Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Editorial Introduction: The 25th Anniversary Forums","authors":"Carla Gras,&nbsp;Shreya Sinha,&nbsp;Forrest Zhang,&nbsp;Kees Jansen,&nbsp;Jessie Luna,&nbsp;Marcus Taylor","doi":"10.1111/joac.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The year 2025 marks volume 25 of the <i>Journal of Agrarian Change</i>, meaning that the journal has been advancing the field of agrarian political economy for a full quarter century. To pay testament to this heritage, the journal editors have created a series of forums that capture current thinking on a range of contemporary issues in our field. This introductory statement sets out the first three forums, on climate change, agroecology and value analysis, respectively. The forums present one of the many ways that the <i>Journal of Agrarian Change</i> will continue to advance agrarian political economy over the coming years.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482302","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":"How is Climate Change Changing Agrarian Studies?","authors":"Kasia Paprocki,&nbsp;Alejandro Camargo,&nbsp;Marcus Taylor,&nbsp;Suhas Bhasme,&nbsp;Megan Mills-Novoa","doi":"10.1111/joac.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A range of compelling recent literature highlights how climate change is rewriting the intertwined social and environmental processes that comprise agrarian landscapes. Mainstream reaction has been to double down on technical intensification strategies supplemented by a resolute faith in scientific advancement to reduce vulnerabilities. For critical agrarian studies, however, climate change raises new conceptual and methodological challenges. Has climate change reinforced or undermined existing concepts and frameworks that explain core dynamics of agrarian change? Does agrarian studies as a field of engaged research need to change alongside the climate? In this exchange our contributors consider how anthropocentric climate change requires the field to rethink core analytical categories within agrarian studies. Key questions that the forum addresses include: How does climate change validate and/or challenge the conceptual armoury and normative orientations inherited largely from Marxist-influenced political economy? What new concepts and theoretical influences will prove helpful in orientating agrarian studies within a changing climate? How do we synthesise these with existing frameworks and concerns? And how does this reformulation change our understanding of the forms and content of resistance within agrarian environments?</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482127","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":"Challenging Agroecology—Promise and Pitfalls for Agrarian Studies","authors":"Ben M. McKay,&nbsp;Georgina Catacora-Vargas,&nbsp;Antonio Castellanos-Navarrete,&nbsp;Rachel Bezner Kerr,&nbsp;Jessie K. Luna","doi":"10.1111/joac.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Within agrarian studies, promoting agroecology is widely held as a key objective to animate progressive change with social and environmental benefits across rural regions. Yet, in practice, many questions remain salient concerning the political economy and social dynamics of agroecological transitions. On the one hand, different visions of agroecology exist in terms of both agricultural practices and their surrounding social relations. While a plurality of visions within the field is often celebrated, this conceptual flexibility can make analysis of what works, why, where, and for whom more challenging. On the other hand, agroecological transitions often present daunting challenges for resource poor farmers: a time lag for agroecological methods to become effective; a switch of markets and associated relationships; and new demands for farm and labour management in conditions of uncertain knowledge and constrained resources. These questions push the field of agrarian studies to move beyond simplified normative presentations of agroecology and grapple with the messy political economy of transitions. What are the social, political, and technical preconditions of success? How do agroecological transitions play out in communities and regions that often have internal divisions and conflicting interests? What are the respective roles—if any—of the state, social movements, or non-governmental agencies in such processes? And, given the partial adoption of agroecology within various governmental realms, is there a risk of a bifurcation of agriculture wherein there is intensive industrial farming for an agrarian elite and agroecology prescribed for a neo-subsistence rural poor?</p><p>To address these themes, the Journal of Agrarian Change asked a series of authors to consider two interlinked questions. First, how does agrarian studies as a field of analysis challenge agroecology by contextualizing agroecological initiatives within the complex dynamics of agrarian change? Second, how do the normative goals and practical experiences of agroecology challenge agrarian studies to widen, adapt or reinvent its empirical foci and analytical tools?</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482328","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":"What is the Value of Value for Agrarian Studies?","authors":"A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi,&nbsp;Srishti Yadav,&nbsp;Alessandra Mezzadri,&nbsp;Marcus Taylor","doi":"10.1111/joac.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Reflecting a longstanding intellectual heritage in Marxist political economy, contributions to agrarian studies have variously referred to the production, distribution and extraction of value. Despite this central role within the heritage of agrarian studies, the concept of value is often used inconsistently between authors and sometimes deployed without clear elucidation of the underlying theoretical tenets. As such, value often tends to be used more as a metaphor suggestive of conditions of exploitation rather than a detailed conceptual framework. In response, we must ask if there is still a robust case for value analysis forming a foundational pillar of agrarian studies? To address this challenging question, we invited three authors to give their perspective on the value of value for agrarian studies. First and foremost, we asked them to consider what value analysis does that is otherwise missed in critical agrarian studies and how we can mobilise its potential to sharpen analyses. Two further pivotal questions arise, spurred on by recent trends in the literature. First, to what extent do the categories of value enrich or hinder our evolving understanding of the dynamics of social reproduction within agrarian households and communities, including the gendered relations through which agriculture and livelihoods are performed? Similarly, are the largely anthropogenic concepts of value fit for the purpose of explaining environmental change and the more-than-human dynamics through which agricultural landscapes are produced and change over time?</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482124","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":"How Intersecting State Paternalism, Low Aspirations and Relative Satisfaction Preserve the Inertia of Rural Livelihoods in Odisha","authors":"Takuya Nakagawa,&nbsp;Josef Novotný","doi":"10.1111/joac.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Rural Odisha, located along the eastern coast of India, has experienced slow economic growth over the past decade. This article employs a perspective rooted in the political economy of rural livelihoods to explore how and why this stagnation manifests among farmers. The case study focuses on farming households in a socioecologically homogeneous area with an upgraded irrigation scheme in an interior area in the northeastern side of the state. It uses longitudinal data from structured interviews in 2010/11 and 2022/23 with the same 175 households, supplemented by 64 semistructured interviews with local actors including farmers, local functionaries, government officers, and private actors. Our framework analyses the interplay of livelihood dynamics, aspiration formation, political economic drivers, ecological contexts and local innovation systems. The findings reveal a trajectory of structural change with limited livelihood dynamism, particularly in agriculture and crop diversification, though more changes were observed in nonfarm livelihoods. Limited agricultural dynamism was driven by modest aspirations and reinforced by paternalistic governance that undermines farmer agency. The study enhances our longitudinal understanding of agrarian change and livelihood dynamics with intergenerational differences.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482091","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":"Organizational Accumulation: Revisiting Capitalist Transitions and the Danish Farmer Cooperatives From the 19th to the 21st Centuries","authors":"Markus Christian Hansen,&nbsp;Esben Bøgh Sørensen","doi":"10.1111/joac.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When, how and why does farming become capitalist? This question has long shaped debates in agrarian studies and economic history. Although traditional analyses emphasize market dependency and competitive pressures, this paper argues for a shift in focus towards the diverse strategies of reproduction that farmers have employed in different historical contexts. Rather than searching for common capitalist behaviours, we should examine what made farmers different as they transitioned to capitalism. This approach is illustrated through the case of Denmark, where farmers from the late 19th century pioneered a unique strategy of cooperative organization to transition into capitalist agriculture. We introduce the concept of ‘organizational accumulation’ to describe this process, in which cooperative networks enabled farmers to strongly influence key aspects of production, processing and trade. By foregrounding organizational accumulation, this paper offers a new perspective on how capitalist farming emerges—and how its trajectories vary across time and place.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482265","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":"Blue Economy Struggles—Capital and Power in the Global Ocean: Introduction","authors":"Felix Mallin","doi":"10.1111/joac.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<p>If we heed the calls of fisher movements, coastal communities and environmentalists worldwide a striking picture emerges: the ocean is being claimed, carved up and commodified at an unprecedented scale. This symposium, comprising four contributions and an introductory essay, debates this ongoing capitalist capture of the oceans in the Blue Economy era, tracing historical legacies, legal architectures, geopolitical motives and underlying class dynamics that animate the broader phenomenon of ocean grabbing. While the ‘blue hype’ of the past decade has framed ocean grabbing as a novel phenomenon, the introduction sets the stage by challenging such anachronisms, situating contemporary enclosures within a long history of maritime territorialisation and resource appropriation. Drawing on agrarian political economy, it foregrounds how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has not only enabled but institutionalised ocean grabs, folding vast marine spaces into global circuits of capital accumulation. The four contributions that follow unpack these and related dynamics across different geographies and themes, including distant-water fishing, militarised law enforcement and the entwinement of conservation and extraction. They reveal how capitalist expansion at sea advances not only through brute dispossession. More often it occurs via subtle legal innovation, ecological narratives, piecemeal technocratic reconfigurations of territorial control and class differentiation across geographical scales. By re-examining the evolution and distinctiveness of oceanic relations of property and production, the symposium offers fresh insight into the shifting balances of capital and power in the governance of the global ocean and arising opportunities for resistance.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482256","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":"Marine Degradation and Market Dependency in Ghana: Food Sovereignty as a Critique of Capital in Aquatic Food Systems","authors":"Sophie Standen","doi":"10.1111/joac.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70013","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Small-scale fisheries constitute a vital source of food for millions of people, despite facing increasing marginalisation. Food sovereignty is a global social movement that calls attention to the marginalisation of small-scale food producers in capitalist, corporate-controlled food systems. This paper develops a food sovereign approach to understanding issues affecting small-scale fisheries' aquatic food systems. Using qualitative empirical data, it focuses on women post-harvest workers and the industrial trawling sector in Ghana. Industrial trawling has engendered marine degradation through overfishing, causing a reliance on buying imported and trawler-caught fish, due to a lack of accessible and affordable fish from the small-scale sector. The adverse ecological consequences of marine capitalist overexploitation are a key driver in creating the cyclical conditions for capitalist market dependency in Ghanaian fisheries. Examining how marine capitalist overexploitation propels market dependency can help illuminate the complexities of moving towards aquatic food sovereignty in the contemporary world.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482084","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":"GM Crops and the Jevons Paradox: Induced Innovation, Systemic Effects and Net Pesticide Increases From Pesticide-Decreasing Crops","authors":"Andrew Flachs,&nbsp;Glenn Davis Stone,&nbsp;Steven Hallett,&nbsp;K. R. Kranthi","doi":"10.1111/joac.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Jevons paradox describes how increased efficiency in the use of a resource can paradoxically increase rather than reduce its overall consumption. In agricultural systems, efficiency is confounded by a broad range of economic, ecological, social and evolutionary factors. Agriculture is a particularly elastic kind of production: Efficiencies in one input can lead to an increased consumption of other inputs as well as changes to system outputs. Furthermore, policy, market forces and farmer decisions shape the cultural notion of efficiency across the agricultural landscape. This paper expands the Jevons paradox to consider not just how increased efficiencies induce greater resource consumption in other parts of agrarian systems but also how that consumption entrenches capitalist monoculture. Genetically modified (GM) crops are a technology with the theoretical potential to make agriculture more efficient as a function of yield per input (e.g., water, fuel, fertilizer and pesticide) or unit of land. Like other technological efficiencies, however, the increased use of GM crops over the past 30 years has not contributed to input reductions nor to land reclamations, but to the expansion of agricultural land and increased use of the very pesticides these technologies are purported to curtail. Here, we present a global analysis of Herbicide Tolerant crops and an empirical case study from <i>Bacillus thuringiensis</i> (Bt) cotton in India. In lowering the costs for pesticide applications at the farm level, GM crops not only induce greater overall consumption of those pesticides but also help to sustain this larger system of chemical-intensive monoculture.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482188","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 Class Dynamics of Ocean Grabbing: Who Are the ‘Fisher Peoples’?","authors":"Mads Barbesgaard","doi":"10.1111/joac.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Amidst processes of (uneven) dispossession and displacement of coastal populations—often termed ‘ocean grabbing’—scholar-activists, NGOs and the leadership of different social movements invoke, so-called, ‘fisher people’ as the political subjects of resistance. These ‘fisher people’ are often cast as capital's other as part of a normative and moral critique of ocean grabbing and purportedly the agents of change towards ‘blue justice’. Arguing for the importance of analytically differentiating within and between both classes of capital <i>and</i> classes of labour, this intervention draws on a seemingly clear-cut case of violent ocean grabbing in Southern Myanmar to question prevalent assumptions around undifferentiated ‘fisher peoples’. The intervention argues that the literatures on ocean grabbing and blue (in)justice could usefully draw from the conceptual tools of Marxist agrarian political economy to better analyse concrete social relations of production and reproduction.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482092","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}