Expanding through Precarity

Since the early 2000s, the border regions of the Russian Far East have seen rapid growth in large-scale Chinese agriculture through contract-farming arrangements. This article, drawing on archival and ethnographic findings, focuses on contract relations between Chinese agribusinesses and small farmers as a labour regime, unusual in the Russian context. It argues that practices of informal subcontracting, mediation and border governance underlie this regime and produce precarity for small farmers, shifting to them the natural and human risks of agricultural production in Russia. The article points out that managers of large companies used the border to discipline and dispossess direct producers.