{"title":"Surplus Populations and Socio-Ecological Conflicts in Latin America: The Case of the Mapuche Struggle in Southern Chile","authors":"Jakob Graf","doi":"10.1111/joac.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>So-called surplus populations have repeatedly been the focus of critical analyses in recent years. This refers to a large social group that comprises most of the population in the Global South and is characterised by the fact that it is not integrated into the capitalist mode of production to any relevant extent through wage labour. The consequence is that these surplus populations must reproduce themselves largely outside of capitalist relations of production in a strict sense. This article addresses two research gaps. First, the debate on surplus populations has so far focused mainly on Asian or African contexts and has hardly been related to Latin America; second, this debate on surplus populations has not been linked to the large number of socio-ecological conflicts surrounding their social reproduction in this region. This article shows that this perspective is extremely insightful and illustrates this by looking at the conflict between the forestry industry and the indigenous Mapuche in southern Chile.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007471","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":"Institutions and the Gender Land Gap: A Comparative Analysis","authors":"Cheryl Doss, Helena Mika","doi":"10.1111/joac.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Strengthening women's property rights is on the policy agenda. Rich detailed analyses abound, discussing how agrarian change, including commercialization of land or land titling programmes, affect women's property rights within a particular context. In this comparative paper, we examine national-level institutional factors across 45 low- and middle-income countries. We combine individual-level land ownership data with indicators about the structure of the economy, land markets, work and education, gender equality, property rights, social norms, marital property rights and inheritance and political voice. We find no evidence that economic growth is associated with lower gender land gaps. However, the indicators that proxy for greater gender equality in the labour force, educational attainment and legal and social norms are all associated with a lower gender gap in landownership, suggesting that national-level institutions can play an important role in supporting women's land rights.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146016341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State, Capital and Coercion in Indonesia's Food Estates","authors":"Fuad Abdulgani, Laksmi Adriani Savitri","doi":"10.1111/joac.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70031","url":null,"abstract":"<p>From colonial times to the present, the Indonesian state has continuously attempted to re-organise nature, technology and relations of production by establishing large-scale food monocrop farming or “food estates”. As Indonesian food production has largely been based on petty commodity production by small farmers, including a minority of petty capitalists and a large majority of marginal farmers, we ask why food estate initiatives have been persistently reproduced in different times and places despite a century-long history of failure of such projects. As we show through historical and contemporary examples of food estate programmes, the Indonesian “outer islands” have been the main sites of accelerated corporate land grabbing and coercion in both wage labour and contract farming labour regimes. We argue that the persistence of food estate visions and initiatives can be understood as an enduring colonialism, structured through the idealisation of modern industrial agriculture, the view of small farmers as ‘racialised others’, backward and inferior and the systematic denial of customary land rights. This is made possible by the integration of corporate agribusiness in the state's food self-sufficiency project, producing labour regimes sustained by the state coercion as evidenced by the increasing military involvement in food estate projects.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dispossession, Extractive Capitalism and Political Reactions From Below in West Papua","authors":"Rassela Malinda","doi":"10.1111/joac.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Examining two distinct types of resistance, this study explores how local inequalities in land and power have shaped and differentiated the political reactions of West Papuans in the face of dispossession. The first type involves overt struggle against dispossession. Two cases of indigenous communities resisting the expansion of plantations shed light on how alliances between indigenous landholders, local state actors and environmental NGOs can create a political opportunity structure that bolsters the demands of resistance groups. The second type, a less-studied response to dispossession, demonstrates how terms of inclusion shape the strategies of landholding groups demanding to be incorporated into contract arrangements. This study relies on primary materials collected during fieldwork in West Papua since 2019, combined with secondary data.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distributive Politics and Class Dynamics in Rural Java","authors":"Colum Graham","doi":"10.1111/joac.70030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70030","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on fieldwork in a village I call Lone Teak in East Java, Indonesia, this paper examines emerging patterns of class differentiation and distributive politics. The history of Lone Teak's landholding structure reveals long-term patterns of inequality. However, since widespread deforestation during 1998–2002, new dynamics emerged. Many households have accessed local state forestland for farming and more attainable state capital has underwritten the expansion of their agricultural production. With greater access to forestland and capital, lower classes have experienced upward social mobility, whereas landowning middle classes struggle to maintain, let alone move beyond their existing position. These state-induced developments have produced a differentiated nostalgia for former President Suharto's era (1966–1998). This nostalgia reflects a response to losses and expectations for better opportunities to accumulate, not a desire for returning to authoritarian rule.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Proletarians: Women Workers in the Javanese Heartland","authors":"Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih","doi":"10.1111/joac.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article investigates proletarian precarity among female factory workers in the interplay of factory and family dynamics in Indonesia’s Javanese heartland. These women workers are part of semiproletarian households that combine income from a mix of precarious work and self-employment within the rural–urban nexus, which encompasses rural villages and the towns and cities to which their inhabitants regularly commute for work. Their connection with land and agricultural activities, along with rural-based networks, subsidizes part of the cost of labour reproduction in labour-intensive industry in middle-sized cities, while shaping their negotiation of patriarchy and capitalist accumulation. Female factory workers’ everyday navigation of the productive and reproductive spheres is often disregarded by traditional agrarian and labour movements. The analysis also points to the inherent contradictions within their experiences, where attempts to negotiate subordination often (inadvertently) reproduce existing power relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sustainability Standards, Differentiation and Green Capital Accumulation in Global Agrifood Value Chains","authors":"Juliane Lang","doi":"10.1111/joac.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The mainstreaming of sustainability standards in agrifood industries has often been accompanied by adverse distributional outcomes. While powerful lead firms in global value chains obtain reputational benefits and premiums, costs and risks are transferred to suppliers. Yet, we still know little about how producers resist this form of green capital accumulation and with what results. In this paper, I draw on a comparative study of Chilean wine and farmed salmon to contrast a sector with globally fragmented sustainability standardisation (wine) with one in which standards are globally homogenised (salmon). I show how in both industries, green capital accumulation is characterised by power struggles over capturing value through standards, and from differentiated forms of sustainability efforts. I highlight how, by exercising control through standards, powerful actors externalise costs and risks, while by exercising control through intangible assets they appropriate value from other actors’ differentiated sustainability efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Socialist Entrepreneurship and Integrated Peasant Economy: Failed Collectivization in Yugoslavia (1949–1953)","authors":"Lev Centrih","doi":"10.1111/joac.70026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70026","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the specific features of collectivization in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on Slovenia as one of its constituent republics. Through a bottom-up approach, it examines selected cases from the countryside surrounding the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, between 1949 and 1953. Unlike the Soviet and broader Eastern European cases, the Slovene/Yugoslav regime stemmed from both a socialist revolution and the National Liberation War. Alongside coercion, it used pragmatic strategies to win over the peasantry—allowing wealthier peasants to join labour cooperatives and promoting ‘entrepreneurship’, a value rooted in capitalism, as a socialist principle. While aiming to preserve the industriousness of petty commodity production, the authorities sought to achieve this within a new environment: no longer in private enterprises, but in state or collective (cooperative) ones, protected from the destructive consequences of capitalism. Drawing on case studies, the article demonstrates that collectivization failed: Support from revolutionary activists proved insufficient, peasants rejected the proposed entrepreneurial model, and they continued to pursue individualistic family farming. It explains the persistence of traditional agriculture through the concept of the integrated peasant economy, in dialogue with theories of pluriactivity and petty commodity production.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Contracts: Supply Chains and Dynamics of Incorporation Among Classes of Capital in the Aftermath of Global Outbreaks of Avian Flu","authors":"Jostein Jakobsen, Mads Barbesgaard, Mariel Aguilar-Støen","doi":"10.1111/joac.70025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70025","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates how agricultural producers are incorporated into commodity circuits under contemporary capitalism, in the context of growing pressures from emerging infectious diseases. Focusing on poultry production systems in Denmark and Norway currently under threat from highly pathogenic avian influenza, we argue that understanding these dynamics requires an expanded conception of agriculture that accounts for the contractual arrangements binding poultry growers to both upstream and downstream actors in a supply chain defined by spatially dispersed operations with growers positioned midstream. Specifically, we explore how risk diffuses along supply chains, how forms of knowledge and resources originating upstream and downstream of the farm-level organise production processes, and the managerial efforts aimed at reconciling contradictory interests. We contend that these dynamics have significant implications for how outbreaks of infectious diseases ramify across variously situated actors in natural resource industries under contemporary capitalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"25 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70025","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145181502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examining Land Inheritance Patterns in Ghana Through a Gender Lens","authors":"Abena D. Oduro","doi":"10.1111/joac.70024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70024","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The growing literature on women's land rights in the1990s triggered international development policy support for land titling with the aim of strengthening women's land rights. However, land titling is unlikely to close the gender gap in land ownership if the main mode of acquiring land, inheritance, is not equally available to women and men. The paper draws upon two surveys on gendered access to land ownership to examine how Ghana's customary and formal inheritance institutions affect women's and men's land ownership. The paper shows that men are still overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of inherited land and that, without policies to address this, titling programmes will only perpetuate the gender gap in land ownership that is biased against women. The paper recommends a three-pronged approach that prioritises public education on the benefits of women's land ownership, reform of inheritance laws to promote gender equality and effective enforcement of these laws.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70024","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146016347","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}