Agrarian transition in former Soviet Central Asia: A comparative study of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan

While analysing in detail the agrarian transition that is taking place in two former Soviet Central Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan (concentrating on agrarian reform, deregulation and financial institutions), the crude classifications that are normally used as framework, such as ‘slow’ versus ‘fast’ reforms or ‘gradualism’ versus ‘shock‐therapy’ are seen as not very useful. These transitions are highly complex and diverse, and therefore any analysis and policy design must be based on a real understanding of the institutional setting of the agrarian sector. It is concluded that agrarian markets are not spontaneously appearing, and that there is an important role for the state to promote ‘the construction of markets’.     

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.     

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.     

Centering labor in the land grab debate

Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A labor perspective is also relevant at the national and transnational scale, where it highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system. In much of the global South, the anticipated transition from the farm to factory has not taken place and education offers no solution, as vast numbers of educated people are unemployed. Unless vast numbers of jobs are created, or a global basic income grant is devised to redistribute the wealth generated in highly productive but labor-displacing ventures, any program that robs rural people of their foothold on the land must be firmly rejected.     

The nature and logic of the peasant economy—II: Diversity and change: III. Policy and intervention

The following Part II of this paper is devoted to the diversity of peasant economies, focusing on the typical patterns of change included under the umbrella term of ‘modernisation’. It reviews in these terms the aspects of the peasant economy outlined in Part I. The final Part III turns to agrarian policies and the impact of state intervention on peasant economies. It discusses the aims of such interventions i.e. land reform and the major programmes of reconstruction and transition in peasant economies today: ‘betting on the strong’, collectivisation, and the transformation of the peasant into a ‘modern’ farmer.     

First to third nature: the rise of capitalist conservation on Palawan Island,the Philippines

The social relations and agricultural lands that rural peoples in Southeast Asia hold in common are being commodified through the converging pressures of agrarian change, conservation and capitalist development. This paper examines how broader and local processes driving agrarian differentiation have been accelerated through the revaluing of people and nature in market terms to ostensibly finance conservation through development at the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park – the flagship protected area of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on the notions of ‘first’ and ‘third nature’, I show how the pace and scale of agrarian change between rural peoples has gone ‘fast forward’ with the onset of resource partitioning, objectification, commodification and, ultimately, revaluing through translocal ‘capitalist conservation’, the rise of conservation as capitalist production. I examine how the national park's valuing as a ‘common’ World Heritage has drawn major private sector investments that objectify, commodify and rearticulate the value of nature as capital that finances and merges conservation and development according to the images and ideals of the modern Philippines. The conclusion asserts that while the processes of differentiation and capitalist conservation facilitate the revaluing of nature in market terms, the overall process remains recursive, partial and context dependent.     

Capitalism obscured: the limits of law and rights-based approaches to poverty reduction and development

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) was established by the United Nations in 2005 and concluded in 2008. Although inspired by Hernando de Soto's analysis of the role of property rights in economic development, the scope of the Commission was defined as ‘legal empowerment’ in general. This commentary offers a critique of the CLEP report, and argues that its underlying assumptions rest on an idealised version of liberal democratic capitalism in which a dynamic market economy assures ‘win-win’ solutions for all. This implies that there are no tensions between the four ‘pillars’ of legal empowerment identified by CLEP (the rule of law, property rights, labour rights, and business rights). However, in the real world of capitalism, in both democratic and authoritarian versions, there are structural tensions between classes of capital and classes of labour, which result in the economy and its underlying institutional order becoming a key site of contestation. The case of farm labour in rural South Africa is used to illustrate this argument. A focus on legal rights can, however, be ‘empowering’ to a degree, when it helps defend poor people from exploitation and abuse, or is located within broader strategies to eradicate systemic poverty.     

Modernising subordination? A South Asian perspective on the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development

The World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development argues that the solution to rural poverty in South Asia is through commercial smallholder farming, rural waged labour in farm and non-farm activities, or outmigration. Critically evaluating the Report from a South Asian perspective on the basis of agrarian structure, market-led agrarian transformation, the power of monopoly capital, and the option of off-farm livelihoods, it is argued that the Report has a deeply flawed understanding of the process of capitalist development in rural South Asia. Its path-dependent vision of the future of agriculture is rooted in modernisation theory, and predicated on the continued subordination of the majority of those who live in the South Asian countryside.     

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.     

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.     

Bolivia's soy complex: the development of ‘productive exclusion’

A significant transition is underway in Bolivia where both domestic and foreign capital are monopolizing commercial agriculture and leading a highly mechanized, capital-intensive production model which has considerably diminished the need for labour. This paper explores mechanisms and processes of ‘productive exclusion’ in the soy-producing zones of Santa Cruz in relation to the expansion, concentration and mechanization of the ‘soy complex’. We provide an analysis of how the agrarian structure has developed since soy was adopted – from ‘putting land into production’ to ‘expanding the agricultural frontier’ and ‘controlling the agro-industrial chain’. We explore how and the extent to which the penetration of new capital is leading to new processes of agrarian change which exclude the rural majority from accessing the means of production. While a process of ‘foreignization’ of land began to take shape in the early 1990s, new processes of capital accumulation are eroding the ability of small farmers to engage in productive activity, potentially leading to ‘surplus’ populations no longer needed for capital accumulation.     

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.     

Land grabbing,social differentiation,intensified migration and food security in northern Ghana

This paper argues that large-scale land appropriation is displacing subsistence farmers and reworking agrarian social relations in northern Ghana. The recent wave of farmland enclosure has not only resulted in heightened land scarcity, but also fostered a marked social differentiation within farming communities. The dominant form of inequality is an evolving class of landless and near-landless farmers. The majority of households cope with such dynamics by deepening their own self-exploitation in the production process. The fulcrum of this self-exploitation is gendered property rights as part of the conjugal contract, with men exerting a far greater monopoly over land resources than had previously been the case. Due to acute land shortages, women’s rights to use land as wives, mothers and daughters are becoming insecure, as their vegetable plots are being reclassified as male-controlled household fields. The paper further documents the painful choices that landless farmers have to make in order to meet livelihood needs, including highly disciplined, yet low-waged, farm labor work and sharecropping contracts. In these livelihood pathways, there emerge, again, exploitative relations of production, whereby surplus is expropriated from land-dispossessed migrant laborers and concentrated with farm owners. These dynamics produce a ‘simple reproduction squeeze’ for the land-dispossessed. Overall, the paper contributes to the emerging land grabbing literature by showing geographically specific processes of change for large-scale mining operations and gendered differentiated impacts.     

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.     

Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to an overdue need to locate the current land rush in its historical context, less as a new phenomenon than as a surge in the continuing capture of ordinary people's rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation. It aims to do so by looking back to earlier land rushes, and particularly to those which have bearing upon sub-Saharan Africa, the site of most large-scale involuntary land loss today. In particular, the paper focuses upon a central tool of land rushes, property law. The core argument made is that land rushes past and present have relied upon legal manipulations which deny that local indigenous (‘customary’) tenures deliver property rights, thereby legalizing the theft of the lands of the poor or subject peoples. Even prior to capitalist transformation this feudal-derived machination was an instrument of aligned class privilege and power, later elaborated to justify mass land and resource capture through colonialism. Now it is routinely embedded in the legal canons of elite-aligned agrarian governance as the means of retaining control over the land resources which rural communities presume are their own.     

From collectives to markets: Restructured agriculture‐industry linkages in rural China: Some micro‐level evidence

The article attempts to put together micro‐evidence for constructing an initial sketch of the emergent structure of linkages between agriculture and rural industry. It focuses mainly on three aspects : (i) the transfer of land from peasants to industrial and other enterprises, (ii) mechanisms and practices for absorbing peasant labour into the rural non‐farm sector, especially in the form of wage labour, and (iii) the forms and relative dimensions of various direct and indirect financial flows between rural enterprises and the agricultural sector. The article also offers some observations concerning the likely implications of the restructuring of rural economic relationships for rural (and agricultural) accumulation, for the efficiency of resource use, for equity and welfare in the rural sector, and for social processes in the countryside. The article provides a comparative perspective, whereby the post‐reform forms, pattern and nature of rural agriculture‐industry linkages are set against the lapsed context of the rural people's commune.     

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.’     

Agrarian reform and the transition to socialism in Chile, 1970–1973

The purpose of this article is to examine Popular Unity's agrarian policy in the light of the failure of the revolutionary forces to capture power and initiate a transition to socialism in Chile. We argue that Popular Unity's agrarian policy reflects the limitations and contradictions of its strategy to power. Although Allende's agrarian reform was extensive, drastic and rapidly executed, it nevertheless limited the peasantry's contribution to the revolutionary struggle for power. In the first part we briefly examine the agrarian legacy left by the Christian Democrat government of Frei to the Popular Unity and present the agrarian programme of Allende's government. We proceed in the second part with an analysis of peasant mobilisation and organisation, focusing on land seizures and peasant councils. In the third part we devote our attention to the organisation and functioning of the expropriated latifundia, which constituted the reformed sector, and examine why socialist relations of production failed to develop. Finally, in the fourth part, we attempt an assessment of Popular Unity's agrarian policy from the viewpoint of the accumulation of revolutionary forces in the rural sector by highlighting some of its contradictions.     

Commentary: Food regime for thought

This essay engages with Henry Bernstein's critical survey of food regime analysis, focusing on the claim that my interpretation of the food regime takes a misguided ‘peasant turn’. I argue Henry's representation loses sight of my reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’, as more than analysis of the uneven process by which capital subordinates landed property, and therefore of the class fate of the peasantry, as such. Rather it is about social and ecological fate on a global scale, involving questions of ecosystem survival, precarious labor circuits, urban slum proliferation, privatization of states, financialization, intellectual (property) rights, climate change mitigation and so on. Significantly, global recognition of these connections to processes of agro-industrialization and enclosure was informed by a ‘peasant’ mobilization that would be unthinkable within the terms of the classical agrarian question. Peasant organizations catalyzed challenge to the neoliberal food order institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, in a time of massive dispossession. Politicizing neoliberal ‘food security’ as an agribusiness project, the ‘food sovereignty’ counter-movement used a politics of strategic essentialism to unmask the undemocratic and impoverishing architecture of the ‘free trade’ regime privileging corporate rights over state and citizen rights. In effect, this counter-movement performed a food regime analysis from within, importantly reaching beyond a peasant project. This essay revisits the comparative-historical method by which the food regime trajectory can be understood, as a contradictory set of interacting forces and relations that complicate and shape and reshape its politics, and yet allow identification of emergent possibilities.     

Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for Development Report read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.