Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

Green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments designed to finance environmentally sustainable activities, products, and assets, such as forest recovery, energy efficiency projects or conservation of water resources. This article analyses the green bond market related to Brazilian agribusiness, following statements of the main promoters of this segment highlighting the country as one with great potential to be ‘unlocked’ for green finance in the agricultural arena. In this vein, the article explores how the very possibility of issuing agribusiness-related green bonds in Brazil and its alleged potential are embedded in a longer trajectory of assetization of the country's agriculture, as well as in a recent coming together of agricultural financing and the capital market.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing has been internationally branded as a major threat to oceans. Frequently depicted as having profound societal impacts and operational synergies with other forms of criminal activities, which justify the need for a so-called global fight against IUU fishing to protect the marine commons and secure marine spaces. Whereas industrial fishing is the prime culprit, policy reforms are being promoted to regulate and formalise artisanal and traditional fishing practices. This raises questions on how enforcement and formalisation processes are translated into practice and shaped by economic interests within and beyond the oceans. In this intervention, we focus on the governance of IUU fishing in Colombia and anchor our critique into two acts—the act of criminalisation and the act of impunity—to uncover a theatre of enforcement at sea. We argue that the punitive approach to IUU fishing criminalises fisher peoples, whereas domestic, foreign and transnational capitalist actors continue to operate, depleting oceans and exploiting fish workers' labour with very limited control. We conclude by asserting that the fight against IUU fishing is in part a fight against precarious fish workers and fisher peoples, rather than against ‘ocean grabbers’, reflecting biased criminalisation processes with differentiated impacts at the intersections of class, gender and race.

The human penchant for luxury foods has spurred mass migration, dietary overhaul and environmental change in many places around the world. Desires for foods like sugar, bread, beef and packaged foods were also central to the success of the British Empire and were a key part of American hegemony in the 20th century, and prestigious foods continue to be an important part of capital accumulation and power today. In this paper, I explore how the social value of food underpins the pursuit of prestigious food consumption and how aspirations to consume specific luxury foods align with periods of capital accumulation. This paper is organized by the traditional food regime's temporal periods, and in it, I explore the historical evolution and adoption of prestigious foods, illustrating both the need for food regime scholarship to pay more attention to dietary aspirations and highlighting the persistent utility of this approach for revealing connections between ideology, class relations and power as they are manifested through food.

When coal mines expand across Central and Eastern India, agrarian groups typically object strongly to displacement. Meanwhile, and often in the immediate vicinity of the expanding mines, the previously displaced now working in the coal economy protest against mine closures. Additional millions are situated somewhere between attempts to protect agrarian livelihoods and keeping a coal job as their lives become increasingly conflated with, and dependent on, coal. In this article, we draw on long-term and recent engagements across two coal-producing states in India to reflect on difficult livelihood transitions to and away from coal mining among indigenous and caste Hindu groups. We focus on the enduring value of land for which there is no good substitute as means of social reproduction. When a mine inevitably closes, lacking skills and land holdings generate a downward spiral in enforced livelihood transitions towards insecure informality. This creates enduring tensions in the concept of ‘just transitions’ when applied to the Indian coal sector.

Incorporated into the global economy to provide the commodities for core capitalist countries, Indonesia experienced a variety of predominantly unfree labour regimes that connected local societies to global markets. These regimes varied from slavery, coerced labour imposed by colonial authorities, to extensive patterns of leverage employers hold over workers through advance payments. This paper gives an overview of different forms of exploitation pursued both by Dutch colonialism as well as local rulers from the 1600s onwards; it explores how these varied over time and place and how a major divergence of labour regimes happened in the 19th century wherein densely populated Java followed a different trajectory from other islands that were mostly thinly populated. In Java, plantation agriculture became embedded in local rural economies whereas production for the global market in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago led to an upsurge of slave-based production. Only in the 20th century did this bifurcated pattern of labour recruitment start to converge, wherein hundreds of thousands of Javanese migrant workers were recruited under indentured conditions. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates how these patterns have left their legacies in postcolonial times.

This study reevaluates the perceived decline of state involvement in agriculture and examines the contradictions of state intervention within neoliberal contexts through a commodity-specific analysis of tea production in Turkey. Based on fieldwork in Rize, which produces 65% of the country's tea and plays a central role in a nation with the highest per capita tea consumption globally, the study highlights the Turkish state's contradictory approach. This approach oscillates between aligning with the interests of capital and those of petty-commodity producers, often resulting in unsustainable outcomes and abrupt policy shifts shaped by the specificities of tea as a commodity, including its perishability, seasonality and low maintenance requirements. Labour strategies add another layer of contradiction, with the state actively facilitating migrant labour supply for harvesting when possible, while at other times turning a blind eye to irregular migration and informal labour markets controlled by brokers. This dual approach suppresses production costs and supports the continuity of smallholder tea cultivation, yet increasingly reinforces reliance on precarious and fragmented labour markets. The findings contribute to broader discussions on state involvement in agriculture, highlighting how policy, commodity traits and social class dynamics interact to shape sectoral outcomes.

This article shows how the reproductive work in the households of the semi-proletarianized Swedish group termed crofters (Sw: torpare) ensured subsistence for the crofters and increased capital accumulation for large landowners. Crofters lived under partly proletarianized, partly feudal conditions and their labour organization illuminates the proletarianization during the 19th century. Through two concepts from the field of Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, Alessandra Mezzadri's ‘value theory of inclusion’ and Nancy Fraser's ‘contradictions of care’, it is shown how the landowner externalized the costs of reproductive care work to be absorbed by the crofter households. This increased labour control, and the reproductive labour of the crofter household increased the value of the land for the landowner, allowing for capital accumulation. The analysis shows a process in which the crofter institution underwent a formal subsumption of labour, keeping the forms intact but increasingly contributing to capital accumulation through the organization of reproduction.

Many recent studies on Indonesia have underlined the importance of corporate capital, either private or state-owned, as the dominant actors in the countryside. This paper argues that in the different contexts of rurality in Indonesia, noncorporate capital, including capitalist farmers and landlord capitalists, functions as a prominent segment of the rural ruling class. The paper develops an understanding of these dominant actors by exploring internal differentiation among them. Different fractions within both capitalist farmers, including ‘typical capitalist farmers’, ‘politico-bureaucrat capitalist farmers’ and ‘professional capitalist farmers’, and landlord capitalists, including ‘present landlords’ and ‘absentee landlords’, shape the nature of their cooperation and competition and how they relate to other classes. The internal dynamics of the rural ruling class shape the organization of commodity production and class reproduction (accumulation) strategies in specific settings. Drawing on the processes of agrarian change in rural Java and Sumatra, this paper sheds light on the nature of the rural ruling class, an important segment of the current trajectories of capitalism in Indonesia. By doing so, it adds a new perspective on the broader power relations in the countryside.

In recent decades, the increasing international demand for shea nuts has resulted in changes to the livelihoods of women collecting and processing these nuts in West Africa. Market integration of shea nut collectors affects social dynamics as capitalist relations and significant income differences among the collectors emerge. Using survey data, we establish a typology to describe shea nut collectors, based on the financial capital that they invest in shea and their other sources of income. We show that a small group of collector-traders is able to benefit from the shea boom through the sale of shea nuts purchased from other collectors at a lower price. Conversely, a larger group of dedicated and diversified collectors are compelled to sell their nuts at a low price for their subsistence. This interdependence highlights capitalist relations, income gaps and social differentiation among the collectors. This process intersects with gendered access to ownership and income control. Our analysis challenges common assumptions about the potential of market integration to achieve win–win scenario and shows that unequal development is constitutive of such approaches. Despite the limited role of shea nut collection in household income, we argue that the social differentiation at play shares similarities with that observed for cash crops in other cases of agrarian change. We conclude by highlighting that shea nut collectors need to be perceived as a heterogeneous group, navigating the intricacies of capitalist market integration with different interests and opportunities.

The power of agro-food capital is frequently highlighted, but its internal dynamics are under-researched. This paper contributes to the understanding of agro-food capital in agrarian political economy through an analysis of milling and storage activities that intermediate grain production and consumption in South Africa. The paper shows that these activities can provide important sources of income and optionality supporting diverse accumulation strategies by a range of big business interests. Our analysis highlights that agro-food capital may not always be a coherent set of interests that is distinct from, and acts upon, other fractions of capital in the agrarian political economy. Instead, it may come to be a contested space, used to support differing accumulation strategies pursued by actors with varying interests. Such contestation may produce complex amalgamations of agricultural, industrial, financial and trading capital and contribute to variegation in trajectories of agrarian change.