加强宁夏农村文化建设的几点思考

构建农村和谐社会,经济发展是根本,文化建设是关键。加强农村文化建设,既是当前农村、农业、农民实现持续健康科学发展的必然要求,也是构建农村和谐社会的有机组成部分。     

农村社会保障面临的困境、挑战与对策

建立和完善农村社会保障体系,让农民能够得到比较可靠的社会基本保障,不仅是现实的农村经济和社会现状以及农村人口结构变化的需要,更是维护农村大局稳定和建设和谐社会的需要。我国农村传统的土地养老保障和家庭养老方式,已经不适应经济社会转型时期的农民需求,要积极探索和建立新型农村社会保障体系。     

日本、印度金融支持农村基础设施建设的经验及启示

日本、印度两国在农村基础设施建设过程中,有多种金融机构提供多样化的金融服务,如日本的农协、农林渔业金融公库,印度的国家农业和农村开发银行等,为农村基础设施建设提供了贷款、担保等服务,确保了农村基础设施建设的金融需求。日本、印度的金融支持农村基础设施建设的实践给我国提供了有益的启示。     

Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 2: On Rural Proletarianization and an Alternate Food Future

In the second of our two-part review of Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 study of American agriculture, we extrapolate upon Alexander Chayanov’s neoliberal appropriation, Giovanni Arrighi’s treatment of partial proletarianization, the propagandistic “family farm,” agribusiness’s fluctuating territorial embeddedness, agriculture as an industry, and land and rent as commodities themselves. We finish by deploying Lenin’s alternate history as a Benjaminian détournement in the face of what now appear insurmountable obstacles. An alternate food future is not only possible, it is already underway.     

Raising citizens in ‘mixed’ family setting: mothering techniques of Filipino and Thai migrants in Belgium

As states increasingly regulate ‘mixed’ family formation, self-positioning has become central to the lives of migrant spouses, including women. To understand this process, the present article investigates the mothering techniques of Filipino and Thai migrant women in Belgium, that is, the decisions, actions and ways of being they consciously enact in response to state policies ‘here’ and/or 'there' to secure the mother–child bond in space and time. Interviews and observations reveal these women’s main techniques: obtaining Belgian nationality for themselves, prioritising a single nationality (Belgian) for their children and staying at home (in the case of Filipino migrant women) or working (in the case of Thai women). This self-positioning sets these women’s own path and prepare their children’s route towards full, active membership in the nation. Mothering appears therefore as a fertile site of citizenship, which from afar echoes the public–private divide but in close-up reveals the porosity of such dichotomy.     

Unpacking Local Economic Development: A Case Study from Nekemte Town and Its Hinterlands,Oromia, Ethiopia

Most agree that local economic development (LED) is a “bottom-up” development approach seeking to unleash the development potential of a locality. Nonetheless, focusing closely on the dynamics of specific localities, this can be criticized for being too local and overlooking extra-local links. This article explores the drivers of LED from the local economic actors’ perspectives in Nekemte town and its hinterlands, Oromia region, Ethiopia. The results clarify that LED is not only just “local”, but also an approach that links urban and rural areas, and thus, understanding rural–urban linkages is a prerequisite for a better understanding of the local economic development.     

Class,nation and religion: changing nature of Akali Dal politics in Punjab,India

The Akali Dal is the best organised political party in Punjab and has ruled over Punjab for a longer period than any other political party since the creation of the Punjabi-speaking state in 1966. It articulates aspirations of Punjabi regional nationalism along with trying to protect the interests of the Sikhs as a religious minority in India and abroad. As a part of shaping Punjab's economic future, it deals with the pressures of Indian and global capitalism. This paper is an attempt to track the multi-faceted pressures of class, religion and nationalism in the way Akali Dal negotiates its politics in Indian federalism.     

Labour flexibility in export horticulture: a case study of northeast Brazilian grape production

This article analyses the nature and extent of labour flexibility, defined as lack of permanent and secure employment contracts, within an emerging export horticulture sector in northeast Brazil. Whilst much has been written about flexible employment systems in agriculture, it is important to show exactly why, how, and to what extent these systems are flexible, and conversely, what kinds of strategies and practices are available to workers to ameliorate their conditions within such systems. This article illustrates how a combination of processes – farms' ability to produce two harvests per annum, northern retailers' increasing demands for product quality, employers' requirements for relatively skilled labour, and workers' ability to organise and extract concessions from employers – contribute, within the conditions of the São Francisco valley, to specific labour regimes and forms of labour flexibility.     

Fighting rural poverty,inequality and low productivity through legal empowerment of the poor

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the work of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) to the broader academic community interested in the challenge of eradicating rural poverty and promoting the structural and institutional changes which underpin such a challenge. While rural development research in the past has included work on several components of the legal empowerment of the poor (LEP) agenda such as property and labour rights, much less attention has been given to the other two pillars of the framework – access to justice and rule of law and business rights – which together constitute the four pillars of LEP. However the real difference and value added is the power of the systemic interaction among the pillars and the empowerment approach to change. In this approach, change is initiated bottom up with legal identity, organisations, information, and voice of the poor. In other words an active citizenry, complemented by a democratic and effective state. None of this happens naturally as vested interests and skewed power and asset relationships are bound to get in the way of change to greater equity. Such change is only likely to come through iterative contestations between organisations of the poor, the middle class, and the state. This approach is not presented as a panacea but one which will hopefully complement and accelerate what is already working.