Agrarian Context Research Articles

SOCIO-ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF FOREIGN LABOUR MIGRATION IN AGRARIAN SOCIETIES OF NEPAL

Socio-cultural, economic, political, and environmental factors play a crucial role in migration. The phenomenon of foreign labor migration has been shaped by a variety of factors including different dimensions of sustainable livelihood that push people to seek better opportunities. The main objective of this research was to assess the socioeconomic determinants of foreign labor migration in the agrarian community of the Sindhuli district of Nepal using a simple random sample technique. Accordingly, a quantitative interview protocol was employed along with the use of key informants’ interviews to collect pertinent information in the year 2021. Findings revealed that determining factors responsible for foreign labor migration were primarily low individual income (with a score of 0.72), followed by a lack of employment opportunities (0.66); poor economic conditions (0.57); limited access to social protection (0.42), and child education (0.36). Additionally, other factors that contributed to the migration included social prestige, desire for property accumulation, peer pressure, the decline in agricultural production, lack of education, inability to pay loans, and food insecurity. The finding of this research thus suggests the need to consider these core facts while developing strategies to manage migration so as to impact positive implications in the agrarian context of Nepal.

A rural‐centric model for understanding women's later life precarity in an agrarian economy in Uganda

AbstractAging as a woman within the context of agricultural transformation where production and consumption values shape everyday life raises concerns of later life precarity. Gender economic inclusion is imperative in the achievement of inclusive rural development. But there is a tendency to homogenize female experiences of poverty based on gender and class, ignoring the impact of global economic and social changes on Uganda's rural economy and the elderly. Furthermore, in the agrarian context, precarity hinges on gender images of a desirable agricultural worker and neoliberal policies that exacerbate vulnerabilities of elderly women already living on the economic margins of global capitalism. Drawing on rural‐dwelling older women's narratives, this article reveals that precarity in an environment of agrarian capitalism is a product of conflict between the desire to maintain relationships of reciprocity and engagement in production. In this article, a five‐tier rural‐centric model relevant to conceptualizing risk factors to precarity is proposed. The model is influenced by the Bourdieusian theory of capital and Gudeman's economy theory. The model provides an opportunity to re‐imagine and situate older women's later life precarity within the wider sociopolitical and economic context, and consequently design appropriate social protection initiatives.

A Critical Discourse Analysis on Bvrtan’s Persatvan Rakyat Svkatani

Bvrtan is a quite unique Indonesian black metal band. Combining humor with the black metal’s dark aesthetic, Bvrtan’s works have been well appreciated by the Indonesian underground scene. In contrast to other black metal practices that shout anti-religion and absolute freedom messages, Bvrtan’s works are identical with social criticism of Indonesian agrarian context. Thus, this study exists to discuss one of Bvrtan’s work entitled Perstavan Rakyat Svkatani. By applying theoretical approach of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the researcher uncovers how Bvrtan’s work is composed of various type of texts, ranging from linguistic, the discursive practice and social contexts. By the theoretical view, the researcher finally found that this work specifically relate to a wider context of Indonesian agrarian problem that involves the pseudo-welfare of farmers. With satirical lyrics and angry expletives, the phrase of “sejahtera matamv” is the pivotal key to understand every dimension of discourse within this work.

Nuisance, Planning and the Common Law in Late Eighteenth-Century Bombay

ABSTRACT The literature on the legal transfer of English property law to colonial South Asia has long focused on the agrarian context. Urban property and the built environment remain understudied. This article explores how the common law of nuisance found its way into the workings of a Committee of Buildings in late eighteenth-century Bombay. An analysis of the internal files of the Committee of Buildings shows that the Committee focused on public and private nuisance mitigation. Residents filed private party nuisance complaints, taking up nuisance law in their own disputes with neighbours. The Committee’s attempts to deal with public nuisances highlights the resistance of local residents. The conclusion considers the broader question of how we can conceptualize the actors, vectors and mechanisms involved in legal transfer, and its reception. Alternative explanations such as influences from pre-English colonial regimes, the impact of local custom, and the balance between common law and statute are evaluated. Rather than a seamless legal transfer, nuisance in early colonial Bombay demonstrates dialogue, resistance and appropriation.

Silent transitions: Commercialization and changing customary land tenure systems in upland Laos

What happens to local institutional arrangements regarding access and use of communal land under the forces of agricultural commercialization? Taking Khwaykham village in Phongsaly province, Laos as a case study, this paper sheds light on this question as farm households in the settlement have progressively transitioned to commercial farming, specifically tea cultivation. Traditionally, farm households’ access and rights to use the land were embedded in their swidden agriculture practices. The adoption of tea has increasingly fixed land use rights, making land sticky at the household rather than communal level. How, why and with what effects this occurs are the focus of the paper. We argue that while this transition to tea cultivation has benefited – in income terms – most farm households in the village, it has also created an agrarian context for increased inequity between those households who rapidly took the opportunity from the tea boom and others who have missed out on it.

Disparate but not antagonistic: Classes of labour in cotton production in Burkina Faso

AbstractThis paper examines the variety of agrarian classes of labour and the challenges they face in organizing and pursuing their interests. By taking the cotton sector in Burkina Faso as a case study, it analyses how various ‘classes of labour’ organize and mobilize for collective action to raise their claims: poor cotton farmers and workers in the cotton factories. Poor and middle farmers recently came to the fore when they boycotted cotton production in large numbers. The study focusses on the boycott campaign, and more broadly on class struggle and collective action by farmers and workers, on interclass alliances, and on capital's attempts to play the classes of labour against one another. The boycott campaign provides an outstanding case to analyse the interests of the various classes of labour and of opportunities for rural–urban mobilization and alliances across classes of labour. I argue that poor farmers and factory workers along the chain of cotton production can be considered as various classes of labour that are not necessarily antagonistic to one another but, first and foremost, to capital. In order to achieve radical transformation in the agrarian context, what is needed are networks and organizations to establish interclass solidarity and alliances.

Groundwater irrigation reduces overall poverty but increases socioeconomic vulnerability in a semiarid region of southern India

The development of irrigation is generally considered an efficient way to reduce poverty in rural areas, although its impact on the inequality between farmers is more debated. In fact, assessing the impact of water management on different categories of farmers requires resituating it within the different dimensions of the local socio-technical context. We tested this hypothesis in a semi-arid area in Karnataka, South India, where groundwater irrigation was introduced five decades ago. Using the conceptual framework of comparative agriculture, based on farmers’ interviews, we built a farm typology, traced the trajectories of farm types over the last decades and assessed their current technical and economic performances. Our results show that the differentiation of farm trajectories since the 1950s has been linked with the development of groundwater irrigation, interplaying with their initial assets, and the evolution of the national and local contexts. We highlight the mechanisms by which irrigation indeed reduces poverty but engenders fragilities, particularly for poor households, whose situation was aggravated by the depletion of water resources over the last two decades. Finally, this extensive understanding of the agrarian context allowed us to formulate and assess the potential of different ways forward, including irrigation technology, change in cropping or livestock systems, land tenure, and value added distribution. As such, this analysis would be of major interest to policy makers involved in reforming the agricultural context for better agricultural water management.

Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform at 20: exploring disability inclusion and the attendant policy implications

This article interrogates disability inclusion two decades after Zimbabwe’s fast-tracked land reform and the associated policy pathways for improving the situation of people with disabilities in an agrarian context. Exploring the country’s land reform through disability inclusion lenses is largely missing in literature and policy. Using disability inclusion and interpretivism as the evaluative conceptual framing and heuristic research approach in a rural district respectively, the article shows that latent and manifest politics of inclusion and exclusion influence people with disabilities’ formal and informal access to land and agrarian support. Accordingly, the article advances the significance of a sturdy transformative agenda that prioritizes this often-sidelined group in the productive, redistributive, reproductive, protective and social compact outcomes of the land reform. This approach tackles the structural causes of marginalization, inequality and poverty in pursuit of generating and sustaining the wellbeing of people with disabilities.

Peasant Livelihoods in Times of Covid-19: A Classical Agrarian and Political Economy Perspective

The Covid-19 pandemic has had unprecedented global impact, creating multiple crises that have gone beyond the epidemiological, extending to the socio-economic and political. It has exposed structural flaws in global capitalism and intensified inequalities that have traditionally been imbedded in relations of production and social reproduction. In emerging Covid-19 literature, blind spots exist on its impact on peasant households. It is this knowledge gap that this article fills. Focusing on an agrarian context in rural Zimbabwe, the article employs a classical agrarian perspective and the political economy approach as conceptual and heuristic tools to explore the impact which this novel virus has had on rural livelihoods. It shows that the pandemic has impacted agricultural production, social reproduction, labour relations and asset accumulation. While its impact has been largely negative, opportunities were created with peasant agency being critical in dealing with shocks and vulnerabilities.

Farmers’ Suicides and Psychosocial Intervention

Farmers’ suicides in India, exemplifying the agrarian crisis, have been a contemporary cause of grave concern. The Vidarbha Psychosocial Support and Care Program (VPSCP) in western India is an example of a psychosocial intervention being implemented to address the psychological consequences of adverse circumstances triggered by the agrarian distress of farmers through a multi-pronged strategy of delivery of mental health care services to those in need dovetailed with livelihood/employment support schemes. This article, which forms part of a larger evaluation carried out on the impact and effectiveness of the VPSCP, focuses primarily on the process and functioning of the programme; its strengths and challenges through the perspectives of key stakeholders; and perceptions of psychosocial stress in the community. Although firmer linkages with the government health care programme and with employment support/welfare schemes is needed, the VPSCP can be taken as a viable template for the integration of socio-economic determinants and mental health concerns in the agrarian context in order to reduce the incidence of suicide.

El Instituto Internacional de Agricultura: España y la «cuestión social», 1905-1923

In the agrarian context of the early 20th century, networks of experts and interest groups were created. These formed institutions across state borders to achieve prestige derived from their supranational character and ostensible technical and scientific capacity. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact in Spain of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), from the year of its creation until the advent of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the lens of the “social question”: a concept that popularized the proposals and disagreements surrounding labour regulation. The research draws from the latest contributions in transnational history and internationalism, recent secondary sources about the IIA and primary sources that reflect how transnational IIA networks worked in and with Spain to address agricultural labour issues. The article concludes that the intensely transnational connections between agrarian elites, owners and technicians in the early 20th century transformed social relations in agriculture and agrarian public policies in Spain.

Political ecology of household water security among the urban poor in Malawi

This paper examines strategies used by the poor in urban Malawi in their struggles to ensure sufficient and continuous water supply for domestic and business purposes in a context where even though the state is the major provider of water, exorbitant tariffs mean that most people remain utterly excluded from or tenuously connected to the official grid. Using Mzuzu in northern Malawi as a case study, and applying theoretical perspectives grounded in political ecology, the findings of qualitative research (n = =52) conducted in Mzuzu indicate that the urban poor use a variety of contingent sources of water to augment supply from the ‘public’ water supply system. The findings also show that social ties and institutional affiliations operating outside of market relations provide an important avenue for ensuring adequate water supply. These non-market factors include, but are not limited to, blood relations, fictive kinship ties, membership and/or participation in civil society networks, ethnic affinities, and moral sentiments of need. The paper argues that, while the urban poor are themselves marginalized, the social and spatial strategies they pursue to access water are not necessarily inclusive. By shedding light on how the urban poor tactfully use these strategies to build spatial and intergenerational access to water, this study contributes to a better understanding of the non-market dynamics that provide an escape for the urban poor marginally integrated into the ‘public’ water supply system. The paper extends the applicability of political ecology beyond its traditional agrarian context to the realm of water politics in urban settings in the developing world

Mending the Social? Reflections on the Farmer’s Agitation in Contemporary India

This essay is a reflection of some of the distinctive aspects of the ongoing farmer’s movement in India that has passed its one-year mark. Situating the movement in the agrarian context of the region, I show the multi-pronged nature of the movement and the diverse tools that it has deployed for protesting against the controversial farm laws, which if it had been implemented would have further aggravated rural distress in the region. In this essay, I claim that the movement is also unique in the alliances that it has forged in the course of articulating its resistance, which though not firmed up as yet, has the potential to strengthen India’s democracy.

COVID-19, lockdown and peasants in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The exploration of COVID-19 in Zimbabwe and the consequent responses have blind spots in relation to peasant communities. Despite the peasantry featuring in Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform literature, such literature is lacking when it comes to the interrogation of how this diverse and sometimes less recognised group responded to the novel virus. The article explores peasant life in a time of COVID-19 and lockdown in Zimbabwe, paying special attention to the impact of the pandemic on their ‘total way of life’, their agency in responding to the pandemic in an agrarian context, and implications for the present and future.

Review: The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture

Review: <i>The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture</i>

Do gender differences lead to unequal access to climate adaptation strategies in an agrarian context? Perceptions from coastal Bangladesh

ABSTRACT While people around the world are increasingly facing various climate-related stresses, women with limited resources in low income developing societies are often at a greater risk largely because of their pre-existing constraints on social, economic, political, and cultural resources and opportunities. In this paper, we investigate how gender differences influence farmers’ access to various resources that are critical for local climate adaptation in coastal Bangladesh. As one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in not only the country but the world, coastal Bangladesh is experiencing a significant increase in sea level rise, tropical cyclones, storm surges, coastal flooding, coastal erosions as well as unpredictable rainfall patterns. All of these climate related stresses directly contribute to the region’s increasing exposure to saltwater intrusion in coastal lands and freshwater sources. While a majority of the previous research has focused on community-based climate adaptation, there has been limited attention on how gender differences shape local farmers’ climate adaptation strategies. Using mixed-methods research, this article highlights the ways in which male-headed and female-headed farming households have differential access to locally available adaptation resources along with associated constraints or opportunities for adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies vary substantially. Our findings suggest female-headed farms are less likely to sell their farmland or migrate away in search of non-farm income due to normative gendered expectations and socio-cultural restrictions. Therefore, female farmers are forced to pursue in-place farming adaptation strategies with limited external resources while relying on informal social networks for weather and climate information.

Later, smaller, better? Water infrastructure and infant mortality in Finnish cities and towns, 1870–1938

ABSTRACTWe analyse the role of modern water infrastructure in reducing infant mortality in Finnish cities and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Estimates from US data suggest that urban water infrastructures greatly affected the health transition in Western countries, implying policy lessons for developing countries. Finland is a relevant case due to the early onset of mortality decline in a predominantly agrarian context in a country with a low GDP. Our sources enable analysis across population centres of varying size as well as over different phases of development. We construct panel data on infant mortality and the initiation of three major water interventions – piped water, sewers and chlorination – in 37 Finnish cities and towns from approximately 1870 to 1938. We show that in line with previous literature, the interventions had a significant effect on infant mortality, jointly accounting for roughly 40% of the average decrease in different cities. However, most of the measurable effect was driven by small- and medium-sized cities adopting more advanced technology in the twentieth century rather than by pioneering larger cities in the nineteenth century. Weighting by population size rather than using average effects reduces the estimate to about 32%. Due to low levels of urbanisation, the measurable impact on national mortality decline was only about 4–5 % over the entire period, but roughly twice as high in the twentieth century, when both urbanisation and a decline in urban infant mortality rates gathered pace. Following development economics, our findings emphasise the importance of distinguishing the effects of sanitation by period and developmental context rather than compressing them into a single estimate.

Assessing differential vulnerability of communities in the agrarian context in two districts of Maharashtra, India

ABSTRACTClimate variability causes multiple difficulties to rural poor. The loss in agriculture production is the most predominant impact among many, especially in drought-prone regions of India. Aggravating this further are the non-climatic risks like depletion of groundwater, land fragmentation, lack of post-harvest structures and disappearing and deteriorating common property resources among many others. Within this context, the current study presents how agrarian livelihoods in rural Maharashtra has been transforming to adapt to both the changing climate and non-climatic drivers. A community engaging vulnerability assessment tool was used to explore the climate risks and vulnerabilities of different social groups. Insights indicate that vulnerability is socially differentiated and across farmer categories and social groups. Caste and social standing play a significant role in access to resources, land ownership, livelihoods choices and approaches – impacting their vulnerability to climate change. The study concludes that vulnerability assessments need to be conducted at lower scales, as climate risks vary even within small clusters of villages. This understanding helps designing programmes and policies that build adaptive capacities of rural poor and thus recommends integrating community engagement into academic research is critical.

Community gardens and the making of organic subjects: a case study from the Peruvian Andes

This research contributes to emergent theories on subject formation by showing how community garden (CG) participants in a small rural town in Northern Peru came to embrace a set of ideas and practices related to organic agriculture. Most CG scholarship describes the myriad benefits for participants and their communities, as well as individuals’ motivations for wanting to grow their own food. Relatively little research has explored how various kinds of gardens and their organizers produce subjects. Drawing from scholarship on community gardens and subject formation, I examine the emergence of what I call an “organic subjectivity” among garden participants. Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted in Peru, I argue that the making of organic subjects in the CG is the result of three primary influences: (1) the changing agrarian context in the community marked by the adoption of conventional farming practices, (2) the influence of the garden organizer as the agent of an organic ideology, and (3) the material practices associated with CG participation. This case study reinforces the notion that CGs produce subjects and that such subjects could well be oriented towards an agenda of progressive agrarian change that promotes environmental awareness and ecological farming practices, key elements of emerging alternative food networks in the global North and South.

Espacios agrarios y justicia de género: un caso de estudio en el País Vasco

El artículo explora la intersección entre espacio agrario y feminismo, a partir de un caso de estudio en Usurbil (País Vasco). El objetivo es visibilizar y analizar las experiencias, desigualdades e identidades de la mujer agricultora –agente social ausente en nuestras narrativas– en el contexto del Norte Global. Se analizan las múltiples injusticias de género en relación a la división sexual del trabajo, las relaciones de poder, la participación y el reconocimiento (ausente/estereotipado), para concluir con las especificidades de estas injusticias para el espacio agrario y para el caso vasco.