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The lucky and unlucky daughter: Gender, land inheritance and agrarian change in Ratanakiri, Cambodia Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Alice Beban, Joanna Bourke Martignoni
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
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Reproductive binds: The gendered economy of debt in a Syrian refugee farmworker camp Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 China Sajadian
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
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-12-26
No abstract is available for this article.
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Agricultural intensification increases farmers' income but reduces food self-sufficiency and bee diversity: Evidence from southeast Mexico Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Eric Vides-Borrell, Pierre Gasselin, Bruce G. Ferguson, Luciana Porter-Bolland, Tiffany Dangla-Pelissier, Simon Ayvayan, Rémy Vandame
The tropical region of Hopelchén, southeastern Mexico, is a place of high contrasts in terms of the agricultural intensity of production systems and landscape configuration: It presents enormous areas of conserved forest and at the same time the highest rate of deforestation in Mexico. The consequences of agricultural intensification in this region are the subject of our research. We surveyed 80 farmers
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Emerging patterns of accumulation in land redistribution in South Africa Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Farai Mtero, Nkanyiso Gumede, Katlego Ramantsima
This article contributes to the wider debates on the impacts and outcomes of state efforts to create agrarian capitalists in land reform and agriculture in most countries of the global South. Specifically, this article presents empirical evidence on South Africa's State Land Lease and Disposal Policy (SLLDP) and analyses emerging accumulation dynamics in land redistribution. The evidence presented
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Work and social reproduction in rural India: Lessons from time-use data Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-12-04 Smriti Rao, Smita Ramnarain, Sirisha Naidu, Anupama Uppal, Avanti Mukherjee
Efforts to decentre/decolonize our understanding of capitalist development in the Global South call for more complex and differentiated categories of work that acknowledge the significance of both non-waged and reproductive labour. These categories would allow us to more clearly ‘see’ the varying intersections of gender, class and caste within this world of work. Even as the literature on work in the
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Political economy of input–output markets of groundnut: A case from the groundnut value chain of Turkey Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Burhan Özalp, M. Necat Ören
Mainstream economics argues that value chains provide farmers better prices and incomes, thus aiding development. However, this study contradicts this consensus, revealing that the value chain generates the status of petty commodity producers for farmers. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the value chain keeps downstream actors, such as merchants, processors, wholesalers, and retailers, in a powerful
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Social reproduction in crisis: Gendered labour regimes in agro-export sectors in Ecuador and Chile Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Laura T. Raynolds, Annabel Ipsen
The pandemic lays bare the centrality of social reproduction in upholding global commodity networks. Capitalism's reliance on gendered and racialized systems of social reproduction has deepened structural contradictions and socio-economic divides across agro-export sectors and agrarian communities. We analyse how COVID-19 policies and responses in Ecuador and Chile are reshaping systems of social and
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-09-20
No abstract is available for this article.
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Blaming the victim or structural conditioning? COVID-19, obesity and the neoliberal diet Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Gerardo Otero
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
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Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Kristina Dietz
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
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Agrarian change in neoliberal Turkey: Insights from privatization of the sugar industry Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Kubra M. Altaytas
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
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A framework for understanding land control transfer in agricultural commodity frontiers Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Olivia del Giorgio
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
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Indigenous collective land titling and the creation of leftovers: Insights from Paraguay and Cambodia Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-08-21 Esther Leemann, Cari Tusing
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
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Family farmers' strategies to develop autonomy through agroecological and solidarity economy practices: The case of BioVida in the Ecuadorian Andes Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Unai Villalba-Eguiluz, Sara Latorre, Jhonny Jiménez
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
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From creating to confronting racial hierarchies: The evolving role of the US state in land policy Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Anthony Pahnke, Jordan Treakle
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)
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-06-30
No abstract is available for this article.
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Illegibly legible: Outcomes of a land records modernisation programme in South India Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Ramakumar R, Padmini Ramesh
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
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Distress in the fields: Indian agriculture after economic liberalization, By R. Ramakumar (Ed.), Tulika Books. 2022. pp. xxiv+484. INR 1500 (hbk). ISBN: 978-81-950559-0-6 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 John Harriss
If you are looking for a definitive account of agricultural policy in India over the years following the country's initially tentative economic liberalization in 1991, then this is the book for you. As the editor, himself the author of a long and magisterial introductory essay says, he and the authors of the 16 chapters of the book set out to achieve four objectives. They wanted to offer an extensive
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Climate precarity in rural livelihoods: Agrarian transformations and smallholder vulnerability in Vietnam Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Pamela McElwee, Nghiêm Phương Tuyến, Lê Thị Vân Huệ, Vũ Thị Diệu Hương
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
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Contemporary agrarian, rural and rural–urban movements and alliances Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Saturnino M. Borras
Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure
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Manufactured regional crises: The Middle East and North Africa under global food regimes Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Roland Riachi, Giuliano Martiniello
The current agrarian and food crisis in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been interpreted through a number of tropes. Within the dominant mainstream discourse, the MENA region is often depicted as a homogenous geographical area characterized by dryness, infertile lands and poor water resources. How did imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War influence the MENA food systems? What were the
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Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID-19 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Vasanthi Venkatesh, Talia Esnard, Vladimir Bogoeski, Tomaso Ferrando
Migrant farmworkers are a ubiquitous but invisibilised, expropriated and exploited component of the global agricultural economy. Their conditions took centre-stage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fear of production disruption in the migrant labour-intensive sectors led to foreign workers being deemed ‘essential’ in many countries, and exceptional procedures and regulations were instituted that further
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Behind the ‘creative destruction’ of human diets: An analysis of the structure and market dynamics of the ultra-processed food manufacturing industry and implications for public health Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Benjamin Wood, Owain Williams, Phil Baker, Gary Sacks
A global transition towards diets increasingly dominated by ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has occurred in recent decades to the detriment of public health and the environment. This study aimed to examine long-term trends in the structure and market dynamics of the global UPF manufacturing industry as part of broader efforts to understand the drivers of this transition. Using diverse methods, metrics
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Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 R.C. Sudheesh
This paper looks at a case of rural-to-rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation
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Land, investment and migration. By Camilla Toulmin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. pp. xxv + 241. £67.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780198852766 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Christian Lund
Dark clouds of violence gather over the heads of the villagers in the Sahel. Insurgencies and banditry, motivated by a volatile mixture of well-founded distrust in government, misgivings about urban wealth capture and bitterness about decades of abandonment, terrorize the countryside. Laced with religious sentiments, oratory and decor, armed groups seem to develop ethnic, racial and geopolitical unrest
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Going green in Thailand: Upgrading in global organic value chains Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Joel D. Moore, John A. Donaldson
Under what conditions are some small-scale agricultural producers able to overcome challenges associated with shifting to organic production, whereas most are not? The answers are vital for the global effort to encourage more sustainable, pro-poor forms of agriculture—more organic farming, more sustainable production; more smallholders engaged in green production, more income and better livelihoods
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Discipline and resistance in southwestern Ontario: Securitization of migrant workers and their acts of defiance Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Chris Ramsaroop
COVID-19 has had deep impacts on a wide range of vulnerable communities in Canada. Migrant agricultural workers in the southwestern region of Ontario were particularly impacted. Fearing the threat of the ‘racialized foreign other’, the Canadian state produced myriad securitization responses with heightened surveillance. This paper will examine both state and non-state forms of securitization and the
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‘For them farming may be the last resort, but for us it is a new hope’: Ageing, youth and farming in India Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-05 B. B. Mohanty, Papesh K. Lenka
Based on an empirical exercise carried out in five villages of Odisha in eastern India, the paper looks into ageing of the farm population and the experiences and responses of farmers of various age groups to farming. The findings of the study indicate that agriculture is greying, farmers are getting older and the youth, particularly of higher and cultivating castes, are averse to farming. The unwillingness
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Amplifying invisibility: COVID-19 and Zimbabwean migrant farm workers in South Africa Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Lincoln Addison
How does the COVID-19 pandemic impact migrant worker visibility? This paper examines how the pandemic underscores the invisibility of Zimbabwean migrant farm workers employed at ZZ2, one of the largest commercial farms in South Africa. I argue that Zimbabweans are made invisible in three ways. First, employer and state restrictions on mobility, alongside rising xenophobia in South Africa, leave migrant
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COVID-19 and the power of indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in the US Pacific Northwest Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Tomás Alberto Madrigal
Over the last several years—in the context of US political upheaval, ongoing crises related to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn—indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in Washington State have engaged more intensely in class struggle through acts of solidarity and forms of collective action, in part through independent labour unions, worker cooperatives and mutual
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-03-21
No abstract is available for this article.
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An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis By Karen E. Rignall, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. pp. 264. 125$ (hb). ISBN: 9781501756122 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Fayrouz Yousfi
What does it mean to live a rural life in Morocco? How do farmers participate in rural politics? How does the transformation of peasant farming inform us about rural life's social and political organization? These central questions guide Karen E. Rignall's book An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and the Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis. At the heart of the argument, Rignall shows how rural dwellers
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Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction By Helen Anne Curry. University of California Press. 2022. Pp 321. $85 (hb); $29.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780520307681(hb)/9780520307698 (pb) Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Carol Hernández-Rodríguez, Hugo Perales
Helen Anne Curry's book Endangered Maize provides an excellent, captivating description of the origins, ideas, and motivations behind the narratives of maize as an endangered genetic resource and how these narratives have shaped the methods and tools of conservation adopted by scientists and states. The book focuses on the role of actors from the two major participants in maize development and conservation:
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-01-10
No abstract is available for this article.
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Progressive politics and populism: Classes of labour and rural–urban political sociology—An introduction to the special issue Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Jonathan Pattenden
This special issue analyses the prospects for a progressive politics against right-wing populism and capitalism. Taken as a whole, its articles underline the need to understand progressive movements as encompassing agrarian, rural, and urban settings and as socially rooted among labourers and petty commodity producers that do not accumulate (classes of labour), which includes the majority of farmers
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Restructuring palm oil value chain governance in Colombia through long-term labour control Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Angela Serrano
In this paper, I argue that the cumulative effects of coercive and indirect labour discipline enable firms to reorganize production. Through a historical analysis of the palm oil industry in northeastern Colombia, I identify changing forms of value chain governance in relation to transformations in labour control regimes. The combined effects of multiple labour control strategies have weakened labour
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Tracking farmland investment in Australia: Institutional finance and the politics of data mapping Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Kiah Smith, Alexandra Langford, Geoffrey Lawrence
Tracking farmland purchases is central to interpreting transnational finance's growing power in agrarian restructuring. Australia's public Register of foreign land ownership reveals little about agrarian change, however. In presenting the first comprehensive mapping of farmland purchases made between 2008 and 2020, this paper examines the ways that financial investments are altering farm ownership
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Predators in the web of life: World ecology of historical human–wolf relations in Finland Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Sanna Komi, Markus Kröger
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
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Who owns the land owns the wind? Land and citizenship in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Gerardo A. Torres Contreras
Wind energy expansion across rural areas interacts with various interests at the local level, generating multiple reactions within communities. The Eólica del Sur wind farm implementation pathway in Mexico is a paragon of different positions vis-à-vis this industry after trying to install 132 wind turbines in other towns since 2006. This paper argues that there is a bias in studies of the politics
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Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-11-30 Victoria Stead
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
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Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Boaventura Monjane
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
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Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in 21st century Pakistani Punjab Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Muhammad Yahya Aftab, Noaman G. Ali
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
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Paying for ecological services in Ecuador: The political economy of structural inequality Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Matthew McBurney, Luis Alberto Tuaza, Craig Johnson
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
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Essential agriculture, sacrificial labor, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US South Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Caroline Keegan
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
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Between construction yard and village: Changing relations of caste and hierarchy among Madhya Pradesh's labouring classes Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Arnaud Kaba
In Madhya Pradesh, India, rural migrant workers hired in flyover's construction yards experiment a space of work where the social practices relating to caste separation and hierarchy are temporally softened. This paper shows that these processes of conviviality, through mixing between castes and trans-communitarian work identities based on the hierarchies of labour, are taking part in the lower classes'
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Handbook of critical agrarian studies, By Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Kristina Dietz, Bettina Engels, Ben M. McKay, Edward Elgar (Eds.), 2021, Pp. xxvi + 713. £244.80 (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-78897-245-1 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Henry Bernstein
The substance of ‘the agrarian question’ (or questions) has changed a great deal in the period of neoliberalism and globalisation, say the last 40 to 50 years. ‘Classically’ central preoccupations—class formation in the countryside, the contributions of agricultural development to industrialization, ‘peasant wars’ and what followed them, the agrarian programmes of communist and socialist parties—have
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Dispossession through land titling: Legal loopholes and shadow procedures to urbanized forestlands in the Yucatán Peninsula Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-10-02 Gabriela Torres-Mazuera
Under certain circumstances, land titling, property regime changes, and land-use conversions yield substantial profits. Yet few people possess the wealth, knowledge, and networks to benefit from these procedures. In the Yucatán Peninsula, a region recently targeted as a prominent investment location by the Mexican national government (mainly with the “Tren Maya” megaproject) and the private capital
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Issue Information Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-09-15
No abstract is available for this article.
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Disparate but not antagonistic: Classes of labour in cotton production in Burkina Faso Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Bettina Engels
This paper examines the variety of agrarian classes of labour and the challenges they face in organizing and pursuing their interests. By taking the cotton sector in Burkina Faso as a case study, it analyses how various ‘classes of labour’ organize and mobilize for collective action to raise their claims: poor cotton farmers and workers in the cotton factories. Poor and middle farmers recently came
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We, campesinos: The potentials and pitfalls of agrarian populism in Colombia's agrarian strike Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Kyla Sankey
This contribution aims to explore the potentials and pitfalls for the emergence of a popular agrarian movement capable of offering a progressive alternative to the far-right. Taking the case of Colombia's national agrarian strike, the paper argues that food sovereignty can offer a mobilizing framework for a multiclass, antineoliberal agrarian coalition. However, the possibilities for building a counter-hegemonic
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Coolie labour and colonial capitalism in Asia Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-15 Jan Breman
In the course of my academic research labour bondage after the abolition of slavery has been a recurrent theme in my writings on the colonial past and the postcolonial present. In the context of the globalizing economy, the role of capitalism as a dominant mode of production has been of pivotal importance in the perpetuation of confined labour relations. This argument does not concur with the conventional
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Who owns the wind?: Climate crisis and the hope of renewable energy, By David McDermott Hughes Verso. 2021. pp. 256. £11.89 (pbk). ISBN-13:978-1-83976-113-3 Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Paola Velasco-Herrejón
David McDermott Hughes's Who Owns the Wind provides a fantastic account of a tense relationship between a wind farm and a 200-person village that the author calls Sereno, located in the autonomous region of Andalucía, in the South of Spain. As he sketches his stay in the village from 2015 to 2018, he maps how its landless inhabitants, “squatting” in the village, and a handful of Spanish landowners
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Land for dignity and struggle for identity: Landlordism and caste in a village of south India Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Jessy K. Philip
The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two-way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural-based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt
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A methodology for class analysis: Agricultural investments and agrarian change in South Africa Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Brittany Bunce
This paper presents a class-analytic approach, which combines a “labour exploitation criterion” with class typologies developed for the South African context and the author's additions. The labour exploitation criterion distinguishes between rural classes based on the degree to which one employs others, works for others, or works for oneself. I combine the principal indicator of “labour exploitation”
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Agrarian movements and rural populism in Indonesia Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-08-02 Ben White, Colum Graham, Laksmi Savitri
In this article, we reflect on the changing trajectories of agrarian movements in Indonesia. In the two decades after independence, a left-populist alliance of peasants, plantation workers, and other affiliate organizations achieved a mass following and were embraced by President Sukarno. In the aftermath of their violent destruction, the Suharto regime reordered agrarian movements into a single corporatist
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Village ties: Women, NGOs, and informal institutions in rural Bangladesh, by Nayma Qayum Rutgers University Press. 2021. Pp. 230. $120.00 (hb)/$29.95 (pb/ebook). ISBN: 9781978816459 (hb)/9781978816442 (pb)/9781978816480 (ebook) Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Sahana Ghosh
Nayma Qayum's Village Ties is a wide-ranging book that is methodologically rich, analytically ambitious, and lucidly written. It tells the story of Polli Samaj (translated from Bengali as rural society), a nationwide development programme run by Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), one of the world's largest NGOs in Bangladesh. Under Polli Samaj (PS), rural women organize in ward-based groups
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Three populisms and two dead ends: Variants of agrarian populism in Thailand Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Oliver Pye, Nantawat Chatuthai
This article discusses three forms of agrarian populism in Thailand: the “grassroots populism” of the Assembly of the Poor, the “reactionary populism” of the yellow shirts, and the “capitalist populism” of the red shirts. We examine how these three strands of populism are embedded within dynamics of agrarian change in Thailand and how the intellectual and activist orientation towards agrarian populism
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(Landlord) Theory from the South: Empire and estates on a Punjabi Frontier Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-07-17 Shozab Raza
Theory has occasionally shaped agrarian transformations. Utilitarian theory, for instance, influenced British colonial land revenue policies, while modernization theory spurred, via the Green Revolution, the development of capitalist farming across the global South. Yet scholarship, when it has probed the mediation of theory in agrarian change, has largely centred on the intellectual activities of
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Ocean and land grabbing in Ghana's offshore petroleum industry: From the agrarian question to the question of industrialization Journal of Agrarian Change (IF 2.902) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno, Jesse Salah Ovadia
Ghana's petroleum industry is located several nautical miles offshore in the Western Region of the country. Yet, the mechanisms and processes of production and transportation of crude petroleum are accompanied by the dispossessing of the adjoining coastal communities of their means of (re)production both on the ocean and on land. Although the insights of agrarian political economy have been deployed