Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

Recent years have seen a sharp uptick in efforts to expedite resource extraction in, and expand biodiversity conservation to, Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), the ~70% of oceans outside state space. In this symposium piece, we explore the co-constitution of the parallel acceleration of biodiversity conservation and economic exploitation that is unfolding in ways unique to the high seas, but consistent with global patterns wherein this coupling encloses space for capitalist value extraction. These coupled tendencies are part of expanded ocean regulation and, in ABNJ, they form part of state-capital advancement into one of the remaining world frontiers. We explore this extraction-conservation nexus in two contemporary ABNJ negotiations: 1) the Implementing Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction and 2) the International Seabed Authority's development of an exploitation regime for deep-seabed mining in the Area. Our findings build on insights from agrarian political economy and political ecology that establish the co-constitution – rather than incommensurability – of conservation and extractive activities in terrestrial spaces and draw out the arenas of this nexus in the ecologically complex, political-economic grey zone that is the uninhabited (by humans), non-state space of the planet. This work contributes to placing the high seas and the emergent blue economy within the critical scholarship that describes and explores the conservation-extraction nexus and its consequences.

Turkey's Community Development Program (CDP), implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, has remained a largely underexplored subject in the global history of rural community development schemes. Based on detailed archival research, this article shows that the programme's central goal was to mobilize the labour and financial resources of the villagers to carry out rapid infrastructure construction. Turkish policymakers hoped that such mobilization could help achieve a high level of rural development far beyond what could be achieved by relying solely on government spending and might also allow the allocation of more resources to urban industrialization. Despite its initial promise, the CDP was unable to effectively mobilize the countryside due to a combination of structural, political, and bureaucratic challenges, including unequal land distribution, intense electoral competition, and inadequate administrative coordination. However, the CDP was not entirely inconsequential. It played a modest role in the commercialization and capitalist transformation of Turkish agriculture.

This article studies the connections between lessor landowners, land grabbing and land financialization in contemporary capital accumulation. Drawing upon extensive empirical research conducted in Uruguay, which combined database analysis and in-depth interviews, the paper provides key insights to understand why land leasing has become a central strategy of ground rent appropriation among different types of landowners at the beginning of the 21st century. Our main results show that the leasing strategy is a combination of tenant-capitalists' expansion, social differentiation and demographic processes of the small landowning capitals displaced from production that rent out their lands, the process of land financialization through large institutional investors, which deploy a land banking strategy, and the optimization of land exploitation among landowner-capitalists. Moreover, our results highlight the importance of prioritising the study of landowners as a class in itself and the different forms of ground rent appropriation.

Agribusiness expansion is usually framed around two competing narratives. On the one hand, advocates present it as a promising vehicle to modernise agriculture and integrate small farmers into global value chains. On the other hand, critics denounce it as a top-down corporate assault to monopolise agriculture and dispossess peasants of land. Despite their differences, these contrasting narratives tend to share a reductionistic capital-centric bias as they are mainly focused on the alleged benefits/dangers of the ‘arrival’ of agribusiness corporate capital. Although simplistic, these narratives have been politically effective in shaping the public debate and thus should be exposed to critical challenge. Drawing on my ethnographic research in eastern lowland Bolivia, I show how both narratives fail to capture the complexity of an actually existing agribusiness structure. My grounded analysis of the process of agrarian change focuses on the changing labour dynamics among campesinos who have striven to become prosperous soy producers. Faced with bleak prospects and structural insecurity, they have been articulating a political practice around the notion of precarity. I argue that this emerging politics from below deserves more attention as an important terrain of political struggles of classes of labour.

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war have demonstrated that the neoliberal system is unstable during global crises. In times of crisis, exporter countries adopt protectionist policies in the form of export restrictions to safeguard their local food supply and curb inflation. Consequently, low-income countries might find themselves unable to access essential food products. In this regard, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war has gradually increased export restrictions, causing severe food supply disruptions. In particular, import-dependent countries cannot access essential food products and face famine. To this point, this study explores the vulnerabilities of neoliberalism when exporter countries turn to protectionism. Moreover, it asks whether food sovereignty and self-sufficiency could act as a safeguard for import-dependent states against such vulnerabilities. In doing so, the study aims to contribute to the literature by linking protectionism with export restrictions, diverging from the more common association of protectionism with solely import restrictions.

Martinez Salinas, J.A. (2024), Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia's oil palm zone. By Tania Murray Li, Pujo Semedi, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2021. pp. 256. $26.95 (pb); $102.95 (hb). ISBN: 9781478014959, 9781478013990. J Agrar Change, 24: e12575. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12575

In this article, the surname of one of the authors of the reviewed book is repeatedly misspelt. Instead of ‘Semejo’, it should read ‘Semedi’ in all instances.

We apologize for this error.

Renowned agrarian scholar-activists Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco wrote the book Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles to identify the ‘modest but significant’ (p. 12) role of agrarian scholar-activists in struggles for agrarian justice. While the authors do not provide a bullet-point action plan on what to do, and rightfully so, they aim to provoke the thoughts and actions of agrarian scholar-activists by directing them towards the contradictions, tensions and challenges that arise during the practice of scholar-activism amidst the neoliberal policy architecture that dictates today's politics of agriculture, research and education. The book is divided into four chapters, which provide the reader with an understanding of competing views on agrarian politics in general and land politics in particular. It mainly discusses how ‘scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails’ (p. 1). It engages with the potential role of scholar-activists in shaping future political and research agendas to attain agrarian and social justice.

The struggle for access to land is at the heart of struggles for agrarian justice and, by extension, social justice. Therefore, the book locates land struggles within the broader narrative of rural agrarian transformations, which hold the key to understanding how power structures form and change over time, shaping historical and social relations around land. It discusses how the contemporary global land rush is accelerating the pace of land grabbing in diverse forms. It includes attacks not only on agricultural lands but also on indigenous community lands and rural non-agricultural spaces, urban agriculture and urban non-agriculture lands required for economic production and social reproduction in the north and south, which are not commonly discussed in agrarian politics. In most cases, the state acts as a broker and exerts extra-economic coercion to facilitate capital accumulation processes in the name of development. Land grabbing is also legitimized through the purchase and sale of land through markets under the pretexts of productivity and economic efficiency. Given the diverse mechanisms of land grabbing, the face and form of the land grabbers or the key reactionary classes also extend beyond the landlords or agribusiness plantation owners to individual land buyers, land mafias and domestic and transnational corporate land grabbers. Borras and Franco emphasize that there is an urgent need to interpret the changing social dynamics with existing and new analytical tools and change the course of these dynamics to create a ‘more just, fairer, and kinder world’ (p. 1). This requires agrarian scholar-activists to take an unapologetic and explicit bias towards the oppressed classes and social groups ‘embedded in class and co-constitut

In Harvest for the World, Graze for the Region: A History of Globalization in the Montes de María (1850-1914) (my translation), Santiago Colmenares explores a fascinating Colombian counterpoint of tobacco and cattle in a low-lying chain of mountains that bisects the country's Caribbean plains. The book is a major contribution to the agrarian history of this region. For a long time, the history of Colombian tobacco production focused on Ambalema, in the centre of the country (Harrison, 1952; Ocampo, 1984). It was from here that tobacco exports, freed from state monopoly in the late 1840s, reconnected Colombia with an expanding North Atlantic economy and fanned the flames of liberalism. For all the importance of Ambalema, however, the Montes de María produced more tobacco over a longer period. Building on the work of Viloria (1999) and Blanco (2011), Colmenares examines the production and commercialization of tobacco in this region with empirical rigour and theoretical sophistication. Two sets of literature frame his study: the classic agrarian question regarding the resilience of the peasantry and the interest of the new economic history in quantitative studies and income distribution. By highlighting the importance of credit rather than just land, processes of social differentiation and locating the expansion of ranching within an economic-cum-ecological crisis, Colmenares enriches our understanding of commodity production and inequality in Colombia's Caribbean region.

Cosechar para el mundo, pastar para la region has five chapters plus an introduction and a short conclusion. Specialists in Latin American agrarian history will find Chapters Two through Five, which tackle the subjects of credit, the social relations of production, the distribution of income along the tobacco commodity chain and the expansion of ranching, of particular interest. I will address the findings of these chapters below. The first chapter, which situates the tobacco zone of the Montes de María within a global context, has a broader appeal.

Colmenares' global perspective is innovative, for few if any agrarian histories of Colombia seriously attempt to look beyond the borders of the nation. However, his approach is rooted more in comparative than global history. There were four main producers of medium- to low-quality, dark leaf tobacco for the German market, where it was used to produce cheap cigars: the Montes de María and Ambalema (Colombia), Cibao (Dominican Republic) and Recôncavo (northeastern Brazil). While a relatively independent peasantry cultivated tobacco in the Montes de María and Cibao, in Ambalema it was grown by sharecroppers. In Recôncavo, marginal sugar estates ceded terrain to a growing landowning peasantry. By comparing these regions, Colmenares demonstrates that tobacco exports could occur under a variety of conditions. Nonetheless, tobacco cultivation was most onerous for