Agrarian Crisis Research Articles

Issues and Challenges in Indian Agriculture

The agricultural sector is one of the most important sectors of the economy, especially with respect to employment and this sector is undergoing agrarian crisis. Growth rate in this sector is very important because it will bring about growth rate in the overall economy of India. This paper discusses the issues and challenges faced by Indian agriculture and also directs the road ahead. Yield and production of several crops have been analyzed over various states and also the statistics have been compared with international countries.

Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India

AbstractThis paper looks at a case of rural‐to‐rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio‐political factors at play.

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Indian Agriculture: A Review

The rise and spread of Covid-19 pandemic affected all parts of the human society by creating massive socio-economic panic across all the sectors including agriculture, tourism, commerce, shipping, manufacturing and tertiary sectors across the world. The agricultural and food sector were considered as the most crucial part of the developing economics across the globe, which was completely exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has an undesirable and prominent influence on agriculture and allied sectors in India. The pandemic lockdown has resulted in the agrarian crisis across the nation by influencing and disrupting the food demand, food supply and value chain of various agricultural goods and commodities. In the country like India where majority of the population, approximately 140 million, depends directly or indirectly on agriculture and food sectors as the primary source of their income the impact due to the Covid-19 pandemic created an imbalance and affected the economy of the nation. Containing an analysis and detailed review based on articles, scientific reports, publications, organizational statements, and press releases, this review article addresses an inclusive assessment and highlights the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on agriculture and food systems. An effort has been made to understand its impact on food supply, food demand, food prices, food security and national economy. The need of the hour is to promote effective solutions in order to control critical factors such as food production, food supply, food demand, price hikes, food security and supply chain resilience. Since the urbanization and population will have tremendous growth in the coming decades, epidemics may be more frequent and we need to ensure contingency plans and mitigation strategies, especially for agricultural and food systems.

Variability and Trend in Summer Monsoon Rainfall and its Correlation with Crop Yield in the Districts of Andhra Pradesh During 2011-2020

In the context of climate change and its impact on agriculture, the paper analyses the trend of monsoon rainfall and its correlation with crop yield in Andhra Pradesh. The summer monsoon is the main rainy source of water for the state of Andhra Pradesh. The Kharif crops depend on the southwest monsoon rains to the extent that its adverse variability may lead to water stress and agrarian crisis. It has been observed from the study that in recent years the contribution of monsoon rainfall during September is increasing, and any harvest during the month is correspondingly affected, leading to a decline in the crop yield.

Agrarian crisis, affect, and accumulation

This commentary responds to Mahanty et al.'s article, which offers ‘rupture’ as an alternative analytic to ‘the Anthropocene’. I apply this concept to fieldwork in Kalimpong, a district of the Indian state of West Bengal in the eastern Himalayas, to highlight the concept's utility for attending to the complexity of environmental crisis.

Significance of Farmers’ Distress Index in Reducing Agrarian Crisis: An Approach to Study Vulnerability in the Context of Dryland Farmers in India

Significance of Farmers’ Distress Index in Reducing Agrarian Crisis: An Approach to Study Vulnerability in the Context of Dryland Farmers in India

A study of the socio-economic context and impact of influenza pandemic of 1918–19 on Bihar

The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 wreaked havoc all over the world, and Bihar, where more than a million people died, was no exception. The pandemic became more lethal in Bihar relative to what we know of other states in eastern India. Why did rural mortality surpass urban mortality? How did the pandemic worsen the socio-economic crisis in the years that followed? This study examines the socio-economic context of the pandemic in Bihar at a micro-level and investigates how the pandemic became unbearable for the people due to a severe economic crisis that resulted from the war and failed monsoons, among other factors. It seeks to explain the manner in which factors such as agricultural failure, inflation, high population density and poor health infrastructure resulted in higher rural mortality. It also shows how the loss of the younger generation and forced migration during the pandemic resulted in a lower rate of birth in the years following the pandemic, resulting in a loss of the labour force and worsening of the agrarian crisis.

Impact of Government Advertisements about Agricultural Information in Sensitising Rural Farmers: A Study of Marathwada Region in Maharashtra

To stimulate the agricultural sector, the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India, has initiated a myriad of welfare initiatives aimed at farmers, entailing a substantial financial commitment. A portion of this financial outlay is also allocated to the dissemination of pertinent information among the farming community. However, a pertinent question arises: does this information reach the rural farmers and do they avail the benefit? The present study attempts to address this issue. Based on a tested questionnaire, a primary survey was conducted in Marathwada region of Maharashtra where the incidence of agrarian crisis is insurmountable. The study found a limited impact of government advertisements regarding agricultural information on farmers in terms of increasing their awareness level. The primary conduit for agricultural information, as ascertained by the study, predominantly stems from informal sources. Among the socio-economic characteristics, only education and land ownership are found to have an impact on the level of awareness and their willingness to acquire information on agriculture. The percentages of farmers, who are aware of the scheme and get its benefits, do not even exceed 30 per cent, irrespective of the scheme under consideration. It was found that only limited farmers are taking benefit of the scheme even after receiving information. A general disinterest was observed among the farmers because of the heavy paperwork of availing those benefits. To engender a constructive transformation in farmers’ awareness levels regarding agricultural schemes and programmes, a well-thought-out and strategic endeavour becomes indispensable.

Strategic framework for achieving gender equality in agriculture

The gender equality on field is vital to enhance production and withstand emerging agrarian crisis. This paper highlights strategic steps that can help in achieving the gender equality on and off farm among farm families of India. The present study is based on ex-post-facto research design and multistage random sampling technique was used for this study. Twenty-eight villages were finalized for the study, covering all seven districts of South Gujarat and from them ten women farmers from each village were selected. Thus 280 farm women formed the sample of our study. Study revealed that the limited right over land and resources, non-availability of credit to women in agriculture and physical drudgery were the most common gender related issues experienced by farm women. They further suggested that equal sharing of work and family between men and women, improving women’s ownership rights through the mechanism of joint pattas, registration of all new assets in the name of both husband and wife and easy access to loans through women’s SHGs can help in reducing gender gap. Thus, considering these results strategic framework at different level is prepared to achieve gender equality in Indian agriculture.

:Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

This crisis manifested itself both socially and politically. In addition to the agrarian crises and the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, protests against excessive taxation and abuses by the nobility gave rise to various revolts. Such protests resulted many times in the persecution of the Jewish population in Castile and Aragon. Despite the flourishing literary production that constitutes the archive of the book in question, the Castilian court is marked by dynastic intrigues and clashes between different factions of the nobility. In this context, the texts studied in the present book are concerned with the dialectical relationship between experience and reason that produces passions. The passions would not in turn be mere subjective reactions to the environment, but the product of an experience that allows the individual consciousness to understand itself as such. Hence, the rhetorical importance of deixis in songbook poetry insofar as it establishes a basis on which to build forms of intersubjectivity. Passions give content to this intersubjectivity, demarcating the boundary between the collective and the individual, between the political and the personal. The definition of the passions is produced through an incessant questioning of the poets and their readers. What kind of experience is love? What kind of knowledge does this experience produce? What are its ethical, orienting dimensions in a world that seems characterized by instability and the instrumentalization of personal relationships?

From ‘virtuous’ to ‘subhuman’: representations of Italian peasants between the 1860s and the 1880s

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the representations and narratives of the rural world produced by the Italian dominant elite, especially the agrarian, during the period from Unification to the agrarian crisis of the 1880s, through the analysis of numerous published and unpublished sources. During this crucial period of transition, the idealized version of the peasant as a repository of ancient virtue was replaced by another, which cast the shadow of biological inferiority over the rural class. I argue that this process resulted from the influence of Lombrosian ideas then spreading through the society, in addition to the growth of socialism, and the economic, political, and social changes underway primarily in the north, where rural areas saw the implementation of a capitalist system. The analysis of this transformation sheds new light on the history of the Italian ruling class of the 1800s, highlighting the reactionary views and class-consciousness of the society.

Beyond bad weather: climates of uncertainty in rural India

ABSTRACT Drawing on research in central India, this paper argues that emerging climatic risks are inseparable from the systemic risks of capitalist production, particularly in relation to India's ongoing agrarian crisis. Drawing from classic debates in peasant studies around agrarian risk, subsistence, and moral economy, I argue that the intertwined effects of climatic variability and agrarian capitalism have produced a generalized ‘climate of uncertainty’ in rural India. The paper explores how encounters with agrarian risk reproduce social inequalities. It concludes that a deeper reckoning with regional histories of agrarian change is critical to forging just and secure rural futures in the face of the global climate crisis.

Rise and Fall of the Bharatiya Kisan Union: The Farmers’ Protests of 2020–2021 in the Making of New Rural Politics

In the 1980s, India's farmers' protests including the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) emerged as a strong political force that played an important role in the overthrow of the Congress government in the1989 elections. However, in the 1990s introduction of the neoliberal economic policies shifted the agrarian economy to non-farm occupations and deepened the ongoing agrarian crisis. By focusing on the BKU and its politics, this paper examines the ways in which agrarian change and crisis coupled with the rise of Hindutva politics weakened the agrarian polity in western Uttar Pradesh over the last three decades. Drawing on ethnographic research in Muzaffarnagar, however, I argue that the farmers' protests (of 2020 -2021) have revived farmers' identity and have renewed the agrarian polity. These protests not only created unprecedented alliances across caste, class, gender, and religion but also brought together farm unions, left, and progressive civil society organizations.

COVID 19 and Resilience of Village Farmers in Tabou Department

This paper discusses the process of adaptation and farmer resilience to the effects of COVID-19. It illustrates the change in behaviour of farm managers faced with the structural crisis of value chains in the oil palm sector. The study in Tabou combined both quantitative and qualitative research. These two (2) approaches were implemented using techniques (documentary research, interview, observation) and data collection tools (interview guide, questionnaires, observation grid). The study shows that the health crisis linked to COVID-19 has led to disorganisation within the oil palm cooperative societies. These companies are losing members due to the slowdown in palm oil processing companies, the inability of the supervisory structures (PALMCI [1] and cooperatives) to absorb almost all village production, and the instability (downward) of the purchase price per kilogram of palm oil. Faced with the crisis, poor sales, rotting production and food insecurity, farmers created networks for the direct purchase of production and the artisanal processing of palm oil. Thus, in the face of the agrarian crisis, peasant societies are finding endogenous resources to meet their daily needs.

Colonizing the rains: Disentangling more-than-human technopolitics of drought protection in the archive

Preoccupations for the widening gap between irrigated and rainfed areas are central to debates addressing the agrarian crisis in semi-arid India. Yet policies are driven by a catch-up mentality that points towards an irrigated model of agriculture, demarcating rainfed areas as spaces of rural marginality. To unpack the historical causes behind this ‘irrigation at all costs’ mindset, the paper traces how the rainfed/irrigated gap became constituted through policies of drought-protection during British colonial time. Focussing on the Bombay Deccan after the establishment of the British Raj, it frames drought-protection as a more-than-human technopolitics to explore the performative power of technopolitical practices to bring water worlds into being.Through a critical reading of the colonial archive, we trace the ontological work of drought-protection as a practice that rearranged existing human-water relations to materialize a reality of water ‘as irrigation’. Grounded on linear and predictable flows, this irrigated ontology divided the landscape along an irrigated-as-protected and rainfed-as-unprotected logic. Encountering a world that followed geographies of water ‘as precipitation’ however created sites of contestation blurring the partition envisioned by engineering plans. Rather than the imposition of hydrological power from above, colonizing the rains represents a contested project whereby certain water worlds became present and real while others discarded and less real. Contributing to scholarship shaking the ontological ground underneath water management regimes, we suggest a reflexive turn for these practices, as they must confront their power to materialize (water) realities and the possibility to enact a decolonial technopolitics beyond water’s liquid form.

Modern agrarian crises and components of Ukrainian food industry sustainability

The main systemic flaws and problems that led to the destruction of the planning and administrative model of the economy and the transition to a market, and in the agricultural sector were accompanied by a transformational recession in the 1990s and the emergence of recurrent agrarian crises in the future. It is established that the consequences of the decline in agriculture correlate with the scale of production by the capacity of the food industry, but with a shifted time frame. It was confrmed that, frst of all, the agrarian crisis covers agricultural production, and it further affects other branches and sectors of the agri-food complex. The peculiarities of the manifestation of agrarian crises of 2008-2009, 2014-2015 and 2020-2021 are revealed and the inter-crisis periods concerning the causes and consequences of noticeable fluctuations with the production of food enterprises are analyzed. It is established that the achievement of the pre-crisis (1990) level of food, beverages and tobacco products occurred six years after the "bottom" of the transformational recession, and agricultural products - twenty years later. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a worldwide crisis and an agrarian crisis in Ukraine which resulted in signifcant weakening of resilience due to reduction in food production. In this regard, it was important to identify and assess the degree of key problems development the agricultural sector, on the progress of which in the face of increasing market turbulence and will depend on the sustainability of the food industry. The key components for preserving and strengthening the sustainability of the food industry for the current stage have been systematized, in particular, satisfying processing capacities in safe and high-quality food raw materials and carrying out innovative and technological modernization of food processing enterprises, completing national food security legislation of Ukraine on sanitary and phytosanitary measures for the protection of animals and plants to EU legislation. It is established that the implementation of HACCP in food industry is rather topical in the need for a comprehensive solution to a number of problems in the feed-food chain "from feld to table". It is grounded that the practical observance of hygiene, safety and quality requirements will ensure the safety of products of animal origin. It is revealed that market operators comply with the requirements of national regulations, which are harmonized with EU Directives, technical regulations, standards, guidelines of good practice, and implementation of basic principles, methodological approaches and regulations of the Community in the feld of domestic sanitation. phytosanitary measures, form a single regulatory feld of veterinary and phytosanitary requirements for feed market operators. As a result, a transition to a qualitatively higher level of requirements in the chain "from the feld to the table" will take place and ensure their continuity and increasing the level of compliance with safety and quality standards of livestock products. It is emphasized that the advancement of Ukraine's agricultural sector on the path of integration into the EU internal market is accompanied by the emergence of new differences and inconsistencies between domestic and European requirements, changes in the regulatory framework and their implementation in practice. This is an important prerequisite for providing processing facilities with safe and high-quality raw materials and the production of competitive products, which will contribute to increase the sustainability of the food industry. Key words: agrarian crisis, market turbulence, development trends, stability of the food industry, regulatory framework for the production of livestock products.

Moving up the Hill? Peasant Strategies in Times of Plague and Climate Change

Abstract The Late Medieval Agrarian Crisis is associated with a desertion of rural settlements. Farmsteads in agriculturally-marginal locations are presumed to have been among the first to be deserted. In recent decades, interdisciplinary research has instead shown several examples of increased agrarian activity, including cereal cultivation, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in forested upland areas of boreal inland Scandinavia. Farmsteads and hamlets established in forested upland areas in the fourteenth century have also been discovered. The recent excavation of one such farmstead, Ivarsbråten, shows that both settlement and agrarian production at the site had been adapted to the new climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age, which involved colder and wetter weather. It is here suggested that micro-mobility, moving out of a hamlet to an upland position, was a climate adaptation strategy pursued by a small number of peasants.

Agrarian crisis in wheat-producing region of India: analysis of profitability and costs

Agrarian crisis in wheat-producing region of India: analysis of profitability and costs

The Irish Land Question, the International Monetary Problem, and Archbishop William Walsh, 1881–1896

AbstractThis article explores the significance to the Irish land question of a controversial issue in late nineteenth-century international political economy – bimetallism. Bimetallists advocated a monetary system that used gold and silver to define currency value rather than gold alone. Archbishop William Walsh's support for bimetallism is analysed to highlight how Ireland provided a case-study that framed this debate. Walsh believed the gold standard deepened an agrarian crisis that drove the Irish land question. He argued that careful and internationally orchestrated reform of the monetary system offered the means for its resolution. Walsh's bimetallist views marked him out as an original thinker within Irish nationalism, and his views were debated and adopted by monetary reformers across Britain, Europe, and the United States where they featured during the 1896 Presidential Election. Walsh's engagement in monetary politics must also be understood within a tradition of Catholic social teaching in which he positioned himself as a critic of financial capitalism. This article contextualizes the Irish land question within wider debates on the role of silver in the global economy and argues that Walsh's monetary thought reveals him to be a more significant international intellectual than his involvement in Irish politics tends to allow.

Agrarian crises and producerist populism in French rural unions: limits and potential for an emancipatory rural politics

The article examines the reactions of two important agricultural trade unions in France, the ?Confédération Paysanne and the Coordination Rurale, to the liberalisation and financialisation of the ?European Common Agricultural Policy. It highlights the adoption of a "producerist populism" approach ?focused on the role of transnational economic and financial elites in co-opting the state, reducing ?public aid and as the main driver of the economic crises experienced by French farmers. The article ?traces the manifestations of this approach in the claims and analyses of the two unions in the face of ?recent economic developments in the wheat and dairy sectors in France. It argues that the producerist understanding of the crises in agriculture leads these two farmers unions, from opposite political backgrounds, to develop common arguments, opening to strategic alliances. Finally, based on the current ?debate on authoritarian populism in rural areas, the article discusses the interest in overcoming these ?narratives in favour of a more emancipatory rural perspective.?