Land reform and Agrarian change in India and Pakistan since 1947: 1

Analysing the class character of land reform in India and Pakistan the author makes a distinction between ideology and programme. Judged by its ideology, land reform in India is sharply anti‐landlord and pro‐peasant and is thus a mobiliser of peasant support for the ruling elite. The programme of land reform, however, serves primarily the interests of an emerging intermediate class of under‐proprietors and big peasants. This intermediate class makes a joint front with the rural poor to curb the privileges of landlords. But it makes a common cause with the landlords to thwart any prospect of agrarian radicalism turning into a pro‐poor agrarian programme. In Pakistan the conflict between the old landlords and the emerging intermediate class is not as sharply articulated as in India and land policy therefore had a more pronounced pro‐landlord bias than was the case in India. In Pakistan at best it denotes the tension between the old moribund and a new dynamic landlord class.?     

Tenancy contracts during transition: A study based on fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh (India)

This article attempts to situate the nature of and changes in tenancy contracts in the context of agrarian transition in developing countries such as India. Inter‐ and intra‐village variations in tenancy contracts are examined in detail for three contrasted villages in Uttar Pradesh (India), with the aim of bringing out the systematic basis of such variations. It is argued that Marxist analysis, based on the nature of class relations, offers a more credible explanation of the nature and unevenness of change, than neo‐classical analysis. Moreover, such analysis also offers a satisfactory explanation of the impact of tenancy on several commonly studied variables.     

The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations

The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo‐classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national democratic struggle in South Africa, as for democratic and socialist struggles elsewhere. This discussion concentrates on issues concerning the land question, the agriculture/industry contradiction and the worker‐peasant alliance, petty commodity production and class differentiation vs. a homogenised rural mass ('the people'), and the centrality of the agrarian question to national democratic struggles and those for socialist transformation.     

The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverishing for the rural poor. Given the minimal benefits for rural India in this model of development, farmer resistance to land dispossession is likely to continue and pose the most serious obstacle to capitalist growth in India. The agrarian questions of labor and capital are, consequently, now rejoined in ‘the land question.’     

Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth,Agrarian Crisis,Internal Colonization,and the Intensification of Class Struggle

Focusing on the countryside and rural poor, this article delineates the contours and considers the effects of the Indian state's adoption of neoliberal policies in the early 1990s. It argues that the shift to neoliberalism has produced a pattern of predatory growth that has privileged urban India, entailed a withdrawal of state support for the agrarian sector, and increasingly involved the forcible expropriation of the land and resources of the rural poor. This pattern and the neoliberal policies underpinning it have precipitated an agrarian crisis, while domestic and international capital have been the principal beneficiaries of the ‘internal colonization’ of the poor through dispossession and suppression. At the same time, the shift to neoliberalism has formed the specific context for an intensification of agrarian class conflict that has included the mobilization of rural elites as well as the rural poor.     

Reconsidering the links between poverty,international labour migration,and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural people's engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.     

Agrarian doctrines of development: Part I

Doctrines of development are understood through a distinction between intentional development and the immanent process of capitalist development. Agrarian doctrine consists of proposals, usually associated with official policy, to undertake agrarian schemes of development based on small‐farm, household production. The intention is to compensate for mass unemployment, urban poverty and the threat of rural emigration. This article gives a historical account of two cases of agrarian doctrine. The first, that of nineteenth‐century Quebec following self‐government in 1848, illustrates the intention of land colonisation schemes to prevent emigration from French Canadian territory to the United States. In the second case, that of twentieth‐century Kenya, schemes of household production were developed in the face of the emergence of mass unemployment; their promotion, especially after political independence in 1963, accompanied the development of indigenous capitalism. The social trusteeship of development is the key to understanding agrarian doctrine. The article concludes by showing why agrarian doctrine underlies the ‘decentralised despotism ‘ at the heart of Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Citizen and Subject, and is an integral part of the historical roots of contemporary advocacy of decentralised rural development.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

Who gains from contract farming? Dependencies,power relations,and institutional change

ABSTRACT

The paper highlights the mechanisms through which outgrower contract farming creates dependencies at the local level. Using sugarcane case study in Malawi, we show that dependencies are created through redefinition of use rights to customary land and through the redefinition of cash flows into outgrower communities. Through this two-dimensional process, corporations can secure access to land, exert control over local communities and transform the local social relations of reciprocity serving as the pillars of resistance. Our results indicate that contract farming changes rural agrarian relations, transforms local family institutions by carefully selecting a few household members with influence into the scheme and selectively dispossessing the poor community members.     

The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy

The paper is concerned with marginal populations affected by the ‘truncated agrarian transitions’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: people displaced out of land-based employment without reasonable prospects for accumulation in the non-farm economy. It analyses the forms of economic agency of people living in the migrant routes and networks connecting the shantytowns of Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa. It describes the artful and hybrid nature of their livelihood strategies – strategies that involve the integration from ‘below’ of urban and rural spaces, formal and informal income, and which simultaneously take shape outside the regulatory spaces conferred by the state, and make use of the rights and opportunities created by law and formality. Far from being reduced to the ‘outcast’ condition of ‘bare life’, marginalized and poor people in South Africa pursue inventive strategies on uneven terrain, cutting across the dichotomies of official discourse and teleological analysis. This allows a more nuanced analysis of the nature and specificity of the agrarian transition in South Africa.     

The Agrarian question in Mexico: Debate in a Cul‐de‐Sac

The theme of this review essay is Mexico's unresolved agrarian question and the possibility of a distinct ‘Mexican Road’. Four books on the Mexican peasantry are considered: in turn, by John Gledhill, Jonathan Fox, Frank Cancian and Roger Bartra. They all deal with the relationships that connect that peasantry to the Mexican state within a tradition of rural development that has been punctuated and characterised by revolution and state‐building agrarian reform. It is argued that our understanding of the agrarian question in Mexico continues to be bogged down by unfocused monographs on the one hand (the books by the first three of the authors named) and schematic assumptions on the other (as exemplified by Bartra); and that much research needs to be done before the ‘Mexican Road’ can be seen as an accepted option among substantive agrarian alternatives. That research needs to appraise two assumptions frequently made: first, that the hacienda economy was pre‐capitalist; and secondly, that the agrarian programme in Mexico ushered in the rural transition to capitalism.

Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo, by John Gledhill, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991. Pp.xv + 420. NP. ISBN 968 7230 68 1

The Politics of Food in Mexico, by Jonathan Fox. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp.xii + 280. $43.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 8014 2716 9

The Decline of Community in Zinacantdn, by Frank Cancian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp.xxi + 300. $42.50 (hardback) ISBN 0 8047 2040 1

Agrarian Structure and Political Power in Mexico, by Roger Bartra. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp.xvii + 221. £37 (hardback); £12.50 (paperback) ISBN 0 80184 4398 7 and 4542 4     

New markets,old struggles: Large and small farmers in the export agriculture of coastal Peru

Although the output of high-value crops in Peru has increased during the era of ‘globalization’, producers still tend to contextualize this development in relation to the 1969 agrarian reform. Considered here is how large and small farmers in the Cañete region perceive the changes that have occurred in agriculture since a generation ago, with particular reference to market competition and the implications of the new economic conditions for environmental sustainability. Despite the fact that farmers located at each end of the rural hierarchy experience the economic impact of globalization differently, small cultivators exporting their produce to the international market being particularly vulnerable to its laissez faire regime, they nevertheless share a common belief in the importance of agriculture for the well-being of the nation. The latter, it is suggested, is a discourse that reproduces much of the ideology associated historically with the agrarian and foundation myths.     

Book reviews

During the past two decades agrarian (‘land and farm’) reforms have been widespread in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), following earlier ones in Asia (China and Vietnam). However, independent family farms did not become the predominant sector in most of Eastern Europe. A new dual (or bi-modal) agrarian structure emerged, consisting of large farm enterprises (with much less social functions than they had before), and very small peasant farms or subsidiary plots. The paper compares five case studies, looking at agrarian actors, property rights, state influence, and rural poverty. These are Russia, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in the EECCA region, and China's Xinjiang province in Asia. The paper concludes that state influence is still substantial, property rights regimes are quite diverse and rural poverty remains medium to high. State-led agrarian reform, in particular where a redistributive (or restitution-based) land reform was implemented led in some cases to land-based wealth redistribution, but policies and institutions were lacking to support the individual farm sector. More often the outcome was a rapid transfer of land in the hands of corporate farm enterprises, reversing the initial process of ‘re-peasantization’. It seems that the old ‘Soviet dream’ of mega-farm enterprises in the ‘transition to capitalism’ has regained prominence, with huge agro-holdings ‘calling the shots’, providing an insecure future for agricultural workers, peasants and farmers.     

Origins of debt,mortgage and alienation of land in early modern Punjab

The agrarian structure of the Punjab in Pakistan and India was fashioned by the socio‐economic and legal institutions established by the British after their annexation of the Province in 1849. One of the consequences of this was an increase in usury/money‐lending capital and a resultant rise in endemic debt among the peasantry and alienation of proprietors’ land by money‐lenders. These changes alarmed the colonial authorities who attempted to deal with the situation simply through legislation, without addressing the complexities of Punjab's political economy. The problem of debt and the reliance of cultivators on the moneylenders for finance continued after 1947. Based on evidence from settlement reports and other original documents this article explores the origin of this problem.     

Hukou and land: market reform and rural displacement in China

Scholarship about the Chinese hukou (household registration) system has focused on the advantages and entitlements associated with urban hukou. This paper shifts attention to the key entitlement provided by rural hukou – village land. While early hukou reforms were mainly designed to open up urban labor markets to rural migrants, recent reforms have also begun to open up rural land markets, by replacing hukou-based land rights with market-based rights. These reforms are designed to facilitate land concentration and the transfer of land to outside developers and agribusiness companies, which has been hindered by hukou-based land rights. Underlying the reforms is the government's agenda of promoting large-scale agriculture and urbanization, both of which require the removal of a large portion of the rural population from the land. By focusing on land rights rather than urban benefits, this paper provides a new perspective on the evolution of the hukou system, and highlights the negative implications of recent reforms for livelihood security in the countryside.     

Globalisation and the foreignisation of space: seven processes driving the current global land grab

The current global land grab is causing radical changes in the use and ownership of land. The main process driving the land grab, or ‘foreignisation of space’, as highlighted in the media and the emerging literature is the production of food and biofuel for export in the aftermath of recent food and energy crises. However, there are several other processes driving the land rush. In this article I argue that an analytical framework that focuses on only one or two processes that drive the global land grab offers a narrow perspective on this complex process. It will be unable to take into account the full range and extent of agrarian and social changes that occur in light of the land grab and their strategic implications for poor people's livelihoods. An important starting point is to identify the broad processes driving the current land rush, and trace their structural and institutional origins. To do so, I identify and examine seven factors that are giving rise to radical changes in landownership and land use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Finally, ‘codes of conduct’ as proposed by several quarters in the context of global land grab are unlikely to work in favour of the poor.     

Plantation rubber,land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.     

Note on land reform in Bangladesh: The efficacy of ceilings

In this note, new data concerning the agrarian structure of Bangladesh are employed to test the efficacy of ceilings on the size of landholdings as a means of making land available to the landless and the near landless. The data confirm that the numbers of potential claimants for land far exceeds the potential supply, even if ceilings on holdings were lowered from 100 standard bighas (331/3 acres) to 25 standard bighas (81/3 acres).     

The land exclusion dilemma and Sumatra’s agrarian reactionaries

Even as millions of rural workers have organized into agrarian movements, their efforts to benefit from progressive social mobilizations often fail. To understand how agrarian movements can overcome these difficulties, this contribution acknowledges a dilemma: As agrarian movement members create ties to land they necessarily confront new forms of exclusion. We discuss this exclusionary land dilemma, with a focus on Sumatra’s agrarian reactionaries as an elite class possessing a potent exclusionary force that seeks to erase agrarian movement legitimacy and block rural workers’ mobilizations to reclaim and occupy land. We trace these agrarian reactionaries’ public life across a state–corporate–criminal apparatus and their repression of two agrarian movement mobilizations. We find agrarian reactionaries’ actions offer a partial explanation for the still-limited gains of Sumatra’s rural workers’ movements. Agrarian reactionaries legitimize their exclusions with nativist, ethno-territorial ideas that co-opt indigenous rights claims. In response, laborers and agriculturalists are now refining a more inclusive land politics – one of greater unifying influence that does not depend upon claims of indigeneity – to overcome reactionary repression.     

Mutuality and competition: Female landless labour and wage rates in Tamil Nadu

The factors determining rural wage rates have remained problematic in writings on agrarian structure in rural India. First, a striking segmentation of the rural labour market has been widely noted so that different wage rates exist even for contiguous villages. Secondly, it has been argued that the ‘stickiness downwards’ of wage rates, particularly the rigidity downwards of daily money wages, is very marked and is not susceptible to explanation in terms of conventional economic theories. A useful approach by Rudra to these two problems is examined here and it is suggested that the striking contrasts that emerge between his model (based on Bengali data) and the Tamil model presented here show that it is essential to incorporate a micro‐level anthropological approach in order to understand rural wage rate determinants. There can be no pan‐Indian model: only through micro‐level approaches can researchers understand the importance of complex socio‐cultural contexts to the ways in which wage rates are formed and changed.