Who gains from contract farming? Dependencies,power relations,and institutional change

ABSTRACT

The paper highlights the mechanisms through which outgrower contract farming creates dependencies at the local level. Using sugarcane case study in Malawi, we show that dependencies are created through redefinition of use rights to customary land and through the redefinition of cash flows into outgrower communities. Through this two-dimensional process, corporations can secure access to land, exert control over local communities and transform the local social relations of reciprocity serving as the pillars of resistance. Our results indicate that contract farming changes rural agrarian relations, transforms local family institutions by carefully selecting a few household members with influence into the scheme and selectively dispossessing the poor community members.     

Authoritarian populism in rural Belarus: distinction,commonalities, and projected finale

ABSTRACT

The paper inspects how agrarian debates apply to rural Belarus. Following the ‘persistence versus disappearance’ debate, it finds the moral economy alongside request for change. Pursuing the ‘adaptation versus resistance’ debate, it spots adaptability and exclusion of those failing to adapt. Here ‘lukascism’ surfaces resting on constructing the ‘other’. A rare case of agrarian populism employed by top authority, lukascism is otherwise humdrum. Proclaiming some principles of the moral economy while disregarding others, inconsistent lukascism undercuts the ‘coexistence scenario’ of households with large-scale farming. Change avoidance is a commonplace foretelling lukascism’s finale: its appeal is limited by the older generation..     

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.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

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.     

Land reform and agrarian change in India and Pakistan since 1947: II

Analysing the actual processes and patterns of agrarian change following land reforms in India and Pakistan the author shows how radical land reform ideology without a radical land‐reform programme has dual consequences — beneficial for the emerging dynamic landlord or intermediate classes and agonising and unsettling for the rural poor. The latter are deprived of the elements of paternalism and security existing even within the old exploitative system without the provision of a new framework of security.

These dual consquences have been reinforced further by recent technological changes and the impetus to commercialism from these changes. The forced shift from secure to insecure, feudalistic to commercial, tenancy or the decline of tenancy resulting from eviction of tenants and resort to self‐cultivation by landlords coupled with growing economic differentiation between rich and poor peasants denote new and more naked sources of social tension and conflict than the old. They herald especially in India a new phase of agrarian instability in which the discontent of the rural poor may grow and cumulate and may even provide the impulse for a radical agrarian programme in tune with a radical agrarian ideology.?     

The pankhursts and the war: suffrage magazines and first world war propaganda

Abstract

This article focuses in depth upon the prison experiences of the suffragettes in Edwardian Britain and challenges many of the assumptions that have commonly been made about women suffrage prisoners. Thus it is revealed that a number of the prisoners were poor and working-class women and not, as has been too readily assumed, bourgeois women. The assumption too that the women prisoners were single is challenged. Married women and mothers as well as spinsters, endured the harshness of prison life. Other differences between the women, such as disability and age, are also explored. Despite such differentiation, however, the women prisoners developed supportive networks, a culture of sharing and an emphasis upon the collectivity. Their courage, bravery and faith in the women's cause, especially when enduring the torture of forcible feeding and repeated imprisonments, should remain an inspiration to all feminists today.     

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.     

Land reforms and voluntary resettlement: household participation and attrition rates in Malawi

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the factors influencing household participation in and withdrawal from a World Bank-funded voluntary resettlement scheme moving 15,000 low-income farming households within and across rural districts in Malawi. Using a survey of 203 beneficiary households, focus groups and in-depth interviews, we identify a lack of access to land and conflict over land in the area of origin as salient participation factors in resettlement, while withdrawal factors include lower access to infrastructure and poor soil quality in resettlement areas. We also highlight limited prior awareness of actual conditions in resettlement areas, low and biased participation in the decision to move, a greater desire for formal land titles due to loss of customary entitlement as a result of resettlement, and widespread ambiguity and confusion over titles for resettled plots. In this context, we point to a pattern of ‘negative resettlement’, in which households remain resettled despite major grievances, for lack of an alternative option, contrasting with ‘positive resettlement’, where households remain by choice. We suggest that intra-district resettlement is more likely to be successful than inter-district resettlement when there is a risk of informed consent deficiency. These findings point to the relative failures of this particular resettlement scheme, and suggest possible improvements for land redistribution schemes from agro-industrial projects to poor households.     

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.     

Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.     

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.     

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

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

Towards a Feminization of Agricultural Labour in Northwest Syria

Smallholdings in the rural areas of northwest Syria are a result of land fragmentation that is due to inheritance. Because of rapid population growth combined with land fragmentation, these smallholdings are increasing and cannot sustain the rural households whose sizes and needs are also increasing rapidly This situation has led to increasing numbers of males migrating to urban areas in Syria and to neighbouring countries looking for work opportunities. In addition, recent agricultural intensification trends seem to have led to the emergence of a waged labour force which, in the absence of male workers owing to significant rates of migration, is now predominantly female. Agricultural labour use depends upon household characteristics and resources (type of labour used, gender of labour waged/exchanged/familial). The article attempts to present a comprehensive analysis of household labour use in distinctive farming systems in one region of Syria that has undergone great change in recent decades, and examines the changes in the composition of the agricultural labour force. Secondary information, rapid ural appraisals and formal farm surveys were used to gather information on the households in a study area where different farming systems coexist. The results show that the decrease in landholding size, the resulting male migration, and land intensification have resulted in the expansion offemale labour in agriculturalproduction, which has been termed in this research a 'feminization of agricultural labour'. This suggests that agricultural research and extension services will have to work more with women farmers and farm workers, seek their wisdom and involve them in technology and transfer. This is not easy in conservative societies but requires research and extension institutions to take this reality into consideration in their programmes.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

"The Full Fruits of Our Labor": The Rebirth of the Living Wage Movement

A detailed report by the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston in 1998 revealed that many workers were earning hourly wages far below a "living wage." Employing what they called the "self-sufficiency standard," the activists succeeded in pushing the Boston City Council to pass a living wage ordinance. What many living wage activists did not realize is that this was not the first time the Women's Educational and Industrial Union had been involved in a campaign for living wages. In 1911, the organization released another report, profiling the incomes and expenditures of 450 women workers in Boston. The following year, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a minimum wage law. This is just one example of the many links between the current campaign for living wages and struggles from the past. Labor historians and today's activists have much to learn from one another in this fight for living wages that has been a mainstay of the U.S. labor movement.     

Resistance,class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.