Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Reservoirs of Fertility: Colonialism and Britain's Turn to ‘Food Security’, 1945–65","authors":"Alex McKendrick","doi":"10.1111/joac.70061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70061","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines Britain's post-war turn from the world's leading food importer to being largely self-sufficient in food, as a key process within the transition from first to second global food regime. It focuses on the special soil fertility resources mobilised to implement this transition in British agriculture; looking first at the economic, political and military strategic factors which drove the heavy use and stockpiling of chemical fertilisers; and then at Britain's colonial phosphate rock networks. This article affirms the value of a concrete and historicised theoretical approach to Food Regimes Analysis, to appreciate secondary dynamics and regional differences. By employing an archive-centred historical method with close attention to the role of the state and political economy, this article reveals the endurance of formal colonialism and colonial forms of exploitation—alongside the development of a US-led international state system—in determining the hierarchy of states under the Second Food Regime.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70061","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ambiguous Ecologies of Agri-Alternatives: Exploring the Calculus of Social Reproduction in Rural India","authors":"Arianna Tozzi,&nbsp;Enid Still","doi":"10.1111/joac.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper advances scholarship on agri-alternatives by probing the gap between romanticised narratives of how alternative farming transitions ought to be and the actual practices farmers enact in their fields. Focusing on moments when such alternatives encounter on-the-ground realities, we propose ambiguous ecologies as a lens to explore the various elements shaping farmers' decisions and their complex dynamics. Centering social reproduction, we argue that transitions to agri-alternatives are contested processes whereby farmers renegotiate productive and reproductive agrarian relations amidst uneven risks. Drawing on ethnographic insights from India, we contribute to feminist theorisation on the calculus guiding farmers' practices in two ways. First, by positing that ecologies and their materialities are key to how farmers navigate their engagement with agri-alternatives, and second, by showing how ambiguous ecologies work as sites of agency where farmers make intimate calculations to construct liveable socio-ecological relations against the grain of industrialised farming regimes.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agrarian Change and Accumulation in Central India: Revisiting the Agrarian Question of Capital","authors":"Sunit Arora,&nbsp;Deepak K. Mishra","doi":"10.1111/joac.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, we revisit the relevance of the agrarian question of capital and provide evidence of the dynamism in agriculture based on an empirical enquiry. We study the possibilities, channels and patterns of agrarian accumulation and its spillover on the nonagrarian accumulation dynamics in an agriculturally advanced region lying in central India. Based on this empirical study, we posit that the agrarian question of capital remains important at a regional scale in India. By bringing the focus back on the question of capital, the paper maps the contemporary agrarian change processes as being linked to the process of generation of agrarian surplus and contributes to the debate on the relevance of the agrarian question of capital in the global south.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Legitimising the Food Regime in Post-Socialist Croatia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Croatia's Agricultural Strategies, 1991 to 2013","authors":"Alexander Gavranich","doi":"10.1111/joac.70066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70066","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What role has the state played in the establishment of the current food regime in a post-socialist setting? Focusing on Croatia, I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the national agricultural strategies enacted during the neoliberal transition between 1991 and 2013. I find that the state discursively legitimised the emergence and consolidation of the current food regime through two dominant tactics: (1) the collective diagnostic framing of peasants, family farmers and socialist agriculture as the ‘problem’ and (2) the deployment of ostensibly ‘rational’ language. Presenting a sociopolitical history of Croatia's neoliberal transition, I argue that the principal material beneficiaries of the state-legitimised food regime have predominantly been the political and economic elite of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), who rose to power during the corrupt privatisations of socialist-era enterprises in the 1990s and set Croatia on a path of clientelism and criminality. Today, Croatia exists as a small, globally integrated state of negligible political sway that is effectively captured by a single dominant political party. The novel dynamics of this situation in the agricultural sector do not easily fit within existing food regime conceptualisations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147567662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploitation, Interlinked Transactions and Agrarian Class Relations in Uttar Pradesh, India","authors":"Shinu Varkey","doi":"10.1111/joac.70055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70055","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A striking feature of rural markets in underdeveloped agrarian economies is interlinked transactions, where two or more interdependent exchanges are simultaneously agreed upon across different markets. In contemporary India, even as the capitalist relations of production are dominant, there are still regions where interlinkages play a major role in defining the class relations, which in turn influence their agricultural development. This paper analyses the nature of interlinked transactions in Eastern and Bundelkhand regions of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and agriculture-dependent state. Using a Marxist framework, I argue that such linkages are essentially exploitative, hindering the progressive development of agriculture in these regions. The dominant parties in the interlinked transactions continue to use them as important sources of labour mobilisation and surplus extraction. It further studies the possible influence of the interlinkages associated with tenancy and credit transactions in lowering crop productivity and profitability and finally their impact on the livelihood strategies adopted by the agricultural households.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70055","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pensadores Rebeldes, By Cristóbal Kay, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UDP, 2023. 195 pp. $26.00 (paperback). ISBN: 978-956-314-578-6","authors":"Jordi Gascón","doi":"10.1111/joac.70071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70071","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Professor Emeritus, Cristóbal Kay, is a Chilean-British political economist. His long academic career has focused on two closely related areas of research: the analysis of agrarian transformations in Latin America and the history and debates surrounding development models in this region. Kay has become a leading authority in both fields, with major works including Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, a book originally published in 1989 and which has had several subsequent reprints (Kay &lt;span&gt;1989&lt;/span&gt;), survey articles on the Agrarian Question written with A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Akram-Lodhi and Kay &lt;span&gt;2010a&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2010b&lt;/span&gt;), seminal papers analysing the phenomenon of new rurality (Kay &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2009a&lt;/span&gt;) and works combining the two areas of research (Kay &lt;span&gt;2006&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2009b&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Pensadores rebeldes&lt;/i&gt; (Rebel Thinkers) is his latest book to date. It contains six articles that Kay published in various journals over the previous two decades. These are reviews in which he analyses the work and lives of renowned Latin American and/or Latin Americanists intellectuals within Kay's two fields of work. These thinkers challenged the academically and politically dominant theories of their time. The book consists of six chapters, each devoted to a particular thinker, organised in two main thematic parts. The first part analyses four authors who shaped what has been termed Dependency Theory(ies), a paradigm developed in Latin America that challenged developmentalist and modernisation theories. It should be remembered that the latter theories maintained that poverty in peripheral countries was due to the fact that they were at earlier stages of development than those already achieved by central countries. From this point of view, underdevelopment was not due to political and economic inequality between the global South and North, nor to unequal income distribution. Therefore, peripheral countries could overcome underdevelopment by imitating the historical process experienced by industrialised countries. In the mid-20th century, this was the hegemonic view in the bloc of liberal democracies (Rostow &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt; [1960]; Parsons &lt;span&gt;1966&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first author reviewed is Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who turned the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) into a benchmark for economic policies under the Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) strategy. With ECLAC as his flagship, Prebisch introduced the debate on development/underdevelopment into the Latin American political and social agenda, and beyond. The book then focuses on thinkers from a later generation: Brazilian economists Celso Furtado (1920–2004) and Theotônio dos Santos (1926–1974) and André Gunder Frank (1929–2005), an economist of German and American nationality who was closely involved with Latin America as an intellectual and activist.","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70071","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racialized Labour in the Colonial Food Regime: The Whitening of England's Farmworkers","authors":"Ben Richardson","doi":"10.1111/joac.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The crystallization of a colonial food regime in the 1870s centred around Britain is key to historical accounts of agrarian political economy. Yet such accounts have neglected the role of the agrarian proletariat in shaping this regime from below and its basis in racialized hierarchy. To better equip food regime analysis to apprehend the possibilities for labour agency and the persistence of racism, this article provides a race-conscious case study of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union: a chief protagonist in Britain's late-19th century ‘revolt of the field’. Its contribution is two-fold. First, it shows how the union helped consolidate the colonial food regime's tenets of free trade, settler colonialism and nationalist state-building in the English countryside. Second, it situates these within the union's racial project to whiten England's farmworkers whereby the creation of a white slave subjectivity, emigration to the settler states and adherence to English nationalism were used to secure material and symbolic gains. Its core argument is that the articulation of class formation with racial formation was authored by organized agricultural labour and mattered for regime stability; a historical argument with contemporary relevance in a world where populist appeals to workers and whiteness are reascendant.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, By Shankar Ramaswami, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. pp. 304. $64.95 (hb) / $64.95 (e-book). ISBN: 9781512826647; ISBN: 9781512826654","authors":"Jan Breman","doi":"10.1111/joac.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70050","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The book under review discusses the work and life of migrant labourers who are confronted at home with a shortage of waged employment to make ends meet for themselves and the other members of their household. In the rural habitat, they belong to the landpoor and landless segments stuck at the bottom of the pile. Deprived of viable livelihood in agriculture, which used to be the mainstay for former generations, these proletarianized classes of peasant stock have found no substitute for their labour power in other sectors of the village economy. They are forced to leave their domicile in search of earnings enough to take care of their own cost of living and to provide for the subsistence of dependent members in their household who are left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Labour migration is not a one-way trek of departure and settlement elsewhere. Wherever they manage to go, usually and preferably to towns and cities nearby or far away, the large majority of them do not succeed in staying on in the destinations reached. Not only because they are hired and fired according to the need of the moment on casualized conditions but also driven in their quest for wages in the thoroughly informalized economy. Migrant labourers are also often unable to find the dwelling space required for establishing themselves more permanently. Their migration remains cyclical in nature, moving out and coming back every now and then, if they can spare or borrow the money for travel. It is a mobility that tends to last throughout the length of working life. Such a peripatetic existence starts at young adolescence and already frequently ends in the late forties or early fifties, due to failing health and loss of vitality to keep working.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The demand for outside labour is not necessarily caused by a lack of local supply. Capital and government in combination insist on keeping huge crowds of wage hunters and gatherers without proper jobs and shelter instead of ending their nomadism. Capital, because footlooseness drives down the labour price to the lowest level possible; the government, because it aims to keep this off-and-on employed swarm firmly embedded in the countryside, fragmented and scattered over a sprawl of rural slums. Rather than allowing this proletariat at drift to settle down in aggregated habitat on the city outskirts, which could incite large-scale public disorder, it shows that both operate in tandem to privilege capital and victimize labour, a collusion that contributes to widening the distance between them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migrants constitute a major part of the urban workforce recruited for their cheap cost and pliability. Both recruitment and dismissal are not sealed with a legally binding work contract stipulating terms of fair treatment and wage payment. The labour power extracted to a maximal extent from them when commanded is dismally rewarded. Exploitation and repression are the driving forces for their erratic engagement in all sectors of the economy, not seldom in occ","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70050","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Class Dynamics of Tenancy and Accumulation in Capitalist Agriculture in India","authors":"Paramjit Singh,&nbsp;Mukesh Kumar","doi":"10.1111/joac.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article underscores the crucial role of tenancy practices in shaping agricultural production dynamics and accumulation/livelihood strategies across different peasant classes in India. By examining tenancy dynamics in Haryana, a key region in India's Green Revolution and forefront of neoliberal reforms, the paper makes two contributions to the literature: First, it contributes to tenancy literature by reinstating Marxist class analysis and second, by employing a novel economic class-based classification of households rather than traditional size-based classification. The findings of the study reveal significant variations in objectives and extent of tenancy among economic classes: poor and small peasants engage in hunger (subsistence) leasing due to economic distress, while rich peasants lease for accumulation, leveraging their resources and hired labour. The escalating significance of tenancy amidst agrarian distress in rural India emphasizes that tenancy exploitation persists despite neoliberal reforms. This supports the advocacy of left-wing parties in India for comprehensive land reforms aimed at redistributing land to actual cultivators, thereby addressing inequities in land ownership and tenancy systems to promote equitable distribution of agricultural resources and alleviate rural poverty.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147569076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Theory to the Field and Back Again: Fieldwork-Based Research on Social Differentiation in Agrarian Studies","authors":"Patrick Illien,&nbsp;Helena Pérez Niño","doi":"10.1111/joac.70067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70067","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Fieldwork is the cornerstone of empirical research in agrarian studies. Discussion about methodological options has, however, not kept up with the innovative conceptual developments taking place within the discipline. This is particularly evident in the study of social differentiation, a key concern in agrarian scholarship. Through a review of the empirical literature on agrarian social differentiation in journal articles using field-based research, we identify two approaches: a stratification approach, where respondents are assigned to groups according to common socio-economic characteristics and a relational approach that studies the range of social interactions between and among groups and ensuing distributional implications. Renewed interest for the relational approach to social differentiation raises methodological questions that have not yet been examined. The paper explores implications for data collection and analysis in order to better understand the dynamics underpinning social differentiation. We argue that going beyond measuring attributes of individuals and households to investigating the relationships between them entails developing methodological tools to enquire specifically about the relations in which households participate; exploring these relationships from different ends and embedding them into the analysis of agrarian change.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}