Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"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":"COVID-19 and the power of indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in the US Pacific Northwest","authors":"Tomás Alberto Madrigal","doi":"10.1111/joac.12539","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12539","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over the last several years—in the context of US political upheaval, ongoing crises related to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn—indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in Washington State have engaged more intensely in class struggle through acts of solidarity and forms of collective action, in part through independent labour unions, worker cooperatives and mutual aid. This article chronicles the labour struggles that led to a notion of class rooted in family units of production and that strengthened transnational solidarity in resistance to racist forms of exploitation in the agricultural sector. Class organization rooted in family and solidarity has allowed indigenous agricultural workers in Washington State to face COVID-19 and incidents driven by climate change, which syndemically compounded existing community health crises, from a place of power. Focusing on the experience of farmworker families in Washington State, I outline agricultural employers' exploitation of workers during this period of increased vulnerability and the strength of farmworkers' resolve to take their health and well-being into their own hands.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"622-633"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43502603","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}

{"title":"The social reproduction of natural resource extraction and gendered labour regimes in rural Turkey","authors":"Coşku Çelik","doi":"10.1111/joac.12535","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12535","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In recent decades, rural livelihood has been restructured dramatically in the Global South as a result of neoliberal transformations such as the removal of state subsidies for small-scale farmers, privatization of agricultural state economic enterprises, rising control of global agribusiness firms on agricultural production, expropriation of rural commons and private farmland for mega-investments in natural resources. Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments, Turkey has been a prime example of these patterns of accumulation and dispossession. Additionally, the country has been facing coal rush policies of the AKP governments with the aim of utilizing domestic coal to overcome the problem of energy supply security. In this paper, I argue that rural change and patterns of proletarianization in the rural extractive regions are inherently gendered and women assume a central role in the production and social reproduction of the classes of extractive labour. Drawing on 3-year research conducted in the Soma Coal Basin, Western Anatolia, Turkey, the paper examines the transformation of women's (i) petty commodity production as unpaid family farmers, (ii) agricultural wage work and (iii) reproductive work as miners' wives and subsistence farmers as a result of rising private sector coal investments since the mid-2000s.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"24 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12535","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48748247","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":"Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction By Helen Anne Curry. University of California Press. 2022. Pp 321. $85 (hb); $29.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780520307681(hb)/9780520307698 (pb)","authors":"Carol Hernández-Rodríguez,&nbsp;Hugo Perales","doi":"10.1111/joac.12534","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12534","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Helen Anne Curry's book &lt;i&gt;Endangered Maize&lt;/i&gt; provides an excellent, captivating description of the origins, ideas, and motivations behind the narratives of maize as an endangered genetic resource and how these narratives have shaped the methods and tools of conservation adopted by scientists and states. The book focuses on the role of actors from the two major participants in maize development and conservation: the United States, which has largely developed and promoted industrial agriculture while also voicing much of the early concern and spurring initial actions to conserve indigenous maize varieties, and Mexico, the centre of origin and diversity of maize where this grain is the population's primary food, deeply entwined with its culture and stirring nationalistic agendas. Interwoven into these narratives are other international players, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the focus on maize might seem overly specific for general interest, reigning narratives of maize conservation have served as a model for other crops. Furthermore, maize continues to be one of the principal crops feeding the world, even as a large bulk is consumed as animal feed. Recounting the history of maize and the geopolitics and control of germplasm knowledge is crucial to understanding the development of modern agricultural biotechnology, characterized by increasing privatization of genetic resources and the decline of seeds as commons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a historian, Curry skilfully recounts the origins and evolution of narratives of extinction of indigenous landraces and conservation strategies, highlighting the complexity of preservation initiatives and the multiple actors involved and suggesting pathways for the future. A key merit of her account is a sound understanding of underlying aspects of the biology and genetics of maize and its conservation. Accordingly, Curry organizes the chapters of her book corresponding to essential tasks in conserving plant genetic resources: collection, classification, preservation, copy, [treaty] negotiation, evaluation, and cultivation. The chapters describe these functions while telling the history of relevant individuals and institutions with respect to each topic, as well as the geopolitics behind the germplasm extinction and conservation narratives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Endangered Maize&lt;/i&gt;'s story begins in 1916 when Howard Biggar, a US Department of Agriculture employee, set out on a research trip to collect maize landraces from indigenous reserves across the Midwest and north-western United States. He was concerned that corn varieties grown by Native Americans were nearing extinction because of the expansion of settler farming and industrial agriculture. During his travels, Bigga","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"902-904"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12534","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43962934","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":"Restructuring palm oil value chain governance in Colombia through long-term labour control","authors":"Angela Serrano","doi":"10.1111/joac.12528","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12528","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, I argue that the cumulative effects of coercive and indirect labour discipline enable firms to reorganize production. Through a historical analysis of the palm oil industry in northeastern Colombia, I identify changing forms of value chain governance in relation to transformations in labour control regimes. The combined effects of multiple labour control strategies have weakened labour power and workers' overall possibilities to shape value chain governance. In this case, labour coercion directly diminished workers' associational power and enabled labour flexibilization in the industry, limiting workers' structural power. A dialogue between the Global Value Chains framework and Critical Agrarian Studies, with a focus on labour regimes, highlights that labour flexibilization can build on past instances of coercive control to transform the structure of a value chain. This research illustrates that coercion is not necessarily “extra-economic” but is often intrinsic to the organization of the global economy.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"547-567"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46593702","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":"Progressive politics and populism: Classes of labour and rural–urban political sociology—An introduction to the special issue","authors":"Jonathan Pattenden","doi":"10.1111/joac.12532","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12532","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This special issue analyses the prospects for a progressive politics against right-wing populism and capitalism. Taken as a whole, its articles underline the need to understand progressive movements as encompassing agrarian, rural, and urban settings and as socially rooted among labourers and petty commodity producers that do not accumulate (classes of labour), which includes the majority of farmers. Most of the world's rural population now reproduce themselves to some degree in towns and cities, which necessitates further development of a rural–urban political sociology. Articles in the special issue discuss existing and potential organizations and networks of classes of labour. They point to the political <i>potential</i> of migrant populations to erode the social divisions of race, ethnicity, and nationality that capitalism and right-wing populism construct to defend their interests. They contribute to understanding of why some members of classes of labour support racist nationalist populisms that pit them against fellow members of classes of labour. And they show why national contexts matter. Forms of capitalist government, including varieties of populism, are linked to world-historical dynamics of accumulation and reproduction, as well as racialized class relations, and constrain routes to progressive politics in different ways. Analysis of them can inform counter-strategies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 1","pages":"3-21"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12532","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49628659","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":"Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India By Aniket Aga. Yale University Press. 2021. pp. 328. $65.00 (hb). ISBN: 9780300245905","authors":"Ronald J. Herring","doi":"10.1111/joac.12529","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12529","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Aniket Aga probes questions critical to our species: the vetting of authoritative knowledge of risks and benefits embedded in alternative technologies. The focus is state science—the mediating translator of knowledge to policy. He lays out the fundamental tension: “Scientific controversies exert unusual pressures on political institutions. Designed to arbitrate among competing interests, institutions of democracy find themselves in uncharted terrain when confronted with disputes over truth” (p. 237). His focus is India, the implications general and global: One thinks immediately of climate change and pandemics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The text analyses biotechnology through an examination of official approval or rejection of two agricultural crops developed by biotechnology: cotton and &lt;i&gt;brinjal&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;i&gt;baingan&lt;/i&gt;, eggplant, aubergine, &lt;i&gt;Solanum melongena&lt;/i&gt;) and provision of authoritative knowledge on agricultural chemicals, from which the state has retreated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;State science became globally contentious when the genomics revolution in biology raised the stakes: molecular building blocks of life became increasingly amenable to alteration and rearrangement to modify or create novel organisms (Doudna &amp; Steinberg, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). National variations in state science emerged, in production, support, and regulation. Aga does not address what I think is the most consequential variation: divergence of medicine and agriculture. Pharmaceuticals produced using recombinant-DNA (rDNA) technology were slotted into existing routines of vetting, through existing institutions, beginning with human insulin in 1978. Precisely the same technology, when applied to crops, became an object of politically contentious regulation: the GMO. Discourses of risks and benefits of rDNA plants, though not rDNA medicines, were contested globally, supported by rival transnational activist networks, dividing the planet into pro-and anti-GMO formations (Herring, &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;; McHughen, &lt;span&gt;2000&lt;/span&gt;; Paarlberg, &lt;span&gt;2001&lt;/span&gt;; Pinstrup-Andersen &amp; Schioler, &lt;span&gt;2000&lt;/span&gt;; Schurman &amp; Munro, &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;India (as well as China) tasked state institutions to promote biotechnology in agriculture in the early 1990s (Cao, &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;; also detailed in Chapter 2 of Aga's book). Both nations began with Bt cotton—modified with one gene to express an insecticidal protein—to protect crops from destructive insects. Their reasons involved similar imperatives: import substitution for domestic industry, export earnings, and reducing environmental hazards from spraying toxins on cotton plants. India's struggling cotton sector was producing among the lowest yields in the world at the time but devoted more acres to cotton than any other country.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In puzzling contrast to China, India's public sector efforts to produce insect-resistant cotton failed. Aga first takes a structural approach to explain this: The specific organization of state science demonst","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"893-898"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12529","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49250655","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":"Tracking farmland investment in Australia: Institutional finance and the politics of data mapping","authors":"Kiah Smith,&nbsp;Alexandra Langford,&nbsp;Geoffrey Lawrence","doi":"10.1111/joac.12531","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12531","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Tracking farmland purchases is central to interpreting transnational finance's growing power in agrarian restructuring. Australia's public <i>Register</i> of foreign land ownership reveals little about agrarian change, however. In presenting the first comprehensive mapping of farmland purchases made between 2008 and 2020, this paper examines the ways that financial investments are altering farm ownership patterns in Australia. First, we show that most foreign owned land has been purchased by only 10 pastoral companies, which are implicated in speculative development activities. Second, foreign investment in cropping and horticulture is more significant than it appears in the <i>Register</i>, with investments in agricultural infrastructure increasingly driving land use change. Third, we illustrate the deepening entrenchment of institutional finance. By engaging with the findings from our dataset as well as with the politics of data that have shaped the availability of information, the paper progresses understandings of the financialization of farmland in both its material and ideational aspects.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"518-546"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12531","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42547161","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}