Migration and agrarian transformation in Indigenous Mexico

Migration is of particular concern to Indigenous peoples and communities. It physically separates those who migrate from the land upon which collective processes of labour and ritual practice are often based, it affects congruence between individual and collective rationality (as migrants make the choice to maintain or relinquish community membership), and it robs communities of the adult residents who can be essential for projects of collective action. Using the concept of comunalidad, created by Indigenous intellectuals in Oaxaca, Mexico to analyse the importance of alternative practices surrounding land, labour, governance, and ritual found in the region, we show that while Indigenous villages are profoundly affected by different forms of migration, migration itself is not necessarily a “death knell” for Indigenous peasants. We argue that communities struggle—often successfully—to find ways to evolve and reconfigure themselves economically and politically, incorporating migration into the fabric of their daily lives and organizational structures. To make this argument, we draw on ethnographic research conducted with Indigenous Oaxacan transnational communities, both in the United States and Mexico.     

In Search of Pathways out of Poverty: Mapping the Role of International Labour Migration,Agriculture and Rural Labour

The issue of rural poverty continues to shape critical academic and policy discourses in the global South. In such discourses, some scholars and policy‐makers highlight non‐agrarian pathways leading to prosperity, while others continue to emphasize the significance of land and farming for poverty reduction. However, such analyses tend not only to obscure strong linkages between agriculture, migration and rural labour, but also stay silent on how rural people interpret changes or continuities in their livelihoods. In this paper, I focus on the case of rural Nepal to unfold how some rural people, but not others, improve their livelihoods through international labour migration, farming and rural labour. This paper reveals that many poor people have experienced improved livelihoods pursuing a diverse portfolio of agricultural and non‐agricultural activities including labour migration. However, the dispossession of poor people from land and their adverse incorporation into the local and international labour markets continue to perpetuate chronic poverty.     

Agriculture,Land Tenure and International Migration in Rural Guatemala

In this paper, we ask what the effects of migration and remittances are on land tenure, agriculture and forests, based on empirical evidence from four rural communities in Guatemala. Our results suggest that remittances improve migrant families' access to agricultural land which – depending on the context – fosters more equitable local land distribution patterns or land concentration by migrant families. Changes in the political economy of the country also combine to stimulate these patterns, while remittances contribute to secure land rights held by migrant households. But even though migrant households are acquiring more land, the trend does not change the traditional pattern of land distribution in the country. Regarding forests, significant changes were not observed in two of the communities, while in one we observed forest decline and in the last, forest recovery. A trend away from reliance on the land for survival results in forest recovery.     

Labour Migration and Gendered Agricultural Relations: The Feminization of Agriculture in the Ejidal Sector of Calakmul,Mexico

We examine the nature of the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in the semi‐subsistence, peasant production sector of southeastern Mexico, as associated with male labour out‐migration. Presenting findings from empirical work with smallholder producers, we discuss the impact of men's migration to the United States on women's participation in agriculture and gendered relations of agricultural production. In 2007, we conducted a survey of 155 semi‐subsistence, smallholder households in six ejidos. This survey was supplemented by ethnographic research in a single ejido. Our findings demonstrate the need to distinguish between farm labour and management in this sector, and the potentially significant (but focused) changes in the local relations of agricultural production wrought by gendered patterns of labour migration – specifically in tenure, land‐use decision‐making and the management of hired labour.     

Rural in-migration and agricultural development: Evidence from Zambia

While a considerable body of literature has developed in recent years around the drivers and consequences of rural out-migration in sub-Saharan Africa, relatively little work has been done to understand the impacts of migration into rural areas. We use nationally representative household survey data from Zambia to explore the relationship between rural in-migration and agricultural productivity outcomes in receiving communities. We document high levels of rural in-migration throughout Zambia—12% of rural household heads having moved from elsewhere within the previous 10 years—with two-thirds of rural in-migrants originating from other rural areas. Migrants are, on average, better endowed with capital resources than their nonmigrant neighbors and are more engaged with input and output markets. After controlling for other factors, we find that higher rates of rural in-migration are associated with greater agricultural productivity outcomes in receiving communities. These positive associations are particularly pronounced in more remote rural areas, and where in-migration originates from other rural areas. Taken together, our results suggest that rural in-migrants play an important role in the rural transformation processes underway in Zambia.     

Female Labour Supply and Intergenerational Preference Formation: Evidence for Mexico

Using a nationally representative sample for Mexico, we analyse the effect of a husband having a working mother on the probability that he has a working wife. Our results show that labour force participation by a husband's mother increases the probability of the labour force participation of his wife by 15 percentage points. The effect is mainly driven by males with less than high school education. One possible confounding factor is the effect of labour force participation of the wife's mother on the wife's labour participation decision. However, in a different sample, we do not find any effect of work force participation of wives' mothers on wives' decisions to join the labour force. Finally, we test the effect of work force participation by a husband's mother on the husband's preferences regarding child-rearing practices. We find that having a working mother strongly reduces the probability that daughters will be tasked to care for siblings and fosters preferences for a more egalitarian allocation of educational resources among children. Hence, promoting female labour force participation can have important dynamic implications, especially for developing countries.     

劳动力转移、资本深化与农地流转

随着工业化和城镇化的深入,大量农村劳动力外出工作,户均资本投入增加,农业生产趋于资本深化,农地流转市场日渐活跃,过往的研究大多关注劳动力转移对农地流转的影响,少有提及资本深化是否及如何影响农地流转。本文首先建立了相关影响机制并提出研究假说,进而使用CFPS数据进行检验,不仅估算资本深化对农地流转的直接影响,也分析劳动力转移如何通过资本深化间接改变农地流转。研究结果表明,劳动力转移显著地促进了农户农业生产的资本深化进程,资本对劳动力投入进行了替代,同时,资本深化显著提升了种粮大户的农地经营规模。如果将农地流转细分为转入与转出,资本深化促进了转入,但抑制了转出。本研究对于优化农地资源配置,提高农地规模经营水平,促进农业生产提供了新的研究视角。     

Fishermen’s competitiveness and labour market performance: Evidence from shrimpers in Bangladesh

We conduct an experiment to determine competitiveness among shrimpers who engage in collecting shrimp seeds in the southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh. We then examine how competitiveness affects the labour supply decisions and labour market performance of these shrimpers. Our results show that shrimpers who prefer competition are more productive than shrimpers who do not prefer competition. Competitive shrimpers secure better prices and earn higher incomes selling their catches. We estimate that their wage elasticity of participation ranges from 0.4 to 0.5, which is consistent with preferences under neoclassical assumptions. Competitive shrimpers have a slightly greater wage elasticity than non-competitive shrimpers, suggesting that they might be more responsive to expected earnings. Our results have important policy implications for the efficient management of common pool resources.     

Land size and productivity in the livestock sector: evidence from pastoral areas in China

This article explores the relationship between land size and productivity in the livestock sector. Household panel data from pastoral areas in northwestern China were analysed. Results suggest an inverse relationship (IR) between land size and the number of livestock per ha. IR can be largely explained by labour input intensity, which is negatively correlated with land size. We find that household’s labour demand is not separable from household’s labour supply and households’ decisions to rent land and hire labour for grazing are significantly related to the labour–land endowment ratio. These findings are consistent with the Chayanovian explanation that labour input intensity varies with farm size due to unobserved interhousehold variation in shadow wage rates. In addition, participation in the labour market does not significantly influence the IR for the employer, while the practice of land renting reduces, but does not eliminate, the IR for the lease. These findings point towards the potential for using factor markets to optimise pasture‐based livestock production scale, and the need to promote the factor market development to achieve efficiency in resource use.     

Unequal access to land and the current migration crisis

How does the crisis of migration relate to unequal access to land? In what ways can unequal access to land help to explain the migration crisis today? And, how does a focus on land differ from and is superior to existing mainstream analyses and hence extend our understanding of the crisis of migration? Based on comments made by Henry George in Social Problems (1883) and a methodology he espoused in The Science of Political Economy (1898), I argue that much of the crisis of migration can be understood as driven or accentuated by the crisis of land, to wit, inequality, poverty, and other social problems arising from unequal access to land. The role of land in the story of migration varies over time and this temporal feature influences the direction or spatial aspect of migration. The argument is not that all forms of migration in all their complexities arise from unequal access to land but that the myriad of social problems and policies driving the mass migration of people cannot be satisfactorily resolved or fully understood without addressing the class-based land question. If so, mere pro-migration policy − whether it is of the neoliberal or humanistic hue − is not a panacea, especially when the destination settlements have similarly monopolistic land ownership structures. The conservative, nationalist, and nativist stance linked to Garrett Hardin’s ideas in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (1968) and ‘lifeboat ethics: the case against helping the poor’ (1974) is worse because erecting borders is another form of monopolising the commons and land and hence is likely to intensify the inequality and social problems that underpin the global migration crisis. Creating equal access to land in both origin and destination settlements, granting social protection to migrants, especially those in work relations, and granting permanent status to migrants, while providing them and locals with excellent public services and enabling them to contribute to the common wealth in the destination settlement would constitute a much better approach to addressing the migration crisis. This Georgist approach, focusing on the class and the resulting social problems engendered by unequal access to land at different scales in the migration process is more holistic, distinct from and superior to the mainstream approach centred on dysfunctional states, the erection of borders, individual self-interest in driving the migration process, the commodification of labour without social protection, and economic growth without structural redistribution.     

The influence of risk preferences,knowledge, land consolidation,and landscape diversification on pesticide use

Researchers have spent substantial effort to identify factors influencing pesticide use intensity. However, few studies have compared the relative importance of these factors. This study examines four categories of factors that potentially influence farmers’ pesticide use decisions by evaluating incentivized experiment data, farm survey data, and remote sensing data in China. Our results suggest that land diversification has the largest effect on farmers’ pesticide use. Compared with the most rice-intensive landscape type, less rice-intensive systems cause farmers to spray less on middle rice. Heavy pesticide use intensity is associated with land fragmentation as small-scale farms still dominate crop production. Farmers’ integrated pest management knowledge has significant effects on pesticide use. We also find that loss and ambiguity preferences, rather than risk preferences, are more likely to affect pesticide use intensity.     

弱保障而强影响：农村土地权益与女性农业转移人口迁移

研究目的:在农村土地权益对农业转移人口迁移的影响作用突显而人口迁移又反过来影响其在农村土地权益处置的现实背景下,研究中国农业转移人口土地权益的性别差异以及迁移行为对土地权益处置影响的性别差异,为制度政策的制定与完善提供依据。研究方法:利用中国流动人口动态监测调查(CMDS)2017年339个城市或地区数据分析中国农业转移人口土地权益的性别差异,构建Logit模型从微观个体的视角分析农业转移人口的迁移对其农村土地权益处置的影响及性别差异。研究结果:(1)女性农业转移人口的迁移对承包地是否自行耕种的影响比男性更大,主要是在婚姻中的女性迁移影响显著强于男性;(2)女性农业转移人口的迁移对承包地是否转租的影响比男性略强,东部和中部地区农业转移人口迁移时间的影响显著而西部和东北地区的影响则不显著。研究结论:与男性相比,女性的农村土地权益保障较弱,但是女性的非农迁移对其家庭农村土地权益流转的影响较强。     

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District,North‐West Cambodia

In Cambodia, the interactions between large‐scale land investment and land titling gathered particular momentum in 2012–13, when the government initiated an unprecedented upland land titling programme in an attempt to address land tenure insecurity where large‐scale land investment overlaps with land appropriated by peasants. This paper is based on a spatially explicit ethnography of land rights conducted in the Samlaut district of north‐west Cambodia – a former Khmer Rouge resistance stronghold – in a context where the enclosures are both incomplete and entangled with post‐war, socially embedded land tenure systems. We discuss how this new pattern of fragmentation affects the prevailing dynamics of agrarian change. We argue that it has introduced new forms of exclusion and a generalized perception of land tenure uncertainty that is managed by peasants through the actualization of hybrid land tenure arrangements borrowing from state rules and local consensus. In contrast with common expectations about land formalization, the process reinforces the patterns of social differentiation initiated by land rent capture practices of early migrants and pushes more vulnerable peasants into seeking wage labour and resorting to job migration.     

POTENTIAL GAINS FROM THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON LAND: A REPLY

This reply outlines the experience underlying the assumptions in the previous note by Baxter and Bottomley, referring particularly to conditions in Tripolitania. There is no dispute that increases in gross rural product can be expected from the enclosure of common land. It is argued in this reply that this will be accomplished by a migration of labour and capital to the hitherto commonly held land, while Baack's model leads him to suppose the opposite. Baack's theory is used to show that the authors of the original note would still be right if dynamics were introduced into the analysis. It is agreed that Baack's analysis can be used to make the assumptions upon which the origibal note was based more precise as well as to add an additional source of gain not previously considered.     

Chinese Peasant Choices: Migration,Rural Industry or Farming

A nationally representative rural labour force survey of China is analysed to explore the allocation of labour among farming, local non-farming and temporary migration activities. Various tests of labour market segmentation are conducted. The estimated returns to labour off the farm greatly exceed those on the farm. The personal and household determinants of activities, and of days worked in them, are examined for demand or supply constraints on employment; some results are consistent with the former. The relationship between days worked off and on the farm suggests that the opportunity cost to households of non-farm work is very low. The evidence is consistent with there being rationing of non-farm employment. However, tastes, imperfect information, imperfect capital markets, risk-aversion and transaction costs are also relevant. The overcoming of the obstacles to diversification away from farming is important for rural development in China.     

Are Household Production Decisions Cooperative? Evidence on Pastoral Migration and Milk Sales from Northern Kenya

Market-based development efforts frequently create opportunities to generate income from goods previously produced and consumed within the household. Production within the household is often characterized by a gender and age division of labor. Market development efforts to improve well-being may lead to unanticipated outcomes if household production decisions are noncooperative. We develop and test models of household decision making to investigate intrahousehold decision making in a nomadic pastoral setting from Kenya. Our results suggest that household decisions are contested, with husbands using migration decisions to resist wives' ability to market milk.     

压煤村庄搬迁与"挂钩流转"政策相结合时的问题及对策研究——以兖州市为例

研究目的:在建设用地指标异常紧张的情况下,为顺利推进压煤村庄搬迁提供途径。研究方法:资料综合分析法、对比法和实证分析法。研究结果:压煤村庄搬迁与"挂钩流转"政策相结合时存在4大难题,提出了解决方法。研究结论:压煤村庄搬迁与"挂钩流转"政策相结合是可行的。但应适当放宽周转指标归还时间和对耕地数量质量的要求,优先开采能复垦出耕地的村庄下的煤炭资源,尽快归还挂钩周转指标。     

Migration,remittances and smallholder decision-making: Implications for land use and livelihood change in Central America

We model Central American migrant-sending household agricultural practices given labor losses and the concomitant infusion of remittances. Under the new economics of labor migration (NELM) framework, it is hypothesized that smallholder farm households invest remittance income in their land either to increase crop production or to transition to cattle ranching. We test this hypothesis by developing a combination of multivariate logistic, Poisson and beta regression techniques using Latin American Migration Project data to determine how agricultural land use change compared among migrant and non-migrant households in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Results indicate that a rise in months spent abroad and remittances returned do not translate into a higher percentage of farm sales, intensification or transition to cattle ranching – counter to NELM. However, farmers are investing remittances to increase row crop and pasture land holdings. These findings suggest remittance investments in quantitative increase rather than qualitative change in land use practices. Given the expansive land demands supporting low intensity smallholder agriculture and cattle, and the land degradation cattle precipitate particularly, the trend does not augur well for the sustainability of rural landscapes increasingly transformed by international remittances. Appropriate policies to champion coupled human-land system sustainability in Central America might usefully consider viable land use alternatives to remittance investments dedicated to crop and pasture expansion.     

Productivity of Agricultural Labour and Land: An International Comparison

This paper examines partial agricultural land and labour productivity in 1975 and 1980, for different world regions. The results suggest that land and labour productivity are higher in developed countries relative to developing countries. However, agricultural labour productivity differences are more marked than those for agricultural land productivity. The productivity values for 1975 and 1980 indicate a widening of productivity differences, more so in the case of agricultural labour than land. The paper also proposes an alternative approach to estimating agricultural land and labour productivity. This approach, which regresses agricultural labour productivity on a given level of agricultural land productivity, suggests a narrowing of agricultural land productivity differences, relative to the initial approach, across Africa, Asia and Europe during the 1975-1980 period. A brief discussion of the agricultural development policy implications of the results concludes the paper.     

Oil Palm Expansion among Smallholder Farmers in Sumatra,Indonesia

Many tropical regions are experiencing a rapid growth of oil palm cultivation. In Indonesia, the world's leading palm oil producer, in addition to large companies, smallholder farmers are increasingly engaged in the oil palm sector. Smallholder oil palm cultivation may contribute to income gains and socio‐economic development. However, land‐use decisions by smallholders are not well understood. Without appropriate policies, negative social and environmental consequences can also occur. To improve the knowledge base, we use data about present and past land‐use decisions from a survey of farm households in Sumatra. Employing duration models, we analyse the determinants and dynamics of oil palm adoption among smallholders. We find that independently operating farmers are currently driving growth rates in the oil palm sector. Smallholder adoption decisions are mainly attributable to regional and village level factors. While the current adoption primarily occurs outside of contracts, previous contractual ties between companies and other farmers in the same village play an important role for individual decisions. Beyond initial adoption, we also analyse later expansion decisions. While expanding the oil palm area subsequent to initial adoption is common among all types of adopters, those without previous contracts are found to expand significantly faster. We conclude that the concessions the government has allocated to palm oil companies in the past have initiated oil palm adoption in the small farm sector, but that the ensuing land‐use dynamics are mostly beyond government control. Some wider implications are discussed.