Roads from Calabria: The Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy

Scholars 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.     

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour,world hegemonies,and crisis in rural Colombia

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.     

Social conflict and agrarian change in Uganda's countryside

In 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.     

The value components of contract farming in contemporary capitalism

Contract farming (CF) has generally been understood as, essentially, a market institution—by both (approving) “mainstream” and (critical) “radical” perspectives. Analyses of relations of production have, meanwhile, tended towards a problematic “peasantist” frame, where contracts undermine farmer “autonomy” in processes of “flexible” corporate agro‐industrial restructuring. This paper argues that a materialist analysis of CF from within capital–labour relations offers a stronger conceptual foundation for re‐synthesizing questions of market‐power. It first argues that radical notions of “peasant subsumation” conceptually mirror Marx's “formal subsumption of capital” but underplay dynamics of “real subsumption” accompanying capitalism's wider development. Drawing on the “petty commodity production” concept, it then argues that CF's “flexibility” rests in its differential content. CF's fungibility to contradictory movements of “integration” and “dispersion” enables it to emphasize different methods of surplus appropriation under shifting conditions; each corresponding to a different dominant social tendency. On the one hand, conditions of market expansion inspire integration for relative surplus appropriation through raised productivity, and CF tends to act as a “tool of proletarianization” in the wider centralization of capital. On the other, conditions of contraction motivate the dispersal of unvalorized capital, prompting efforts to raise absolute surplus appropriation, and CF tends to act as a “tool of differentiation” to concentrate agricultural capital.     

The social construction of “shared growth”: Zambia Sugar and the uneven terrain of social benefit

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend in agricultural investment and large‐scale farmland acquisition in the Global South and a rapid expansion of scholarship and public debate over the nature, consequences, and desirability of these trends. The polarization of this debate into “win/lose” narratives raises the question of whether, and under what conditions, the logic of capital accumulation driving farmland acquisition and investment can engender broad‐based social benefits akin to “shared growth.” This paper sheds light on this question through a detailed look at the recent expansion of Zambia Sugar's Nakambala Estate in Mazabuka, Zambia. We explore outcomes linked to two of the most prominent pathways through which social benefits are said to accrue: smallholder incorporation and employment. Findings demonstrate the unevenness of outcomes linked to both pathways, with the concrete benefits both claimed and observed through some measures quickly eroding under the weight of alternative performance metrics. The unevenness produced by the intensification of capitalist relations is manifested not just between those differentially positioned with respect to the incoming investment (“outgrower,” “employee,” and “land loser”) but within each of those conditions. This ambiguity opens spaces for competing representations of the promises and pitfalls of these processes, while highlighting the shaky ground on which shared growth and inclusive business agendas stand.     

Three populisms and two dead ends: Variants of agrarian populism in Thailand

This article discusses three forms of agrarian populism in Thailand: the “grassroots populism” of the Assembly of the Poor, the “reactionary populism” of the yellow shirts, and the “capitalist populism” of the red shirts. We examine how these three strands of populism are embedded within dynamics of agrarian change in Thailand and how the intellectual and activist orientation towards agrarian populism led to the neglect of labour, particularly agricultural migrant workers. We show how key ideological underpinnings of the Assembly's grassroots populism (Brass's “agrarian myth”) could be appropriated for the agrarian component of both reactionary and capitalist populism. Rather than a new populism, we argue that a broad and popular challenge to right-wing authoritarianism should develop inclusive class politics that embrace the rural–urban linkages that already define the social fabric of the new, rural, and agrarian precarious working class.     

Mapping historical and contemporary agrarian transformations and capitalist infiltration in a complex upland environment: A case from eastern Nepal

The relationship that mountain communities have with global capitalism are complex, being mediated by a diverse topography and ecology, both of which provide opportunities for capital accumulation, while also isolating older, “pre‐capitalist” modes of production. This paper takes a case study valley from Nepal's eastern hills, tracing over two centuries of agrarian change and evolving interactions between “adivasi” and “semi‐feudal” economic formations with capitalism. In recent years, the expansion of markets, rising demand for cash, and climate stress have solidified migrant labour as a core component of livelihoods, and the primary mechanism of surplus appropriation from the hill peasantry. Through a focus on three altitudinal zones, however, it is demonstrated how the trajectory of this transformation, including the interactions with persisting pre‐capitalist formations, is mediated by both political–economic processes and the local agro‐ecological context.     

“The enchantment of property”: Arthur Young,enclosure, and the cottage economy in England, 1770–1840

English agricultural practice changed dramatically in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as enclosure, the dominance of commercial short‐term leases for tenant farmers, and the proletarianization of the agricultural labour force completed what has been called an agricultural revolution. A less often noted aspect of this change was what was called “a war on cottages” and cottage gardens. The Board of Agriculture and Arthur Young were important cheerleaders for this process. Yet many of the most prominent members of the Board of Agriculture made impassioned appeals for the provision of land for English cottagers as a way to reduce poverty and stressed that cottagers produced remarkable returns from their small farms. Arthur Young became the most vocal proponent of land for cottagers. This article suggests that their appeals for land for cottagers were limited by both farmers' desire for easily controlled labour and misplaced concerns about the supposed inevitability of the poverty inherent in very small farms.     

Policy review of water reform in the Murray–Darling Basin,Australia: the “do's” and “do'nots”

The water reforms undertaken in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia since 2007 have been viewed as a model for other countries seeking to respond to water insecurity. Here, a policy review is provided of this water reform and whether it delivers on key environmental objectives in the 2007 Water Act (the Act). The evaluation includes a review of the 2012 Basin Plan, a key instrument of the Act, and complementary policies associated with the acquisition of water entitlements for the environment via direct (reverse tenders) and indirect (infrastructure subsidies) means. Using the objects of the Act as a benchmark, an evaluation is provided of the following: (i) planned reductions in irrigation water extractions in the 2012 Basin Plan; (ii) risks associated with the 2018 amendments to the Basin Plan that, collectively, allow for an increase in irrigation water extractions of some 22 per cent, relative to the sustainable diversion limits specified in the 2012 Basin Plan; (iii) Basin‐scale environmental outcomes achieved, as of the end of 2018; and (iv) economic effects of direct and indirect methods of acquiring water for the environment. Findings from the review generate the “Do's” and “Do Nots” of water reform for Australia, and possibly other countries, when managing the trade‐offs between water for irrigation and the environment.     

Is Peasantry Dead? Neoliberal Reforms,the State and Agrarian Change in Bangladesh

This paper focuses on three decades of agrarian reform policies and the resulting peculiarity of the development trajectory in Bangladesh. I interrogate the ways in which the reforms have led to a paradoxical situation consisting of partial protelarianization in attempting to promote a market‐based economy. I contend that the particular positioning of the state is central to understanding this dialectic between proletarianization and the persistence of small peasants amid a huge rush towards the formation of a capitalist market economy. I conclude that the partial nature of agrarian transformation that we now experience in Bangladesh may not be resolved in favour of a complete proletarianization of small peasants in the foreseeable future.     

Chile's Neoliberal Agrarian Transformation and the Peasantry

In the mid–1970s, following the early shift to neoliberalism, the Chilean rural sector was restructured dramatically, becoming one of the most successful cases of non–traditional agricultural export (NTAE) growth. However, many analysts fail to discuss the problematic nature of Chile’s integration into the global market. Underpinning this rapid growth of NTAEs is the exploitation of cheap peasant labour, especially seasonal female wage workers. This article examines the elements of continuity and change in agrarian policy since the transition to democracy in 1990. In particular, it presents the policy debate on the future of the peasantry: capitalization or proletarianization? The dilemma that policy makers face over maintaining high rates of NTAE growth while at the same time attempting to reduce poverty and income inequalities are also highlighted. The Chilean case can be considered as paradigmatic insofar as it exhibits key characteristics of the classical capitalist transformation of agriculture: the emergence of a new class of dynamic agricultural entrepreneurs, renewed proletarianization and land concentration, and intensification of social differentiation.     

Introduction to the special issue “small farms: decline or persistence?”

This issue of Agricultural Economics contains articles from a seminar entitled “Small Farms: Decline or Persistence?” held at the University of Kent. This issue includes nine papers selected from more than 50 papers presented at the seminar. Articles published use a range of econometric and simulation methods to provide a suite of case studies. Topics studied range from such fundamental issues as what constitutes a small farm to recent trends in the diversification of small farms and their integration into modern globalized food chains. Several papers emphasize the link between agricultural policy development and the future of small farms.     

Agrarian Change and Labour Supply in Turkey, 1950–1980

Agrarian structures based on small peasant property can have two opposite kinds of impact on urban wages. In the first type, stable smallholder farming bringing high returns puts upward pressure on wages. In the second type, smallholder farming that does not bring sufficient returns leads to semi‐proletarianization in which workers' access to rural sources of income functions as wage subsidy and puts downward pressure on wages. This paper argues that the situation in Turkey between 1950 and 1980 fits the second type. By pointing out the factors that changed the attitude of the migrant labourers towards class struggle from relative passivity to increasing militancy, it suggests that instead of the rural ties of the emerging working class, the main reason behind the dramatic rise in urban wages in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s was the working‐class struggle throughout the period.     

(Landlord) Theory from the South: Empire and estates on a Punjabi Frontier

Theory has occasionally shaped agrarian transformations. Utilitarian theory, for instance, influenced British colonial land revenue policies, while modernization theory spurred, via the Green Revolution, the development of capitalist farming across the global South. Yet scholarship, when it has probed the mediation of theory in agrarian change, has largely centred on the intellectual activities of Western figures. In this paper, I examine an under-appreciated theorizing actor: landlords in the global South. I explore landlords' concept-work in the former “Punjab Frontier,” a region where Baloch chiefs collaborated with the British Raj to acquire localized magisterial powers, a paramilitary apparatus, and immense “landed estates” (jagirs). To overcome various crises, certain chiefs engaged with various imperial concepts—namely, property, race, progress, contract, and freedom—and re-arranged their estates. By showing how these elites creatively embraced these concepts to maintain a colonial-fortified hegemony, I also challenge those who overstate the emancipatory and decolonial possibilities of theory from the South.     

Capitalist development in hostile conjunctures: War,dispossession, and class formation in Turkey

This article analyses how periods of geopolitical conflict and violence have affected the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey. We argue that all major episodes of conflict, violence and war—from forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the non‐Muslims in the late 19th and the early 20th century, to Kurdish secessionist warfare in the 1990s and the Syrian Civil War—have become major historical turning points in the development of historical capitalism in Turkey. These “hostile conjunctures” transformed capitalism through their direct and indirect effects on dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation. Although each of these conflicts produced a violent dispossession process, none of them resembled the rural dispossession process in England. To make sense of Turkey's experience, we turn our attention to what we call the “Castilian/Spanish road,” and what Lenin called the “Junker/Prussian road” and the “farmers/American road.” Our analysis shows that these differential paths of dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation have produced highly variegated rather than uniform outcomes. We conclude that we are living in a new “hostile conjuncture,” which is pregnant to a major structural crisis and is generating the preconditions of another historical transformation in the way capitalism operates.     

Essential agriculture,sacrificial labor,and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US South

As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H-2A visa program. Through a focus on H-2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.     

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

Histories of agrarian capitalism have often been constrained by the implications of Robert Brenner's work on the subject. This essay, employing archival and secondary research on Ecuador's long 19th century experiences with cacao capitalism, argues that production processes and localized forms of accumulation, rather than class structure and legal relations, should be included in our definition of the concept. By focusing on how fixed capital in cacao trees and the production of the yearly cacao commodity responded to global demand and local material conditions, I propose amplifying the concept of agrarian capitalism, as well as a rethinking of coastal Ecuador's history of capitalist development. I highlight how both absolute and relative forms of surplus value generation coexisted in coastal Ecuador's cacao haciendas, while demonstrating how financial instruments used for extending the cacao frontier undermined the prospects for long‐term growth.     

Dispossession through land titling: Legal loopholes and shadow procedures to urbanized forestlands in the Yucatán Peninsula

Under certain circumstances, land titling, property regime changes, and land-use conversions yield substantial profits. Yet few people possess the wealth, knowledge, and networks to benefit from these procedures. In the Yucatán Peninsula, a region recently targeted as a prominent investment location by the Mexican national government (mainly with the “Tren Maya” megaproject) and the private capital, forestlands collectively owned as ejidos by Mayan peasants are on the trend to complete privatization. Against the arguments of neo-institutional economists that in the 1990s promoted legal reforms and justified land-titling programmes worldwide to make available credit for uncapitalized peasants, individual land titling of commonly held lands in Mexico increased the overall economic value of the land, but not the investment in economic activities related to farmland and indigenous communities. Instead, those policies enabled land grabbing, dispossession, and urbanization. In this article, I describe recent private-led initiatives of ejido land titling that have redefined agricultural land's uses, meanings, and values for capitalist accumulation. In doing so, I explain how and why Mayan ejidatarios have been excluded from the monetary benefits of land titling, a top-bottom dispossession process only accomplished through shadow procedures and former privatization of ejidos' common lands.     

“We'll turn your water into Coca‐Cola”: The atomizing practices of oil palm plantation development in Indonesia

This article discusses land control strategies and practices for development of large‐scale oil palm plantations in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. In oil palm and “land grab” literature, much attention is paid to potential contributions of free, prior, and informed consent procedures. However, this article demonstrates how “atomizing” practices obstruct such procedures. Some practices stand out: During a preparatory phase of plantation development, companies remain in the background and leave actual land acquisition to local authorities and villagers, thus obscuring their agenda for plantation development. Second, rather than negotiating land transfer in public meetings, companies use a combination of promises, bribes, and threats to gain support or to enforce acceptance. Third, companies gain support by “wedging” themselves into communities, exacerbating disparities within communities. Analysis of this atomized process of plantation development is crucial for a critical understanding of oil palm conflicts.