Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature‐based Conflicts in R7iacute;o San Juan,Nicaragua

This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Río San Juan, Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors, from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers, absentee cattle raisers, timber dealers, transnational corporations, and non‐governmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource‐related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political‐economic processes and environment‐development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.     

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.     

Mercantile Transformations: Understanding the State,Global Debt and Philippine Agriculture

This paper examines an important continuity in the political economy of the Philippines: the interplay between domestic merchant capitalists and the state over the role of the state in the Philippine economy. During the Marcos regime, this interplay increasingly took the form of competition between state mercantile interests and ‘private’ merchant interests. This competition is still being played out. To better understand the nature of the competition, consideration is focused on two essential contemporary facts: the Philippines has a major external debt crisis and the Philippines, still predominantly an agrarian country, suffers from stagnant productivity growth and enduring rural poverty. While the Philippine external debt problem can be attributed in significant part to various international hegemonic interests, the analysis concludes that the characteristics of the crisis primarily reflect changing state/class/economy configurations within the Philippines. These same configurations, in turn, significantly influence the implications of the external debt crisis on Philippine agriculture.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Labour after Land Reform: The Precarious Livelihoods of Former Farmworkers in Zimbabwe

What happens to labour when major redistributive land reform restructures a system of settler colonial agriculture? This article examines the livelihoods of former farmworkers on large‐scale commercial farms who still live in farm compounds after Zimbabwe's land reform. Through a mix of surveys and in‐depth biographical interviews, four different types of livelihood are identified, centred on differences in land access. These show how diverse, but often precarious, livelihoods are being carved out, representing the ‘fragmented classes of labour’ in a restructured agrarian economy. The analysis highlights the tensions between gaining new freedoms, notably through access to land, and being subject to new livelihood vulnerabilities. The findings are discussed in relation to wider questions about the informalization of the economy and the role of labour and employment in a post‐settler agrarian economy, where the old ‘farmworker’ label no longer applies.     

Regional Forest Agreements: Resolving Resource Conflicts or Managing Resource Politics?

Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) are the latest institutional response to conflict over the allocation, use and management of forests in Australia. RFAs involve a process of resource assessment leading to a long-term agreement between federal and state governments. This paper examines the approach to assessment being used in RFAs with reference to the literature on the practice of resource and environmental assessment and the changing shape of intergovernmental relations in Australia. It concludes that RFAs have not succeeded in resolving conflict over forestry, as was intended, but have successfully managed forest politics, both between governments and in the broader policy community.     

Mother,Child, Race,Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption

‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transracial adoption, which became the subject of debate in the USA during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and were at least as much about symbolic debates over race as the fate of particular children. Together, these visual and familial practices made US foreign and domestic poverty policy intelligible as a debate over whether to save women and children. When they cast the USA as rescuer, they made it all but impossible to understand what US political, military or economic power had to do with creating the problem.     

Fulfilling Promises of More Substantive Democracy? Post‐neoliberalism and Natural Resource Governance in South America

Benefiting from the commodity boom, progressive governments across South America have sought to move away from the neoliberal policies adopted previously by strengthening the role of the state and using revenues from commodity exports to address social concerns. This approach, often called neo‐extractivism, has become the main development strategy over the past 15 years. Yet, the increasingly intensive and extensive natural resource exploitation underlying this development strategy has also led to multiple protests and contestations across South America. This article thus examines the relationship between neo‐extractivism as a development strategy and the quality of democracy under progressive governments in South America. On the one hand, neo‐extractivism has allowed states to become more inclusive by paying attention to social concerns which in turn has been an important element in the legitimacy of progressive governments. On the other hand, the reliance on neo‐extractivism as the main development strategy poses important constraints on the ability of post‐neoliberal states to build more substantive democracies which could take into account a variety of positions, give citizens a say in decisions directly affecting their livelihoods, and promote public debates on key questions confronting society.     

Intense Paradoxes of Memory: Researching Moral Questions About Remembering the Socialist Past

In 2007 two researchers embarked upon a project on the “social construction of the socialist past in eastern Germany”. The project sought to explore how the socialist past is remembered today, and the moral ambiguities condensed in memories. This is particularly relevant in eastern Germany, where debates about how to interpret the socialist past continue to strive. However, it soon became apparent that doing such an ethnographic project is no easy task. Both researchers became sucked into the debates they sought to explore, including the question of who people had been during GDR (German Democratic Republic, former East Germany) times and whether this mattered. Using the ethnographic self as a resource, this article explores the ethics of complicity or detachment in fieldwork situations where the researcher was invited to make judgements. It argues that ethnographers need to address the question of value‐judgements openly in their fieldwork, since they form an intrinsic part of all our humanity.     

Fuelling Social Inclusion? Neo‐extractivism,State–Society Relations and Biofuel Policies in Latin America's Southern Cone

Scholarship on neo‐extractivism agrees that this ‘post‐neoliberal’ model of development is founded on an inherent contradiction between the commitment to continue natural resource extraction and the need to legitimize these activities by using their revenues for poverty reduction. Using the cases of the national biofuel policies of the ‘post‐neoliberal’ governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, this article enquires why and how these policies emerged, how they were implemented, and how the resulting national experiences exemplify the inherent contradictions embedded in neo‐extractivist policies. Adopting a strategic‐relational approach to analyse state–society interaction, it is argued that the scope of progressive policies is conditioned to a large extent by pre‐existing social structures, institutions and state–society interactions. The article shows how progressive reforms intersect with the prevailing interests of agribusiness and state actors and are recast and used for different ends as these interact with powerful actors such as the multinational soybean complex and agrarian movements. It is suggested that the prevailing over‐emphasis in the neo‐extractivist literature on the politics of domination and contestation overlooks the multiple and complex rural responses of the different progressive governments. It also obscures the possibilities to explore the ruptures and continuities of these countries’ governments with previous models, and therefore fails to recognize state advances.     

Active Learning for Understanding Land Degradation: African Catchment Game and Riskmap

Land degradation is the result of the intersection of a complex set of biophysical and socio‐economic factors. The capacity of an individual or community to address land degradation is likewise constrained. While it is quite possible for professionals and learners to grasp the main issues around land degradation from a theoretical perspective, internalising the reality of what it means to be the resource degrader is more difficult. We have developed two active learning methods that aim to address this problem. The first is the African Catchment Game, a role‐playing game based on Graham Chapman's Green Revolution Game, adapted for the southern Africa context and incorporating a land degradation component. In this game participants play out the complex dynamics of rural‐urban‐global linkages against a background of environmental hazards. The second is based on Save the Children Fund's RiskMap computer simulation that models risk in terms of rural livelihoods for different income groups. Ethiopia is used as the example. This paper evaluates the two active learning techniques as tools for exploring the relationships between land degradation and poverty through an evaluation of participants’ experiences. The analysis shows clear potential for developing alternative teaching curricula that are aligned to our theoretical understanding.     

Loggers,Development Agents and the Exercise of Power in Amazonia

Many believe that Amazonian communities could benefit from the growing market for timber through self‐governed approaches to forest management. However, there is no clear understanding of how communities are to develop such approaches given logging frontiers that are characterized by informal negotiations with loggers and community forestry initiatives that are promoted by development agents. This article reports on research from four study areas in Bolivia, Brazil and Peru which reveals that external players exercise considerable power over communities. First, loggers and development agents impose forest management schemes directly on communities, hindering them from developing their own approaches. Second, paternalistic relationships with loggers and development agents prevent communities from identifying common interests and expressing these through their representative organizations. Finally, loggers and development agents use powerful discourses to shape acceptable schemes in forest management, silencing communities’ voices in debates. Through these different power mechanisms, external agents thwart the emergence of self‐governed community management approaches.     

THE “ROUTINE‐SCAPE” AND SOCIAL STRUCTURALIZATION IN THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

Recent archaeo‐botanical research has suggested that the introduction of farming did not immediately cause a sufficient shift in subsistence strategy to form an agrarian society but that the process took as long as hundreds of years. It is therefore suggested that it was not the farming technique in itself but the establishment of routinized day‐to‐day activity patterns and world views associated with farming that eventually led to the formation of a new social structure. The holistic concept of a dynamic day‐today routine and its associated physical and conceptual landscape is termed routine‐scape through which the process of agrarian society formation in Japan is examined around 1000–500 bce when paddy rice farming was introduced from China to Japan. A new crop storage system of a raised‐floor granary was also adopted as a part of the rice‐farming routine, which resulted in changing the Japanese routine‐scape. The community leaders increasingly associated the granary with both symbolic and practical significance; alongside controlling the storage‐related routine they finally gained centralized power. This paper indicates that agriculture brought along a new range of routine activities and their dynamic interactions with landscape produced new social structures.     

Social Movements and the Politicization of Chronic Poverty

Discussions of chronic poverty emphasize the extent to which poverty endures because of the social relationships and structures within which particular social groups are embedded. In this sense chronic poverty is a socio‐political relationship rather than a condition of assetless‐ness. Understood as such, processes of social mobilization become central to any discussion of chronic poverty because they are vehicles through which such relationships are argued over in society and potentially changed. This article explores the ways in which social movements, as one form of such mobilization, might affect chronic poverty. Four domains are discussed: influencing the underlying dynamics of the political economy of poverty; challenging dominant meanings of poverty in society; direct effects on the assets of the poor; and engaging with the state. The inherent fragilities of social movements limit these contributions, the most important of which is to destabilize taken‐for‐granted, hegemonic discourses on poverty and its reduction.     

Reviving Agrarian Studies in South‐East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy

This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South‐East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away from anthropology and political science and towards a geographical focus. This is explained both by institutional factors, as a large international research programme based in (but not limited to) geography has taken the lead on the revival, and also by the substantive shift in agrarian studies away from narrowly local village ethnographies or broad‐based scholarship inspired by Cold War concerns, towards a multi‐scale and contextualised approach in which environment, globalisation, migration, territorial expansion, spatial inequality, and other key geographical themes have framed explorations of agrarian change.     

Geography and the study of Third World underdevelopment re-revisited

Progress in development geography has been recently associated with the shift of the perspective on underdevelopment from a right-wing, conservative standpoint to a leftward, liberal-radical position. Marxism often conceals its message in obscure rhetoric with moral overtones on colonialism, slavery, poverty, and underdevelopment. Liberal academics have lamely acceded to the dogmas of this once-assertive ideology. Marxist view have exerted a stimulus on debates, but could not provide answers to the issues of this discipline. The hopes of development and prosperity a generation ago have evaporated only to be replaced by news of economic malaise, the food crisis, and crushing debt. In the late 1980's geographers addressed Third World environmental issues. Blaikie and Brookfield examined environmental deterioration among elements of the population-environment issue. Lewis and Berry dealt with African environments and resources. Watts and Bassett touched on agrarian and political concerns in West Africa. Adams examined water resources development in Nigeria's Sokoto Valley. Bryceson analyzed the political economy of agriculture in Tanzania. Lawson depicted how government policy bore on agriculture and its regional pattern. Crush detailed the absorption of Swazi labor into the South African economy. Dayal described the deficiency diet of agricultural workers in Bangladesh. Others examined Africa's financial disaster, Japan's trade surplus, and the global population crisis. Nevertheless, the dearth of output on and neglect of Third World issues by human geographers awaits positive research publications.