Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Labour Regimes and Rural Classes of Labour in the Automotive Industry in Mexico","authors":"Mateo Crossa,&nbsp;Iván Lopez Ovalle","doi":"10.1111/joac.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The automotive industry in Mexico is sustained by a labour regime rooted in low-cost labour, made possible in part by the integration of rural workers and peasants into both the production lines and the broader processes of social reproduction of labour power. To fully grasp this relationship would require analyzing the mechanisms that enforce labour control and discipline, not only within the production process itself but also within the broader realm of social reproduction. This article examines the composition of the labour force in Tlaxcala's automotive region, focusing on the areas surrounding the Puebla-based VW and Audi assembly plants, to emphasize the essential role of workers from peasant backgrounds in maintaining conditions of super-exploitation. Displaced by neoliberal policies of dispossession and forced devaluation, these rural workers have become a key source of cheap labour for the industry. Now integrated into the workforce as part of ‘rural classes of labour,’ they rely on multiple economic activities to compensate for the industry's low wages. This dynamic illustrates how the subordinate incorporation of rural communities into the maquiladora sector is essential to maintain the labour regimes characteristic of automotive export enclaves.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146002556","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":"Behind the Myth: Land Sparing and Deforestation in Brazil","authors":"Ludivine Eloy,&nbsp;Karina Y. M. Kato,&nbsp;Valdemar João Wesz Junior,&nbsp;Susanna Hecht","doi":"10.1111/joac.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The land sparing model, that is, the idea that agricultural intensification fosters environmental protection, lacks empirical validation. In Brazil, sustainable intensification through the conversion of degraded pastures into agricultural areas became a promising and widespread solution to deforestation. We investigate the mismatch between the land sparing discourse and the reality of productive and territorial strategies of large soybean producers in Brazil. We combined documental, fieldwork and secondary data from old (Mato Grosso), intermediate (Pará) and recent agricultural frontiers (Roraima). We argue that the land sparing narrative relies on a conceptual separation between modern agriculture and a land extensive ‘backward agriculture’ (on deforestation fronts). We show that many agroindustrial enterprises expand their activities from consolidated areas to agricultural frontiers, maintaining farms in both regions. For the agribusiness sector, maintaining the myth of sustainable ecological intensification is crucial to conceal its role in opening up new deforestation fronts across South America.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007846","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":"On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geographyby Henri Lefebvre, Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, Editors, Robert Bononno, Translator. University of Minnesota Press. 2022. 304 pp. $59 (hbk); $30 (pbk). ISBN-10: 1517904692; ISBN-13: 9781517904692","authors":"Gillian Hart","doi":"10.1111/joac.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70047","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Most Anglophone readers regard Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) first and foremost as a theorist of ‘The Urban Question’. &lt;i&gt;On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography&lt;/i&gt;, a newly translated collection of Lefebvre's essays edited and introduced by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, makes clear how Lefebvre's early engagement with rural and agrarian questions illuminated and shaped his subsequent urban work. Their excellent introductory essay also highlights the detailed empirical and historical work on both rural and urban processes that informed his theoretical contributions and provides a comprehensive roadmap through the 12 chapters published between 1949 and 1969. They comprise the specifically rural essays from Lefebvre's 1970 collection &lt;i&gt;Du rural à l'urbain&lt;/i&gt; along with two supplemental essays on rural issues and some of the transitional texts from 1960/1 that begin to trace urbanization processes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me start with a very brief biographical/historical sketch relevant to Lefebvre's rural contributions, bearing in mind the enormity of his &lt;i&gt;oeuvre&lt;/i&gt; (some 60 books and 300 articles). His writings during the 1930s, many in collaboration with Norbert Guterman, were important &lt;i&gt;inter alia&lt;/i&gt; in bringing Marx's early writings to a French audience, translating Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's dialectics into French and analysing nationalism and fascism. His anti-Stalinist &lt;i&gt;Dialectical Materialism&lt;/i&gt;, originally published in 1940, was republished in English translation by the University of Minnesota Press in &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt; with an illuminating Preface by Stefan Kipfer. Following the German invasion of France, Lefebvre's membership in the French communist party (PCF) resulted in his losing his teaching job and moving to Aix-en-Provence, where he joined the French Resistance. He also engaged in extensive research in the Pyrenees, where he had family roots.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 1948, he entered the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris where, as Lefebvre observes in the 1969 Introduction to &lt;i&gt;Du rural à l'urbain&lt;/i&gt; (included in this collection), he was able ‘to make the transition from “pure” philosophy to the study of social practice and everydayness [&lt;i&gt;quotidienneté&lt;/i&gt;]’, attending primarily to the problem of ‘the peasants, the peasantry, agricultural production and industrialization in this context’ (p. 3). Lefebvre makes clear that his agrarian interests stretched far beyond his rural research in France, posing three central questions: Why was worldwide revolution deflected from industrial to predominantly agrarian countries; what are the conditions under which peasants become an active revolutionary force and the limits of this development; and the difficulties of agricultural production in the construction of socialism. Explaining that he had amassed ‘an enormous amount of documentation on the peasant question and agrarian reform in Latin America, Italy and the Islamic states’, Lefebvre expresses his frustration at ‘ne","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007627","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":"Growing From Below: Accumulation and Differentiation in Publicly Supported Irrigation Schemes in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania","authors":"Victor Mbande,&nbsp;Lowe Börjeson,&nbsp;Emma Liwenga","doi":"10.1111/joac.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What model of agricultural transformation can reach the policy goals of just transformation and increased productivity in the diverse African smallholder sector? A response to this question relies on studies that examine outcomes of local agricultural investments. A significant, yet under-studied, example of these investments is small-scale public investments in irrigation. To address this gap, we analyse social differentiation and accumulation patterns arising from donor-supported public investments in irrigation in four villages in the Kilombero District, Tanzania. Participatory wealth ranking and interviews reveal that investments in small-scale smallholder irrigation fuelled a process of accumulation from ‘below’. We discuss how these investments can be considered more inclusive than ‘from above’ accumulation (from extra-local investments), while nonetheless contributing to some differentiation among smallholders. We conclude that public investments that align with smallholders' initiatives in irrigation development are more likely to contribute to policy goals of socially inclusive improved agricultural productivity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146027520","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 Polanyian Framework for Analyzing a Diverse Black-Market Economy in Cuba","authors":"Federica Bono,&nbsp;John C. Finn","doi":"10.1111/joac.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Inspired by Carmen Diana Deere's work, we examine how planned economies, markets and communal economies interrelate to co-produce Cuba's agricultural economy. We show the variety of noncapitalist practices interrelated with and embedded in the black market and how these interactions produce diverse ethics. We build on a geographic interpretation of Karl Polanyi's substantive understanding of the economy and on geographic literature on the informal economy to offer a framework for analysing diversity within a black-market economy. Based on a case study of five agricultural cooperatives in a small rural village, we illustrate how, in Cuba, so-called ‘capitalist’ practices and profitmaking are interrelated with solidary, communal and political ethics. We conclude that understanding the heterogeneity in already existing economic relations is important for envisioning innovative economic models.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007582","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":"Finance, Land and Labour","authors":"Samuel Frederico,&nbsp;Stefan Ouma,&nbsp;Emily Duncan,&nbsp;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 Forums¹, 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":"Cultivating Climate Precarity: Mechanisms of Surplus Capture and Immiserizing Growth in Guatemala's Horticultural Export Sector","authors":"S. Ryan Isakson","doi":"10.1111/joac.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In recent decades, prominent development organizations have promoted market inclusion and agricultural value chain integration as pathways to rural prosperity in the Global South. Focusing upon the experiences of Indigenous Kaqchikel peasants in Guatemala's horticultural export sector, this paper offers a cautionary tale. Drawing upon Carmen Diana Deere's pioneering work on the political economy of agrarian change, I examine how mechanisms of surplus transfer have been reconfigured and intensified through the incorporation of peasants into export markets for fresh fruits and vegetables. Fusing Deere's framework with insights from the political ecology literature on climate change adaptation, I show how development initiatives that promise inclusion and poverty alleviation can, paradoxically, deepen socio-economic inequality and environmental vulnerability. Guatemala has emerged as a prominent exporter of horticultural products and the sector generates substantial profits and foreign exchange. Yet the historical marginalization of Kaqchikel farmers means that they are often adversely incorporated into agricultural value chains. Their integration into exploitative market relations has produced mounting debts and deepening environmental precarity. The result is a stark example of immiserizing growth.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007331","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 Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics and the Infrastructural State in Cuba, By Gustav Cederlöf, Oakland: University of California Press. 2023. 260 pp. $29.50/£25 (pb/e-book) $95.00/£80.00 (hb). ISBN: 978-0-52-039313-4","authors":"Gerardo A. Torres Contreras","doi":"10.1111/joac.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70036","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Gustav Cederlöf's book, &lt;i&gt;The low-carbon contradiction: energy transition, geopolitics and the infrastructural state in Cuba&lt;/i&gt;, is a rich account of what the Cuban experience can tell us about some of today's most pressing questions vis-à-vis energy justice and decarbonisation, the impacts of cross-sectoral energy efficiency policies and energy path dependencies in the world economy. By tracing the evolution of Cuba's energy policies since the Revolution and their interlinkage with the global economy, Cederlöf asks two crucial questions. First, how an imaginary of energy use and postcolonial development was placed in Cuban politics and how this imaginary has been renegotiated in periods of geopolitical and environmental change. Second, how particular energy sources give rise to spatial patterns of social and economic activity that engender political ideas, social relations and economic interests. To answer these questions, the book offers insight into the tensions and contradictions at play in Cuba's low-carbon transition. It shows that the energy sector in post-revolutionary Cuba was shaped by a fundamental tension: a fossil-fuel growth-oriented economy was at odds with political efforts to create a low-carbon economy resting on non-growth social values. In doing so, the book contends that this tension resulted from unequal power relations at both the local and the global scale and sheds light on how the conditions of possibility for an energy transition in the periphery are highly distant from those determining the core of the global economy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Across five rich chapters, Cederlöf narrates and analyses how Cuban people experienced different configurations of the state vis-à-vis energy policy, from a centralised infrastructure that enabled the redistribution of energy for economic development to non-state infrastructures that prioritised the access and use of energy according to possibilities of local autonomy. The concept of infrastructural state, understood as an entity with relational qualities and a social life, is thus essential to understanding Cederlöf's account. This meant that the state's ability to maintain a political arrangement of resource distribution generated experiences of energy use and access that were highly differentiated along lines of gender, race and class from the 1950s to the early 2010s.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 1 sets the historical conditions of Cuba and how a low-carbon transition must be analysed from its position in the global economy. Cederlöf shows how the Cuban economy was highly dependent on sugarcane exports and how centuries of colonial extraction meant that the island had little or close to no forest cover. The post-revolutionary Cuban energy matrix configuration is thus analysed vis-à-vis these dependencies, thereby configuring specific dynamics around the access and use of energy. Electricity became a material base and a metaphor for the socialist state to bring the masses out of darkness. In doing so, ener","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007780","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}