Women,poverty and agricultural growth in India

This article explores the interlinkages between gender, poverty and agricultural growth in India. It shows how women and female children of poor rural households bear a disproportionately high share of the burden of poverty. This is manifest especially in a systematic bias against females in the intra‐household distribution of food and health care. However, there are significant cross‐regional differences in the extent of the bias which is much higher in the north‐western states relative to the southern. Some of the likely factors ‐ economic, social, historical ‐ underlying these differences are discussed here. The specific problems of female‐headed households are separately considered. Also, the on‐going debate on the relationship between rural poverty and agricultural growth is critically examined. In addition, a detailed quantitative analysis is undertaken of the differential effects of the new agricultural technology, and associated growth, on the employment and earnings of female and male agricultural labourers (who constitute the bulk of the rural poor). The association between changes in these economic variables and others, such as in the incidence and pattern of dowry payments, is also examined, as are the implications of both these aspects for the situation of rural women in poverty in different geographic regions.     

Rural industry and uneven development: The significance of gender in the Irish Linen industry

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The ‘proto‐industrialisation’ thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognise the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialisation and deindustrialisation.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

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.     

From peasant to entrepreneur in Italy and Japan

From Peasant to Entrepreneur: the Survival of the Family Farm in Italy, by Anna Bull and Paul Corner. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Pp. ix + 174. £29.95. ISBN 0 85496 309 X.

Bull and Corner's historical study of the development of the ‘pluriactive’ rural household and its impact on the structure of industry in one region of Italy might go unnoticed by those concerned with rural change in other parts of the world. However, the clear similarities between the experience they describe and contemporaneous developments in Japan suggest the possibility of an alternative pattern of agriculture/industry relations over the course of industrialisation in economies where the small‐scale, multi‐functional, rural household prevails.     

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.     

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.     

Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State

In this article a particular factual model of the way in which imperialism worked with respect to the Indian economy, which is widely accepted, is contested. The model in question assumes that though imperialism acts to transform agriculture—disintegrating and dissolving the traditional village structure—because it also thwarted industrialisation, backwardness in agriculture and dependence were maintained: the transformation of agrarian relations of production is contrasted with the stagnation of industrial growth, and the latter is held to be the causal factor. Against this it is argued that an examination of colonial migration reveals both the specific characteristics of the colonial working class it produced and the continuing existence of feudal ties of dependence in agriculture. The situation is best conceptualised in terms of the existence within the Indian social formation of feudal (agrarian) and proto‐capitalist (mines, plantations, factories) modes of production, articulated in such a way that the main costs of reproduction of labour power that was sold in the capitalist sector were borne in the non‐capitalist agrarian sector. The article concentrates on the period from the 1880s to the 1930s.     

Chispas: From peasant to “bandit”∗

The widely held view that Iranian industrialisation policies during the 1962–77 period led to a squeeze of resources out of the agricultural sector is re‐examined. Measurements of internal terms of trade and net agricultural resource flows are presented for the first time, which show a sizeable resource inflow into the agricultural sector. It is argued that the agricultural policy problem was a consequence of inefficient resource use in this sector, rather than of an inadequate level of resource transfers to agriculture.     

Rural living conditions in pre‐liberation China: A survey of three recent studies

The degree of poverty and immiseration among China's rural population prior to 1949 has been a subject of much debate for many years. Three authors ‐ Brandt (1989), Faure (1989) and Huang (1990) ‐ have rekindled the debate by their diverse conclusions in their new books. While each of the studies have their conceptual and argumentative flaws, taken as a group they reveal that conditions in pre‐Liberation China were extremely complex and varied. As a result, the notion of making categorical statements regarding pre‐Liberation China loses credibility.

Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China 1870–1937, by Loren Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp.xiii + 232. £30.00/$42.50 (hardback). ISBN0521 371961

The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988, by Philip C.C. Huang. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Pp.xiv + 421. $49.50 (hardback); $16.95 (paperback). ISBN 0847 1787 and 1788 5

The Rural Economy of Pre‐Liberation China: Trade Increase and Peasant Livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937, by David Faure. Hongkong: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp.xiv + 283. £22.50 (hardback). ISBN 0 19 582707 4     

The peasant image and agrarian change: Representations of rural society in nineteenth‐century French painting from millet to van Gogh

In the upsurge of rustic themes in French painting during the second half of the nineteenth century is articulated a range of urban responses to agrarian and industrial transformation of country and city at the time. The recreation through art of ‘peasant culture’ was rooted in preoccupations about work and production, changing social relations and forms of sociability, the idea of the nation and the growth of political consciousness. This article examines some of the processes underlying the abundant production of peasant images ‐ the role of patronage, the growing importance of contemporary art criticism in formulating and diffusing values and sensibilities — as well as the complex and, at times, contradictory strains within the iconography of rural life in nineteenth‐century French art.     

Russian agrarian reform and rural capitalism reconsidered

Since 1990, significant institutional and policy change has occurred in the Russian agrarian sector. A crucial question is whether these changes will facilitate rural capitalism and the emergence of a rural bourgeoisie. This article examines Russian domestic economic policies and international trade policies, arguing that macroeconomic policies are inherently detrimental to the agrarian sector, are undermining the prospects for capitalism and the rise of a rural bourgeoisie, and are hindering economic growth. Since the onset of agrarian reform, financial and material investments into agriculture have been slashed. Russia has also pursued an open trade policy which has witnessed an increase in food imports which pits higher priced domestic food against lower priced, better quality imports. As a consequence the agricultural sector is not fulfilling basic requirements for economic growth. Based on these trends, the article concludes that current prospects for the development of a rural bourgeoisie are not favourable.     

The ‘private plot’ in Soviet agriculture

The paper examines the main components of Mexican agrarian populism, and the attractions of the populist position in the light of the current crisis within the Mexican agricultural sector. It is suggested that the ‘campesinistas’ (agrarian populists) have incorporated various aspects of marxist analysis, but have nevertheless emphasised ways in which their approach pans company with that of most marxists in Latin America. According to writers like Gustavo Esteva, perhaps the leading ‘campesinista’, the peasant economy in the process of developing can co‐exist with capitalism for a protracted period, and considerable doubt exists as to whether the peasant economy is ‘ultimately’ inconsistent with capitalist development. The agrarian populists look to the peasantry in Mexico as a vehicle for rural development, believing that a better understanding of the internal logic of peasant production might facilitate an alternative series of policy measures. The weaknesses of the ‘campesinista’ position are explored, and doubts expressed about the viability of the populist stance as long as Mexico has the option of importing basic foodcrops.     

The impact of the 1970s’ oil boom on Iranian agriculture

This article challenges the dominant strand of thinking on Iranian agriculture, which has hitherto stressed the depressing effects of the 1970s’ oil boom on the rural economy. In highlighting the nature of the economic boom both in the rural and urban areas, it delineates new constraints imposed on agriculture and offers a new explanation as to its outcome. The precipitated outflow of agricultural workforce in this period is thus shown to have been a common source of difficulty to the sector, and not a mere manifestation of its demise. The reasons for this process are located in new developments in the rural non‐farm and urban construction sectors, rather than in the ‘decay’ and ‘disintegration’ of agriculture.     

Oil versus agriculture a case of dual resource depletion in Iran

This paper discusses the performance and prospects of the rural sector in the ‘agricultural’ oil economies in general, and in Iran, in particular. It proposes an analytical framework within which the damaging effects of the oil revenues for the political economy — its structure and its relation — and their specific impact on agriculture and the rural society may be studied. It produces empirical evidence for the rapid destruction of Iranian agriculture in the past fifteen years and it demonstrates that the plight of the Iranian peasantry is a direct consequence of the increase in the oil revenues, and the adoption of public expenditure strategies which they have encouraged. It concludes that unless a radical change in public policy is effected, the Iranians will experience a depletion of both their oil and their agricultural resources within the foreseeable future.??     

Agrarian change and occupational diversification: Non‐agricultural employment and rural development in West Bengal

Based on evidence from the quinquennial surveys on employment by the National Sample Survey Organisation, it has been argued that, as part of the process of change associated with the Green Revolution, rural India is witnessing an agricultural growth‐induced diversification in economic activity in favour of non‐agricultural actvities. This article examines that argument using evidence relating to India as a whole and the state of West Bengal in particular. The analysis suggests that the observed occupational diversification in rural India over the last decade‐and‐a‐half is not so much a fall‐out of rural dynamism in the wake of the Green Revolution, but a reflection of the fact that two‐and‐a‐half decades after the Green Revolution began in India, much of the country is yet to experience the impact of that process.     

Rural studies in France

The article examines a number of criteria by which to categorise rural households into distinct socio‐economic classes. Based on the author's sample survey of 211 households in the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico, the study argues that an analysis of rural class structure must focus not only on access to the means of production and the extent of participation in the labour market but also on key structural features of domestic units such as household size, generational composition, and the division of labour by gender and age. Statistical tests strongly support the thesis that considerations of household structure sharpen and enrich the concept of class. The results also define and distinguish three main class types in the survey region ‐ commercial, subsistence, and landless households.     

Colombian transformations: Peasants and wage‐labourers in the Santa Marta Banana Zone

This paper examines the various forms of rural protest directed against the United Fruit Company in Colombia between 1900 and 1964. It explores the three factors that explain the tensions between the rural population and the Company: structural tensions between the peasant economy and the export sector; the relationship between peasants and wage‐labourers; and the effects of international market cycles on local conditions. In concluding, it questions the usefulness of typologies that, by positing a structural distinction between peasants and proletarians, neglect the historical dynamics of class formation.     

Peasant insurrection in China reconsidered: A preliminary examination of the Jun Mountain peasant rising,Nantong county, 1863

Focusing on a concrete historical example ‐ the Jun Mountain Peasant Rising, a small‐scale, mid‐nineteenth century insurgency in the Yangzi delta region ‐ this article re‐evaluates standard interpretations of peasant action and resistance in China. Although obscure and abortive, the Jun Mountain rising illuminates the developing role and interpenetration of ‘outsider’ communities, sectarian ideology/organisation, class formation, and long‐term trends in peasant culture in the emergence of an insurgent politics which at once built upon and transcended local ties. Preliminary examination of these politics thus contributes to current debate about the nature of Chinese peasant rebellions.