Small farms,smaller plots: land size,fragmentation, and productivity in Ethiopia

African agriculture is often dominated by smallholder farms composed of multiple plots. In policy circles it is often assumed that fragmentation coupled with small farm size is an impediment to increasing yields and thus decreasing poverty and food insecurity. There also exists an influential literature that explores the inverse relationship between farm size and yield. While there are many studies internationally, few have been conducted in Africa. Using an Ethiopian national survey, we explore the relationship between yield, farm size and fragmentation. We find an inverse relationship between farm size and yield, and a positive association between yield and land fragmentation.     

Flying bananas: small producer tactics and the (un)making of Philippine banana export chains

Global production network (GPN) analysts argue that workers actively contribute to the shaping of GPNs through different forms of agency. In this contribution I extend this argument to the tactical agency of small producers. By focusing on the phenomenon of side-selling among Filipino banana contract farmers, I show that these tactics have contributed to the emergence of alternative trade networks that undermined traditional lead firm behaviour and inspired new struggles over chain governance. However, as a diverse and ambiguous group of growers engages in this tactical agency, predominantly as small capital, they also contribute to the continuation of broader dynamics of capital accumulation and labour exploitation.     

Why are public offices sold in Kyrgyzstan?

Why are public offices for sale in Kyrgyzstan? To address this question, this article attempts to set out a new logic for understanding the motives, nature, and consequences of corruption in the country. Rather than securing access to a single favor through bribery, officials invest in political and administrative posts in order to obtain access to stream of rents associated with an office. Political and administrative corruption is organically linked in this system, and corruption stems not so much from weak monitoring as from being a franchise-like arrangement, where officials are required to pay continuous “fees” to their bosses. The key is to be the public official influencing the redistribution of rents as well as participating in the informal market where “public” goods are privatized and exchanged for informal payments. Thus, instead of control over the pure economic assets of the state, influence over the state's institutional and organizational framework is the dominant strategy for earning and investing in the country.     

Safe-guarding the colonial present: game farms on the frontier in KwaZulu-Natal's ‘Battlefields Route’

Drawing on Alistair Fraser's concept of the ‘colonial present’, I show how private game farms are both conceptualised and deployed to maintain ideas of boundaries and belonging that sustain colonial ideals and identities. This article is located on the banks of the Mzinyathi River in KwaZulu-Natal, a river that has functioned as a boundary between various groups for almost two hundred years. The game farms located in this area conserve the idea of the river as a frontier space for ‘white’ South Africa and a boundary with ‘black’ South Africa, as well as entrenching their own boundaries through the imagination and realisation of an idealised space. I argue that the game farms safeguard and perpetuate a colonial present whilst obscuring opportunities for other ways of interpreting and using the space of the farm. Ultimately, how the game farms are now imagined and the way they operate is counterproductive to social transformation in the rural landscape.     

The fractured state in the governance of private game farming: the case of KwaZulu-Natal Province,South Africa

Conversion from livestock and/or crop farming to game farming has been a notable trend on privately owned land in South Africa over the last decades. The rapid growth of wildlife ranching is associated with an annual increase in the areas enclosed by game fences and high demand for wildlife which is being traded privately and at wildlife auctions. Key environmental, agricultural and land reform legislation has been passed since 1994 that impacts this sector, but this legislation does not provide a clear regulatory framework for the game farming industry. This article seeks to understand why game farming is thriving in a regulatory environment plagued with uncertainty. The focus is on one province, KwaZulu-Natal. It is clear that the state is not a homogeneous and monolithic entity applying itself to the regulation of the sector. There is no clear direction on the position of private game farming at the interface of environmental and agricultural regulations. The argument put forward is that the fractured state, in fact, provides space within which the game farmers are able to effectively manoeuvre and to maximise their advantages as private landowners. While game farmers may complain about strict wildlife regulation in the province, the benefits they gain from the combination of a divided state and the presence in this province of a strong, autonomous conservation body are considerable.     

Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy

Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins – for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health – not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is ‘chopped out’ of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human–nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.     

Animal rights is a social justice issue

The literature on social justice, and social justice movements themselves, routinely ignore nonhuman animals as legitimate subjects of social justice. Yet, as with other social justice movements, the contemporary animal liberation movement has as its focus the elimination of institutional and systemic domination and oppression. In this paper, I explicate the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the contemporary animal rights movement, and situate it within the framework of social justice. I argue that those committed to social justice – to minimizing violence, exploitation, domination, objectification, and oppression – are equally obligated to consider the interests of all sentient beings, not only those of human beings.     

论我国农地使用模式的改革

规模经营是农地使用制度变革的根本方向。由于基本国情的制约,我国农地使用模式选择上的决定性因素是农地资源的稀缺性以及由此引发的高度紧张的人地关系。家庭经营是在最大程度上适应我国农地资源状况的农地使用模式。扩大农业经营规模的根本途径在于农业劳动力的转移,要坚持循序渐进、因地制宜的原则,积极而又稳妥地推进我国农地使用模式的变革。     

试论建立农村土地流转市场机制的原则和切入点

我国当前农村土地流转市场机制的现状严重阻碍了农村土地的流转。建立完善的农村土地流转市场机制必须坚持产权登记、公平、公正、公开、市场定价、土地使用管制等原则;同时,建立稳定的农村土地流转市场,必须以明晰农地流转的产权关系、规范农地流转行为、从本地实际出发构建农地流转市场机制为切入点。     

How High-Yield Farming Saves Nature

High-yield farming—more agricultural output per acre of farmland—has been a boon to mankind and to nature. If today’s agricultural efficiency was the same as in the 1950s, the world would need three times the cropland to produce today’s food supply. That would mean that 15-16 million mi² of forest would have been destroyed—all the global forest area available today. Rising population and increased affluence will require a tripling of agricultural efficiency in the next 50 years if we are to protect wildlife at the same time. More investment in agricultural research and education will be required, but this is what produced the previous green revolution.