Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This paper highlights the relevance of Marxian class analysis to understand the changing nature of agrarian classes under capital-intensive agriculture. It is a methodological exercise that builds on Patnaik's labour exploitation index (E-criterion) in three major respects to construct a new index, namely, the Modified Labour Exploitation Index (MEI), to differentiate peasant classes. First and most important, it incorporates the role of mechanisation, which, so far, has been ignored in the methodological attempts to differentiate within the peasantry. Second, it underscores the importance of non-agricultural (and non-rural) bases of simple reproduction in the countryside by incorporating hired-out labour by agricultural households to the non-agricultural sector into the classification criteria. Finally, it makes surplus labour exploited through land leasing empirically testable by using Marx's differential and absolute rent to differentiate between subsistence and commercial leasing. The new index is then empirically tested using primary data collected from rural Haryana, India. The paper argues that MEI is an effective criterion for understanding changing class dynamics, the shifting modes of the livelihood of the poor peasantry and the largely hidden accumulation processes in agrarian societies.

The energy-dense part of the neoliberal diet and obesity made for an explosive combination upon the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy-dense foods lie at the root of comorbidities associated with complications of the COVID-19 pandemic: overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so forth. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated the causal impact of overweight and obesity on more severe or lethal infections. Focusing on the case of Mexico, I will show that inequality strongly conditions what people can eat, so the issue is not simply a matter of personal choice or responsibility. My argument is twofold: (1) Mexico enjoyed its own ‘traditional’ diets through the mid-1980s, which included widely accessible fruits and vegetables. But (2) the neoliberal turn in the form of trade liberalization and deepening inequality caused a substantial reshaping of the diet in favour of energy-dense foods with lower nutritional value. The energy-dense segment of ‘the neoliberal diet’ has turned a large portion of Mexicans into a vulnerable population. But this is a class-differentiated diet with its healthy and nutritious components increasingly less accessible to the working classes. Recovering healthy diets in Mexico will require the recuperation of food sovereignty through the regeneration of its countryside and its peasantry. Agroecological methods of food production will also be needed to alleviate the climate change emergency.

This paper studies the connections between the expansion of mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing and agrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of commodity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from mining through speculative land deals with mining companies. They act as ‘land brokers’ for the mining firms, helping them to overcome a significant barrier to land accumulation through the de facto abolition of landed property. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion of coal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. To develop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and historical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative land dispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed for studying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participation in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms applied to (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded that with high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels, the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a process of agrarian change through land speculation that is articulated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re-strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolution of peasant agriculture.

This paper investigates the dynamics of neoliberal agrarian restructuring within the Turkish sugar industry, focusing on the 2018 privatization of the Alpullu Sugar Factory. The analysis examines the transformative impact of market dependence and land commodification on relationship of farmers with the agricultural sector. Specifically, it focuses on two significant neoliberal shifts that have altered the dynamics of farming. First, the withdrawal of state support in agricultural markets prompted farmers to diversify their income streams, leading to a transition from sugar beet cultivation to alternative crops and contemplation of urban migration. Second, in the 2000s, farmers, grappling with declining agricultural revenues, increasingly relied on private bank credits as a means of financial security. This shift was propelled by changes in agricultural policy regulations and the dissolution of state-sponsored credit systems. Employing a blend of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this study elucidated these complex transformations and their profound impact on agrarian livelihoods, land ownership shifts, production strategies and market relationships. The research revealed the complex interplay of social, economic and historical dynamics steering the trajectory of the Turkish sugar industry, providing valuable insights into neoliberal restructuring.

Across the globe, the expansion of large-scale commodity agriculture is occurring not into empty space but over existing social systems. An understanding of the dynamics of expansion and associated impacts of commodity agriculture thus fundamentally requires examining how existing control regimes are dissolved and, simultaneously, how novel ones are assembled in order to make way for the changes in resources use that characterize these transitional moments. With this in mind, in this article, I provide a broad review of the strategies used to secure control over land prospected for agricultural commodity production, distinguishing between the tactics that are applied by agro-interested actors in order to ‘break down’ forms of existing land control, those they apply in parallel to ‘build up’ new control structures, and those strategies that are applied by actors (often smallholders) wishing to ‘hold on to’ the control that they have. I then present a framework for examining the dynamics of control transfer that builds on this analytical structure of ‘breaking down’, ‘building up’, and ‘holding on to’ control.

Collective land titling often drags on for decades, while private land concessions and holdings do not face the same problem, creating ‘leftovers’ of land available for Indigenous peoples to attempt to collectively title. In two ethnographic case studies in Cambodia and Paraguay, we analyse community-based Indigenous land titling by focusing on the on-the-ground dynamics of property relations, Indigenous livelihood shifts and ecological change. In both countries, large agricultural players implemented a staggering change in local landscapes through deforestation, configuring new realities that in turn feed into local environments and titling processes. Adapting their livelihoods to living in the leftovers, in Cambodia, the Indigenous Bunong shifted from rice to rubber as they navigated the slow titling process. In Paraguay, some Indigenous Guarani shifted from corn to cattle by renting out their collectively titled land. The case studies show that the liberal titling approach to secure Indigenous lands overestimates the ability of title to remove land from capitalist logics such as the push to rent or sell, while some spaces of autonomy are opened. We critique the liberal approaches to formalising title, where Indigenous struggles for their ways of life are funnelled into fighting for collective property.

Considering the global restructuring affecting agrarian landscapes, we build on the concept of autonomy proposed by van der Ploeg and colleagues (but extended and critically complemented) to analyse how family farmers can build this autonomy to face rural capitalist tendencies and maintain their activities and identity. We offer insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Andes, the BioVida organization that is linked to agroecological and social and solidarity economy movements. Our findings show that family farming autonomy is not being achieved homogeneously for the whole household but must be analysed through an intersectional approach. Furthermore, there are simultaneous processes to achieve different degrees of autonomy and (inter-)dependency, which are co-constitutive along gender and age lines and are conditioned by structural constraints. Therefore, for our case study area, agribusiness and family farming processes and spaces seem to operate co-constitutively rather than antagonistically in practical terms. Agroecology-based achievements so far act as a localized buffer against adversity rather than an emancipative territorial project of autonomy.

From systemically dispossessing Indigenous people of their territory for Euro-American settlement to routinely denying African American farmers operating loans in the 20th century, the US government's complicity in creating racial hierarchies in terms of land access is well documented. Less understood is how land policies oriented towards racial equity, namely, the Justice for Black Farmers Act (JBFA), and other initiatives that deal with land access as well as addressing racism more broadly, emerged during recent decades. In this article, we argue that such initiatives resulted from Black-led organizations and other farmer advocacy allies responding to neoliberal policy reforms. Concretely, even as these reforms destabilized farm economies, they also led to a decentralization of agricultural policy administration, which, in turn, created opportunities for community-based organizations to influence land governance. We make this argument after presenting a three-part periodization of the evolution of US land policy, starting with the emergence of racial hierarchies, then the period of partial reforms that began during the New Deal and, finally, the era of neoliberal reform.

This article analyses an initiative in 2017 to update and digitise textual land records in Telangana, a south Indian state. Its premise is that experiments to modernise land records have not met with pre-determined standards of success due, primarily, to the historically evolved contradictions around land as a resource and a commodity. In countries like India, the colonial policies on land and the post-colonial success of landlords to manipulate land records had already left the post-War task of ensuring conclusive land titles intractable. In more recent times, however, the agenda of land records modernisation has been absorbed by neoliberalism, which aims to create free land markets and replace traditional subsidies with direct cash transfers. This article shows that, consequently, the task of land records modernisation in Telangana became disembedded from agendas of agrarian egalitarianism and was rendered more complex—historical errors and exclusions were reproduced in new ways; technocratic solutions of the bureaucracy made governmental processes opaque; landed sections continued to subvert implementation; tenants were excluded from the land titles; and there were fears that the scheme would be misused to ease corporate land acquisition. Land records modernisation remains important for agrarian reform, but its success remains contingent on a greater appreciation among policymakers for the historical and political economy aspects of land ownership and possession.

In recent decades, agrarian transformations in Southeast Asia have resulted in significant environmental and social change, yet insufficient attention has focused on the particular pathways by which these changes have increased vulnerability to climate change. In particular, climate precarity, a situation in which class, social, labour and/or gender inequities amplify negative impacts from climate change, has been on the rise for many smallholders. Using case studies in Vietnam of changes to swidden agriculture in upland areas and the loss of deepwater rice systems in the Mekong Delta lowlands, the paper examines social differentiation and ecological outcomes of these processes and how they have increased climate precarity, particularly for poor households and women. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in affected regions, we identify key changes contributing to climate precarity as farming systems intensify. In particular, loss of flexibility in farmer decision-making, loss of voluntary engagement with markets, and declining access to social capital and entitlements have increased risks for households and reduced adaptation options. Suggestions are made to more directly address these elements in future agricultural and climate policies, rather than current approaches to climate adaptation that often promote even more intensification of agriculture, which runs the risk of exacerbating precarity.