Agrarian Change Research Articles

Early effects of conservation agriculture on soil organic carbon dynamics of Mollisols in Cambodia

AbstractCambodia has faced drastic agrarian changes over the last twenty years with a rapid and massive transformation of the uplands from forest into arable land. Soil quality depletion is one of the main drivers of the resulting decline in crop productivity and increasing production costs in the uplands of Battambang province. The objective of the study was to assess the early effects of conventional plough‐based (20 cm) management (CT) and two conservation agriculture‐based (CA) cropping systems (the use of a single—CAS vs. multiple cover crop species—CAM) on a maize monocropping system using three soil organic carbon (SOC) fractions on Mollisols in Battambang province. SOC content, permanganate oxidizable carbon (POXC) and soil CO2 basal respiration through SituResp® were recorded at a depth of 0–10 cm. Twelve sampling periods were used over the growth period of the cover crops and during the maize cycle. POXC and SituResp® were highly sensitive to management practices with, across the 12 sampling periods, higher values (p < .05) under CA than CT, with an average increase of 6% and from 20% to 23%, respectively. No difference was observed in SOC content between the practices in our sampling periods. Seasonal variations were observed in both POXC and SituResp®. POXC underwent larger fluctuations following critical weather events than SituResp®. This study showed that POXC and SituResp® were rapidly sensitive to changes in agricultural management practices. POXC and SituResp® are largely influenced by seasonality and could help clarify the impact of weather patterns on soil C dynamics.

Mapping the Pluralities of Agrarian Change in India: The Role of Intermediaries and Caste–Tribe Relations in Jharkhand

The agricultural economy of Jharkhand is primarily understood to be ‘subsistence’ agriculture. However, an ongoing agrarian change in rural Jharkhand has drawn less academic attention. This substantial change is from indigenous seeds to high-yielding varieties of paddy seeds enabling food sufficiency in the villages to a larger extent. In addition, the introduction of commercial crops like vegetables, watermelons and marigolds is another attendant change. This article is concerned with ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbouring villages of district—Khunti of Jharkhand, where farmers have been influenced by intermediaries (both old and new) restricted to State, NGOs and private companies (agricultural input suppliers). Also, the introduction of various governmental schemes, such as the ‘Bringing Green Revolution to Eastern India (BGREI)’ programme, a part of ‘National Food Security Mission’ and ‘Special-Swarna Jayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana’, has encouraged agrarian change in rural Jharkhand. Despite Jharkhand being a low agricultural productivity region, there is a proliferated presence of transnational connections such as agribusiness companies and research institutions linked to State institutions and NGOs to form a new set of agricultural intermediaries. These agricultural intermediaries at the regional level in the Khunti district influence the crop choice, cropping pattern and usage of inputs (seeds, fertilisers and pesticides). The study also tries to understand agrarian (labour) relations among caste–tribe communities of rural Jharkhand.

Indebtedness to care: land, loans, and love in financializing Nepal

ABSTRACT A common misconception about women landowners in Nepal is that they do not control the lands they own. In this paper, I focus on women landowners' land-title loans. What does women’s accrual of monetary debt in exchange for titles tell us about women’s control over land? And, what does women’s land debt tell us about the gender of financialization in the context of agrarian change? Based on ten months of ethnographic research in Saptari, Nepal, I show that land use is shifting from cultivation to financial pledging, and that women routinely exercise control over their lands vis-à-vis their command over intergenerational care practices, a process that I term the ‘indebtedness to care.’

Surinder S. Jodhka (Ed.) Agrarian Change in India (Readings on the Economy, Polity and Society)

Surinder S. Jodhka (Ed.) <i>Agrarian Change in India (Readings on the Economy, Polity and Society)</i>

Indigenous communal land titling, the microfinance industry, and agrarian change in Ratanakiri Province, Northeastern Cambodia

ABSTRACT Indigenous Community Land Titles (ICLTs) in Cambodia promised to protect Indigenous land tenure and rotational swidden cultivation. However, the proliferation of microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in Indigenous communities has threatened the process to establish ICLTs. Through a case study of an Indigenous Brao Tanap/Kreung community in Ratanakiri Province, I demonstrate how an ICLT process fell apart, primarily due to agrarian change, an increase in MFI loans, debt, and the desire for individual land certificates to collateralize MFI loans and sell land. This study is relevant for thinking about communal land titling's relationship with investment frontiers, uneven property formalization, and microfinance.

Agro-extractivism

ABSTRACT The term agro-extractivism has become synonymous with large-scale, corporate-controlled, monoculture plantation agriculture. The aim of this concept note is to clarify the extractivist dynamics in the current context of the capitalist development process. The paper surveys the development of agro-extractivism as a conceptual framework and as a feature of the contemporary political economy of agrarian change in Latin America. It briefly reflects on the potential contributions of land-based struggles to post-extractivist alternatives based on food sovereignty politics. The paper concludes by assessing the broader implications of agro-extractivism for our understanding of the agrarian question in the twenty-first century.

Book review: Walden Bello, Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies)

Walden Bello, Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right ( Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies) (Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing), 2019, 196 pp.

Contemporary agrarian, rural and rural–urban movements and alliances

AbstractHenry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de‐valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti‐capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian‐centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement‐building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.

Financial literacy and inclusion for rural agrarian change and sustainable livelihood in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Finance and growth underpin the debate on the implication of financial literacy and financial inclusion for development among scholars. While financial inclusion and financial literacy are positioned as enablers of sustainable development, literature has failed to link the two with sustainable development, especially for rural agrarian dwellers in dire need of financial development attributes. Therefore, this study applied variance-based structural equation modelling to examine the implication of financial literacy and financial inclusion for the sustainable livelihood of rural agrarian settlers in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Global scales were adapted and validated before administering them to 283 farmers and subsistence businesses in the region. The results revealed that financial literacy positively and significantly influences financial inclusion (β = 0.452) and the attainment of sustainable livelihood (β = 0.444). Financial inclusion partially mediates the influence of financial literacy on sustainable livelihood (β = 0.253), as it directly explains the province's sustainable livelihood (β = 0.114). The study's implication informs structured intervention for improving financial literacy to assist the target group with access to requisite funding, which could support their economic activities for a decent living.

Producing nature-based solutions: infrastructural nature and agrarian change in San Martín, Peru

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘nature-based solutions’ has brought together a broad range of actors with seemingly diverse goals. This article, contributing to the forum on climate change and agrarian struggles, argues that these nature-based solutions follow a growing trend to frame the natural world as infrastructure, providing an ethnographic case study of agroforestry and reforestation projects in San Martín, Peru. It shows that as infrastructural nature claims ever more of the metaphorical space of discourse and the material space of landscapes, it becomes not just a new way of producing nature but central to the ideologies and ecologies of green capitalism.

Beyond the boom-bust cycle: An interdisciplinary framework for analysing crop booms

The expansion of commercial agriculture is one of the primary drivers of livelihood and land-use changes in the world. Globalisation and other factors have intensified this expansion to the point where booms in single cash crops overtake entire regions before going bust, a pattern that is particularly pervasive in resource frontiers. Using case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, we propose a new analytical framework for understanding and governing crop booms. We combine multiple theoretical approaches to study crop booms and draw on insights from case study work conducted across temporal and spatial scales. The framework consists of three components: 1) the nested nature of crop boom-bust trajectories, 2) the cyclical spatial and temporal patterns of crop booms, and 3) the variegated pathways and impacts of agrarian change. The framework presents new insights into the processes of agricultural intensification in frontier spaces. As such, it facilitates a better understanding of the drivers, characteristics and impacts of crop booms for researchers and decision-makers alike with the intention of supporting efforts to develop more sustainable pathways in the region and beyond.

Agrarian change and land dispossession linked to the armed conflict in Colombia – a review

Violent conflict can accelerate the development of capitalism in rural areas, entailing the transformation of land distribution patterns. However, this transformation via land grabbing in wartime is under-addressed in the literature. This paper explores the case of land dispossession (LD) in Colombia, defined as land grabbing by taking advantage of the armed conflict, a process that affected mainly smallholders and ethnic communities. By conducting a literature review it was found that agrarian elites, networking with public servants and right-wing paramilitary militias, engaged in LD by using violence but also various symbolic devices that justified LD and assisted the legalisation of usurped land. Two main paths of LD are identified, and a typology of symbolic devices used to justify LD is proposed, showing how the armed conflict hastened agrarian capitalism through land accumulation. The opportunistic participation of civilians in the armed conflict setting, the interlaces between symbolic devices and violence, and the role of the state are highlighted as factors fostering a specific path of agrarian change in wartime characterised by the marginalisation of small-scale farming.

Agricultural systems regulate plant and insect diversity and induce ecosystem novelty

Land-use change plays an important role in shaping plant and insect diversity over long time timescales. Great Britain provides an ideal case study to investigate patterns of long-term vegetation and insect diversity change owing to the existence of spatially and temporally extensive environmental archives (lake sediments, peatlands, and archaeological sites) and a long history of landscape transformation through agrarian change. The trends identified in past environmental datasets allow the impacts of land-use change on plant and insect diversity trends to be investigated alongside exploration of the emergence of ecological novelty. Using fossil pollen, insect (beetle), archaeodemographic, archaeobotanical and modern landscape datasets covering Britain, similarities are identified between insect diversity and pollen sample evenness indicating that vegetation heterogeneity influences insect diversity. Changing land use captured by archaeobotanical data is significantly correlated with pollen diversity demonstrating the role of human activity in shaping past diversity trends with shifts towards ecosystem novelty identified in the form of non-analogue pollen taxa assemblages (unique species combinations). Modern landscapes with higher agricultural suitability are less likely to have pollen analogues beyond the last 1000 years, whilst those in areas less suited to agriculture and on more variable topography are more likely to have analogues older than 1000 years. This signifies the role of agriculture in the creation of novel ecosystems. Ecological assemblages characteristic of earlier periods of the Holocene may persist in areas less impacted by agriculture. The last 200 years has witnessed major shifts in novelty in a low number of pollen sites suggesting that novel ecosystems emerged over a longer time period resulting from the cumulative impacts of land-use change.

Participatory mapping of ecosystem services across a gradient of agricultural intensification in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

ABSTRACT Agrarian change affects the supply and demand of ecosystem services (ES) by reducing the extent of natural ecosystems. Agricultural intensification can lead to changes in land covers and livelihood opportunities and it remains unclear how such changes align or misalign with the desires of local communities. Using participatry mapping, we assessed ES uses and desires of Indigenous people and local communities provided by different land cover types along a gradient of agricultural intensification (forest subsistence, agroforestry mosaic, and monoculture and market-dependence) in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. We found that mapped ES use diversity was highest in the forest-dependent zone and lowest near monoculture agricultural systems. The expressed ES uses and desires varied greatly among land cover types amidst loss of old-growth forest and greater reliance on secondary forest and shrub land. The spatial analysis showed that high priority areas of ES use was related to access in the landscape, demonstrating the importance of attending to place-based social values in ES assessments. From this study, we call for a people-centric spatial modelling approach to address the divergence of social and cultural ES values associated with land covers under different intensification contexts. Participatory mapping clarifies the ES desires of local communities, which state policy often fails to address. We recommend a place specific management strategy to reduce ES trade-offs of specific land use practices, which are currently apparent with agrarian change in Indonesia and relevant for other tropical developing countries.

Women in agribusiness amid crises of social reproduction: the case of women workers at the Greenhouse, Turkey

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the particular intersection of crises and change in gender- and generation-based social reproduction with agrarian change in the form of a large-scale land grab/investment from a feminist perspective. Based on a case study, it interrogates women’s laboring practices as waged labor in a greenhouse in Western Anatolia. I investigate the reasons why women seem to be determined to continue their employment at the Greenhouse while keeping their distance from their previous lives as small-producers and agricultural laborers. Three dynamics are taken into account: women’s perceptions of being peasant/worker; their future prospects in small-scale agricultural production and young generations’ participation in those activities; the niches women create to transform their lives via their work with critical reference to empowerment.

Class processes and agrarian change in southern Belize, 1981–2020

ABSTRACT Environmental and agrarian changes are proceeding rapidly in southern Belize. Despite common recognition of these changes, little research has attempted to examine the class processes involved in social and environmental change. We trace how capitalism has transformed household reproduction over the past four decades, focusing on two key pathways by which these changes unfold: the commercialization of land use and the education of the labour force. Emerging class processes in the Maya communities undermine subsistence agriculture, generate inequality between households and genders, and magnify conflicts over land. These effects complicate struggles for communal land rights and class solidarity.

Post-Colonial Agriculture Policy and Agrarian Change in Malawi, 1964–1979

Abstract Agriculture has always been the main occupation and a source of livelihood for the majority of people in Malawi since time immemorial. This implies that any institutional reform implemented on land, agricultural production and marketing of agricultural enterprises directly affects the farming communities. The interest of the article covers institutional reforms from the years 1964 to 1979. The article briefly analyses the colonial era policies and further explores how the post-colonial government took up a very populist approach to change most of the colonial era ordinances not only as a means of consolidating power but also transferring ownership of the means of production like land to the African farmers. However, though these changes were well intentioned, both the colonial and post-colonial institutional frameworks turned out to be the means through which the peasant farmers were oppressed. This state of affairs of systematic oppression of the peasantry experienced through these policies and laws thwarted the attempts for the transformation of peasantry into capitalist or semi-capitalist farmers. The argument of this article, therefore, is that the current state of the peasantry and underdevelopment of the smallholder sector in Malawi draws its origin from the institutions and structures created in the colonial and immediate post-colonial period. It concludes that a positive change in the state of agrarian communities could be hampered more by the very institutional framework set up for agricultural development. Using a qualitative approach in data collection and analysis, the article explores how the post-colonial policies and practices assisted in bringing about agrarian change in Malawi.

Uneven ores: Gold mining materialities and classes of labor in Indonesia

Behind farming, small-scale mining is one of the most important sources of rural livelihoods in the Global South. A significant body of research has detailed the interlinkages between these activities. More recently, scholars have used the tools of agrarian change to interpret small-scale mining livelihood dynamics. I build on this trend by introducing an emphasis on the materiality of mining. As with small farmers, small-scale miners’ livelihoods depend directly on the land—its material qualities are a prime factor in their choices, successes, and failures. Extending this comparison, I consider how the nature of gold ore shapes small-scale mining labor practices, dynamics, and outcomes. To do so, I examine small-scale gold mining in the Pongkor region of West Java, Indonesia. In Pongkor, an array of people with diverse social positionings participate in mining using different techniques and at different scales. I connect this diversity to the variable characteristics of the ore they mine, including the quality of the ore, the depth where it is found, and the methods required to process its various forms. I argue that these multiple materialities have made small-scale mining both a flexible and an unequal livelihood. The particularities of gold's occurrence enable it to support many people, but simultaneously structure inequalities into small-scale gold production. The interplay of these material conditions and broader political-economic dynamics has ultimately resulted in the differentiation of various “classes of labor.” Like farming, small-scale mining is thus experienced, and incorporated into broader commodity exchange, unevenly.

‘As a farmer you've just got to learn to cope’: Understanding dairy farmers' perceptions of climate change and adaptation decisions in the lower South Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand

The impacts and implications of climate change – such as floods, droughts, heavy rainfall and increased regulation – are affecting dairy farming practices in the lower South Island (Te Waipaounamu) of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Adapting to these changes, in an equitable and transformational manner, is dependent on understanding the underlying root causes of vulnerability alongside local knowledge and values. We apply an intersectional values-based and contextual analysis to describe how past and present processes of agrarian change interact across different farmer identities to influence adaptive pathways. Local knowledge, place-based experience, values and perceptions of fairness intersect with different facets of a farmer's identity – such as financial capacity, land ownership status, debt arrangements, age and gendered participation – to enable or constrain adaptive action. Notably, notions of fairness, whether real or perceived, vary across farmer groups, and influence the kinds of adaptation activities that dairy farmers are willing, or potentially able, to engage in. The results call for more contextualised engagement with farming communities, and highlight the need to build a shared understanding of the complex historical, social, economic, cultural and environmental drivers of past, present and future change, in this highly productive, yet risky, agricultural landscape.

Certificated exclusion: forest carbon sequestration project in Southwest China

ABSTRACT This research presents a case study of a high-profile carbon forest sequestration project in Southwest China, which claims to achieve ‘triple-win’ outcomes for livelihoods, biodiversity and climate change. However, over the last 15 years, each household that participated in the project has only received 10–20 USD (about 0.67–1.33 USD annually), despite the requirement for farmers to convert their agricultural land into tree plantations. We argue that contemporary capitalism engaged in climate change mitigation efforts has effectively recast the rural governance of land from a territorial arrangement to multiple actors exerting control over carbon credit certification, which creates a new form of climate injustice and social exclusion in agrarian change.