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.     

Can there be food sovereignty here?

A central figure in the food sovereignty movement is the ‘middle peasant’, a cautious figure who balances food with cash-crop production, guided by a strong aversion to ecological and market risk. Drawing on long-term field research in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, this article explains why farmers switched from food to mono-crop cacao production, and a stable middle peasantry did not emerge. It outlines their reasons for the switch, their struggles to make ends meet on small plots of poor-quality land, and the rapid polarization that soon arose. Ironically, their farm-dependence increased their vulnerability. Unlike farmers in many parts of the world who appear to be autonomous but are actually supported by state transfers, remittances or wage work, these farmers were on their own. Competitive capitalist relations quickly emerged and took on an especially virulent, almost textbook form. These relations were compulsory. Farmers with inadequate plots of land, and newly landless highlanders, could not opt out, challenging notions of food sovereignty framed in terms of liberal notions of choice. Even when small-scale farmers are untouched by land grabbing or corporate schemes, as in this case, expanding their capacity to exercise control over their food, their farms and their futures is still a huge challenge.     

Land and agricultural commercialisation in Meru County,Kenya: evidence from three models*

What are the relative pros and cons of different pathways of agricultural commercialisation in Africa? This paper examines aspects of three commercial farming cases, each of which represents one of the three most dominant models of commercial agriculture – small-scale outgrowers, medium-size commercial farms and a large estate – in the high-potential area of Meru County in Kenya. The paper provides a comparative perspective across the cases, examining their outcomes in terms of land relations, labour, livelihoods and local economic linkages. The study used a mixed-methods approach, including a household survey and a range of qualitative methods including detailed life histories. We find diverse dynamics across our cases: increasing land consolidation spurred by the rising class of commercial coffee farmers, but also land fragmentation as a result of population pressure and prevalence of inheritance as a pathway to land acquisition in the case of horticultural outgrowers. The plantation generates relatively better paid employment for permanent skilled workers, while the commercial farms create employment for casualised, insecure and poorly paid seasonal labour. These labour regimes are highly gendered. The outgrowers combine family and hired labour. Across the three cases, farmers diversify income between on-farm and off-farm sources. The commercial and outgrower farms are dynamically integrated into the local economy, while the estate is less so. These features of the three models generate processes of social differentiation, which are reshaping the agrarian structure and rural economy in Meru County.     

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.     

Situating tenure,capital and finance in farmland relations: implications for stewardship and agroecological health in Ontario,Canada

Farmers in Canada are older and more capitalized than ever before. Meanwhile, farmland values continue to rise. These forces together are generating unprecedented shifts in farmland relations, marked by increasing reliance on rental tenure and the rise of hybrid owner–renter consolidating farmers. This paper explores these dynamics in Ontario and asks how they are impacting on-farm agroecological stewardship. To do so, we begin with a review of the land and property relations literature as well as farmland and agricultural change in Ontario. We then briefly review agroecological issues and concepts that are important for linking on-farm agroecological health to aformentioned farmland and agricultural changes. From here, we use survey, interview and soil sample data collected from grain farmers across Ontario to elucidate relatively new shifts in land tenure and use dynamics. We argue that this complex set of forces is interacting to produce an appealing set of conditions for financial investors, while restricting access to farmland for less-capitalized farmers. We then show how these shifts are divesting capital and attention from agroecological health. We conclude with a reflection on how the state has been mediating and contributing to these dynamics, and urgently call for land policy that prioritizes social and ecological principals.     

disowning dependence: single women's collective struggle for independence and land rights in northwestern India

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the ‘dependent woman’ naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour.     

Power and Rights in the Community: Paralegals as Leaders in Women’s Legal Empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence.     

Race,immigration and the agrarian question: farmworkers becoming farmers in the United States*

As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transitions. This paper draws on interview-based research conducted in the states of California, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and Washington, with first-generation Latino immigrant farmworkers who have transitioned to farm ownership. The majority are practicing small-scale and diverse crop production, with limited synthetic inputs and mostly family labor, as this form of farming allows them to reclaim control over their own labor and livelihoods, while also earning a cash income. The farmers included in this study, and their rationale for farming despite race- and citizenship-based challenges, cannot be understood simply through a lens of class transition. This contribution provides evidence that Latino immigrants’ ascendancy to farm ownership is instead a result of their struggle to redefine their relationship to land and labor in a country where their race and citizenship status have relegated them to the working poor.     

Controlling land they call their own: access and women's empowerment in Northern Tanzania

Formal rights to land are often promoted as an essential part of empowering women, particularly in the Global South. We look at two grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on land rights and empowerment with Maasai communities in Northern Tanzania. Women involved with both NGOS attest to the power of land ownership for personal empowerment and transformations in gender relations. Yet very few have obtained land ownership titles. Drawing from Ribot and Peluso's theory of access, we argue that more than ownership rights to land, access – to land, knowledge, social relations and political processes – is leading to empowerment for these women, as well as helping to keep land within communities. We illustrate how the following are key to both empowerment processes and protecting community and women's land: (1) access to knowledge about legal rights, such as the right to own land; (2) access to customary forms of authority; and (3) access to a joint social identity – as women, as ‘indigenous people’ and as ‘Maasai'. Through this shared identity and access to knowledge and authority, women are strengthening their access to social relations (amongst themselves, with powerful political players and NGOs), and gaining strength through collective action to protect land rights.     

Gender,resistance and land: interlinked struggles over resources and meanings in South Asia

This article examines the nature of women's resistance to gender inequities in resource distribution and ideological representation. It argues that to understand how women perceive these inequities it is necessary to take into account not only their overt protests but also the many covert forms their resistance might take. At the same time, to significantly alter gendered structures of property and power it appears necessary to move beyond 'individual-covert' to 'group-overt' (organized collective) resistance. These issues are examined here especially in the context of women's struggles for land rights and gender equality in South Asia. Although historically South Asian women have been important participants in peasant movements, these movements have not been typified by women demanding independent land rights or contesting iniquitous gender relations within the movements and within their families. Some recent challenges in this direction indicate that attaining gender equality in the distribution of productive resources will require a simultaneous struggle against constraining ideological constructions of gender, including (in many regions) associated social practices such as purdah. And in both types of struggle (namely concerning resources and gender ideologies), group-overt resistance is likely to be of critical importance.     

On the operation of the land market in backward agriculture: Evidence from a village in Orissa,Eastern India

Based on original field data this article analyses the implications of different contracts found in the land market in the study village. A variety of tenurial contracts including land mortgage, with different terms and conditions, have been found. However, landless labourers were discriminated against by lessors because of their lack of working capital and inadequate cash to lease in land on a cash payment basis. Land mortgage is resorted to by poor peasant as a strategy to mobilise funds for urgent purposes and thereby to stop land alienation. The behaviour of land sale and purchase transactions showed the sluggish nature of the land market, but distress sale is an important phenomenon found in the village. Both intra‐class and inter‐class land transfer were found and the process of differentiation was complex. Rich farmers have tried to consolidate and enlarge their land holdings through selling of low quality and unfavourably located plots and buying better quality and favourably located plots. The process of consolidation by the rich is accompanied by a proliferation of sub‐livelihood plots by poor farmers.     

Soft budgets and elastic debt: farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Since Tajikistan’s independence, market reforms and pressure from international donors have brought changes to the state’s role in the economy. The official narrative holds that the post-socialist state reduced its control over agriculture, but there are still various mechanisms through which it exerts control over farming. In this paper, I examine Tajikistan’s post-socialist agrarian change through the prism of farm debt. Farm debt used to be an accounting nuisance in Soviet agriculture as a result of so-called soft-budget constraints. In the political economy of post-socialist transformation, farm cotton debt has been transformed into indebted land. I classify this debt ‘elastic’ for its ambiguous nature. It ties farmers to land and makes farmers’ independence illusory. With an in-depth analysis based on original ethnographic insights, I aim to provide a theoretical contribution to the way in which debt is conceptualised and politicised in post-Soviet Tajikistan.     

Shifting rights,property and authority in the forest frontier: ‘stakes’ for local land users and citizens

Customary land and forests are more embedded in the global economy than ever. With globally significant supplies of land and raw materials and favorable terms for foreign investors, developing countries – particularly in Africa – have become increasingly attractive trade partners and destinations for investors. Increasing competition over land is placing new pressures on vast tracts of forest and woodland, areas often considered ‘under-utilized’ by national governments despite their critical role in supporting local livelihoods. While increased demand for primary agricultural, forest and mining commodities in the context of forest tenure reforms and decentralized decision-making could create unprecedented economic opportunities for forest-dependent communities, increased ‘stakes’ over forest resources and land will undoubtedly heighten governance challenges. This is in no small part due to the political dynamics of property, and to the role of the ‘recursive constitution of property rights and authority’ in the evolution of the modern nation-state. By identifying the social ‘stakes’ associated with different pathways through which sectoral and extra-sectoral commodities shape forests, this paper provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how shifting contours of rights, property and authority in the context of forest-related trade and investment shape human well-being for affected communities and the wider citizenry of host countries. It then illustrates the use of the framework through its application to two brief case studies from southern Africa: tobacco production in Malawi and copper mining in Zambia. It is hoped that this framework will provide a meaningful contribution to growing scholarship on the political dynamics of property, and implications for rights-based approaches to agricultural investment and large-scale land acquisitions.     

The political and social basis of regional variation in land occupations in Brazil

Land occupations led by Brazil's most dynamic social movement the Landless Workers Movement (MST) began as a regional phenomenon. The south‐east and the north‐east regions were initially the centres of land occupations. The successful occupations in these areas were influenced by the origins of the movement, their proximity to urban areas with sympathetic support networks, concentrations of landless workers and the availability of vast areas of uncultivated land. Initial land settlements led to successful occupations in adjoining areas. Conditions which led to successful organising were later systematised by the MST leaders into a national strategy. Subsequently this strategy directed social intervention in other regions and created the basis for the extension of land occupations in regions beyond their original areas of strength. The extension of successful land occupations to new areas has been based on the ‘transplantation’ of leaders and the recruitment of local cadres who have assimilated the lessons of earlier experience. The MST has been transformed from a regional to a national movement. In the process, the MST has moved from a sectoral ‘agrarian reform’ social movement to a political movement with a national political agenda.     

Bridging the gender gap in agricultural development through gender responsive extension and rural advisory services delivery in Ghana

Despite the critical role women play in agricultural development their access to extension and rural advisory services delivery is limited. To improve this situation, an in-depth understanding of the importance of gender-responsive extension delivery is required. A case study of the Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement Program that put in extra efforts to reach more female farmers with extension delivery and other rural advisory services was conducted. The study investigates how gender dynamics interact with the agricultural extension delivery with particular reference to the adoption of improved technologies. A total sample of 592 smallholder farmers were interviewed in selected communities in Northern Ghana. In addition to one-on-one interviews, 18 focus group discussions were also conducted in the surveyed districts. Study findings confirmed that male farmers had more access to agricultural extension delivery than their female counterparts because of their relatively better financial standing, large farm sizes, mobility to access extension and rural advisory service providers outside their communities. The study identified gendered associations with some crop types across all the study districts. However, the gendered extension delivery led to a new sociocultural order that seems to break down the gendered associations with the adoption of improved technologies.     

“She's not really a woman, she's half a man”: Gendered discourses of embodiment in a French farming community

This paper is about constructions of embodiment in farming families in a community of the Aveyron region in Southern France. More particularly, it explores how the discursive representation of women's bodies both reproduces and legitimates unequal gender relations between women and men on the farm and in the local community. It is argued here that gender is constituted through the ways in which individuals live and construct their bodies within a particular social, cultural, and economic context. But because what is constructed as masculine is valued over what is constructed as feminine, women's bodies and abilities are inferiorised and devalued. In the farming context discussed in this paper, farm women are never seen as having bodies which enable them to farm in the same terms as men. Women's work on the farm is seen as only secondary and complementary to that of farmers in the same way that women's bodies are seen to be lacking in masculine attributes which are defined as central to farming. So that even when women show that they can run farms by themselves and do work which is usually defined as masculine, they are either represented as only being able to do so because they have male help, or because their bodies and attributes do not conform to culturally constructed heterosexual norms of femininity.     

Expropriated from the hereafter: The fate of the landless in the Southern Highlands of Madagascar

During the period following the abolition of slavery by the French colonial government in 1896, the Southern Highlands of Madagascar was settled by ex-slaves. These early settlers constructed a foundation myth of themselves as tompon-tany, or ‘masters of the land’, a discourse not only equating land with tombs, kinship and ancestors, but also coupled with a skilful deployment of ‘Malagasy customs’. In order to exclude later migrants who also wanted to settle, the ‘masters of the land’ attempted to establish control over holdings in the area. To this end, and to reinforce their own legitimacy as landholders, the tompon-tany labelled subsequent migrants andevo (‘slave’ or of ‘slave descent’) who – as a tombless people – have no rights to land. Because they have neither tombs nor ancestors, the landless andevo are socially ostracised and economically marginalised. As an ‘impure people’, they are not entitled to a place in the hereafter.     

Rural landlessness,extended entitlements and inter‐household relations in south Asia: A Bangladesh case

This article shows how people in one part of Bangladesh rendered landless and impoverished by river bank erosion make innovative use of kinship and other ideologies legitimating reciprocity and mutual aid to re‐establish themselves rent‐free on the land of others. It thereby addresses a larger empirical issue: where are the fully landless rural poor in South Asia living, and through what means? Theoretically, it extends Drèze and Sen's analysis of entitlements and poverty to instances of inter‐household cooperative conflict and mutual aid among extremely poor people. A culturally informed, gender disaggregated analysis of those locally called uthuli because they have settled on others’ land without monetary payment demonstrates that women's ‘extended entitlements’ [Drèze and Sen, 1989:10] as daughters, sisters and mothers are often critical assets in establishing residence. Women are also key agents in the establishment and maintenance of uthuli residence and in managing the benefits stemming from it. Using this approach, we show how landless women's entitlements are pivotal in securing access to a houseplot for themselves and their families.     

Exit from agriculture: a step forward or a step backward for the rural poor?

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welfare’ as a safety net when urban workers are ejected back to countryside at times of ‘urban shock’. My essay contrasts the Report's narrative about felicitous trajectories away from and back to the farm with the historical and contemporary experience of Asia's rural poor.     

Post-socialist deindustrialisation and its gendered structure of feeling: the devaluation of women’s work in the Croatian garment industry

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the devaluation of women’s industrial work during the transition from market socialism to capitalism in Croatia. On the basis of oral history interviews with former workers from the Arena knitwear factory in Pula, it explores the gendered structure of feeling created by socialist industrialisation, and its transformations during post-socialist deindustrialisation. In socialist Yugoslavia, female industrial workers participated in the discourses and practices of workers’ self-management. Despite their hard work and their low wages, most workers fondly remember the factory as a space of socialisation, solidarity and empowerment. The factory functioned as a redistributive centre for accessing welfare rights. After post-socialist transition, workers experienced worsening social rights, precarity and exploitation as a result of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the neo-liberal withdrawal of the welfare state. Workers’ nostalgic narratives about their work experiences during socialism are mobilised to reclaim the dignity and value of work in post-socialist times.