Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

To better understand current conflicts related to human–wolf interactions in Finland, this article undertakes a longue-durée examination of societal structural transformations and how they have influenced ways of relating to nature in the country. Through a world-ecological perspective, we weave together a historical review and results of ethnographic fieldwork to explain how and why human–wolf relations in Finland transformed from indifferent coexistence to purposeful eradication in the late 19th century and ultimately to contemporary contested protection. We argue that the nature-making capacities of capitalist development are an integral part of the historical circumstances that led to the eradication of wolves, which was not only the result of animosity towards wolves but also fuelled by the interests of elite hunters. The resulting negative perceptions, coupled with changes in practices and landscapes during the wolf-less era, are central in current contestations, illustrating the deep ideological, emotional, and practical nature relations that capitalism creates.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south-east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri-industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity.

After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro-poor land policy that benefits small-scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross-class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left-wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.

Activists and scholars have debated whether “agrarian populisms” premised on multiple classes and groups can pursue progressive objectives if exploiters and exploited are in the same movements. In Pakistan, the militant Pakistan Kissan Ittehad emerged in 2012 by uniting different classes of owner-cultivators who are largely not in direct relations of exploitation with each other. We argue that the PKI nevertheless advances the interests of a “second tier” of rural capitalists, who exploit rural labourers, while underplaying the interests of owner-peasant farmers. This divergence of interests has contributed to the fragmentation of PKI along class and political lines, including attempts by peasant farmers to independently organize around issues particular to them. We suggest that progressive agrarian populism must hinge on the interests of rural labourers and peasant farmers and that second-tier capitalist farmers may be tactical allies as they oppose neoliberal globalization. However, rural labourers and peasants are ideologically and organizationally weak, and thus, the possibility of left-wing agrarian populism requires much legwork.

Paying Indigenous communities to conserve land for carbon sequestration is a controversial way of tackling climate change. Critics argue that paying for ecological services (or ‘PES’) in the form of carbon offset programmes reduces land and social relations to an economic transaction that devalues Indigenous livelihoods and communities. At the same time, empirical studies have shown that Indigenous communities have accepted and even embraced the idea of being paid to conserve land for climate change mitigation. This paper explores this apparent contradiction by investigating the implementation of Programa Socio Bosque (PSB), a PES carbon sequestration programme in Ecuador. Drawing upon primary fieldwork in the highland province of Chimborazo, it makes the case that PES programmes need to be understood as form of state power that reconfigures and reinforces the ways in which Indigenous peoples engage with the state. Particularly important in this regard is the role of the state in reinforcing the agrarian conditions under which Indigenous communities use and interpret PES payments while at the same time reconfiguring new forms of land conservation. Empirically, the research reveals important complementarities between the goals of carbon sequestration PES programmes and Indigenous land-use practices. Methodologically, it highlights the importance of situating the study of PES programmes in a context of land struggles, community–state relations and agrarian change.

As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H-2A visa program. Through a focus on H-2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.