Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"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":"<p>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.</p><p>The text analyses biotechnology through an examination of official approval or rejection of two agricultural crops developed by biotechnology: cotton and <i>brinjal</i> (<i>baingan</i>, eggplant, aubergine, <i>Solanum melongena</i>) and provision of authoritative knowledge on agricultural chemicals, from which the state has retreated.</p><p>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 & Steinberg, <span>2017</span>). 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, <span>2008</span>; McHughen, <span>2000</span>; Paarlberg, <span>2001</span>; Pinstrup-Andersen & Schioler, <span>2000</span>; Schurman & Munro, <span>2013</span>).</p><p>India (as well as China) tasked state institutions to promote biotechnology in agriculture in the early 1990s (Cao, <span>2018</span>; 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.</p><p>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}

{"title":"Predators in the web of life: World ecology of historical human–wolf relations in Finland","authors":"Sanna Komi,&nbsp;Markus Kröger","doi":"10.1111/joac.12533","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12533","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To better understand current conflicts related to human–wolf interactions in Finland, this article undertakes a <i>longue-durée</i> examination of societal structural transformations and how they have influenced ways of relating to nature in the country. Through a world-ecological perspective, we weave together a historical review and results of ethnographic fieldwork to explain how and why human–wolf relations in Finland transformed from indifferent coexistence to purposeful eradication in the late 19th century and ultimately to contemporary contested protection. We argue that the nature-making capacities of capitalist development are an integral part of the historical circumstances that led to the eradication of wolves, which was not only the result of animosity towards wolves but also fuelled by the interests of elite hunters. The resulting negative perceptions, coupled with changes in practices and landscapes during the wolf-less era, are central in current contestations, illustrating the deep ideological, emotional, and practical nature relations that capitalism creates.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"500-517"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12533","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44902420","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":"Who owns the land owns the wind? Land and citizenship in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico","authors":"Gerardo A. Torres Contreras","doi":"10.1111/joac.12527","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12527","url":null,"abstract":"Wind energy expansion across rural areas interacts with various interests at the local level, generating multiple reactions within communities. The Eólica del Sur wind farm implementation pathway in Mexico is a paragon of different positions vis-à-vis this industry after trying to install 132 wind turbines in other towns since 2006. This paper argues that there is a bias in studies of the politics of wind energy development in favour of oppositional voices, as opposed to groups that endorse wind energy expansion or that have stakes in the sector but neither support nor oppose wind projects per se. Based on fieldwork conducted over three years and semi-structured interviews with Eólica del Sur stakeholders, the paper argues that different responses to wind energy are linked to contrasting ownership claims over land in the region and competing notions of the institutions that should legitimize these claims.","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 2","pages":"365-384"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12527","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41363191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Land acquisition and resource development in contemporary India, Edited by Shashi RatnekarSingh. Cambridge University Press. 2020. Pp. 188. £75.00 (hb). ISBN: 9781108486927","authors":"R. Bose","doi":"10.1111/joac.12530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12530","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44742632","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":"Land acquisition and resource development in contemporary India By Shashi Ratnekar Singh. Cambridge University Press. 2020. Pp. 188. £75.00 (hb). ISBN: 9781108486927","authors":"Rajanya Bose","doi":"10.1111/joac.12530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12530","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Land acquisitions and dispossession have increasingly garnered more attention and provoked debates in India as well as globally, especially in the last two decades (D'Costa &amp; Chakraborty, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;; Edelman et al., &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;; Levien, &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). The land database website “Land conflict watch” estimates that there are 781 ongoing land conflicts in India impacting 7.5 million people. While the post-colonial Indian state has consistently used the colonial doctrine of “eminent domain” to acquire private land in India for “public purposes,” the changing nature of the state has been reflected in the intensification of the “land wars” whereby the states now “broker” and acquire land to service the interests of private capital (Levien, &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;; Sud, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Singh's book “Land Acquisition and Resource Development in India” sits at the intersection of state theory, human geography, and political economy of land dispossession in India. It sheds light on the changing nature of the Indian state, uneven development trajectories across social groups and spaces in India as a result of “resource development,” and the impact of public discourse and mobilizations on the processes of dispossession.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book is divided into three parts, instructively named Theoretical Framework, Case Study, and Analysis, reflecting what to expect from each of those sections. The first two sections make up for most of the book's length, with the concluding section enumerating the journey of and discourse around India's Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894, used by the post-colonial Indian state for six decades after Independence in 1947 to dispossess people from their habitats.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first part of the theoretical framework takes the readers through four main strands of literature: first, on the nature of the Indian state (divided between political–institutional and political–economic perspectives); second, on space, spatiality, and uneven development drawing on the works of scholars like David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Neil Smith, and others; third, a brief summary of John Rawls and Amartya Sen's theorizations of justice, under the title “justice as fairness”; and finally, on public sphere and civil society in India, building on scholarship of Jürgen Habermas and Indian scholars like Neera Chandhoke, Sunil Khilnani, and Sudipta Kaviraj. The second part of the literature review focusses on the political economy of land acquisition in India, taking the readers through the legislative framework, framing of compensation and rehabilitation for land acquisition by the state, the changes in laws and policies regarding resource development, mining, and dispossession in the country in the post-colonial era.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The core of the book is an immersive and impressive case study of dispossessi","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 4","pages":"899-901"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12530","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50125744","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":"Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production","authors":"Victoria Stead","doi":"10.1111/joac.12524","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12524","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south-east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri-industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 3","pages":"579-589"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12524","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47569698","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":"Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique","authors":"Boaventura Monjane","doi":"10.1111/joac.12525","DOIUrl":"10.1111/joac.12525","url":null,"abstract":"<p>After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro-poor land policy that benefits small-scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross-class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left-wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 1","pages":"185-203"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12525","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48937861","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":"Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in the 21st century Pakistani Punjab","authors":"Muhammad Yahya Aftab, Noaman G. Ali","doi":"10.1111/joac.12526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12526","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44571463","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":"Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in 21st century Pakistani Punjab","authors":"Muhammad Yahya Aftab,&nbsp;Noaman G. Ali","doi":"10.1111/joac.12526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12526","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Activists and scholars have debated whether “agrarian populisms” premised on multiple classes and groups can pursue progressive objectives if exploiters and exploited are in the same movements. In Pakistan, the militant Pakistan Kissan Ittehad emerged in 2012 by uniting different classes of owner-cultivators who are largely not in direct relations of exploitation with each other. We argue that the PKI nevertheless advances the interests of a “second tier” of rural capitalists, who exploit rural labourers, while underplaying the interests of owner-peasant farmers. This divergence of interests has contributed to the fragmentation of PKI along class and political lines, including attempts by peasant farmers to independently organize around issues particular to them. We suggest that progressive agrarian populism must hinge on the interests of rural labourers and peasant farmers and that second-tier capitalist farmers may be tactical allies as they oppose neoliberal globalization. However, rural labourers and peasants are ideologically and organizationally weak, and thus, the possibility of left-wing agrarian populism requires much legwork.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"23 1","pages":"85-109"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50145043","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}