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.     

Agrarian Poverty,Nutrition and Economic Class – A Study of Gujarat,India

This paper analyses poverty and calorific undernourishment in the Indian state of Gujarat, where high and market‐led industrial growth has resulted in rapid economic improvement. The study is carried out through a combination of secondary and survey‐based data. We conclude that the neoliberal agenda of uncontrolled, outward‐looking growth has not resulted in significant reduction of poverty or malnourishment in rural areas. Furthermore, while land ownership is officially used as a proxy for wealth distribution, class position appears a better predictor of poverty status in the rural areas than landownership per se. At the policy level, there is a need to revive the agrarian economy and create new non‐agricultural assets, and the primary focus in the state must shift to the distribution of created assets rather than a single‐minded focus on growth.     

Reframing ‘Crisis’ in Fair Trade Coffee Production: Trajectories of Agrarian Change in Nicaragua

A focus on crisis provides a methodological window to understand how agrarian change shapes producer engagement in fair trade. This orientation challenges a separation between the market and development, situating fair trade within global processes that incorporate agrarian histories of social change and conflict. Reframing crisis as a condition of agrarian life, rather than emphasizing its cyclical manifestation within the global economy, reveals how market‐driven development encompasses the material conditions of peoples' existence in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Drawing on the case of coffee production in Nicaragua, experiences of crisis demonstrate that greater attention needs to be paid to the socioeconomic and political dimensions of development within regional commodity assemblages to address entrenched power relations and unequal access to land and resources. This questions moral certainties when examining the paradox of working in and against the market, and suggests that a better understanding of specific trajectories of development could improve fair trade's objective of enhancing producer livelihoods.     

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?