Labour‐intensive road construction in periurban areas — A case study

In the development of any area the provision of roads is a vital requirement. At one underdeveloped area near Durban the opportunity arose to build a low cost, low standard road for a population who needed it but had no prospect of it ever being built. The money was provided through the Government's job creation scheme and 80 percent of it was spent on wages. A comparison is made between labour‐intensive and the conventional plant‐intensive methods of construction.     

The afterlife of living under contract,an epilogue

This epilogue summarizes key challenges in the critical study of contract farming (CF) that are highlighted in this special issue, and it utilizes our co-edited volume Living under contract as the platform to ask what has been learned and what questions remain nearly three decades after the book's publication. It discusses the political and historical moment of the late 1980s when our CF project was started and the neo-liberal roots of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) were firmly implanted, especially in Africa—the regional focus of our book. We argue that this neoliberal turn continues to shape many topics addressed in this special issue, including the role of the state, labour and land (and ecology) relations, and the vertical integration of CF within global values chains. The epilogue concludes with a plea for more systematic comparisons and “big picture” analyses that highlight how space, local agrarian formations and classes, state powers, and materiality (the commodity itself) shape the character and dynamics of CF schemes.