Prosperity in crisis and the longue durée in Africa

ABSTRACT

Understanding the evolution and tenacity of particular ways of envisaging economic growth and development for Africa requires a form of analytical history that examines how conceptual structures function over the longue durée. Such an approach is more than simply empirical analysis through time or a set of abstractions based on the self-understandings of historical agents. It involves the development of a hypothetical analytic structure which through its own forms of transformation eventually comes to play a role in shaping the lived world of participants, including researchers, policymakers and ordinary citizens. This article uses research from Kenya and Zambia to demonstrate how a long-running – but temporally and spatially variable – focus on agricultural productivity has shaped the character of rural life in Africa, and why it has consistently failed to deliver enlarged forms of prosperity based on quality of life and ecological well-being.     

泛长三角区域分工中的安徽农产品加工业发展战略

该文分析了安徽省作为泛长三角区域农产品供应基地的全理性与重要性,并提出了促进安徽农产品加工业发展的主要政策措施。     

大力发展农产品加工业推进广西工业化进程

发展农产品加工业是广西工业化的重要组成部分。发展农产品加工业,符合广西的客观现实,是实现广西工业化的基础,是打破二元经济结构的必然要求,也是广西对接东盟市场的需要。通过发展农产品加工业,可以充分开发利用广西的优势资源,加快县域经济的发展,从而推进广西工业化进程。     

东北黑土区现代农业发展研究

东北黑土区资源丰富,是我国重要的商品粮、石油、化工、钢铁、汽车、森工等生产基地,在我国国民经济建设中占有重要的地位。振兴东北老工业基地,不只是要改造东北地区的老工业,而是要盘活整个东北经济,从而改变东北地区的经济面貌。在这个过程中,农业在经济中的地位绝对不能忽视,只有发达的农业才能很好地为工业与服务业提供基础性保障。辩证地看待农业与工业、服务业之间的关系,更好地理解振兴东北老工业基地战略部署的内涵。只有推行现代农业,为农业经济的发展注入活力,才能推动农业经济的长远发展,才能保证东北老工业基地经济的全面振兴。     

‘Control Grabbing’ and small-scale agricultural intensification: emerging patterns of state-facilitated ‘agricultural investment’ in Rwanda

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment. The Rwandan government has adapted neo-liberal tools, such as ‘performance management contracts’, which make local public administrators accountable for agricultural development targets (often explicitly linked to corporate interests). Activities of international development agencies are becoming intertwined with those of the state and foreign capital, so that a variety of actors and objectives are starting to collaboratively change the relations between land and labour. The global ‘land grab’ is only one aspect of broader patterns of reconfiguration of control over land, labour and markets in the Global South. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the state is orienting public resources towards private interests in Rwanda, through processes that have elsewhere been termed ‘control grabbing’ [Borras et al. 2012 Borras, S.M., et al. 2012. Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation: key features in Latin America. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 33(4), 402–416. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2012.745394[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 402–416].     

Weapons of the week,weakness of the weapons: Shifts and stasis in development theory

Over the past half century the theory, practice and politics informing development studies have followed contrasting trajectories, a tangled epistemological pattern displayed inadvertently by some of the contributions to three of the four books reviewed here. This inconsistency has resulted in confusion, not least where current Marxist approaches to the agrarian question are concerned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, misinterpretations of unfree labour plus the jettisoning of class analysis have led to the abandonment of socialism, and its replacement with nationalism and bourgeois democracy as desirable political objectives. By locating rural class formation and agrarian struggle in a global capitalist context, however, one of the four books demonstrates the continuing importance of socialist politics to the study of development.     

The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.     

农垦企业职工队伍现实问题的理论思考

改革开放以来,农垦企业职工队伍发生重大变化,其社会地位、队伍构成、劳动者权益、社会保障等出现了新的情况,既有转型期作为农垦产业大军的排头兵作用,也客观存在着属于弱势群体特性,探讨和研究农垦企业职工队伍的现实问题,是当前化解社会矛盾,构建农垦和谐社会值得重视的新课题。     

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.     

中西法律文化差异探源

法律文化是法治的支撑 ,中西法律文化传统具有诸多差异。中国传统文化属于人治文化 ,缺乏支撑法治的法律文化传统 ;西方法律文化蕴含深厚的法治根基。究其根源是由中国传统的农业文明和西方的工业文明的差异所致