Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Finance, Land and Labour","authors":"Samuel Frederico, Stefan Ouma, Emily Duncan, Carla Gras","doi":"10.1111/joac.70038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70038","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The dynamics of contemporary capitalism have empowered the role and influence of finance within the realm of agriculture. In response, agri-finance research has focused on the extension of global finance's investment chains and how parts of the agricultural sector—mainly farmland—are transformed into financial assets, where multiple sources of capital seek to make gains. To do so, scholarship on ‘finance going farming’ has directed attention to the variety of financial actors (i.e., pension, endowment and private equity funds, insurance companies and investment banks); their motives to invest; the variegated mechanisms deployed to reformat farmland and agricultural production for financial purposes; and the increasing power of shareholders to shape productive and distributive decisions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of how finance makes its way into agriculture, within agrarian studies, these processes and dynamics raise important conceptual and methodological challenges about how to centre financialization in dynamics of agrarian change. In this exchange, our contributors consider how contemporary trends in agri-finance demand us to rethink relations of production, property and power and processes of accumulation. Key questions that the forum addresses include how and to what extent is finance connected to the restructuring of capital and its modalities of accumulation in agrarian settings? What ties does financialization have to changes in labour regimes? How does it affect productive capital and its associated relations of power? This Forum is part of the 25th Anniversary Forums<sup>1</sup>, following ‘How is climate change changing agrarian studies?’ (Paprocki et al. <span>2025</span>), ‘Challenging agroecology—Promise and pitfalls for agrarian studies’ (McKay et al. <span>2025</span>) and ‘What is the value of value for agrarian studies’ (Akram-Lodhi et al. <span>2025</span>).</p><p>The growing hegemony of finance has been reshaping the mechanisms through which land and nature are appropriated. In global agriculture, institutional investors—such as pension funds, insurance companies, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds—have become central actors in reorganizing the circuits of accumulation by shifting the focus from production to asset valorization and the extraction of territorialized rents (Cotula <span>2012</span>; Isakson <span>2014</span>; Clapp and Isakson <span>2018</span>). This text contributes to the debate by examining how land is increasingly treated as a financial asset through the articulation of rentier and speculative logics, suggesting that asset managers play a pivotal role as strategic intermediaries who coordinate investment flows, mediate relationships between financial investors and local actors, and embed financial rationalities into the operational logic of farming enterprises (Clapp and Isakson <span>2018</span>).</p><p>Although often grouped under the label of ‘financial capital","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181526","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":"A Forest Runs Through It: Gendered Work and Forest Transformations in Mountain Java","authors":"Nancy Lee Peluso,&nbsp;Debbie Prabawati","doi":"10.1111/joac.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on research in a montane forest region of East Java, this article shows how women's and men's work as forest subjects has changed with the changing of the forest and the politics of gendered labour on and off the forest. We examine three conjunctures in the past century when the montane forests were sequentially constituted as subsistence forests, plantation forests and remittance forests. Our narrative is guided by the notion of a locally and globally situated Plantation–Migration Nexus in each conjuncture. We explore the dynamic interplay between changing plantation regimes (labour systems, access rules and ecological composition) and modalities of human migration (circular, transnational and state-directed). Each of these moments witnessed changes in the forest combined with the gendered politics of forest access and control. These in turn resulted in changes in the definition and practice of gendered forest work, production and social reproduction, and social and power relations between forest plantation workers and managers.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181523","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":"Labour and Land in Indonesia: An Introduction","authors":"Ben White,&nbsp;Marcus Taylor","doi":"10.1111/joac.70034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article provides a reflective overview of Indonesian agrarian history, contemporary agrarian dynamics and the growing field of Indonesian agrarian studies. By charting the evolution of the field and highlighting landmark studies, it traces the work and influence of both foreign researchers and the lesser known tradition of agrarian political economy by Indonesian scholars. In doing so, it highlights compelling themes within the political economy of agrarian Indonesia that are engaged in the contributions to the Special Issue on Labour and Land in Indonesia. These include the changing and diverse composition of class relations and their impact on social differentiation; the gendered and generational relationships linking household reproduction to rural and migratory labour; the expansion of plantations and agrarian extractivism; and the increasing bureaucratisation and militarisation of Indonesian rural life. As the individual contributions to the special issue make clear, these areas of research remain central to both the past and future of Indonesian agrarian studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181533","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":"State, Capital and Coercion in Indonesia's Food Estates","authors":"Fuad Abdulgani,&nbsp;Laksmi Adriani Savitri","doi":"10.1111/joac.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70031","url":null,"abstract":"<p>From colonial times to the present, the Indonesian state has continuously attempted to re-organise nature, technology and relations of production by establishing large-scale food monocrop farming or “food estates”. As Indonesian food production has largely been based on petty commodity production by small farmers, including a minority of petty capitalists and a large majority of marginal farmers, we ask why food estate initiatives have been persistently reproduced in different times and places despite a century-long history of failure of such projects. As we show through historical and contemporary examples of food estate programmes, the Indonesian “outer islands” have been the main sites of accelerated corporate land grabbing and coercion in both wage labour and contract farming labour regimes. We argue that the persistence of food estate visions and initiatives can be understood as an enduring colonialism, structured through the idealisation of modern industrial agriculture, the view of small farmers as ‘racialised others’, backward and inferior and the systematic denial of customary land rights. This is made possible by the integration of corporate agribusiness in the state's food self-sufficiency project, producing labour regimes sustained by the state coercion as evidenced by the increasing military involvement in food estate projects.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181676","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":"Dispossession, Extractive Capitalism and Political Reactions From Below in West Papua","authors":"Rassela Malinda","doi":"10.1111/joac.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Examining two distinct types of resistance, this study explores how local inequalities in land and power have shaped and differentiated the political reactions of West Papuans in the face of dispossession. The first type involves overt struggle against dispossession. Two cases of indigenous communities resisting the expansion of plantations shed light on how alliances between indigenous landholders, local state actors and environmental NGOs can create a political opportunity structure that bolsters the demands of resistance groups. The second type, a less-studied response to dispossession, demonstrates how terms of inclusion shape the strategies of landholding groups demanding to be incorporated into contract arrangements. This study relies on primary materials collected during fieldwork in West Papua since 2019, combined with secondary data.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181568","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":"Distributive Politics and Class Dynamics in Rural Java","authors":"Colum Graham","doi":"10.1111/joac.70030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70030","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on fieldwork in a village I call Lone Teak in East Java, Indonesia, this paper examines emerging patterns of class differentiation and distributive politics. The history of Lone Teak's landholding structure reveals long-term patterns of inequality. However, since widespread deforestation during 1998–2002, new dynamics emerged. Many households have accessed local state forestland for farming and more attainable state capital has underwritten the expansion of their agricultural production. With greater access to forestland and capital, lower classes have experienced upward social mobility, whereas landowning middle classes struggle to maintain, let alone move beyond their existing position. These state-induced developments have produced a differentiated nostalgia for former President Suharto's era (1966–1998). This nostalgia reflects a response to losses and expectations for better opportunities to accumulate, not a desire for returning to authoritarian rule.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181530","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":"Precarious Proletarians: Women Workers in the Javanese Heartland","authors":"Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih","doi":"10.1111/joac.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article investigates proletarian precarity among female factory workers in the interplay of factory and family dynamics in Indonesia’s Javanese heartland. These women workers are part of semiproletarian households that combine income from a mix of precarious work and self-employment within the rural–urban nexus, which encompasses rural villages and the towns and cities to which their inhabitants regularly commute for work. Their connection with land and agricultural activities, along with rural-based networks, subsidizes part of the cost of labour reproduction in labour-intensive industry in middle-sized cities, while shaping their negotiation of patriarchy and capitalist accumulation. Female factory workers’ everyday navigation of the productive and reproductive spheres is often disregarded by traditional agrarian and labour movements. The analysis also points to the inherent contradictions within their experiences, where attempts to negotiate subordination often (inadvertently) reproduce existing power relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181529","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":"Sustainability Standards, Differentiation and Green Capital Accumulation in Global Agrifood Value Chains","authors":"Juliane Lang","doi":"10.1111/joac.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The mainstreaming of sustainability standards in agrifood industries has often been accompanied by adverse distributional outcomes. While powerful lead firms in global value chains obtain reputational benefits and premiums, costs and risks are transferred to suppliers. Yet, we still know little about how producers resist this form of green capital accumulation and with what results. In this paper, I draw on a comparative study of Chilean wine and farmed salmon to contrast a sector with globally fragmented sustainability standardisation (wine) with one in which standards are globally homogenised (salmon). I show how in both industries, green capital accumulation is characterised by power struggles over capturing value through standards, and from differentiated forms of sustainability efforts. I highlight how, by exercising control through standards, powerful actors externalise costs and risks, while by exercising control through intangible assets they appropriate value from other actors’ differentiated sustainability efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181517","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":"Socialist Entrepreneurship and Integrated Peasant Economy: Failed Collectivization in Yugoslavia (1949–1953)","authors":"Lev Centrih","doi":"10.1111/joac.70026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70026","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the specific features of collectivization in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on Slovenia as one of its constituent republics. Through a bottom-up approach, it examines selected cases from the countryside surrounding the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, between 1949 and 1953. Unlike the Soviet and broader Eastern European cases, the Slovene/Yugoslav regime stemmed from both a socialist revolution and the National Liberation War. Alongside coercion, it used pragmatic strategies to win over the peasantry—allowing wealthier peasants to join labour cooperatives and promoting ‘entrepreneurship’, a value rooted in capitalism, as a socialist principle. While aiming to preserve the industriousness of petty commodity production, the authorities sought to achieve this within a new environment: no longer in private enterprises, but in state or collective (cooperative) ones, protected from the destructive consequences of capitalism. Drawing on case studies, the article demonstrates that collectivization failed: Support from revolutionary activists proved insufficient, peasants rejected the proposed entrepreneurial model, and they continued to pursue individualistic family farming. It explains the persistence of traditional agriculture through the concept of the integrated peasant economy, in dialogue with theories of pluriactivity and petty commodity production.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181513","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":"Beyond Contracts: Supply Chains and Dynamics of Incorporation Among Classes of Capital in the Aftermath of Global Outbreaks of Avian Flu","authors":"Jostein Jakobsen,&nbsp;Mads Barbesgaard,&nbsp;Mariel Aguilar-Støen","doi":"10.1111/joac.70025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70025","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates how agricultural producers are incorporated into commodity circuits under contemporary capitalism, in the context of growing pressures from emerging infectious diseases. Focusing on poultry production systems in Denmark and Norway currently under threat from highly pathogenic avian influenza, we argue that understanding these dynamics requires an expanded conception of agriculture that accounts for the contractual arrangements binding poultry growers to both upstream and downstream actors in a supply chain defined by spatially dispersed operations with growers positioned midstream. Specifically, we explore how risk diffuses along supply chains, how forms of knowledge and resources originating upstream and downstream of the farm-level organise production processes, and the managerial efforts aimed at reconciling contradictory interests. We contend that these dynamics have significant implications for how outbreaks of infectious diseases ramify across variously situated actors in natural resource industries under contemporary capitalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70025","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181502","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}