Agricultural commercialisation models,agrarian dynamics and local development in Ghana

The renewed commitment of African states to modernising agriculture has reignited longstanding debates about different models of agricultural commercialisation. Which forms of commercialisation models will reduce land dispossession and the impoverishment of smallholders, and transform smallholder agriculture and the wider economy? Of the three broad models of agriculture commercialisation in this debate – plantation, contract farming and medium-scale commercial farming – contract farming has been identified as central to the future of Africa’s commercial agriculture. This paper provides empirical evidence from Ghana on the impacts of these three models on land, labour/employment, livelihoods and local economic linkages. Our findings show that the plantation and the commercial farming areas have highly commercialised land relations, land scarcity and high land prices, compared to the outgrower area where traditional systems of accessing land still dominate, enabling families to produce their own food crops while also diversifying into wage labour and other activities. Food insecurity was highest in the plantation area followed by the commercial area, but lowest in the outgrower area. Here, semi-proletarianised seasonal workers combine self-provisioning from their own farms with wages, and this results in better livelihood outcomes than for permanent workers in plantations and commercial farms. Due to the processing units in the plantation and the outgrower models, they provided more employment. However, the casualisation of labour and gender discrimination in employment and access to land occur in all three cases. All three models generated strong economic linkages mainly because they combined attributes such as processing, provided markets for nearby farmers, induced state infrastructural development and diffused technology in competitive ways. The effects of the models on household and local development are coproduced by their interaction with pre-existing conditions and wider national economic structures.     

Negotiating a New Social Contract for Work: An Online,Distributed Approach

A massive open online course (MOOC) entitled “Shaping the Future of Work” (offered through MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online learning division) has been the context for a multiparty simulation designed to produce classroom negotiation results that will have social impacts. After running the course in the MOOC context three times and in face‐to‐face settings eight times, we noticed that key themes emerged. Participants have brought their own workforce perspectives to their simulation roles as employers, worker representatives, elected officials, and educators. They have called for reciprocal agreements centered on fair treatment and representation in the workplace, improved organizational performance, investments in skills and capabilities, aligned rewards and benefits for workers, and work–life balance in communities. We continue to use the simulation in the classroom and are exploring ways to expand its use. In the meantime, in this article, we discuss how the insights gleaned from this simulation could be used to crystallize and advance a new social contract at a time when the public policies, institutions, and organizational practices governing employment relations have not kept up with the dramatic changes taking place in the workforce, nature of work, and overall economy.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

Negotiating hybridity in highland Bolivia: indigenous moral economy and the expanding market for quinoa

Scholars often highlight the capacity for cooperation and reciprocity as one of the most outstanding features of Andean peasants, but also raise concerns that these traditional strategies necessarily wither and fade as Andean people and places are increasingly incorporated into capitalist markets and processes. This study examines how non-market cooperative and reciprocal economic practices are affected as rural Bolivians expand production to meet a growing international demand for the Andean pseudo-grain quinoa. Based on the grounded experiences of rural Bolivians who are negotiating the modernisation and martketisation of agricultural production for the first time, I find that increasing incorporation into global markets need not undermine the moral economy of rural people, and may in fact strengthen their commitment to reciprocal and cooperative strategies. In contrast to claims that the spread of modern markets and technologies will weaken and ultimately replace cooperative strategies, I argue that reciprocity practices are important components in the construction of a new, hybrid economic space. Within this space, where economic strategies are based on moral sentiments as well as market logic, reciprocity provides a socially and ecologically appropriate ‘toolkit’ with which rural people negotiate their uneven incorporation into global capitalistic processes.     

Grabbing back: essays against the global land grab

ABSTRACT

Extensive research, mainly undertaken by nutrition scientists and economists, indicates that the presence of a home garden is positively associated with improved household nutrition in rural households of the global South. However, this literature is relatively silent on the contexts that influence home garden uptake. This is problematic given rapidly changing social and economic landscapes, which reshape the place and scope for home gardens within households’ livelihood and food provisioning arrangements. Original research from Myanmar reported here reveals that emergent socio-economic contexts for rural households are posing heightened challenges for home gardens to contribute to food and nutrition security.     

Pathways for Preparation: Locating Suicide Education in Preparing Professionals for Encounters with Suicidal Adolescents

Current suicide prevention strategies often include suicide education based on the premise that education can lead to recognition of those at risk of suicide and others who are prepared can respond and potentially save lives. As suicide is a leading cause of death for young people, it is relevant to explore how suicide education is made available to those who serve this population. In a comprehensive review of the existing literature, the presence of suicide content along the path through pre-service programs is examined. While education may be a central part of youth suicide prevention efforts, this review of the literature suggests the following needs: (a) a need for more overt inclusion of suicide content, (b) future examination of suicide content within pre-service programs not yet considered, and (c) appraisal and innovation in suicide pedagogical approaches to determine how preparedness may be enhanced and linked to subsequent practical action.     

Use of Self in the Context of Youth Work

Used in the education of counselors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers, “use of self” is a way of understanding how practitioners bring about human change. In this article, the author discusses how use of self can be applied to youth work and is related to “developmentally responsive practice” thereby providing a deep theoretical construct for understanding youth work as relational. The author concludes by presenting the barriers to the use of self paradigm in the current climate of assessment and accountability, designed to measure static inputs and outputs rather than dynamic systems or ecologies and presents a challenge to the field for designing methodologies that are equally dynamic, responsive and relational.     

The Africa-China relationship: challenges and opportunities

The dramatic growth in the relationship between Africa and China is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century, part of the profound transformations taking place in the global political economy. It has been greeted with excitement, consternation, and confusion. To its cheerleaders, it represents the enduring partnership between Africa and China, spawned by the historical affinities of struggles against Western imperialism and humanistic aspirations for development. To its critics, it is reminiscent of European colonisation a century earlier, in which Africa serves as a cheap source of raw materials, a lucrative export market for Chinese manufactured goods, and an outlet for its surplus capital. Rather than a development partner, some see China as Africa's biggest development competitor, whose explosive growth and insatiable quest for global markets threatens Africa's industrialisation and competitiveness. This paper examines the factors behind the development of Africa-China relations, especially its economic magnitude, and the challenges and opportunities it offers both regions.     

The role of collective mobilization in the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India (1950–2005)

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation by the collectives (before 1984) and local administrations (from 1984 to the abolition of agricultural taxation and compulsory rural labor mobilization in 2006), the Chinese state developed rural infrastructure and the quality of the labor force at a pace and geographical scope that was far beyond its limited fiscal capacity. Efforts by the Indian state to establish rural organizations with similar mobilization capabilities failed due to the effective opposition of well-entrenched political and economic interests in the countryside. Unable to mobilize the labor and financial resources of the villagers, the Indian government relied primarily on its limited fiscal resources, which produced a much slower development of physical infrastructure and labor force quality. These are the primary reasons why China’s rural economy developed much more rapidly than India’s, which contributed significantly to the divergence of their national economies in the post-1950 era.     

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.