoretical potential to make agriculture more efficient as a function of yield per input (e.g., water, fuel, fertilizer and pesticide) or unit of land. Like other technological efficiencies, however, the increased use of GM crops over the past 30 years has not contributed to input reductions nor to land reclamations, but to the expansion of agricultural land and increased use of the very pesticides these technologies are purported to curtail. Here, we present a global analysis of Herbicide Tolerant crops and an empirical case study from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton in India. In lowering the costs for pesticide applications at the farm level, GM crops not only induce greater overall consumption of those pesticides but also help to sustain this larger system of chemical-intensive monoculture.

The many changes in the rural agrarian landscape are expected to transform gender roles in agriculture in developing countries. Our interest is in examining the relation between gender and agricultural decision-making in India, where there is limited research despite agriculture's primacy for rural livelihoods. Drawing on unique data from Karnataka, India, we examine how agricultural decision-making roles vary by sex and whether our understanding is shaped by who responds to these questions. Our results suggest that decision-making is perceived differentially by men and women. Even when women perceive they have a voice in decisions, their spouse does not necessarily endorse it. Men consider themselves sole decision-makers, while women report joint decision-making with their spouses. Further, women's economic resources are associated with their decision-making roles. When women's decision-making roles are recognized, agricultural policies and interventions can be designed to include women, address their constraints and enhance their capabilities.

Amidst processes of (uneven) dispossession and displacement of coastal populations—often termed ‘ocean grabbing’—scholar-activists, NGOs and the leadership of different social movements invoke, so-called, ‘fisher people’ as the political subjects of resistance. These ‘fisher people’ are often cast as capital's other as part of a normative and moral critique of ocean grabbing and purportedly the agents of change towards ‘blue justice’. Arguing for the importance of analytically differentiating within and between both classes of capital and classes of labour, this intervention draws on a seemingly clear-cut case of violent ocean grabbing in Southern Myanmar to question prevalent assumptions around undifferentiated ‘fisher peoples’. The intervention argues that the literatures on ocean grabbing and blue (in)justice could usefully draw from the conceptual tools of Marxist agrarian political economy to better analyse concrete social relations of production and reproduction.

China is the home of the world's largest distant water fishing (DWF) fleet. Narratives of its expansion portray China as a voracious consumer of ocean resources, as a serial abuser of labour and as aggressively expanding into developing country waters in an ‘extractivist’ drive that destroys small scale fishers' livelihoods. Yet, what does taking a historical and relational view tell us about China's activities vis-à-vis other DWF nations? Is the relationship with coastal states an example of ‘neocolonialism’ or, as the Chinese party-state insists, ‘mutual benefit’? And should one read China's DWF fleet as a tool of ‘grand strategy’ directed from Beijing or as rational profit-seeking individual firms, opportunistically driven into new frontiers by the exhaustion of domestic resources? This article seeks to navigate these binaries to argue that China's DWF fleet is the most recent example in a long history of pelagic imperialism by advanced capitalist fishing interests, where fish are a raw material in a wider generative industrial strategy and fishing activity is a tool in geopolitics. It is argued that China's DWF fleet is best understood as a relatively coherent cluster of capitals-in-competition, set in a mosaic of variegated state-capital relations, in tension at different relational scales. The article also offers suggestions for future research on DWF industries.

This article explores the generational reproduction of farming and agrarian relations in the Indonesian islands of Java and Flores. Concentrating mainly on women and men who have managed, or are trying, to establish farming livelihoods, we ask how, why and when do young rural people find—or fail to find—pathways into farming? And in today's increasingly diversified rural contexts, how far do land transmission processes between the generations continue to influence the positioning of the new generation? Our case studies provide an empirical counter to dominant policy framings that locate the rural youth ‘problem’ in young people's deficient mentalities, knowledge and skills, and assume that young farmers stay in the village after leaving school, start farming immediately and by their early 20s become full-time farmers. Our study points to the structural exclusion of young people from access to land; to the fact that most will not become farmers immediately after leaving school, and that when they do get access to farmland, they typically become part-time farmers, combining agricultural and nonfarm activities. While rural class positions and structures are certainly multidimensional, land and agrarian relations still appear as strong bases for the positioning of the new generation.

Land markets are an increasingly significant byproduct of industrialisation in neoliberal India, but accumulation possibilities for rural classes through speculation are uneven. Trajectories through rents are determined not just by the social relations in impacted villages but crucially by the historically determined dynamics of the wider regional economy. This article examines the patterns of differentiation following two decades of land dispossession for industrial infrastructure development in a peripheralised region of western India. The combination of production and circulation through land markets here enables accumulation that is petty (in size) and ‘provincial’ (in terms of linkages and spatial expanse) for surplus-generating capitalist farmers. Overall patterns of accumulation through rents show a fettering of agrarian capital within the rural, the explanation for which lies in the specificities of capitalist development of the wider region, which constrain expanded reproduction through urban sites. Dispossession for manufacturing hubs and the more dispersed industrial infrastructure in the neoliberal era not only increases rural inequalities but does little to ameliorate regional disparities.