Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Peasants in world history. By Eric Vanhaute, New York and London: Routledge. 2021. 146 pp. £136.81 (hbk); £36.59 (pbk). ISBN: 9780415740937, 9780415740944.","authors":"Cristóbal Kay","doi":"10.1111/joac.12573","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12573","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The author is faced with a major challenge in writing a textbook on peasants in ‘world history in action’ … ‘allowing discussions of changes and continuities’ and … ‘comparisons of relevant similarities and differences’ while evaluating them in ‘global contexts’ (p. ii). These citations are from the series editor of ‘Themes in World History’, and this book is the fifth in this series. Vanhaute follows this brief by analysing peasants in world history from 10,000 BCE (Before the Common Era) until today using a ‘peasant frontiers’ approach for this purpose. It is a useful organizing device, and each chapter, except for the introduction, includes the key term ‘frontiers’ followed by a subtitle. The exposition is chronological starting with ‘New Frontiers: From the first peasants to early agrarian states’, followed by ‘Extending Frontiers’, ‘Interconnecting Frontiers’, ‘Intensifying Frontiers’, ‘Globalizing Frontiers’ and finishing with ‘The End of Frontiers’, each with their respective subtitle. A question immediately arises in my mind—does the end of frontiers also mean the end of the peasantry? This has been a key question in the debates on the agrarian question and the future of the peasantry, and the author does not shy away from confronting it as we will see. It is with great interest and expectation that I started to read this book as it reminded me of a review I wrote over 40 years ago of a book with the title <i>Peasants in History</i> edited by Eric Hobsbawm et al.; see Kay (<span>1982</span>). Some of the themes discussed in this book also resurface in the book by Vanhaute such as the analysis of the transformation of the peasant economy and its future, although Hobsbawm et al.'s book is limited to the period from the transition of feudalism to capitalism to the late 1970s, hence before the neoliberal-globalization turn in the world system which figures prominently in Vanhaute's book. But in theoretical terms, Hobsbawm et al.'s book casts its net wider as Marxist and Chayanovian peasantist perpectives are well represented while Vanhaute's book is firmly rooted in the peasantist camp.</p><p>As expected, peasants are at the centre of the book under review even to the extent that they appear in the author's view to be at the centre of human history. There are, of course, different theoretical approaches for analysing the history of peasants, and in the literature on critical agrarian studies, there are two main contesting approaches—the peasantist and the Marxist. The peasantist approach derives mainly from the writings of Alexander Chayanov, Teodor Shanin, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Philip McMichael (all mentioned in the selected readings) while the Marxist approach derives mainly from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky and Henry Bernstein (only Bernstein is mentioned in the readings). Vanhaute's approach is clearly embedded in the peasantist approach, as will became evident later, but he does include in the selected readings some M","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12573","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139528669","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":"Power/knowledge/land: Contested ontologies of land and its governance in Africa. By Laura A. German, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 333. $90.00 (hbk); $39.95 (pbk). ISBN: 9780472075331, 9780472055333","authors":"Youjin B. Chung","doi":"10.1111/joac.12572","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12572","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The global land grab has arguably been one of the most contentious issues in agrarian struggles and public policy debates of the early 21st century. In the wake of the capitalist crises in food, energy, climate and finance of the late 2000s, a diverse group of actors—from national governments to private corporations to individual and institutional investors, including pension funds, hedge funds, university endowments and sovereign wealth funds—rushed to acquire land in the Global South to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. Africa, a region deemed to abound in so-called cheap, idle land, quickly became a hotbed of transnational land acquisitions, prompting concerns about neocolonialism and a ‘New Scramble for Africa’.</p><p>Laura German's book <i>Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa</i> intervenes in the vast literature on the topic in ways that move beyond the classic theoretical moorings in agrarian political economy and critical studies of land and property. As the title suggests, she draws insights from the scholarship on the politics of knowledge and ontological anthropology to unsettle what she calls the ‘land governance orthodoxy’ or the ‘global knowledge regime’ on land that consolidated in the international development policy arena, in response to the public outcry over global land grabbing. This orthodoxy entails the mobilization of discourses and programs that promote such ideals as tenure security, women's empowerment and inclusive business to better manage large-scale land deals and ameliorate their adverse social consequences. German's driving thesis is that this orthodoxy has helped facilitate the commodification of land and the dispossession of customary rights holders, while masking the underlying drivers of the increasing land and livelihood insecurity in rural Africa today: the neoliberal push to privatize land and secure exclusive land access <i>for investors</i>.</p><p>Drawing on Chakrabarty (<span>1992</span>), German aims to ‘provincialize’ and denaturalize the dominant land governance constructs and their ontological premises, as revealed in key documents and websites of multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, development think tanks, nongovernmental organizations and private corporations. To scrutinize the seemingly self-evident truth claims and theories of change advocated by these entities, she provides a thorough systematic review of existing ethnographic evidence, while also using her own observations from fieldwork and engagement in the global land governance fora. Her methodological choice of drawing extensively on a wide range of published ethnographic works is an intentional one. By placing ‘ethnographic materials at the service of world-making’ (p. 3), she contributes to ‘a new anthropology of politics’ (Postero & Elinoff, <span>2019</span>, p. 7) that calls attention to the limits of economic logics, technocratic managerialism and the urgent int","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12572","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138966635","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":"Agricultural intensification increases farmers' income but reduces food self-sufficiency and bee diversity: Evidence from southeast Mexico","authors":"Eric Vides-Borrell,&nbsp;Pierre Gasselin,&nbsp;Bruce G. Ferguson,&nbsp;Luciana Porter-Bolland,&nbsp;Tiffany Dangla-Pelissier,&nbsp;Simon Ayvayan,&nbsp;Rémy Vandame","doi":"10.1111/joac.12571","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12571","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The tropical region of Hopelchén, southeastern Mexico, is a place of high contrasts in terms of the agricultural intensity of production systems and landscape configuration: It presents enormous areas of conserved forest and at the same time the highest rate of deforestation in Mexico. The consequences of agricultural intensification in this region are the subject of our research. We surveyed 80 farmers, whom we grouped into seven types, and developed an index of agricultural intensity based on sowing intensity, frequency of pesticide application and frequency of tractor use. We evaluated the economic potential and added value for farmers, such as food security and self-sufficiency, as well as bee diversity in the agricultural intensification gradient. Our results show that agricultural intensification generates higher added value, but not economic potential, and does not necessarily lead to higher food security. However, it does negatively affect bee diversity and pollination potential, which compromises the sustainable development of the region.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12571","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138693062","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":"Emerging patterns of accumulation in land redistribution in South Africa","authors":"Farai Mtero,&nbsp;Nkanyiso Gumede,&nbsp;Katlego Ramantsima","doi":"10.1111/joac.12570","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12570","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article contributes to the wider debates on the impacts and outcomes of state efforts to create agrarian capitalists in land reform and agriculture in most countries of the global South. Specifically, this article presents empirical evidence on South Africa's State Land Lease and Disposal Policy (SLLDP) and analyses emerging accumulation dynamics in land redistribution. The evidence presented demonstrates that most of the SLLDP farm beneficiaries are capitalists from non-agrarian sectors who increasingly see land reform as the new frontier for accumulation with significant opportunities to access state land and production support. Other agrarian capitalists leverage political influence and accumulate through privileged access to public resources. In contrast, accumulation from below through the reinvestment of farming proceeds remains constrained. Promoting a small segment of already wealthy capitalists greatly limits the potential of land reform to transform social relations in property in favour of historically marginalised social classes.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12570","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138547357","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":"Work and social reproduction in rural India: Lessons from time-use data","authors":"Smriti Rao,&nbsp;Smita Ramnarain,&nbsp;Sirisha Naidu,&nbsp;Anupama Uppal,&nbsp;Avanti Mukherjee","doi":"10.1111/joac.12569","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12569","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Efforts to decentre/decolonize our understanding of capitalist development in the Global South call for more complex and differentiated categories of work that acknowledge the significance of both non-waged and reproductive labour. These categories would allow us to more clearly ‘see’ the varying intersections of gender, class and caste within this world of work. Even as the literature on work in the Global South acknowledges the importance of forms of non-waged work, there is still more work to be done to sufficiently incorporate the labour of social reproduction. In this paper, which emerges from an effort to apply a feminist social reproduction lens in the field, we propose understanding work through four conceptual dyads: waged productive labour, non-waged productive labour, waged reproductive labour and non-waged reproductive labour. Through an in-depth description of three specific cases from a time-use survey we conducted in rural Punjab, India, we argue not only that all four dyads are required to encompass the world of work but also that this more expansive conceptualization can help us produce richer analyses of the intersections of class, caste and gender.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12569","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138530729","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":"Political economy of input–output markets of groundnut: A case from the groundnut value chain of Turkey","authors":"Burhan Özalp,&nbsp;M. Necat Ören","doi":"10.1111/joac.12568","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12568","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mainstream economics argues that value chains provide farmers better prices and incomes, thus aiding development. However, this study contradicts this consensus, revealing that the value chain generates the status of petty commodity producers for farmers. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the value chain keeps downstream actors, such as merchants, processors, wholesalers, and retailers, in a powerful position against farmers. The study delves into these phenomena by considering the historical relationship between the market, the commodification of agriculture, the state, the interconnection of markets, the value chain, and neoliberalism. This research focuses on the political economy of groundnut input–output markets in Turkey through value chain analysis. Based on thorough primary field research, the paper demonstrates that the functioning of the value chain strengthens the position of downstream actors against farmers. Additionally, it shows that the value chain creates interlinking between farmers and merchants and makes small farmers the most disadvantaged actor. Moreover, the study highlights that groundnut production costs have risen at a higher rate than incomes under neoliberal policies. Finally, the article demonstrates that mechanization in groundnut farming, while increasing productivity by meeting the chain demands, fails to significantly improve farmers' incomes and profits due to the impact of neoliberal policies on other input costs.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12568","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138530727","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":"Control, exploitation and exclusion: Experiences of small farmer e-tailers in agricultural e-commerce in China","authors":"Xiaojun Feng","doi":"10.1111/joac.12567","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12567","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Digital technologies are reshaping the landscape of agriculture. In 2021, around 10% of agricultural products in China were distributed through the Internet. As small farmers are traditionally subsumed by commercial capital in the sphere of circulation, this article investigates what difference online marketing has made to this relationship. Using qualitative data collected from a county in China, we examine the experiences of small farmer e-tailers. We find that agricultural e-commerce provides them with an alternative marketing channel and a larger customer base, increases the efficiency of product distribution and allows them to retain a greater share of the value they produce. However, while extant literature suggests that agricultural e-commerce has increased farmers' autonomy and income, we find that small farmers' vertical expansion into e-commerce by becoming agricultural e-tailers fails to alleviate their subsumption by commercial capital and subjects them to more oppressive forms of commercial capital in three ways. First, small farmer e-tailers are controlled by agricultural e-commerce platforms, as their transactions rely on these platforms that are quasi-monopolies in China. Second, these e-tailers are increasingly exploited by platforms and other cybermediaries whom they are forced to pay for Internet traffic. Finally, small farmers are being excluded from being e-tailers as platforms are becoming e-tailers and they cannot compete with corporate e-tailers.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12567","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135251192","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":"Social reproduction in crisis: Gendered labour regimes in agro-export sectors in Ecuador and Chile","authors":"Laura T. Raynolds,&nbsp;Annabel Ipsen","doi":"10.1111/joac.12565","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12565","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The pandemic lays bare the centrality of social reproduction in upholding global commodity networks. Capitalism's reliance on gendered and racialized systems of social reproduction has deepened structural contradictions and socio-economic divides across agro-export sectors and agrarian communities. We analyse how COVID-19 policies and responses in Ecuador and Chile are reshaping systems of social and labour protection in feminized agro-export sectors. We integrate labour regime and gender regime frameworks, showing how they are (1) co-constituted via global forces, national policies, institutional pressures and local practices; (2) intertwined in neoliberal and social-democratic development models; and (3) forged through control, consent and resistance. We analyse national legal frameworks and policy responses to COVID-19, as well as industry, union and worker reactions, illustrating how ‘neutral’ policies have gendered outcomes, (re)creating false binaries between production and reproduction and paid and unpaid work. We find that the pandemic has reshaped gendered labour regimes in agro-exports: in Ecuador, undermining the fragile commitment to a social-democratic gendered labour regime and in Chile, strengthening social-democratic supports and promises of a more equitable gendered labour regime. In both cases, states and firms have neglected to include social reproduction in the ‘costs’ of development, thus threatening national development models grounded in the exploitation of cheap female labour in agro-export sectors.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12565","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135537087","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 to differentiate peasant classes in capital-intensive agriculture?","authors":"Paramjit Singh,&nbsp;Mukesh Kumar","doi":"10.1111/joac.12566","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12566","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper highlights the relevance of Marxian class analysis to understand the changing nature of agrarian classes under capital-intensive agriculture. It is a methodological exercise that builds on Patnaik's labour exploitation index (E-criterion) in three major respects to construct a new index, namely, the Modified Labour Exploitation Index (MEI), to differentiate peasant classes. First and most important, it incorporates the role of mechanisation, which, so far, has been ignored in the methodological attempts to differentiate within the peasantry. Second, it underscores the importance of non-agricultural (and non-rural) bases of simple reproduction in the countryside by incorporating hired-out labour by agricultural households to the non-agricultural sector into the classification criteria. Finally, it makes surplus labour exploited through land leasing empirically testable by using Marx's differential and absolute rent to differentiate between subsistence and commercial leasing. The new index is then empirically tested using primary data collected from rural Haryana, India. The paper argues that MEI is an effective criterion for understanding changing class dynamics, the shifting modes of the livelihood of the poor peasantry and the largely hidden accumulation processes in agrarian societies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12566","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134960176","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":"Blaming the victim or structural conditioning? COVID-19, obesity and the neoliberal diet","authors":"Gerardo Otero","doi":"10.1111/joac.12564","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12564","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The energy-dense part of the neoliberal diet and obesity made for an explosive combination upon the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy-dense foods lie at the root of comorbidities associated with complications of the COVID-19 pandemic: overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so forth. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated the causal impact of overweight and obesity on more severe or lethal infections. Focusing on the case of Mexico, I will show that inequality strongly conditions what people can eat, so the issue is not simply a matter of personal choice or responsibility. My argument is twofold: (1) Mexico enjoyed its own ‘traditional’ diets through the mid-1980s, which included widely accessible fruits and vegetables. But (2) the neoliberal turn in the form of trade liberalization and deepening inequality caused a substantial reshaping of the diet in favour of energy-dense foods with lower nutritional value. The energy-dense segment of ‘the neoliberal diet’ has turned a large portion of Mexicans into a vulnerable population. But this is a class-differentiated diet with its healthy and nutritious components increasingly less accessible to the working classes. Recovering healthy diets in Mexico will require the recuperation of food sovereignty through the regeneration of its countryside and its peasantry. Agroecological methods of food production will also be needed to alleviate the climate change emergency.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12564","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135740574","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}