Local Histories,Global Markets: Cocoa and Class in Upland Sulawesi

Research and policy concerning the Southeast Asian uplands have generally focused on issues of cultural diversity, conservation and community resource management. This article argues for a reorientation of analysis to highlight the increasingly uneven access to land, labour and capital stemming from processes of agrarian differentiation in upland settings. It draws upon contrasting case studies from two areas of Central Sulawesi to explore the processes through which differentiation occurs, and the role of local histories of agriculture and settlement in shaping farmers’ responses to new market opportunities. Smallholders have enthusiastically abandoned their diversified farming systems to invest their land and labour in a new global crop, cocoa, thereby stimulating a set of changes in resource access and social relations that they did not anticipate. The concept of agency drawn from a culturally oriented political economy guides the analysis of struggles over livelihoods, land entitlements, and the reconfiguration of community, as well as the grounds on which new collective visions emerge.     

No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women's Land Rights in Rural China

Since the mid‐1990s, a new land‐use rights regime has gradually come into effect in China. It follows upon a series of earlier changes — land reform, collectivization and the first wave of contracting land to households — that paid attention to women's role in publicly recognized work and provided access to land. The new regime, which has gradually come into effect as previous (usually fifteen‐year) terms expired, authorizes an adjustment in land allocation which is then normally frozen for thirty years. An apparently inadvertent effect of this policy is not only the exclusion of young people from direct access to land for up to thirty years from birth, but the de facto separation of the majority of women who marry or remarry patrilocally from allocated land. ‘No change for thirty years’ (sanshi nian bu bian) has thus become the distinctive feature for women of China's current land‐use regime. The state has renounced its potential to reallocate land periodically and there is no indication that market mechanisms are filling, or are capable of filling, the void thereby created. This article examines local conceptions, responses and practices regarding land‐use rights and their transfer within this new framework, using field evidence from three upland agricultural communities in Chongqing and Sichuan (studied in 2003, 2004 and 2005), where land allocations were fixed in 1995, 1999 and 2001 respectively. The ethnographic findings are further explored in relation to contemporary research on gender and land rights.     

EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes – tenure building and renewal processes – are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments.     

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.     

Biofuels and the politics of mapmaking

On a world scale companies and governments are acquiring tracts of land from rural communities across the developing world in what some describe as a global “land grab.” Yet looking into local settings reveals that negotiations and arrangements are often piecemeal and halting, with little resemblance to a coordinated seizure of land. Conflicting maps, overlapping territorial claims, and unclear acquisition processes are creating land disputes, mistrust, and ambiguity. Resulting cycles of contention are enabling companies to obtain—even appropriate—some land. Still, in at least some locales the process is doing more to undermine development opportunities for all parties.To probe into these local politics of mapmaking, this article draws on fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 in Tanzania's Rufiji District, located in the lower floodplain of the Rufiji River. Companies, one might surmise, should be able to exploit information asymmetries to wrest control of land from local villagers. Interviews, primary documents, and field observations reveal, however, that this is not occurring as much as one might expect along the lower Rufiji River. The politics of such land acquisitions, we argue, would seem to be better understood in terms of cycles of contentious politics, as an ongoing process in which movements and counter-movements vie for control through the strategic use of images, maps, and discourse.This research extends the understanding of the processes changing global agriculture and energy production by bridging the frames of the “politics of mapping” and “cycles of contention” to more fully reveal how and why control over land and resources is shifting in the global South.     

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.     

Exclusion in Area-based Urban Policy Programmes

Area-based urban regeneration programmes such as the New Deal for Communities in the UK, the German Soziale Stadt and the Danish Kvarterloft are based on a participatory approach emphasizing active citizen participation and the involvement of local stakeholders. The article argues that these initiatives are not as open and inclusive as they strive to be, and in this article, we explore the different types of exclusion that can take place when such programmes are implemented. Based on the theoretical literature and on empirical data from the Danish Kvarterloft project, we identify three types of exclusion—structural, discursive and deliberate exclusion—and offer a theoretical analysis and an empirical account of these exclusions. The article concludes that practitioners as well as politicians need to reflect critically on different types of exclusion in order to create transparent and inclusive democratic processes.     

Facing Up to the Centre: The Emergence of Regional Elite Associations in Angola's Political Transition Process

This article compares two regional elite associations in Angola's southern Huíla province — the Associação dos Naturais e Amigos de Kuvango, Jamba e Chipindo (Anakujachi — Association of Natives and Friends of Kuvango, Jamba and Chipindo) and the Associação Solidariedade Nyaneka‐Humbi (SNH — Nyaneka‐Humbi Solidarity Association). It demonstrates how these associations have gained increasing political significance through their representation of local interests. This is facilitated by deeply felt social and political exclusion resulting from war and a centralized state that hardly reaches the periphery where these associations are based. Until now, the central Angolan state has refused to grant the regions more autonomy despite an official gradualismo decentralization policy which introduces elected bodies at district level. In response, the strategy of these associations has been to ensure that their representatives obtain positions within the state, both nationally and locally, so that they could represent the interests of their specific region. Using the example of these regional elite associations, the article retraces the struggle over resources and citizenship, which is embedded in contemporary urban–rural interactions that mark political change in Huíla province.     

Targeting Research for Poverty Reduction in Marginal Areas of Rural Syria

Agricultural research in marginal dry areas can contribute to reducing poverty through the development of technological, institutional and policy options for poor farmers. Such research should address diversified opportunities and development pathways. This article analyses the diversity of livelihood strategies of rural people living in the Khanasser Valley in northwestern Syria, an area that is typical of marginal drylands. It proposes an operational classification of households based on their different livelihood strategies, applying an integrated methodology within a Sustainable Livelihoods framework. Households are classified into three clusters: agriculturists, labourers and pastoralists. The article examines the diversity of livelihoods involved, and considers where and how research should be directed to have greatest impact on poverty. Given that rural households are not homogeneous but dynamic entities, with diverse assets, capabilities and opportunities, the definition of household typologies can help to target development research. The article concludes that while agriculturists benefit most, poor labourers with enough land can also gain from pro‐poor agricultural research. The poorest households with little land, and pastoralists, benefit little or only indirectly.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Land and languor: ethical imaginations of work and forest in northeast Madagascar

Since the early twentieth century, the practice of slash‐and‐burn agriculture by Betsimisaraka subsistence farmers of eastern Madagascar, and their reluctance to engage in wage labor processes, have been interpreted by French and other Malagasy people as symptoms Betsimisaraka laziness. Colonial officials’ idea of remedying Betsimisaraka laziness justified the imposition of wage work and forest conservation. The paper argues that colonial settlers, by conflating their vision of lazy labor and a victimized landscape, did not apprehend the co‐existence of an alternative work ethic which entailed a different time‐space orientation and social relationship to land. While scholars have analyzed the “laziness” of colonial subjects as a form of subaltern resistance to colonial domination, resistance alone does not account for the fact that under certain conditions Betsimisaraka people have also willingly partaken in wage labor. This article reveals how the labor and land ethics of Betsimisaraka farmers have actively contributed to the social and natural environments of capitalism.     

Just Farming? Neoliberal Subjectivities and Agricultural Livelihoods among Educated Youth in Kenya

Given the precariousness of graduate employment in most African countries, coupled with intersecting challenges of food insecurity, urbanization and population growth, educated youth are increasingly being encouraged to seek alternative livelihood opportunities in agriculture — a sector traditionally associated with the uneducated rural poor but which has received considerable developmental attention. This article examines how and with what impacts educated youth in Kenya construct and perform new identities as farmers, distinct from the stigmatized smallholder farmers and in keeping with their status as elite, urbanized, social change makers. By developing the concepts of neoliberal youth subjectivities and opportunity space, and examining their life and work histories, the article analyses how educated young farmers construct themselves as productive and socially respectable through different and locally understood neoliberal subjectivities. The author argues that the performances of educated youth who identify themselves as diversified selves, as members of the elite, and as social change makers challenge the normative notions of protracted youth‐hood and, instead, illuminate the neoliberal lives of these young people, facilitated by a liberalized economy and their social positioning in society.     

Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia

Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which labourers became debt‐bonded, thus situating them within the country’s broader agrarian transition and recasting peasants as rural labour. It then explores workers’ perceptions of rural life, suggesting that the unfreedom of kiln work, contrasted with the fixedness and potential for mobility in rural life, makes workers aspire to return to their land. The article ultimately highlights how the persistence of smallholder farmers can be understood as an issue of poor work under neoliberalism in Cambodia, and draws light on the agency of labour in understanding this.     

Land Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in Nicaragua

This article uses empirical data from a case study in rural Nicaragua to demonstrate the need for a conceptualization of tenure security as seen from the perspective of the landholder. A large group of farmers in the case study area perceive their tenure situation as being insecure despite the fact that they possess a legal title to their land. The article argues that more attention must be paid to aspects such as inequalities of wealth and power, lack of enforcement and lack of impartiality on the part of the formal institutions when addressing tenure security in an institutionally unstable setting, such as that found in Nicaragua. The article contributes to the ongoing discussion by arguing that future research on how to increase rural land tenure security should explore the concept of tenure security as experienced by farmers.     

Elusive Empowerment: Price Information and Disintermediation in Soybean Markets in Malwa,India

Price information provision and disintermediation have often been considered means to empower farmers, since lack of information and multiple intermediaries are seen as major obstacles preventing farmers from obtaining a higher price for their produce. Using the example of soybean in Malwa, central India, which is a cash crop that links farmers to global consumers, this article argues that the very expectation of disintermediation in the soybean supply chain is misleading. India's position in these global networks puts farmers and intermediaries in Malwa in the position of price receivers: they are unable to influence the global price of soybean or manipulate its local price in any way. In this context, providing price information has negligible impact on the final price obtained by farmers. The potential for empowerment has to be understood more broadly, by mapping out the ways in which power is exercised by various actors in the marketplace — one of which is the determination of the quality of a farmer's crop. This article maps such possibilities by examining how norms regarding quality in soybean are created and enforced, and how they are influenced by broader logics that go beyond the soybean marketplace itself.     

Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand

This paper explores the geopolitics surrounding the “modernization” of the formal property rights regime in land in Thailand (formerly Siam) from the mid 1850s to the late 1930s. The paper argues that this weak, peripheral state, in pursuit of international recognition of territorial and jurisdictional sovereignty, employed a strategy of “counter-spatialization” in order to mitigate or deny claims for control over natural resources and population groups by imperial powers. The intertextual dimensions of this “spatial” mode of resistance are elucidated through a close reading of the ways in which diplomatic negotiations of a series of unequal treaties, beginning with the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1855, shaped—and were shaped by—the formulation and implementation of regulations governing formal property rights in land in Siam. The political economy of land rights at the large scale (local implementation of land titling) and the medium scale (enactment of national land laws) was nested within a process of geopolitical contestation over land rights at the small scale (international recognition of Siamese territorial sovereignty).     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

Borrowing of Land,Security of Tenure and Sustainable Land Use in Burkina Faso

Lack of formal security of land tenure is often cited as a constraint for participatory land management programmes which try to motivate African farmers to grow trees and to realize other improvements in their fields in order to control soil erosion. According to this approach, the borrowing of land would represent an insecure form of land tenure hindering sustainable land use. However, on the basis of a case study in Burkina Faso, this article demonstrates that this is not necessarily so: borrowing arrangements may play a part in avoiding local overload of the carrying capacity and in an efficient distribution of village lands among the farming units. Furthermore, borrowing does not hinder some major intensification techniques of land use which are currently being applied in Burkina Faso. Legal interventions which aim to increase security of tenure and to create favourable conditions for sustainable land use may in fact have the opposite effect.     

Azerbaijan: Territorial Issues and Internal Challenges in Mid-2001

This paper examines the relationship between size of land holding and family income, based on a recent survey of rural households in Poland. In general, the results indicate a positive relationship between income and size of land holdings, suggesting that successful Polish farmers are expanding their farm holdings through land market transactions. Constraints to efficient functioning of these land markets in Poland are investigated as well, which include high government-determined land transaction costs, complex registration procedures, poor access to mortgage facilities, and a bias against larger farms built into the unemployment benefits system. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, Q15, Q24. 5 figures, 12 tables, 10 references.     

Law and Disorder: Local Implementation of Mongolia's Land Law

With the dismantling of herding collectives in Mongolia in 1992, formal regulatory institutions for allocating pasture vanished, and weakened customary institutions were unable effectively to fill the void. Increasing poverty and wealth differentiation in the herding sector, a wave of urban–rural migration, and the lack of formal or strong informal regulation led to a downward spiral of unsustainable grazing practices. In 1994, Mongolia's parliament passed the Land Law, which authorized land possession contracts (leases) over pastoral resources such as campsites and pastures. Implementation of leasing provisions began in 1998. This article examines the implications of the Law's implementation at the local level, based on interviews with herders and officials in all levels of government, and a resurvey of herding households. Amongst many findings, the research shows that poorer herders were largely overlooked in the allocation of campsite leases; that the poor had become more mobile and the wealthy more sedentary; that there had been a sharp decline in trespassing following lease implementation, but that many herders and officials expected pasture leasing to lead to increased conflict over pastures. The Land Law provides broad regulatory latitude and flexibility to local authorities, but the Law's lack of clarity and poor understanding of its provisions by herders and local officials limit its utility. The existing legal framework and local attitudes stand in clear opposition to the implied goal of land registration and titling — an all‐embracing land market and the supremacy of private property rights.