Debt and vulnerability: indebtedness,institutions and smallholder agriculture in South India

ABSTRACT

Expanding access to credit remains a key central government strategy for promoting agricultural development and livelihood diversification in south India and more widely. Smallholders borrowing from multiple credit sources are faced with obligations in addition to financial repayment. Available evidence on the consequences of indebtedness extending beyond monetary debt and its influence on vulnerability is incomplete in important ways. This paper presents an integrated vulnerability framework and illustrates the framework through case studies of three pairs of smallholder clients and credit sources. Using process-tracing and progressive contextualization methods, this paper shows the diversity of feedbacks that shape indebtedness and provides examples of social-ecological consequences. Unpacking these consequences in individual cases demonstrates indebtedness as an important root cause of vulnerability, which is in contrast to an examination of proximate causes, such as credit policy or temperature, that is the focus of a large share of scholarship. The paper shows that different credit sources are associated with different sets of obligations, leading to varied livelihood and agricultural consequences. Suggesting ‘credit stacking’ as an important adaptation strategy and research agenda item, the paper makes a plea for careful analysis of the conditions when credit is a factor in adaptive capacity and indebtedness of vulnerability.     

The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty

Agroecology has played a key role in helping Cuba survive the crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuban peasants have been able to boost food production without scarce and expensive imported agricultural chemicals by first substituting more ecological inputs for the no longer available imports, and then by making a transition to more agroecologically integrated and diverse farming systems. This was possible not so much because appropriate alternatives were made available, but rather because of the Campesino-a-Campesino (CAC) social process methodology that the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) used to build a grassroots agroecology movement. This paper was produced in a ‘self-study’ process spearheaded by ANAP and La Via Campesina, the international agrarian movement of which ANAP is a member. In it we document and analyze the history of the Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC), and the significantly increased contribution of peasants to national food production in Cuba that was brought about, at least in part, due to this movement. Our key findings are (i) the spread of agroecology was rapid and successful largely due to the social process methodology and social movement dynamics, (ii) farming practices evolved over time and contributed to significantly increased relative and absolute production by the peasant sector, and (iii) those practices resulted in additional benefits including resilience to climate change.     

The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature,ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants

This paper provides an overview of what we call ‘agroecological revolution’ in Latin America. As the expansion of agroexports and biofuels continues unfolding in Latin America and warming the planet, the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology-based agricultural production gain increasing attention. New approaches and technologies involving the application of blended agroecological science and indigenous knowledge systems are being spearheaded by a significant number of peasants, NGOs and some government and academic institutions, and they are proving to enhance food security while conserving natural resources, and empowering local, regional and national peasant organizations and movements. An assessment of various grassroots initiatives in Latin America reveals that the application of the agroecological paradigm can bring significant environmental, economic and political benefits to small farmers and rural communities as well as urban populations in the region. The trajectory of the agroecological movements in Brazil, the Andean region, Mexico, Central America and Cuba and their potential to promote broad-based and sustainable agrarian and social change is briefly presented and examined. We argue that an emerging threefold ‘agroecological revolution’, namely, epistemological, technical and social, is creating new and unexpected changes directed at restoring local self-reliance, conserving and regenerating natural resource agrobiodiversity, producing healthy foods with low inputs, and empowering peasant organizations. These changes directly challenge neoliberal modernization policies based on agribusiness and agroexports while opening new political roads for Latin American agrarian societies.     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains

This article draws upon existing literature to document and describe the rise of finance in food provisioning. It queries the role of financialization in the contemporary food crisis and analyzes its impacts upon the distribution of power and wealth within and along the generalized agro-food supply chain. A systematic treatment of key nodes in the supply chain reveals four key insights: (1) the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises becoming increasingly involved in financial activities; (2) financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-food system, though they are largely subject to the dictates of finance capital and face renewed competition from financialized commodity traders; (3) financialization has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions, and (4) small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets, they have become weaker vis-à-vis other actors in the agro-food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. The paper concludes by identifying themes for future research and asking readers to reimagine the role of finance in food provisioning.     

Adaptive strategies of smaller foreign investors in the Russian agricultural sector: identity,narrative and performance

This paper utilises a qualitative narrative analysis approach to examine smaller foreign investors operating within the Russian agricultural sector as private farmers: the foreign versions of the krestyansko-fermerskiye khoziaistva (peasant farms) that were the early focus of agrarian reform. With difficulty experienced by foreign investment in Russian agriculture, and with the Putin administration shifting its focus to larger scale agriculture, interest lies in the fate of these smaller foreign investors, set in the broader question of: ‘Is there really a future for smaller foreign investors in Russia?’ The investors were aligned along a performance and narrative spectrum, and the construction of their identities – guided by their adaptive processes on the ‘Turnerian’ frontier – were found to shape their business conduct, and interactions with labour forces and regional authorities. Negative prejudgment of the labour force existed amongst the investors – with associated negative notions of trust, inefficiency, laziness, morality, and sexual deviancy – and they were involved in explicit or ambiguous forms of gift-gifting, drawing parallels to Soviet blat behaviour. This paper concludes that despite efforts to construct identity, the narratives of the investors betrayed themselves in certain aspects, with elements of ‘undoing’ in the identity process.     

恭城新农村建设的路向分析

恭城新农村建设利用本土兴业,种养致富,使经济具有生态性、节能性、友好性、永续性,是对传统农业的创新。它构建了一种城乡融合和农工互补的农村城市化类型,其路径选择对我国中西部地区新农村建设具有重要的启迪意义。     

规模化生产:我国现代农业发展的重要方向

党的十八届三中全会作出了加快发展规模化生产,推进农业现代化的战略部署。从我国发展规模化生产的必要性、重要性、紧迫性和可行性等四个方面来看,我国发展规模化生产是历史的必然,势在必行。我国发展规模化生产应采取以下对策和措施:1.土地流转;2.发展机械;3.规范程序;4.完善法规;5.培训人才;6.加强管理;7.重视科技;8.政策扶持;9.增大投入;10.增强合作。我国发展规模化生产,可能会带来以下几个问题:一是地力衰退问题;二是病虫草害问题;三是土地非农化问题;四是农民失业问题;五是两极分化问题。针对这些问题,作者提出了相应的防范对策和具体措施。     

“十二五”桂林加快转变农业发展方式探析

桂林作为农业大市,加快推进农业发展方式转变具有重大的战略影响和深刻的现实意义。＂十二五＂期间,桂林必须立足本地实际,尊重经济、社会发展规律,按照农业现代化的要求,努力探索一条符合桂林市实际的现代农业发展道路,实现由农业大市向农业强市转变。     

大城市郊区新农村发展模式初探——上海市松江区泖港镇新农村建设经验调研报告

该文总结了上海市松江区泖港镇不倚仗工业闯出新农村发展道路的基本做法和经验，提出保护农业首先要保护环境，发展农业首先要反哺农业，服务农民首先要解放农民，建设农村不能过度依赖工业等建议。