Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Contemporary agrarian, rural and rural–urban movements and alliances","authors":"Saturnino M. Borras Jr","doi":"10.1111/joac.12549","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12549","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>Journal of Agrarian Change</i> organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de-valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti-capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian-centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement-building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"453-476"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12549","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43031708","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":"Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID-19","authors":"Vasanthi Venkatesh,&nbsp;Talia Esnard,&nbsp;Vladimir Bogoeski,&nbsp;Tomaso Ferrando","doi":"10.1111/joac.12546","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12546","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 increased their exploitation, illnesses and deaths. However, the pandemic has not merely exposed the long-established structures of racialised exploitation and expropriation in the domain of farm work. Although it exacerbated the precariousness of the living and working conditions defining the reality of migrant farm workers, there is evidence that the pandemic also strengthened farmworkers' individual and collective consciousness, along with forms of organisation and resistance. The symposium ‘Migrant Farmworkers: Resisting and Organizing before, during and after COVID-19’ explores two dimensions reflected in migrant farmworkers' realities during the pandemic. First, the contributions look at the general conditions defining power structures and material outcomes within the political economy of agriculture before and during the pandemic. Second, they explore the conditions under which resistance and solidarity emerged to question established structures of exploitation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"568-578"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12546","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46036767","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":"Manufactured regional crises: The Middle East and North Africa under global food regimes","authors":"Roland Riachi,&nbsp;Giuliano Martiniello","doi":"10.1111/joac.12547","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12547","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 effects of trade liberalization and neoliberalism on the agricultural systems in the region? These are some questions that this paper will try to answer using a geographical and historical-comparative analysis, through a food regimes lens. Understanding contemporary social relations dynamics cannot be limited to the recent period. Agriculture and food in the MENA region are anchored in the history of power relations ruled by flows of capital and the shaping of ecological transformations during the <i>longue durée</i> of capitalism and its corresponding modes of control and regulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"792-810"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12547","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47113477","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 immaculate conception of data: Agribusiness, activists, and their shared politics of the future. By Kelly Bronson, Québec: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2022. pp. 224. C$ 37.95 (pbk)/C$ 130 (hbk). ISBN: 9780228011224 (pbk)/ISBN: 9780228011217 (hbk)","authors":"Summer Sullivan","doi":"10.1111/joac.12548","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12548","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The promise and prominence of digital agriculture has attracted critical scholars who are guided by the underlying question: What, if anything, distinguishes digital agriculture from its industrial counterpart? Many have weighed in on this debate, but few have done so with such a deeply thoughtful, sharply argued and empirically rich approach as Kelly Bronson in &lt;i&gt;The Immaculate Conception of Data: Agribusiness, Activists, and their Shared Politics of the Future&lt;/i&gt; (2022). She begins a book about agriculture in a curious way by detailing the Cambridge Analytica saga, one of the biggest data privacy scandals in recent history that changed the way everyday people engage with (and trust) popular platforms like Facebook and Google. After it was revealed that Big Tech was collecting personal data and selling it to political advertisers (ultimately used to influence United States presidential elections and Brexit), the public responded with a growing scepticism and even outright anger toward these companies, what Bronson and others refer to as ‘techlash’ (p. 9). Bronson argues that despite the public's increasingly critical eye toward Big Tech's amassment of sensitive data, there has not been a similar reaction to analogous forms of data extraction within the agri-food sector. This is where her book makes a crucial and timely intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;No longer concerned solely with synthetic implements, seeds or tractors, Bronson demonstrates through extensive fieldwork how incumbent agribusinesses like John Deere and Monsanto (recently acquired by Bayer) have shifted toward the mass accumulation of ‘big data’ on farms enabled by sophisticated digital technologies like sensors and drones. These agricultural-cum-data firms also devour start-ups aimed at disrupting agriculture, further concentrating their hold on the agri-food industry with drastic consequences for farmer autonomy. To be sure, most of Bronson's Canadian interviewees operate capital- and resource-intensive farms, contributing to scholarship surrounding the bifurcated market for agricultural technology (Bronson, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;). In other words, these technologies are built for and available almost solely to industrial farmers with access to credit. She accordingly pays heed to this uneven dynamic by recalling the ever-relevant technological treadmill, where farmers become trapped within a predatory agricultural innovation adoption cycle (Cochrane, &lt;span&gt;1993&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;John Deere tractors, for example, are now equipped to collect plant-by-plant data through machine learning algorithms as they roam through the row crops. Just like Google or Facebook, John Deere—not the farmer—owns the data, which contains intricate information on everything from soil health to water levels. In a similar fashion to how Instagram orients its advertisements to a person's browser searches, a farmer's agricultural data are used by agribusinesses to sell tailored information back to the farmer who supplied","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12548","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45345497","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":"Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India","authors":"R.C. Sudheesh","doi":"10.1111/joac.12540","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12540","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio-political factors at play.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"755-770"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12540","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41341949","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":"Land, investment and migration. By Camilla Toulmin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. pp. xxv + 241. £67.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780198852766","authors":"Christian Lund","doi":"10.1111/joac.12544","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12544","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;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. And when French, and other UN troops, struggle with Russian Wagner mercenaries to court the pleasure of the Malian government and to impose peace, chances are that something completely different is in store. Optimism seems foolhardy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yet, if we refuse to see the rural Sahelian population as mere human husks doomed to fade out of history as its predestined losers, we might see resilience, endurance and ingenuity. Against the odds, mind you. Camilla Toulmin's &lt;i&gt;Land, Investment and Migration&lt;/i&gt; is about continuity and change in rural Sahel. Forty-some years have passed since Toulmin's first visit to the village of Dlonguébougou in central Mali in 1980, representing more than a generation, more than 2/3 of Mali's post-independence history. We often rely on memory to compare the present with the past. But memories are not of the past, they are assemblages made in the present with the structure of a flea market and the credibility of a compleat angler. In contrast, Toulmin's comparison of the presence with the past does not rely on memory alone. Her book revisits the place and research that formed the basis of her first book, &lt;i&gt;Cattle, Women and Wells: Managing Household Survival in the Sahel&lt;/i&gt;, from 1992. With the historical documentation in hand, the new book is on firm ground to describe and explains the modest fortunes and more ample adversities that have been visited upon the villagers over the past four decades. Increasing pressure on land and looming insecurity has changed the conditions for all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Toulmin's approach is holistic. She engages the system of production in the Sahel and the social and political relations that are spun around classes of people, their interests, visions and actions. The analysis takes its point of departure in the farming system under the difficulties of climate change. Toulmin shows how farming integrates agroforestry and how wild trees are not as wild and unfarmed as an untrained observer would suspect. The landscape was always frugal, and the chapters show how different ‘famine foods’ create a necessary buffer for survival. The farming system itself is also quite intricate. By zooming in on different varieties of crops, the book makes a case for constant micro-adaptation which is only possible for people who know their environment well. The big question is whether the potential of the adaptive strategies will be exhausted in the face of climate change. The jury is still out on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another relentless pressure comes from land scarcity. Whereas land had seemed endlessly abundant when the ","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12544","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47142299","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":"Going green in Thailand: Upgrading in global organic value chains","authors":"Joel D. Moore,&nbsp;John A. Donaldson","doi":"10.1111/joac.12543","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12543","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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. Yet, answering this question is challenging in part because previous analyses of global production networks, such as those associated with organic agriculture, focus more on broad governance patterns than the specific factors and actors that help smallholders shift to organic production and link to far-flung markets. To fill in these gaps, we conducted fieldwork in Isan, Thailand, a major rice-producing area in which many groups of smallholders have attempted to shift into organic production. Doing so allows us to identify the critical challenges associated with upgrading into organic production and analyse how specific actors enabled some groups to overcome these challenges. Our findings provide a generalizable theoretical approach to understanding how to link small-scale farmers to global value chains in ways that can potentially enhance smallholders' livelihoods, spark rural development and encourage more sustainable practices in agriculture.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"844-867"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12543","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49611620","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":"Amplifying invisibility: COVID-19 and Zimbabwean migrant farm workers in South Africa","authors":"Lincoln Addison","doi":"10.1111/joac.12542","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12542","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 workers hyper-visible to ZZ2 management, yet invisible to most people outside the farm. Second, ZZ2 avoids discussion of its migrant workforce in public forums, even as it faces increased scrutiny for its treatment of its workers during the pandemic. Third, the most prominent critic of ZZ2—the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—grants migrant workers only a partial visibility as undifferentiated foreigners with no voice, a construction that ultimately maintains their invisibility at the company. Taken together, these interlocking forms of invisibilization diminish the structural and associational power of workers.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"590-599"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42922272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"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","authors":"Fayrouz Yousfi","doi":"10.1111/joac.12537","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12537","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and the Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis&lt;/i&gt;. At the heart of the argument, Rignall shows how rural dwellers invented &lt;i&gt;new rurality&lt;/i&gt; (p. 5) to adjust to the new reality (global circuits of capital and labour) facing rural life. Within this, land and farming became the object of their struggle. &lt;i&gt;An Elusive Common&lt;/i&gt; invites the reader to examine southeast Morocco's agrarian political and social transformation over the last century. Furthermore, Rignall attempts to look at the ways in which the integration of southeast Morocco into global circuits of capital, the impact of colonialism on the political landscape, and labour out-migration disorganized the racialized system of farming and sharecropping.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Impressively, the book relies upon 1 year of fieldwork from December 2009 until December 2010 in three villages in the Mgoun Valley in southeast Morocco (viz. El Harte, Rbat and Imzline, and El Bour n'Ait Yayha) and uses qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative approach consisted of a survey of 306 households in 2014. At the same time, the qualitative method involves a rich ethnography of land, labour, and community in the field sites, including testimonies of southeast Morocco's oasis inhabitants and the organization of their rural community. This combination of qualitative and quantitative methods has enriched the book's argument.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first chapter aims to set the scene of Morocco's customary law and land tenure in Rignall's three main fieldwork sites: El Harte, Rbat and Imzline, and El Bour n'Ait Yayha. These three sites show how inhabitants use customary law in their struggles. The first part of chapter one provides an overview of customary governance and its relationship to the legal regime in which the jma'a (community) and individuals own the land. Rignall demonstrates how colonial authority designed bureaucratic and legal opacity regarding the governance of land tenure and collective land, which the post-colonial states inherited. These legal ambiguities, Rignall argues, were used by the three communities to make their claims over land. At the same time, the author makes a claim against the romanticization of customs and the community by showing how labour migration to Europe at the beginning of the 1960s produced a new social and economic landscape. Indeed, through remittances, sharecroppers were able to transition to landowners and develop commercial agriculture. Thus, capital accumulation, in this case, allowed marginalized inhabitants of southeast Morocco to gain upward mobility and “secure their autonomy” (p. 76).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Mgoun Valley is not limited to its fields of roses. Indeed, at the edge of the re","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"905-908"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12537","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44098379","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":"China's financialized soybeans: The fault lines of neomercantilism narratives in international food regime analyses","authors":"Tomaz Mefano Fares","doi":"10.1111/joac.12536","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12536","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Neomercantilism is commonly portrayed as a central mechanism of China's global agribusiness engagement. It implies reordering the international food regime by moving away from financial and trade liberalization and securing stable import supplies and price controls under state support. However, this article raises an alternative interpretation through an empirical-rich investigation of the prominence of the state-owned China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) in the soybean commodity chain. The article draws upon analyses of the Chinese state and international food regime to demonstrate that recent changes in state-capital relations during the Xi Jinping administration propelled forms of capital accumulation based on financial speculation and shareholder values. I conclude that state-driven internationalization has placed Chinese agribusiness in an advantageous position within global finance rather than challenging it through agrarian neomercantilist strategies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"477-499"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12536","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46663213","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}