Agrarian Change Research Articles

Agrarian change and well-being status of Mara tribe in Mizoram

This study is focused on the agrarian change and well-being status among Mara hill tribe practicing Shifting Cultivation (SC) in Saiha, a remote Hill district in North Eastern Region of India. Using a mixed methods research design, 50 tribal households were interviewed with the help of structured interview schedule. The findings reveal transition in terms of aversion of the tribal youths from SC, declining dependency of the community on SC and fare share (37.16%) of total expenditure on children’s education. Further, increased access to information gadgets like mobile phone, TV and radio are triggering material aspirations among the tribal community. The average monthly income of respondent households was about ` 10766 and 77.56% of the total income is contributed by agriculture and allied activities. Higher inclination was observed towards settled cultivation with high value horticultural crops, however, community ownership of land, lack of market access and higher technological gap in agriculture were impeding entrepreneurship. The study reveals that well-being of 93% tribal households were moderate or inconsistent. They are experiencing difficulties as on date and are also expected to continue with it in the near future. Hence, planning and implementation of development schemes focused on welfare and livelihood diversification need to be revisited to enhance overall well-being of the hill tribe who rely on SC for their livelihood.

Conditions of Employment and Livelihood Security of Informal Workers: A Study of Four Villages in Jalpaiguri District, West Bengal

The article analyses the conditions of employment of informal workers in four different villages with varying livelihood opportunities. Based on the secondary database, it argues that the labor market is characterized by widespread unemployment, and there has been an increase in the share of marginal workers over the years in the study villages, as well as in rural Jalpaiguri. The analysis of primary data reveals that tea cultivation and agriculture were main sources of employment of informal workers; however, these did not provide livelihood security. The wage rate was lower than the legally prescribed minimum wage in West Bengal. Also, the workers, most of whom were either Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, did not receive year-round employment in the study villages. In the absence of remittances from the migrant workers, a substantial number of households were poor. The research shows that informal wage work in the study area was insufficient for a decent level of living. The article argues that agrarian changes in the study area did not lead to desirable outcomes for substantial sections of the population.

Isu Perubahan Agraria dalam Lirik Lagu Populer Indonesia 1950-1980

Indonesia is an agricultural country where the majority of the population lives from cultivating land, both in rather sophisticated and simple ways, and making a living from the produce of the earth. The picture can be said to be correct for, at least, until the last decade before entering the millennium era. If you look at Indonesia's macroeconomic statistics from 1961 to 2011, it will be seen a decrease in the presentation of the population working in the agricultural sector. Along with that, the number of people working in the industrial (manufacturing) sector is increasing. Significant improvement is most clearly seen in the service sector. So that in 2011 the number beat the population of Indonesia who worked in the agricultural sector. If the change in agrarian society is seen as a popular change for Indonesians - in the sense that the change is experienced by many people, occurs in a broad spatial scope and with a significant impact - the question is, how will the change in an agrarian society be captured and interpreted in the mind by artists and especially musicians who, I think, have a role as recorders of the age? To answer that question, the writer selected a number of popular Indonesian songs from the 1950s to the 1980s with poems containing pieces of agrarian change.

Beyond the local – Exploring the socio-spatial patterns of translocal network capital and its role in household resilience in Northeast Thailand

Livelihood studies have highlighted social support networks as critical sources of social capital and as an important feature of rural households' resilience, however so far, have contributed little the understanding of network capital's socio-spatial patterns. Accordingly, livelihood studies have tended to omit relevant determinants of rural households' resilience, especially in emerging and developing countries, such as Thailand, where rapid agrarian change and migration have resulted in increasing translocal connectedness between rural and urban areas and unevenly distributed livelihood outcomes. This paper aims at closing this gap, by systematically assessing the socio-spatial patterns of rural households' translocal networks in Northeast Thailand. Applying a translocal network approach combining methods of formal social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative network research, we find that translocal network capital matters more for accessing advice than for labor, but particularly for accessing financial support. Although poor households have less translocal network capital at their disposal, they depend more critically on translocal networks than rich households. While poor households rely particularly on migration-related bonding ties to provide financial means for coping with precarious livelihood conditions, rich households can leverage institutional translocal bridging ties to access advice and finance for the transformation towards market-oriented agriculture. These findings suggest that, in Northeast Thailand, translocal network capital contributes less to the poors' than to the richs' resilience. We conclude by calling for a more nuanced consideration of the socio-spatial patterns of network capital and propose applying a translocal network perspective as a fruitful means to this end.

Embodied political ecology: Sensing agrarian change in north India

In this article, I consider what an attention to embodied experience can add to our understandings of the Green Revolution and other currents of agrarian change in north India. I present and analyze organic farmers’ narratives of agrarian change in Uttarakhand, demonstrating how these accounts foreground issues of embodiment including health, disease, bodily strength, sensory perception, and memory. Developing these narratives toward a political ecology of the body, I consider how these embodied perceptions shape farmers’ accounts and valuations of agrarian change, inform farmers’ decision making, and potentially motivate them to become involved in forms of collective action. In closing, I reflect on how a focus on farmers’ embodied perceptions might complicate histories of the Green Revolution and inform on the ground efforts to support transitions to more sustainable forms of agriculture in north India.

Multi-level socioecological drivers of agrarian change: Longitudinal evidence from mixed rice-livestock-aquaculture farming systems of Bangladesh

Coastal systems are facing natural and human-driven change coupled with a rising population. With increasing shifts in socioecological conditions during the past several decades, it is important to understand how socioecological drivers at different hierarchical levels: -micro, -meso, and -macro affect coastal farming systems, which play a crucial role in the livelihoods of coastal dwellers. Mixed rice-livestock-aquaculture farming in Southern Bangladesh exemplifies the rapid change occurring in many of the world's coastal farming systems in response to these drivers. We used panel data observations from the above study area and modeled trajectories of farm typologies, and the impact of multi-level socioecological drivers by a novel approach. Our approach integrates: (1) a well-articulated conceptual frame of change observed using (2) a temporal view of the potential drivers, change process and farm type outcomes, with the twenty years panel data of 502 households that is analyzed by means of (3) multivariate statistics in conjunction with panel data models that operationalize the conceptual frame. Our approach allows (a) estimating dynamic effects over time that typically cannot be estimated in a cross-sectional data set, (b) distinguishing between time-invariant fixed and time dependent random effects of multi-level socioecological drivers, and (c) controlling for omitted variables to a certain extent. Considering farming systems both within and outside of polder embankment systems intended to protect against oceanic water intrusion, we found a gradual shift from heterogeneous, rice-livestock farm types to more homogenous farms with less livestock and more off-farm activities. Micro-level factors including farm plot fragmentation, farmers' experience in cropping, machinery, salinity and soil fertility were influencing changes in farming systems. Meso-level factors including markets, road infrastructure, labor availability, access to extension and land tenure also affect the trajectory of farming systems change. Among macro-level drivers, increasing population density positively and significantly influenced cropping intensity among farms outside polder systems. Within polders, a positive but non-significant trend was observed for the influence of population density on cropping intensity. Our data also indicate negative and significant influence of cyclonic storms on cropping intensity over time in both areas. Our results underscore the importance of accounting for multiple levels of socioecological drivers of change when developing appropriate policy options for sustainable development in South Asia's coastal farming systems.

Commuting distances to local non‐farm workplaces and out‐migration: The case of Northeast Thailand

The relationship between commuting distances and where people work has been studied for urban contexts in both developed countries and developing countries. However, few studies have examined the situation in rural areas, and none look at commuting distances to non‐farm workplaces in rural areas of developing countries. This paper investigates how commuting distance, and thus accessibility, to local non‐farm work influences non‐farm employment and out‐migration from rural villages in Northeast Thailand. The main issues examined are: (i) the distance that rural residents travel to work in local non‐farm jobs; and (ii) the influence that local non‐farm employment has on the number of outmigrants from rural villages. The study finds: (i) distance between villages and non‐farm work sites impact the number of villagers who are employed in regular wage work; (ii) beyond 20 km villagers are less likely to travel to non‐farm employment using their own means of transportation; and (iii) employment in regular wage work decreases outmigration. The findings from this study contribute to the debates over the drivers of rural out‐migration, rural livelihood changes, and agrarian changes that are taking place in Southeast Asia.

Project-Based State Intervention and Agrarian Change in Contemporary China: The Case of Rice Production in Pingwan County, Hunan

This article analyzes the role of the state in the development of capitalist agriculture in contemporary China by focusing on the implementation of the central-government-sponsored National Grain Security Project and Agricultural Industrialization Project in Pingwan county of Hunan province since 2009. It demonstrates that by providing significant (formal and informal) subsidies and transferring large tracts of farmland to large farmers and agribusinesses, the Chinese government has made the capitalist transformation of rice production possible. We stress that in the absence of private property rights, the local governments’ strong control over farmland transactions makes it relatively easy to transfer large tracts quickly, helping agribusinesses and large farmers avoid significant transaction costs they would otherwise have to face under a system of private landownership. The article also shows that existing policies support the transfer of farmland in regions with favorable geographic and climatic conditions over other regions and therefore lack the capacity to significantly decrease regional inequalities.

Gender Dimensions of Mountain Agriculture: A Note on Arunachal Pradesh, India

Agriculture in Arunachal Pradesh, a state located in the eastern Himalayas, used to be primarily need-based. Slash and burn agriculture, locally called jhum, was the foundation of the traditional economy. In the past decades, agriculture in the mountain areas has undergone significant change. This shift from need-based to commercial agriculture has been accompanied by a shift from collective to private rights over land. This paper argues that such changes in the mountain agriculture systems are better understood as a gendered process of social and economic transformation. Agrarian change has affected men and women in Arunachal Pradesh in different ways. Women farmers continue to work in agriculture, but their rights are gradually getting eroded as a result of the commercialisation of the economy.

Class differentiation, deagrarianization, and repeasantization following the coffee crisis in Agua Buena, Costa Rica

AbstractThis research evaluated trajectories of agrarian change following liberalization and deregulation of the coffee commodity chain, assessing the transformation of agrarian class structures and livelihoods between 2000 and 2009 among landed coffee farmers from Agua Buena, Costa Rica. Simultaneous processes of differentiation, deagrarianization, and repeasantization are documented. Deagrarianization is identified as the result of either adaptive or maladaptive processes of livelihood diversification out of agriculture. Repeasantization is characterized by the widespread adoption of low external‐input agriculture driven by cultural norms of self‐sufficiency and labour flexibility within farm households. In order to ensure equitability and the continued viability of rural households in communities ravaged by commodity deregulation, aid and training need to be targeted towards resource‐poor households in two principal areas: first, to transition off‐farm livelihoods into stable and high return activities and, second, to provide the agroecological knowledge and resources for farming households to self‐provision and distantiate themselves from the market.

Women's agency in changing contexts: A case study of innovation processes in Western Kenya

In this paper we describe social change and the potential of agricultural innovation processes to create, or expand, spaces for women to exercise agency in economic and agricultural decision-making in Kenya. Rural communities are increasingly drawn into global processes that create local economic and agrarian change, with marked influences on gender relations, roles and responsibilities. We draw on a qualitative case study with 140 research participants from rural and peri-urban villages in Western Kenya. We examine how global processes have fostered local level changes in the last decade to contextualize innovation processes. Economic changes related to paid work and an evident increase of women's participation in rural development programs reflect, in part, a gender, often women-centred development agenda that targets women in rural programming. Next, we describe a more recent agricultural innovation process to explore decision-making about time use, access to and control over productive resources. Lastly, we describe patterns in gender relations, roles and responsibilities that have changed in response to broader community change and how innovation specific decision-making may create spaces for women to exercise agency in local contexts. We draw on feminist geographic perspectives to better understand these processes through an exploration of everyday practices. Our focus on gender relations and agency as spatial phenomena facilitates an understanding of how roles and responsibilities are created, reproduced and, in some cases, transformed to increase women's agency in particular spaces. Our key findings highlight how economic pressure and agricultural programs that focus on women have brought women into public spaces in new ways and created gendered opportunity spaces amidst persisting roles of men as authorities and final decision-makers and women playing supportive roles. Innovation processes often replicate gender patterns through decision-making in productive assets, however access to agriknowledge offers avenues for women to expand their opportunity spaces by expanding social networks and their ability to negotiate for resources in the household. We recommend further studies that draw on feminist geography to inform the design of agricultural innovations and interventions to benefit women, men and to improve overall livelihoods.

Environmental change and normalization of cash crop systems in Africa: preventing agrarian change in West Africa cocoa

ABSTRACTIn recent years, environmental and demographic crises have often been associated with increasing hunger and poverty in agrarian societies. The potential of such crisis to play a positive role in the evolution of agriculture and agricultural societies has been overlooked. Environmental crises such as deforestation for example (in a production where forestland is a production factor) are points of resource alteration that require corresponding alterations in farming systems. Normalization occurs when farmers are induced to defy such signals indicating the need to diversify and instead choose to continue along their existing path regardless of the changing resource endowment. In the absence is replacement of the vital production factor such continuity has to be paid for.

Social conflict and agrarian change inUganda's countryside

AbstractIn this paper, I explore the significance of Giovanni Arrighi's scholarship about the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and transformation in Africa and other “hostile” environments for critical agrarian studies. Specifically, I examine the relevance of his work for the analysis of multiple trajectories of agrarian change and social conflict in Uganda's countryside. By adopting synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the analysis here unveils the geographically uneven nature of transformation in the agrarian social structure in two distinct regions in Uganda: Buganda and Acholi. This complementarity allows us to grasp continuities and discontinuities in the processes of agrarian change and in the social struggles over the production and appropriation of surplus value in the longue durée. I argue that the agrarian social structure and the associated dynamics and forms of social conflict in the two regions massively diverged during the colonial period, while partially converging in the current era of neoliberal restructuring.

Roads from Calabria: The Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy

AbstractScholars of agrarian change have long debated the nature of capitalist transition in the countryside, including whether the deepened interlinking of local, national, and transnational economic activities make past trajectories of agrarian transformation unlikely to reoccur in the present. This essay makes the case that Giovanni Arrighi's work has much to add to our understanding of the agrarian question in global historical perspective. We focus in particular on Arrighi's research on trajectories of change in the Calabrian region of southern Italy, and his essay “Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments.” In this piece, Arrighi and co‐author Fortunata Piselli develop two key insights. The first is that the pathways to capitalism are diverse, non‐linear, and historically contingent such that within one country—or, in the case of Italy, a single subnational region—multiple trajectories can be found. The second is that the outcomes of capitalist transition vary based on a country's position in the international hierarchy of wealth, meaning that agrarian transformation is compatible with both economic development and underdevelopment. We describe the three methodological principles that enabled Arrighi to develop his analysis of capitalist transition and explain how the papers collected in this special issue reflect and extend the Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy.

Characteristics of “work in agriculture” scientific communities. A bibliometric review

Work is a central concern for sustainable farming systems and rural communities, especially regarding specific issues of the agricultural sector, as the strong decrease in rural employment and the less attractive working conditions. Many articles covering diverse related topics have been published. However, the few studies analyzing the state of worldwide scientific research on work in agriculture give only a fragmented view, since they focus on specialized topics and disciplines. To fill this knowledge gap, the aim of this study was to review the state of research on work in agriculture addressed by the scientific literature, through a bibliometric analysis by country, institution, journal, author, and keywords. Our main finds are that (1) work in agriculture issues is divided into six main research domains: occupational health and safety, labor market and rural employment, labor and farm sustainability, work organization, agricultural policy and agrarian changes, and labor and family farms; (2) these research domains are analyzed by five scientific communities: ergonomics, agricultural economics, livestock farming systems, rural sociology, and agricultural policy; (3) the reference authors, most-cited articles, and main journals were identified for each scientific community; (4) USA, France, and China arise as leaders in the scientific landscape. We show for the first time the characteristics of the main scientific communities worldwide that have performed the most relevant research related to work in agriculture over the past 10 years. This review provides a benchmark for future research on agricultural work-related topics and encourages collaborations between researchers from different scientific communities for interdisciplinary innovation, which support sustainable working conditions in agriculture.

Intersections between rural livelihood security and animal pollination in Anolaima, Colombia

In the tropics, the interdependence between animal pollinators and smallholders is imperiled by the expansion of industrial agriculture. We discuss some of the intersections between animal pollination and agrarian change through an empirical case study of Anolaima, formerly considered “the fruit capital of Colombia”. The paper draws on 22 months of field research that included surveys with 320 households and more detailed interviews and participant observation with 16 focal families. Agrarian change has directly and indirectly driven the declines of animal pollinators necessary to the production of a large proportion of foods with high nutritional value, increasing the socio-ecological vulnerability of rural people. We describe an ironic and vicious cycle of inequality in Anolaima, where smallholders—especially older farmers and large families with small farms—once benefitted from nutritionally-rich, animal pollinated foods grown on their diverse agricultural plots. Now their agricultural production is threatened by pollinator declines driven by agroindustrial practices, which are conducted by wealthier households who secure food access by purchasing foods that include fruits dependent on animal pollination formerly grown locally. These dynamics leave low-income farmers surrounded by simplified, chemical-laden landscapes inhospitable to the bees upon which their agricultural livelihoods depend; and faced with food insecurity, unable to afford or access the culturally important foods they used to cultivate. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of traditional, diversified smallholder agriculture, its contribution to a large fraction of food consumed worldwide, and its role in biodiversity conservation in rural landscapes.

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong region: drivers of transformation and pathways of change

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong region: Drivers of transformation and pathways of change

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.

“One family, two systems”: Food safety crisis as a catalyst for agrarian changes in rural China

The political economy of agrarian changes in rural China has attracted much scholarly attention. Yet these studies have placed limited emphasis on the role of food safety crisis, a critical issue that not only motivated consumption changes of urban residents, but also catalyzed a differentiated food production and supply scheme in rural China. Our extensive fieldwork revealed that more than 60% of rural farming households in China are adopting two distinctive farming approaches: conventional production with intensive usage of agrochemicals for selling to the market and ecological production with limited or no usage of agrochemicals for self-consumption, relatives and people with close social ties. This is what we call ‘one family, two systems’. This paper conceptualizes and illustrates the widespread yet rarely discussed phenomenon with specific cases. We argue that ‘one family, two systems’ is farmers' self-protection response to the heightened food safety crisis. It reveals that the access to ecologically produced food in the common phenomenon is determined by farmers' social relations and thus is embedded in local social network. ‘One family, two systems’ fosters agrarian changes in at least two dimensions – the farmer-driven ecologicalization of food production and the re-embedding of food production and consumption in ecological systems and social relations in rural China.

Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility: Precarity, Translocality, and Resilience

AbstractWithin and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of ‘precarity’ that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.