Struggling to Save Cash: Seasonal Migration and Vulnerability in West Bengal,India

This article concerns an important but overlooked means by which able‐bodied poor people get hold of lump sums of cash in rural West Bengal: seasonal migration for agricultural wage work. Drawing on a regional study of four migration streams, our main focus here is on the struggle to secure this cash by landless households in just one of those streams, originating in Murshidabad District. Case studies are used to illustrate the importance for women in nuclear families of maintaining supportive networks of kin for periods when men are absent. A parallel analysis is made of the negotiations between male migrant workers and their employers, at labour markets, during the period of work, and afterwards. The article then briefly discusses some of the contrasting ways in which remittances are used by landless households and owners of very small plots of land, in the context of rapid ecological change, demographic pressure and growing inequality.     

Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal

Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.     

Land Reforms at Centre Stage: The Evidence on West Bengal

The debate on the agrarian problem in developing countries has alternated between a stress on the necessity for land reforms and an emphasis on the introduction of productivity-enhancing technology, leading to a trickle-down effect. In the Indian state of West Bengal, the former strategy has been pursued since the mid-1970s. Most observers agree that this approach has stimulated a ‘virtuous circle’, leading to higher production, a decrease in poverty and in polarization, and a perceptible improvement of the human development index. This article addresses the causality sequence, namely, whether land reform or irrigation has acted as the kick-start mechanism to these improvements. The irrigation figures are not impressive, either in comparison with the outlay in other Indian states, or in terms of crop coverage. The explanation for activation of a virtuous circle may therefore be found in land reform, at least if land reform is considered and implemented in its comprehensive meaning: intervention in the relations of production, the forces of production and the broad social and political parameters.     

The Limits of Public Policy Intervention in Urban Logistics: Lessons from Vicenza (Italy)

For over 15 years, the subject of urban logistics has preoccupied many stakeholders, including both private and public decision-makers. The purpose of this paper is to present a study of the limits of public policy regulations restricting vehicle access to limited traffic zones to promote the use of urban consolidation centres (UCCs). After examining the main technical and economic aspects of implementing an UCC, we present the case of Vicenza (Italy), which has implemented very restrictive regulations. We study the municipal regulations and their legal consequences, by analysing court rulings issued between 2006 and 2009, following a lawsuit brought by an association of freight transport carriers due to these restrictions. Although this case seems applicable to a specific context, we identify several lessons that can be extrapolated to other cities. Therefore, the lessons drawn for other urban areas in Europe are presented, and their advantages and possible transferability studied.     

Palynology of the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition in the Rajmahal Formation,West Bengal,India

Borehole PGD-1A penetrated Cretaceous Rajmahal Formation and underlying Triassic Panchet Formation between 288–423.51 m. Palynoassemblages recovered within the Mesozoic sequence are assigned to three palynozones closely comparable to Australian assemblages. The oldest palynozone is the Verrucosisporites-Lundbladispora zone, which occurs between 373.5–376 m in the uppermost Panchet Formation. The first occurrence of Callialasporites turbatus occurs at 373.5 m and signals the presence of Jurassic deposits. The overlying Infratrappean greyshales (371.5–354 m) of the Rajmahal Formation is represented by the Murospora florida palynozone of Late Jurassic age. The youngest palynozone identified is the Cicatricosisporites australiensis zone which occurs within the Inter-trappeans (346.35–295.0 m) of the Rajmahal Formation. Based on ages assigned to the M. florida and C. australiensis zones in Australia, the Rajmahal Formation is dated as Oxfordian-Berriasian. The first appearance datums (FADs) of Cicatricosisporites australiensis, Crybelosporites stylolsus, Aequitriradites spinulosus and Lycopodiacidites dettmannae suggest that the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary probably lies just within the interval 346.35–328.81 m in Inter-trappean bed II.     

Family Property and the Limits of Intervention: The Article 27 Reforms and the PROCEDE Programme in Mexico

In the 1990s the Mexican peasants witnessed the introduction of a new Agrarian Law and the implementation of the land regularization programme, PROCEDE. In this article it is demonstrated that the privatization of previously communally held ejido land did not lead to the promised dynamic land market, nor to an increase in agricultural productivity. On the basis of an in–depth study of land tenure practices in the ejido La Canoa in Western Mexico, it is shown that the changes of 1992 did not address the main problems of peasant agriculture. The new Agrarian Law legalized practices which, although illegal, had already become quite common in ejidos throughout Mexico. In addition, it is argued that legal security does not necessarily reside in official registration by the state, but can also be based on local recognition of land rights. The main argument of the article is that property consists of complex sets of claims, rights and obligations that cannot be manipulated by forms of state intervention that reduce land tenure predicaments to technical problems.     

The Effort to Reverse Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Limits of Returns

Two American-based geographers examine the international community's efforts to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina since the end of the war in 1995. The paper, based on extensive field work and semi-structured interviews, first examines the geography of the nearly one million refugees and internally displaced persons who have returned to their pre-war domiciles in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They then identify and discuss limits to the reversal of ethnic cleansing imposed by demographic, institutional, geopolitical, and economic factors. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I31, O15, O19. 7 figures, 1 table, 60 references.     

Beyond The Limits to Growth: Ecology and the Neoliberal Counterrevolution

This paper brings autonomist Marxist analyses of post‐Fordist transition together with the geographical literature on ecosystem services to argue that the rise of the ecosystem service economy was central to what Paolo Virno has called the neoliberal counterrevolution. By analyzing the discourse of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, I demonstrate that early efforts to account for the value of environmental functions were a response to the instabilities faced by globalized capital in the postwar era. The rise of the ecosystem service economy is central to what autonomist Marxists describe as a post‐Fordist mode of production in which the activities of social (and, I argue, ecological) reproduction become direct sources of value. The paper suggests the need to revise the autonomist analysis to account for both the ecological dimensions of Fordist crisis, and the importance of the ecosystem service economy as a means whereby the counterrevolution was accomplished.     

汉代甘肃河西地区农作物浅述——以历代出土汉简为例

甘肃河西地区,是古丝绸之路的交通要道。丝绸之路从中亚进入中国境内,经河西走廊,入宁夏而达西安。可以说,河西地区对中西文化交流做出了巨大贡献。本文以历代出土汉简为例,简述了汉代甘肃河西地区农作物的种植情况。