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.     

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.     

Green grabbing and the dynamics of local-level engagement with neoliberalization in Tanzania's wildlife management areas

This paper analyzes the politics and struggles ongoing within wildlife management areas (WMAs) in Tanzania to discuss the dynamics of neoliberalization of the wildlife sector. We discuss neoliberalization as a new political-economic context within which the ongoing politics of natural resource management are played out, and focus on green grabbing as an expression of these politics. We discuss how local-level actors are engaged in these processes, often in strategic ways, to negotiate their roles within WMAs and address green grabbing by the state. Secondly, we discuss an example of the politics of land control and local-level actors’ enactment of accumulation by dispossession within a WMA.     

Rubber plantations in the Northwest: rethinking the concept of land grabs in Vietnam

At first glance, rubber plantations in the Northwest of Vietnam do not appear so different from ‘large-scale land acquisition’, which is quite common in the Global South. However, when we closely examine how many processes in plantations work, we can see that there are many different processes at work besides those that take place in other countries where transnational or domestic corporations purchase or lease land for growing food, fibre or fuel crops. Rubber plantations have been strongly supported by the government and promoted as a way to industrialize and modernize the uplands, while claiming to narrow the economic gap between the uplands and lowlands. Drawing on fieldwork in two villages in Son La, and on a review of policy papers and documents, this paper identifies the political mechanisms and policies that have emerged as critical factors enabling the dispossession of land for the development of a market economy with a socialist orientation in Vietnam. The paper seeks to understand how institutional control over land and over the discussion of political subjects produces control. It argues that land grabs for rubber plantations in Northwest Vietnam are moves to strengthen state sovereignty. This land seizure has indeed created a new way of land governance that hitherto did not exist in Vietnam.     

Community forest concessionaires: resisting green grabs and producing political subjects in Guatemala

In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ‘from below’ by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject – the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.     

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.     

Global resource grabs,agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: two West African case studies

This paper places land grabbing within the context of developments within agribusiness within the last 30 years, tracing the various trajectories of increasing competition and concentration and pressures on commodity prices that have resulted in increasing dispossession of smallholders and a move in some agri-food chains towards large estate production. The paper explores the ways in which contemporary agricultural policies and neoliberal market reforms reflect these developments and examines recent framing of land policies in Africa in the context of the development of agrarian capital and agribusiness. Competitiveness results in dispossession of less successful smallholders from below by commercial smallholders, and from above by large estates vertically integrated into agribusiness marketing chains. This is illustrated with examples from the cocoa sector in Côte d'Ivoire and pineapples in Ghana.     

Family farming in Brazil: evolution between the 1996 and 2006 agricultural censuses

This article compares the main findings of Brazilian agricultural census data of 1996 with the same of 2006 by applying the methodology known as ‘FAO/INCRA’ (Food Agriculture Organization/Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária) which allows the characterization of family farms in relation to the total universe of farms. In this comparison several variables are shown, including the share of family farming in the total value of production, in the total number of farms, utilization of modern technology and partial factor productivity. Census data shows that family farming has changed from 37.91 percent of total production value to 36.11 percent during a decade of strong expansion of agriculture as a whole, demonstrating the economic relevance of this segment which, besides producing food, is integrated in the most important productive agricultural chains of the Brazilian agribusiness. Family farming is a heterogeneous segment, with different sub-segments. During the studied period of ten years the most rich of these sub-segments (A) has increased participation in total production, while the poorer sub-segments (C and D) have only grown in absolute terms without a corresponding increase in production.     

Green pretexts: Ecotourism,neoliberal conservation and land grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park,Colombia

While conflict-related dynamics are recognized as causes of land grabbing in Colombia, violent processes of exclusion and expropriation behind ‘greener’ projects are often seen as disconnected from them. The case of ecotourism in Tayrona National Natural Park makes it possible to explore the geographies of violence that sustain tourism in the area and their role in shaping everyday resource politics. This paper shows how green pretexts of paradisiacal spots in need of protection have contributed to privatization and dispossession. Furthermore, it details how land-grabbing dynamics have been enabled by processes of sociospatial demarcation that produce not-green-enough subjects as bodies-out-of-place.     

Soybean agri-food systems dynamics and the diversity of farming styles on the agricultural frontier in Mato Grosso,Brazil

Soybean production in South America has become a symbol of commodity crops produced on a large scale for the agribusiness geared to global markets. However, in practice, there are diverse styles of farming, ranging from the very large scale to the small scale, associated with different social relations of production. This diversity of farm types is often overlooked within the focus on the stereotypical large-scale farm. Any understanding of the social dynamics of relations of production and farming practices, and so insights into longer term trajectories of agrarian change, must also go beyond a simplistic dichotomous vision of large-scale versus small-scale farming.     

中非工会差异及中资企业在非应对劳资矛盾的行为逻辑 —— 基于对坦桑尼亚的调研

在"中非合作论坛"、"一带一路"倡议的推动下,越来越多的中资企业进入非洲。随着企业在非洲的经营活动的日趋活跃,企业面临的劳资问题也不断增加。然而大多数在非的企业管理者在处理劳资矛盾时,并没有正确评估当地工会的角色与作用,也没有积极处理场域内的劳资矛盾,这不但给企业带来经济损失,也对国家形象造成了影响。本文以坦桑尼亚为例,通过调研分析,认为造成在非中资企业处理工会问题不力的根源是中非工会的差异,包括两国工会的本质、制度安排、日常活动差异等。面对中方管理者的工会经验缺失,一些立足于长远发展的企业已经开始尝试与当地工会合作,并以其在中国的工会经验为切入点,通过表彰先进、节日慰问等形式来培养员工中对中国友好的代表,通过他们的带动作用团结凝聚工人,尽管这些做法起到了一定的团结作用,但因这些措施具有临时性、随机性等特征,并不能持续发挥作用。     

Food safety and the political economy of food governance: the case of shrimp farming in Nam Dinh Province,Vietnam

This contribution is a critique of the public and private governance models in response to the food safety crisis in Vietnam. Using shrimp farming in Nam Dinh province as a case study, the paper argues that public food governance has addressed some of the safety issues in the input sector but remains largely ineffective at the production level due to limited financial and human resources. In turn, private governance has had more successes but its impact is limited to the value-chain while food safety can be influenced by both sectoral and cross-sectoral production practices. In addition, it reinforces the subordination of direct producers by keeping them within industrial production, passing down the cost of safety compliance, and forcing them to assume production risks while reducing their profit margins. More importantly, safety governance under industrial farming is likely to open new opportunities for land expropriation and concentration, affecting the livelihood of small farmers and potentially leading to political unrest. The essay thus asserts that food safety needs to be addressed under the integrated framework of Food Sovereignty, which seeks to obtain food quality, including safety together with agroecological production, farmers' control of productive resources and the enabling of local trading systems.     

New investment,old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture

Foreign investment in agricultural land acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa has been viewed primarily as driven by a set of linked ‘crises’: in financial capital markets, in security of energy and food supply, and in global environmental governance. This paper argues that a focus on the ‘buyers’ of land risks overlooking the dynamics that operate on the side of the land ‘sellers’. Accordingly, the first part of the paper argues that it is important to view the current ‘land grab’ as the latest stage in a longer historical process of competition for control of land and other natural resources by different ‘domestic’ economic and political actors within African countries. While such struggles are often characterised as the ‘state versus the peasantry’, with the state acting on behalf of ‘urban elites’, the paper argues that processes of accumulation and associated enclosure of natural resources need to be examined more critically in specific contexts if the role and impact of foreign capital investment are to be understood. The second part of the paper seeks to identify the ways in which questions of scale (in the sense of greater capital intensity) can be considered to be constraints to the development of African agriculture. Particularly, it considers the extent to which the production models most frequently mentioned in connection with foreign investment (large-scale mechanised farms and small-scale outgrower contract farming) respond to current productivity constraints. The paper argues that current debates about foreign investment in agricultural land underplay the importance of water resources needed to overcome production risks associated with irregular rainfall. Bringing the water dimension of land deals more clearly into focus is necessary if the scope for positive and negative impacts of new investment on existing land users is to be fully understood. The paper concludes by considering the implications of such challenges in the current context of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa.     

Politics of inclusion and exclusion in the Chinese industrial tree plantation sector: the global resource rush seen from inside China

In the last two decades, the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector has expanded rapidly in southern China, causing important changes in land-use and land control. It involves both domestic and transnational corporations, and has provoked widespread conflict and political contestations. The villagers who are affected by the expansion of ITPs have reacted in varied and complex ways: some of the villagers were incorporated in the ITP sector, while others are excluded; some have embraced the change, while others have complaints; and some of the complaints remained latent, while others developed into (overt or covert) forms of resistance. This paper explores how and why various social groups have responded differently to the expansion of ITPs. This paper reveals the dynamics of villagers’ inclusion and exclusion in the ITP sector, covering both ‘passive’ and ‘active’ forms of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in differentiated political reactions from villagers. This paper hopes to contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of the complex engagement of villagers in changes in land use and land control, not just in the most commonly studied countries in global land grabbing but inside China, and in transactions that involved large foreign companies, something that has so far been missed in the literature on land grabbing.     

Power,politics and policy in the appropriation of urban wetlands: the critical case of Sri Lanka

Little is known about the drivers and governance strategies of appropriation of urban nature in the global south. We compare urban land-grabbing in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, with broader understanding of rural land-grabbing in the developing world. We show that the colonial legacy of appropriation and alteration of urban wetlands in Colombo has attained new heights in the neo-liberal period. This cyclical process has caused acute irreversible damage to the wetland ecosystem and a vast majority of the urban poor, with the marginalised continuing to suffer dispossession and environmental hazard. In recognition of the inherent limitations of ‘uncontrollable’ hybrid ecologies, potent social struggles have emerged to resist the continued appropriation agenda. As this cycle is perpetuated, broader social struggles for democratic urban governance have overtaken the pursuit of narrow political-economic goals and internal policy reform.     

Armed conflict,land grabs and primitive accumulation in Colombia: micro processes,macro trends and the puzzles in between

Armed conflict is widely believed to disrupt agricultural production and ‘reverse’ development, but it may also involve the violent transformation of rural economies from subsistence to commercial agriculture. The case of Las Pavas, an estate in northern Colombia, provides further evidence that armed conflict created opportunities for violent land grabs and the expansion of commercial agriculture in Colombia. However, aggregate data suggest that primitive accumulation may be only part of the story behind the massive scale of forced displacement and dispossession. A research strategy that accounts for the diversity of subnational contexts, processes and outcomes is needed.     

The international political economy of the global land rush: A critical appraisal of trends,scale, geography and drivers

Over the past few years, agribusiness, investment funds and government agencies have been acquiring long-term rights over large areas of farmland in lower income countries. It is widely thought that private sector expectations of higher agricultural commodity prices and government concerns about longer-term food and energy security underpin much recent land acquisition for agricultural investments. These processes are expected to have lasting and far-reaching implications for world agriculture and for livelihoods and food security in recipient countries. This paper critically examines evidence of trends, scale, geography and drivers in the global land rush. While this analysis broadly corroborates some widespread assumptions, it also points to a more complex set of drivers that reflect fundamental shifts in economic and geopolitical relations linking sovereign states, global finance, and agribusiness through to local groups. Only a solid understanding of these fundamental drivers can help identify levers and pressure points for policy responses to address the challenges raised by large-scale land acquisitions.     

Biotechnology and bio-hegemony in Uganda: unraveling the social relations underpinning the promotion of genetically modified crops into new African markets

This paper aims to uncover the social relations used to promote genetically modified (GM) crops into new African markets. It unravels the network of corporate actors, development agencies, policy officials, and research scientists that support the unquestioned dominance of GM in Uganda, which houses one of the largest experimental program dedicated to agricultural biotechnology on the continent. Gramscian insights reveal how these constellations of power align to support biotechnology at the expense of other technological possibilities, and how this consensus maintains its position of dominance while remaining largely unquestioned and unchallenged.     

The development of a new labour framework during the Second Republic in Spain: the Central Service for job placement and defence against unemployment

The Great Depression affected the Spanish economy, sharply increasing the number of unemployed workers, known as the ‘sin trabajo’. In an effort to address problems with the labour market, the Central Office for Job Placement and Defence against Unemployment was established in 1931 for the purpose, in Niceto Alcalá-Zamora’s words, of heading off ‘regrettable passions and misadventures of a social or political nature’. The ‘reformist challenge’ to the traditional social order would commence that same year, when the PSOE’s Largo Caballero became head of the Ministry of Labour. The staff of the Central Office for Job Placement were aware of proposals by Keynes and other economists regarding this issue, so it can be said that in addition to responding to the urgent social pressure of the moment, the employment policies implemented also sought added legitimacy in the context of theoretical trends that enjoyed consensus at that time.