Unjustified optimism: why the World Bank's 2008 ‘agriculture for development’ report misses the point for South Africa

The World Bank Development Report 2008 sees agriculture as a crucial instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction. It emphasises the need for a sharp productivity increase in smallholder farming, as well as more effective support to millions of subsistence farmers. However, while admitting that there are challenges in making this goal a reality, the report fails to fully acknowledge the legacy of colonialism and apartheid on land and agrarian relations in South Africa. Contrary to the World Bank's optimism about smallholder and subsistence agriculture, this legacy of inequality and land dispossession discourages farming by Blacks in countries like South Africa.     

The labor of agrodiversity in a Moroccan oasis

This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be ‘new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.     

Agricultural commercialisation models,agrarian dynamics and local development in Ghana

The renewed commitment of African states to modernising agriculture has reignited longstanding debates about different models of agricultural commercialisation. Which forms of commercialisation models will reduce land dispossession and the impoverishment of smallholders, and transform smallholder agriculture and the wider economy? Of the three broad models of agriculture commercialisation in this debate – plantation, contract farming and medium-scale commercial farming – contract farming has been identified as central to the future of Africa’s commercial agriculture. This paper provides empirical evidence from Ghana on the impacts of these three models on land, labour/employment, livelihoods and local economic linkages. Our findings show that the plantation and the commercial farming areas have highly commercialised land relations, land scarcity and high land prices, compared to the outgrower area where traditional systems of accessing land still dominate, enabling families to produce their own food crops while also diversifying into wage labour and other activities. Food insecurity was highest in the plantation area followed by the commercial area, but lowest in the outgrower area. Here, semi-proletarianised seasonal workers combine self-provisioning from their own farms with wages, and this results in better livelihood outcomes than for permanent workers in plantations and commercial farms. Due to the processing units in the plantation and the outgrower models, they provided more employment. However, the casualisation of labour and gender discrimination in employment and access to land occur in all three cases. All three models generated strong economic linkages mainly because they combined attributes such as processing, provided markets for nearby farmers, induced state infrastructural development and diffused technology in competitive ways. The effects of the models on household and local development are coproduced by their interaction with pre-existing conditions and wider national economic structures.     

Gendered experiences of dispossession: oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun community in West Kalimantan

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour. At the same time, as in other cases of expansion of agrarian corporate commodity production, we can discern a familiar pattern of ambivalence between, on the one hand, the attractions of regular cash income and, on the other, the loss of resource tenure and autonomy, which helps to explain the community's gendered experience of coercion, exploitation, intimidation, consent and resistance.     

Troubling notions of farmer choice: hybrid Bt cotton seed production in western India

The debate over agricultural biotechnology is increasingly being centered on the question of farmer choice. Advocates for biotechnology argue that farmers should be able to choose the seeds and technologies they use, and therefore these new technologies should be legalized and made available immediately. Who would deny farmers of the global South their right to choose? But these discourses of choice and freedom are being deployed to market a particular kind of development. This neoliberal development of agriculture is leading to the individualization of risk, the shifting of risk to marginalized contract farming households, and greater control for wealthier farmers, seed companies and agents. The state of Gujarat, India, is seen as a success story of hybrid Bt cotton, in which farmers have their choice of hundreds of varieties of seeds. As cotton seed production is taking off in the neighboring state of Rajasthan, however, choosing Bt cotton has different implications and meanings altogether. Drawing on eight months of qualitative research with adivasi households in Dungarpur District, Rajasthan, I offer narrative accounts from farmers and seed agents that both explore and trouble neoliberal notions of farmer choice. The use of these discourses by biotech advocates is just one example of the ways that choice and freedom are being utilized to further neoliberal development.     

Peasants,grapes and corporations: The growth of contract farming in a Chilean community

This article examines the social implications of contract farming promoted in smallholding areas. It is argued that rather than resulting in overall proletarianisation of the local peasantry, contract farming may accelerate its differentiation and disintegration by converting rich peasants into peasant capitalists. The argument is supported by a historical analysis of socio‐economic and organisational processes in a Chilean smallholding community which experienced two consecutive waves of agribusiness expansion: a tobacco boom in the 1950s and a fruit export expansion in the 1970s and 1980s.     

Plantations,outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change

Whether or not investments in African agriculture can generate quality employment at scale, avoid dispossessing local people of their land, promote diversified and sustainable livelihoods, and catalyse more vibrant local economies depends on what farming model is pursued. In this Forum, we build on recent scholarship by discussing the key findings of our recent studies in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. We examined cases of three models of agricultural commercialisation, characterised by different sets of institutional arrangements that link land, labour and capital. The three models are: plantations or estates with on-farm processing; contract farming and outgrower schemes; and medium-scale commercial farming areas. Building on core debates in the critical agrarian studies literature, we identify commercial farming areas and contract farming as producing the most local economic linkages, and plantations/estates as producing more jobs, although these are of low quality and mostly casual. We point to the gender and generational dynamics emerging in the three models, which reflect the changing demand for family and wage labour. Models of agricultural commercialisation do not always deliver what is expected of them in part because local conditions play a critical role in the unfolding outcomes for land relations, labour regimes, livelihoods and local economies.     

The politics of private farming in Russia

This article seeks to explore why private farming in Russia has fared so poorly even after private farming was designated the centrepiece of Russian land reform and political capital was invested in its success. The underlying causes for the lack of success extend beyond economic and social factors. While the entire agricultural sector has been adversely affected by reform policies undertaken since 1992, private farmers have been hurt the most because they were more vulnerable. Private farmers have not been successful in defending their interests because they are politically weak, a fact that led them to seek out urban alliances whose interests differ from private farmers, and because of intra‐rural divisions that have weakened the efforts by agrarians to defend their interests.     

Questioning pathways out of poverty: Indonesia as an illustrative case for the World Bank's transforming countries

The World Development Report 2008 uses Indonesia as an illustrative case for what it calls ‘transforming countries’. The main argument of this paper is that the three pathways out of poverty (commercially-oriented entrepreneurial smallholder farming; rural non-farm enterprise development, and out-migration) prescribed by the Report should be theoretically and empirically questioned because of the possibility of a reverse consequence: the perpetuation of poverty in Indonesia.     

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt,inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.     

Different farming styles behind the homogenous soy production in southern Brazil

Soy is often perceived as a typical example of a homogenous capitalist agricultural model that is responsible for ecological damage and social conflicts. But this monolithic perception of soy production can be challenged: more than 30 percent of the soy producers in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) are family farmers. In this contribution, we study soy production, the soy producers and their institutional environment from an actor-oriented perspective. We have uncovered different farming styles behind soy production: the colonial farmer, the niche farmer and the entrepreneurial farmer. The farming styles differ from each other not only in the farming system, but also in attitudes (for example, towards the forest). We found that the institutional environment and the technology are mainly focused on the entrepreneurial farmer. However, also, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) neglect the existence of small-scale soy producers. These results have several repercussions for further analysis of this problematic crop and how it can shift towards a more sustainable agricultural production model as small-scale farmers might produce soy more sustainably.     

Farming for Walmart: the politics of corporate control and responsibility in the global South

To analyse corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business tool and as a way to promote food security in the global South, this article draws on 65 interviews with supply chain personnel and a 2013 survey of 250 smallholder farmers in Nicaragua. Contrary to private governance literature, Walmart's efforts to control supply chains in Nicaragua are not advancing rural sustainability; feelings of mistrust and unfairness persist among farmers, and many are returning to local markets to regain independence. This analysis extends our understanding of why CSR is failing to help agrarian societies and confirms CSR as principally a business strategy.     

Knowledge and agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan

The agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan is an instructive case for examining the relative viability of large-scale farming vis-à-vis smallholder agriculture. Within the transition from communism to capitalism in Kazakhstan, de-collectivisation involved not only a redefinition of property rights but also a dramatic rupture with former modes of agricultural knowledge generation and use. Up to now, however, the role of knowledge and skills in shaping de-collectivisation has received scant attention in the literature on postsocialism. This article argues that the loss and inadequacy of knowledge, following the collapse of knowledge institutions and the shift from large-scale knowledge-intensive mechanised farming to predominantly manual farming on small plots, needs to form part of any explanation of the postsocialist agrarian crisis. The analysis shows the importance of studying access to, and control over, knowledge in constructing a theory of agricultural labour processes.     

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.     

Land,development and contract farming on the Guatemalan oil palm frontier

Integration of smallholder agriculture into oil palm production schemes has been advocated as a strategy for rural poverty reduction in the global South, including Guatemala, where the crop had been promoted through a contentious government programme. This study, set in Guatemala’s northern lowlands, challenges the official narrative that smallholder oil palm cultivation catalyses rural development and deters peasant land sales. Results indicate that oil palm expansion is accelerating land sales and provides minimal benefits, namely non-inclusive and precarious jobs. The host community is becoming increasingly susceptible to global market volatility, as oil palm puts pressure on subsistence farming and eliminates other livelihood options.     

Farming is easy,becoming Brazilian is hard: North American soy farmers’ social values of production,work and land in Soylandia

Since the late 1980s, North American farmers have been migrating to Brazil to produce soybeans and escape a general farm crisis in the United States. This paper analyzes their work, values, social relations and relations with the land in order to understand transnational farming and agrarian change from the perspective of transnational farmers. North Americans’ migration to Brazil and soy production in Brazil can inform our understanding of the mechanisms of the soy boom and unpack the relative significance of social values at play in intensive, technified and financialized agriculture. It also provides an evocative perspective of the soy boom as it engages with issues of transnationalism, crisis, migration and change in business and farming practices. Using ethnographic data, this paper explores the intimate and emerging realities of agrarian change by detailing four elements of transnational farming – migration, farm management, land use and work – through the narration of three farmers’ career histories. These cases address the transformation of social values of work, land and social relations through the processes of migration and agrarian change. Farmers’ work, it is found, emerges out of an entanglement of regulations, expertise, meanings of work and land, worker relations and the political economy of Brazil and the United States.     

Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.     

Green economy,Scandinavian investments and agricultural modernization in Tanzania

‘Green economy’ is a broad concept open to different interpretations, definitions and practices ranging from the greening of current neoliberal economies to radical transformations of these economies. In Africa, one emerging and powerful idea in the implementation of the green economy seems to be to use a green agenda to further strengthen development as modernization through capital-intensive land investments. This has again reinvigorated old debates about large-scale versus smallholder agriculture. Influential actors justify large-scale ‘green’ investments by the urgency for economic development as well as to offset carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. In this contribution, we discuss the case of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) to give examples of how the green economy may materialize in Africa. SAGCOT is presented by the Tanzanian government as well as investors and donors as a leading African example of an ‘investment blueprint’ and as a laboratory to test green growth combining profitable farming with the safeguard of ecosystem services. In particular, we discuss three Scandinavian investments within SAGCOT, their social implications and their discursive representations through the public debates that these investments have generated in Scandinavia.     

Smallholdings,land law and the politics of land tenure in Papua New Guinea

It has been asserted of Papua New Guinea that the nineteenth and twentieth century expansion of capitalism into that country occurred without the commodification of more than a small amount of land. The various arguments supporting this view are rejected, and the evidence to the contrary is presented. It is shown that from the 1950s smallholder production increases have been substantial, mainly but not wholly in export crops. The role of the state is examined, with particular focus upon the characteristics of state power and the politics of land which have underpinned the increase in smallholder production. Similarities in the quality and application of state power across both colonial and post‐colonial regimes is stressed.     

Twentieth‐century rural England: A case for ‘peasant studies'?

Reed and others have argued for the continuing existence of a peasantry in nineteenth‐century England. The present article uses the instance of an upland Yorkshire area to suggest that a ‘peasantry’ continued there until the mid‐twentieth century sustained and to some extent re‐shaped by trends in the national agricultural economy. Family‐centred farming on small acreages, low rents and capital inputs, flexible attitudes to work and the dual economy proved efficient mechanisms for surmounting economic conditions which were often disadvantagous to larger farmers. Investigation of other areas of England for similar phenomena is invited.