Access and control of agro-biotechnology: Bt cotton,ecological change and risk in China

This article argues that if the introduction of genetically modified crops (GM crops) in developing countries is to be successful, we can and should not evade questions of access and control of technology. It implies probing into the experiences, perceptions and understanding of GM crops by the prime user: the farmer. Exactly in these respects the scholarly literature is remarkably silent. We know little about farmers' experiences and perceptions of GM crops' potential risks and benefits. This is evident when concentrating on a major GM crop – Bt cotton – and studying this in the context of China, its second largest producer in the world. Based on the results of a large survey, we demonstrate that Chinese farmers' awareness (‘having heard of’) and their understanding (‘being able to explain’) of Bt cotton is low. This may lead to ill-informed, distorted risk perceptions and a general inability to relate agricultural production problems to the specific nature of transgenic cotton cultivation. A great majority of the farmers find that the Chinese seed market was liberalised too early, in turn leading to a high incidence of ‘stealth transgenics’ or illegal seeds, the undermining of farmers' trust in private institutions, and a weakened biosafety regime. This finding points to the need for continued state intervention in the seed market, particularly in a developing context. Finally, we have discovered that farmers report a significantly lower reduction in pesticide use by Bt cotton than found in other studies. As suggested by recent research, we suspect that the higher pesticide use is necessary to control secondary pests – i.e. pests other than the cotton bollworm. We present empirical evidence that Chinese farmers perceive a substantive increase in secondary pests after Bt cotton was introduced.     

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

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

Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for Development Report read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.     

China's soybean crisis: the logic of modernization and its discontents

Lester Brown sounded an alarm in 1995: who will feed China? Against this backdrop, this contribution examines China's dramatic turn from having been a soybean net exporter, up until the mid-1990s, to being the biggest importer of genetically modified (GM) soybeans, since 2000. With China's growing soybean imports, domestic soybean production has experienced a drastic fall, creating an outcry about a ‘soybean crisis’ in China. This paper examines competing interpretations about China's soybean imports and how a wide arrange of heated debates and critical reflections have emerged about China's position in globalization, the role of the state in food security, the safety of GM foods, consumer rights, what constitutes scientific authority, and the power of transnational corporations. In these debates, Chinese critics have very different views about the US and South America, where significant GM soybeans are produced for export to China.     

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.     

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.     

Fleeing rural violence: Mam women seeking gendered justice in Guatemala and the U.S.

ABSTRACT

I use the concept of gendered embodied structures of violence as the analytical framework for illustrating how in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala, historical and contemporary structures and processes of violence which center the normalization of multiple forms of implied or actual physical and sexual violence against women (and often other men and children) continue to undermine efforts to strengthen women’s rights and provide access to safety and justice for women. Overlapping structures of primarily male power suggest the difficulty of separating state and non-state actors from the vectors of violence affecting women. This article contributes to emerging literature on indigenous women’s access to justice in Latin America through adding a transnational lens to this discussion and suggesting why we cannot separate pubic from private violence and state from non-state actors.     

Out of the mainstream: water rights,politics and identity

ABSTRACT

Indigenous maize from Mexico has become crucial for a wave of contemporary agricultural development initiatives seeking to cultivate a ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Plant breeders developing disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation. Historicizing this transnational linkage, this paper argues that Green Revolution science appropriates indigenous maize through racial logics rooted in whiteness. In the 1940s, American scientists sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexico’s agriculture negotiated their own racial subjectivity through their encounters with Mexico’s indigenous people. In the process, they constructed a racial hierarchy that equated whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment. This racialization undergirded a maize program led by E.J. Wellhausen that collected and catalogued hundreds of varieties of Mexico’s maize – and then distributed them to American seed companies. Wellhausen’s seeds formed the genetic backbone for subsequent Green Revolution projects. The ‘white science’ he embodied expanded as the Revolution sought out nonwhite agriculture across the global South. Today, the Green Revolution’s racial logics are re-articulated along its geographical and technological frontier, as indigenous maize provides the seeds for the African Green Revolution.     

First be a woman? rural development,social change and women farmers’ lives in Thessaly-Greece

This research is prompted by a desire to portray how Thessalian women farmers’ lives have been and are still affected by agrarian, economic, political and social transformations that took place in Greece from 1950 onwards. Using a cueing technique, we collected 2034 autobiographical memories from 74 women farmers. In general, the story our data tell indicates that the progress regarding woman’s position within family and society was slow and erratic, whereas it is still underway, since gender role appropriateness remains a robust construction. The analysis proved that the first signs of change appeared in the 1970s, when the migration from Thessaly to Europe brought about some unprecedented ideas on woman’s social and domestic roles. Other factors, such as the modernization of agriculture in 1980s and the consequent economic flourishing, along with the aura conveyed by the new (female) members of farming communities, and the opening of rural societies in 1990s and 2000s, facilitated this change.     

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

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

M. L. Darling and the Punjab peasant in prosperity and debt: A fresh look

More than half a century ago M. L. Darling contended that the volume and burden of debt in the Punjab province of British India were higher for the more prosperous farmers or areas. This thesis has enjoyed considerable intellectual respect over the years. The present article attempts a closer inspection of Darling's data and argues that though the prosperous farmers had a larger volume of debt its incidence was lower. The findings of the All‐India Rural Credit Survey (1951–52) corroborate this contention.     

Women in agriculture in Nigeria: Problems and policies for development

This paper focuses on the involvement of Nigerian Women in Agriculture. A total of 600 women was selected for study in three different areas of Nigeria (West, North and East) in order to capture differences in the socio-economic activities of the women.A ranking of the socio-economic activities of the women studied indicated that their most important activity was the care of children, followed by house-keeping and then trading. A ranking of the women's preferred socio-economic activity revealed that the women would like to spend less time on home-related activities to increase time spent on farming, processing and trading. On an overall basis, trading was the women's most important occupation outside the home, followed by farming. Yoruba women of Western Nigeria are more often traders than Ibo women of Eastern Nigeria, who are often farmers. The Hausa/Fulani women of Northern Nigeria are positioned between the two other groups with respect to their involvement in farm operations. For the whole of Nigeria, economic considerations are a major determinant of the extent to which women are involved in farming as against processing and trading. Once men move out of farming into such non-farm occupations as factory work, mining and distribution of industrial goods, women take up food production for home consumption and for sale, regardless of which ethnic group they belong to, although in relative terms the restricting influence of the Moslem religion on the women in the North must be acknowledged. About 40 per cent of all the women studied could be classified as farmers, 28 per cent as processors and 52 per cent as traders. Processing was often part of farming or trading. The women were mainly involved in the production, processing and trading of such food crops as maize, rice, cassava, yam and palm oil. They were rarely connected with agricultural export crops such as cocoa, cotton and groundnuts. The women who were farmers undertook most farm operations themselves, including the more difficult ones such as land clearing and land preparation for planting. When necessary, they used supplementary family and hired labour. An analysis of the women's life and work indicated that they feel themselves left behind in the general drive towards development.The main policy implication of the research findings is that an employment-educational and incomes strategy needs to be devised for the women in order to enhance their contributions to agricultural and rural development in Nigeria and for their own personal fulfilment.     

cultivating the edge: an ethnography of first-generation women farmers in the American Midwest

In the US, an emergent cultural icon of resistant agriculture, the agrarian heroine, attests to growing popular interest in first-generation women farmers. Drawing on practice theory, historical geographical materialism, intersubjective ethnography and feminist scholarship, this ethnography focusses on three first-generation women farmers growing organic vegetable crops for the Chicago market, with critical attention to the body, the land and their uses. By applying permaculture’s theory of ‘the edge’ anthropologically, this study explores the work these women do to cultivate relational spaces that promote fluidity, diversity and solidarity in opposition to industrial agriculture and the homogenising forces of globalisation. The portraits that emerge problematise popular representations of first-generation women farmers.     

Genetically modified soybeans,agrochemical exposure,and everyday forms of peasant collaboration in Argentina

Since the 2000s, both the production of genetically modified (GM) soybeans and the cases of agrochemical exposure have grown exponentially in Argentina. Drawing on ethnographic research, I analyze how peasant social movements understand the socio-environmental problems caused by the expansion of GM soybeans. I argue that at national, provincial, and local scales, the institutional recognition of peasant social movements and the performative actions of authorities discourage contentious collective action through subtle yet powerful mechanisms. The article contributes to social movement research and to the literature on peasant resistance by analyzing the cultural dynamics that constrain contention and shape processes of peasant collaboration, which are arguably as important as peasant resistance, although much less studied.     

Book Reviews

This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby for a protected areas system that enclosed one-third of Guatemala's territory. This paper argues that this transnational conservation alliance, comprised of international conservation agencies and national elites, evokes the violence of scorched earth counterinsurgency. The use of jungle and forest discourses in successive territorial projects produces a racialized landscape that connects a violent past to a violent present. In recent years, jungle discourses have articulated advocacy for increased militarization to fight the ‘war on drugs’ in protected areas. As such, I argue thatconservation agencies and the military are complicit in reproducing social inequalities, often through violent exclusions.     

Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses? Differentiation among petty commodity producers in guatemala

In this paper I discuss the way in which rural artisans in one municipio of Guatemala organize production and how this organization impedes the differentiation of the artisanal population into owners and workers. I show that categories of owners and workers exist in the municipio, but that these categories do not reproduce themselves as classes; instead, they reproduce each other through the life cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, I look at internal relations of production, the external environment of large‐scale capital, and the role of migration and the stale in the creation of a permanent Guatemalan proletariat and in the creation of an undifferentiated artisanal economy.     

Unmasking the subaltern,or salamis without themistocles

The rubber tree is native to the humid tropics and has traditionally been cropped in the equatorial zone between 10°N and 10°S; in mainland Southeast Asia this includes portions of southern Thailand, southeastern Vietnam, and southern Myanmar. In the early 1950s, the Chinese government began to invest in growing rubber in environments perceived to be ecologically marginal and eventually established state rubber plantations in areas that lie as far north as 22° north latitude. China's success in growing rubber in these ‘non-traditional’ environments expanded the habitat in which rubber could be planted and pushed it further north. Today entrepreneurs from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand are investing in rubber plantations in areas of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, northwest Vietnam, northeast Thailand, and Yunnan, China. The impact of rubber on smallholders, however, is not yet clear. Experiences in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China and northeast Thailand clearly show that smallholder rubber production is a viable and effective proposition in moving households and communities out of poverty. By contrast in countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar many farmers are struggling to maintain their lands and forests in the face of growing pressures from investors and government institutions to impose concession arrangements.     

The Bureaucratic Origins of Migrant Poverty: The Texas Cotton Industry, 1910–1930

Migrant poverty resulted from the bureaucratization of Mexicans as a cheap source of labor for the Texas cotton industry from 1910 to 1930. State and federal employment programs and policies designed to maintain an organized and efficient labor market bureaucratized the divisions of labor that segregated Mexicans in seasonal low-wage agricultural work. While the implementation of labor legislation solved the temporary labor needs of large-scale cotton farmers, it exacerbated the working and living conditions of Mexican migratory workers. The welfare of Mexican migrants worsened as state managers integrated the recruitment and distribution of this labor force into the organizational structure of the Texas cotton industry.     

‘Let's party’: State intervention,discursive traditionalism and the labour process of Highland rice cultivators in Central Sulawesi,Indonesia

The state has intruded in the labour process of the highland wet‐rice farmers of Central Sulawesi since the imposition of Dutch colonial rule in 1905. Capitalist development since that time has resulted in differentiation in the ownership of the means of production; however, class tensions have been countered by the New Order state's shrouding the work process in a ‘discursive traditionalism’ which transforms wage labour into a ‘work party’. The transformations in this work party over time and the resultant political ramafications are examined.     

Words speak louder than actions: the ‘peasant’ dimension of the Confédération Paysanne's alternative to industrial farming

Through its historical account of the Confédération Paysanne (CP)'s origins and early years (France), this paper explores the ways in which ‘peasant’ discourses are shaped by non-peasant understandings of what ‘being a peasant’ should mean. As we shall see, far from reflecting an innate and immutable ‘peasant’ way of being or seeing, references to ‘peasantness’ and ‘peasant farming’ act as discursive tools to both unite a heterogeneous activist base (composed of marginal and marginalized farmers) and advance organizational interests. This requires the CP – and its predecessors – to respond to a series of external constraints. In the course of this paper, we shall also show how academics play an important mediating role in the process of constructing or adapting the CP's ‘peasant’ discourse.