Accumulation by Dispossession and Socio‐Environmental Conflicts Caused by the Expansion of Agribusiness in Argentina

Drawing upon the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, this paper analyses the expansion of agrarian capital in Argentina. A case study illustrates the social and environmental impacts of the expansion of agribusiness in central Argentina and the social struggle – both rural and urban – that has arisen to resist this process. Although government policies after the 2001 crisis differ in many ways from those of the 1990s, current agrarian policies are not significantly distinct from those followed during the pre‐crisis neoliberal period. Rather than ‘post‐neoliberal’, the new model could thus be better described as ‘neo‐extractivist’. With the connivance of the state, agribusiness is producing the largest‐ever transformation of natural capital into economic capital in the history of the region. Moreover, the latest policy developments suggest that Argentina is on the threshold of a new and deeper stage of agrarian capital expansion and wealth concentration, this time operating at a much larger scale.     

Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movements in Indonesia

This essay examines the convergences, tensions and mutual influences of agrarian and environmental movements in Indonesia and their connections to transnational movements under state-led development and neoliberal governance regimes. The authors argue that environmental movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century affected the strategies, struggles, mutual relations with, and public discourses of resurgent agrarian movements in diverse ways. Environmental movements had significant influences on national policy, law and practice within a decade of their emergence under the state-led development regime of President Suharto. Environmental activists used the appearance of technical 'apolitical' concerns to their advantage. They mobilized at multiple scales, targeting laws and other institutions of state power at the same time as organizing the grassroots. The repression of the Suharto regime forced agrarian reform activists underground, while environmental issues were mainstreamed. Agrarian movements in Indonesia today, under a decentralized regime dominated by neoliberal policies, have faced new opportunities and constraints due to national and transnational influences of environmental and agrarian reform discourses and networks. We show how these influences have changed the political fields within which Indonesian agrarian movement groups operate: forming, shifting and struggling over critical alliances.     

Poisoned,Dispossessed and Excluded: A Critique of the Neoliberal Soy Regime in Paraguay

This paper challenges the recent hailing of agricultural biotechnology as a panacea for food insecurity and rural poverty in countries of the global South. Based on an empirical investigation of the neoliberal soy regime in Paraguay, I document how the profound transformation of this country's agricultural mode of production over the past two decades, spurred by the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture and the biorevolution, has jeopardized rural livelihoods. In particular, I demonstrate how the transgenic soyization of Paraguay's agriculture has led to an increased concentration of landholdings, as well as the displacement and disempowerment of peasants and rural labourers who have been rendered surplus to the requirements of agribusiness capital. At the same time, the consolidation of this new agro‐industrial model has fostered a growing dependence on agrochemicals that compromise environmental quality and human health. Thus, I argue, a development policy based on industrial monocropping of genetically modified (GM) soy is inappropriate, unsustainable and unethical.     

The Lived Experience of Food Sovereignty: Gender,Indigenous Crops and Small‐Scale Farming in Mtubatuba,South Africa

Food sovereignty has become a powerful concept to critique the dominant global food regime. Although it has not taken root in South Africa as fiercely as elsewhere, we use this concept to explore how one small‐scale farmer seeks to wean herself from the dominant food system in the small town of Mtubatuba, KwaZulu‐Natal. Using ethnographic methods and in‐depth interviews about this single intense and extreme case, we explore this farmer's commitment and argue that it constitutes what we call the ‘lived experience of food sovereignty’. If food sovereignty is concerned with small‐farmer control over decisions about food cultivation, distribution and consumption, we examine this farmer's praxis and explore the obstacles she faces. These include gendered and racialized agrarian questions, land struggles, social reproduction and perceptions of her indigenous crops. We also examine the networks, knowledge, systems and methods that have allowed her to cultivate her self‐reliance.     

Can the State Foster Food Sovereignty? Insights from the Case of Ecuador

This paper contributes to the discussion on food sovereignty and the state by analysing the case of Ecuador. It presents a theoretical framework and literature review focused on the question of food sovereignty, the state and agrarian political economy. The case study of Ecuador, one of a handful of countries that has attempted to institutionalize food sovereignty in state policy, examines the political processes that led to the institutionalization of food sovereignty and the rural development and agricultural policies of the ‘post‐neoliberal’ government of Rafael Correa. The analysis of the Ecuadorian case concludes that the implementation of public policies reflecting food sovereignty principles has largely proven elusive, with the exception of some institutional changes and developments at the local levels of the state.     

BRICS varieties of capitalism and food regime reordering: A comparative institutional analysis

The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has sparked debates on the possibility of a ‘great transformation’ in the course of neoliberal capitalism and the global agrifood system. This paper seeks to contribute to these debates by providing a comparative institutional analysis of the BRIC(S) ‘varieties of capitalism’ in the current ‘food regime’ international reordering. Capital accumulation, social reproduction and politics are key problems of the ‘agrifood question’ in the BRIC(S) varieties of capitalism. My argumentation is that capitalist diversity stems largely from the historically embedded legacy of the agrarian question in each country, that the dynamics of the agrifood system influence their development trajectories in decisive ways, and that the BRIC(S)‐driven polycentric shifts in the contemporary food regime are crucial to the destiny of global capitalism.     

The hidden edifice of (food) sovereignty: Rights,territory, and the struggle for agrarian reform in Venezuela

This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the “sovereignty problem” in food sovereignty (FS) studies. Contemporary scholarship has largely struggled to answer the question of who or what is sovereign within the realm of FS politics—underpinned by the relocalisation of agrarian production, sustainable nature–society relations, and a radical democratisation of food systems. Although the most recent scholarship has made significant progress on this issue, I offer an alternative historical materialist account of sovereignty understood as the combination of rights and territory. From a critical Marxian perspective, I deconstruct the basis of sovereign power as the intersection between social property rights (exploitation) and territorial governance (political technology) congealed within both capital and the state. This approach thus provides some clarity as to the necessary breaks required to establish an FS regime (self‐directed labour and cooperative territorial governance). The framework is then applied to the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. While witnessing some important achievements, Venezuela's FS experiment has encountered a number of contradictions. As this case study shows, peasant struggles aiming to retake control over production and establish cooperative forms of governance must traverse the entire terrain of the state and thus affect a broader socialisation of society's sociopolitical infrastructures.     

Evo Morales and the MST in Bolivia: Continuities and Discontinuities in Agrarian Reform

There is a widespread understanding in critical scholarly literature that the government of Evo Morales is fundamentally challenging the neoliberal order in Bolivia. The empirical record of Morales' first five years in office, however, illustrates significant neoliberal continuities in the country's political economy. At the same time, the most important social movements that resisted neoliberalism prior to Morales' election have been considerably demobilized in its wake. This gives rise to the critique that the Morales government has merely implemented a more politically stable version of the model of accumulation it inherited. This paper draws on recent field research in Bolivia to make a contribution to this broader research agenda on reconstituted neoliberalism. Our focus is twofold. On the one hand, the paper examines the continuities of agrarian class relations from the INRA law at the height of neoliberalism in 1996 to the various agrarian reform initiatives introduced since Morales assumed office in 2006. On the other hand, the paper traces the mobilization of the Bolivian Landless Peasants' Movement (MST) in response to the failure of the 1996 neoliberal agrarian reform, followed by the movement's demobilization after Morales' 2006 agrarian reform initiative. The paper explores this demobilization in the context of agrarian relations that have remained largely unchanged in the same period. Finally, the paper draws on recent reflections by MST members who, to varying degrees, seem to be growing critical of Morales' failure to fundamentally alter rural class relations, and the difficulties of remobilizing their movement at the present time.     

Towards an agrarian question of circulation: Walmart's expansion in Chile and the agrarian political economy of supply chain capitalism

The central role that infrastructures of circulation and connectivity—logistical, financial, and digital—have come to perform in the reproduction of agro‐food systems calls for an expanded conception of agriculture that integrates dialectically the production of economic value and its subsequent realization in the sphere of exchange. Through the case of Walmart's expansion in Chile, and on the basis of a critical theorization of the circulation of capital, this paper proposes an agrarian question of circulation in which the apparently distinct realms of food production, transport, storage, and consumption are brought together into a contradictory and yet unitary whole. The case of Walmart Chile is illustrative of how the reconfiguration of spaces of urban mass consumption and the organizational restructuring of agro‐industrial hinterlands constitute each other in intricate ways. An agrarian question of circulation, the paper concludes, bears important political implications for rethinking the scope and extent of contemporary discussions on agrarian reform being put forward by transnational rural organizations.     

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.     

Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique

After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro-poor land policy that benefits small-scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross-class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left-wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.     

The Return of the State: Neocollectivism,Agrarian Politics and Images of Technological Progress in the MAS Era in Bolivia

The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party promised to break with neoliberal politics when it rose to power in Bolivia in 2006. Using the concept of neocollectivism to characterize MAS agrarian politics, this paper examines one of its key instruments for achieving rural development: the state enterprise EMAPA. This state company, which supports small producers, envisions a new agrarian structure of production and commercialization, one that will break the power of the Santa Cruz–based agro‐industrial elite. Drawing on a discussion of the mechanisms of governance employed by this state entity, we argue that new complexities in state–civil society relations and a low state capacity have constrained its ability to shift power relationships between the state and the agro‐industrial elites. Instead of reducing the dependency of small producers on agro‐industrial capital, the Bolivian state has increased it, thereby undermining its goal of redistribution. The paper also analyses different moments of politicization and depoliticization in the intervention process arising from the demand for political change, as well as for technically efficient and profitable agricultural production.     

The Conflicted State and Agrarian Transformation in Pink Tide Venezuela

Can radical political‐economic transformation be achieved by electoral regimes that have not thoroughly reconstructed the state? Contemporary Venezuela offers an optimal venue for examining this question. The Chavista movement did not replace the previous state: instead, its leaders attempted to reform existing state entities and establish new ones in pursuit of its transformation agenda. It has also used its oil wealth to support cooperatively‐oriented economic activity, without necessarily fundamentally altering the property structure. Thus, the social change‐oriented political economy exists alongside the traditional one. Focusing on agrarian transformation, we examine ethnographically how these factors have impacted the state's capacity to attain its goal of national food sovereignty. We find that the state's ability to accomplish this objective has been compromised by lack of agency‐level capacity, inter‐agency conflict and the persistence of the previously‐extant agrarian property structure. These dynamics have influenced the state to shift from its initial objective of food sovereignty to a policy of nationalist food security.     

Landownership Distribution,Socio‐Economic Precariousness and Empowerment: The Role of Small Peasants in Maresme County (Catalonia,Spain) from 1850 to the 1950s

I present fresh data that show the leading role played by smallholder peasants in land‐use intensification, technical improvement and landscape transformation in Maresme County (province of Barcelona, Spain) between 1850 and the 1950s. As a reaction to their precarious situation, caused by an unequal landownership distribution (which is assessed by looking at the minimum‐income and maximum workable farm sizes), smallholders drove agrarian changes in this coastal Mediterranean area. The results of their individual efforts, and their collective action through social mobilization and cooperatives, entailed a socio‐economic and political improvement, especially in denser populated areas closer to markets, until the arrival of Franco's regime.     

A Honey‐Sealed Alliance: Mayan Beekeepers in the Yucatan Peninsula versus Transgenic Soybeans in Mexico's Last Tropical Forest

The peasant economy of the Yucatan Peninsula is sustained by agriculture and beekeeping. Honey production has great economic importance, given that it represents the main source of income for Mayan rural families. Furthermore, Mexico is the world's fourth‐largest exporter of honey. The honey comes from jungle that covers the peninsular territory and forms part of a production system that broadly utilizes forestry resources. Two new situations emerged in 2011 that detonated social mobilization to defend beekeeping: the Mexican government authorized the planting of transgenic soybeans, while the European Union announced that honey that originated from transgenic pollen would have to be labelled (‘contains transgenics’), whereas honey importers demand transgenic‐free honey. The introduction of transgenic soybeans in the Yucatan Peninsula is part of the modern, industrial agricultural impetus in the region, which is entering into conflict with the Mayan peasant agriculture and threatens the survival of the most important Mexican tropical forest. A movement alliance was built among different social actors, including Mayan communities, beekeeper and civil‐society organizations, universities and honey‐exporting entrepreneurs, who developed an opposition and a resistance strategy to the cultivation of transgenic soybeans. Their repertoire has included collective legal, educational and organizational action, scientific research, mobilization, information, a media presence and lobbying. This mobilization has yielded results, as in 2015 the judiciary power invalidated the authorization of the cultivation of transgenic soybeans.     

United States–Cuba Agricultural Relations and Agrarian Questions

In the wake of Cuba's far‐reaching, halting economic reforms, geopolitical rapprochement and trade openings with the United States (US) offer opportunities and risks for Cuban small‐scale farmers and agrarian cooperatives: pressures, paradoxes and potential abound. Meanwhile, on the margins, agro‐ecologically oriented tours bring admiring US students, farmers and agrarian advocates. Cubans concur that the country must solve key problems in its agricultural sector to overcome the contradictions of its agri‐food model, and that this entails more exchange with the US – but in what capacity and on what terms? The current crossroads begs the classic agrarian question, even as it updates it. Having experienced and survived the promises and disasters of both capitalist and communist agricultural economies, Cuban farmers expand the original ‘peasant’ protagonist. As they navigate new non‐state markets and recent re‐entrenchment of state control of prices, Cuban farmers and cooperatives struggle to avoid monopolizing tendencies of unfettered capitalist as well as communist agricultural economies – both of which have historically been ecologically damaging. US agribusiness courts Cuba, but not as mere unidirectional capture: Cubans are inviting and leveraging trade to end the embargo, which is increasingly being modified altogether. Key Cuban agrarian principles of resilience and cooperativismo have persisted through capitalist and communist crises: could they influence prospects for agro‐industrial hegemony from the North?      

Maize Diversity and the Political Economy of Agrarian Restructuring in Guatemala

The neoliberal restructuring of agriculture is often predicated on the promise of a more efficient food system: other objectives, such as access to food, the environmental sustainability of production practices, the nutritional composition of diets and the rights of food producers, are largely ignored. In this paper, I document how the liberalization of trade and agricultural policies in Guatemala has undermined the latter set of objectives, thereby compromising domestic food sovereignty and global food security. In particular, I demonstrate how neoliberal policies have undermined maize agriculture and contributed to the loss of crop genetic resources in the Guatemalan ‘megacentre’ of agricultural biodiversity. In its place, small‐scale farmers have been encouraged to conform to the country's purported comparative advantage in non‐traditional export crops. The results have been widening inequality, a growing dependence upon imported grain and agrochemicals, environmental degradation and decreased food security.     

Safe food,green food,good food: Chinese Community Supported Agriculture and the rising middle class

The growth of China's middle class is driving an expansion of interest in ‘green’ and sustainable food, food that is perceived to be healthy, safe and environmentally friendly. Self-consciously ‘sustainable’ agriculture is a new phenomenon in China, but it has emerged from, and builds upon, an agrarian history that is markedly different from that of the West. In this paper, we address the relationship between the Chinese middle class, an overwhelmingly urban group, and Chinese sustainable agriculture, a largely urban-oriented enterprise, from the perspective of our work in establishing and operating Beijing's first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. We discuss the farm's environmental and institutional sustainability, situating its development within the larger context of contemporary Chinese agriculture, and we examine the potential for future success with CSA models in China based on evidence from this case.     

How financial investment distorts food prices: evidence from U.S. grain markets

Convergence between commodity futures prices and the underlying physical assets at each contract's expiration date is a pivotal condition for the market's functioning. Between 2005 and 2010, convergence failed for several U.S. grain markets. This article presents a price pressure‐augmented commodity storage model that links the scale of nonconvergence to financial investment channeled through indices, which are traded in commodity futures markets. The model is empirically tested, using Markov regime‐switching regression analysis. Regression results strongly support the model's predicted link between index investment and the extent of nonconvergence for three grains traded at the Chicago Board of Trade: wheat, corn, and soybeans.