Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

Inspired by the work of Carmen Diana Deere, this paper examines how an analysis of the work of rural production, even when gendered, is compromised if it does not incorporate reproductive labour. The paper presents estimates of the gender yield gap in agricultural crop productivity in Tanzania, along with the statistical causes of the gender yield gap, in order to demonstrate what is and why it matters. The paper then shows that the gender yield gap cannot be understood without interrogating how the reproductive labour of unpaid care and domestic work limits the time for productive activities available to women who have day-to-day decision-making managerial control over plots of land. In this light, the paper suggests a way of rethinking the basic analytical frameworks of agrarian political economy in ways that are consistent with and incorporate the theoretical insights of Carmen Diana Deere. The implications of the analysis are stark: it should not be assumed that all members of an agrarian household share an identical class location, as remains far too often the default assumption in agrarian political economy.

In the past few decades, there has been a renewed interest by feminist scholars in social reproduction. Global South scholars have argued that in agrarian societies of the global South that are marked by a high prevalence of surplus population, social reproduction is largely the responsibility of households, facilitated through unpaid gendered labour that is mostly performed by women. In this article, I draw from the Mhlopheni case of former labour tenants who were evicted and later re-claimed their land in South Africa to demonstrate the centrality of land in social reproduction. I argue that three processes are important and aid social reproduction: (i) land redistribution to the dispossessed, (ii) socially embedded tenure arrangements and (iii) unpaid gendered labour within households which is largely performed by women. These three processes reinforce each other. It is not just land that is crucial for social reproduction, but how that land is used, controlled, accessed and held, and the gendered labour required to turn resources into consumable goods that enable people to live. To support my argument, I draw on empirical evidence collected between 2020 and 2022 where I conducted 56 in-depth interviews, four focus group discussions and a survey of 32 households.

The paper underscores the need to reconsider the ontological separation between processes of production and reproduction in the context of agrarian-urban interlinkages. It synthesizes ‘value theory of inclusion’ with a notion of ‘unfair bargaining power’ to offer a new understanding of processes of agrarian change in the context of Pakistan. Expansion of the agrarian–urban frontier, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary agrarian change in Pakistan, constitutes a crucial yet undertheorized site of value extraction. The paper shows that contemporary processes of capital accumulation rely on the swift conversion of agricultural land into commercial real estate, manifested in the form of gated housing enclaves. This process, on the one hand, accelerates the devalourization of small-farm-based production, and on the other hand, it allows affluent residents of gated housing enclaves to extract gendered surplus labour in the form of domestic workers from the growing pool of ‘classes of labour’. In short, the expansion of agrarian–urban frontier is predicated on devalourization of agrarian livelihoods and exploitation of women's labour.

Much of the existing debate on social reproduction focuses on capitalist social relations or is framed around the distinction between the Global North and Global South. Using China, whose unique post-1949 developmental trajectory embraces both elements of socialism and capitalism, this article aims to breakdown the dichotomy between capitalism and other economic systems and instead draw attention to the ways in which households, the state and market are interdependent. Drawing upon an ethnography conducted in two rural villages and three-generational life history data, this article explores how the organization of reproductive work evolved in rural families against the backdrop of wider political and economic transformations since 1949. Through an examination of the inter-linkages between productive and reproductive activities across three generations, it reveals that unpaid reproductive work, performed unambiguously by women, has been central to China's economic modernization in both the Mao and Post-Mao eras. The organization of this reproductive work among women inside the households of each generation since 1949 is influenced by a combination of factors including the patrilocal and patrilineal kinship system, the social welfare context and the economic processes of a particular era. While confirming existing scholarship on migration and agrarian change, by revealing the household as a site of gendered and intergenerational negotiation, this article disputes a linear generational power shift in agrarian transformations.

In many agrarian societies, women come to own land, and people secure care in old age through land inheritance. The social norms guiding inheritance shape gendered, generational and class-based relations of power in rural areas, and intra-family land rights can be lost when inheritance norms shift. In Cambodia's northeastern Ratanakiri province, rapid agrarian change over the past decade—including the expansion of land grabs, cash cropping and Khmer in-migration—is transforming decision-making around inheritance. Based on a large sample of qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 2016 and 2020 with Indigenous and Khmer communities, we focus on the ways in which intergenerational and gendered obligations of care are being reconfigured as land scarcity and inequalities within rural areas become more pronounced. We argue that social norms around land inheritance are in flux, with a proliferation of diverse practices emerging including a shift from matrilineal to bilateral inheritance amongst some Indigenous families, the deferment of marriage and inheritance decisions due to a lack of land and parents taking on debt to buy land and secure care in older age. These changes are reconfiguring gendered and generational identities in relation to land and have potentially negative consequences for land-poor families, in particular, for poor Indigenous women. These changes are symptoms of a larger ‘crisis of care’ in rural communities.

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, this article analyses the gendered economy of debt among Syrian farmworkers in shawish camps, which have for decades supplied the largest and lowest paid seasonal labour force within Lebanon's food system. In turn, it traces how debt relations in these camps expanded as hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought long-term refuge in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria (2011 to present). Revisiting classic and contemporary agrarian questions of debt from a feminist social reproduction perspective, the article charts how this debt system ultimately deepened the burdens of feminized work in the fields and in the home. Emblematic of debt's ‘reproductive binds’, these camps offer broader insights into how debt reconfigures gendered and generational divisions of labour within displaced agricultural families—and how these conditions are negotiated, contested and reproduced in daily life.

The frontier of colonial Queensland was pushed northward through the second half of the 19th century by proliferating sugar plantations. The cultivation of sugar cane for these plantations rested predominantly on the shoulders of unfree, racialized Pacific Islander workers. This history reveals dialectics of cheap lives and land, as nature was produced for exchange at the commodity frontier, unfolding in crises of disease, death and exhaustion. In exploring the story of this frontier, an opportunity emerges to begin a conversation between a recent return to materialism within Australian historiography and the traditions of eco-Marxism and Black radicalism. The contention here is that this engagement represents both ‘urgent history’ and ‘truth-telling’, as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene.

This timely book by Tania Li and Pujo Semedi offers a grounded account of how the operation of plantations transforms space. Plantation Life focuses on the transformations enacted by corporations owning and running those plantations and the ‘social, economic, and political relations that plantation corporations set in place […] and […] the forms of life they generate’ (p. 3). The authors present the life of workers and communities in the Natco and Priva oil palm plantations, the former state-owned and the latter privately owned. This detailed approach to ‘plantation life’ conceptualizes the presence of corporations in the form of occupation and shows how such occupation creates certain forms of abandonment. The authors deploy a rich ethnographic and historical approach to place these plantations at the crossroads of different unique conjunctures, spatial, social, legal and political, which enable ‘corporate profits’ and produce certain ‘forms of life’. This book's content is based on more than 5 years of field research in Tanjung, in Indonesian Borneo, incorporating a decolonial, collaborative and situated approach.

From 2010 to 2015, the authors along with a team of 60 undergraduate and graduate students conducted interviews, surveys and participant observation. This fine-grained ethnography contributes to a burgeoning scholarly conversation about plantations and the ‘plantationocene’ (Davis et al., 2019; Haraway, 2015; Haraway & Anna, 2019; Tsing, 2015; Wolford, 2021). This time, Li and Semejo turn their attention to the interfaces between corporations and state power that enable plantations to be profitable endeavours. Their account shows how the operation of modern plantations implies wider transformations in the life of villagers and workers in the plantation zone through the forms of occupation that it entails. In the enforcement of state mandates to bring ‘development’ to remote areas, companies decide which forms of life they nurture and which ones they abandon. In this capacity, plantations limit access of community members to land and water and create new forms of citizenship, in conditions outside the control of local communities. In this corporate-shaped landscape, communities have adapted their livelihoods to resist and, in a way, also benefit from the plantation corporations by receiving bribes or even stealing. The authors present their argument in seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion.

In the introduction, Li and Semedi lay out the theoretical concepts informing the book ‘corporate occupation’, ‘imperial debris’ and ‘extractive regimes’. In Indonesia, plantation corporations fulfil the double mandate of serving the public good and creating profits in a way that delegates state power to those corporations. This mandate defines the ‘occupation’ that enables plantation corporations to organize life bio-politica