Labour
Book Review: Mythri Jegathesan’s Tea & Solidarity
JAYASEELAN RAJ Tea and Solidarity is a fascinating monograph by Mythri Jegathesan that examines the lives of tea-plucking women and their families as they seek work outside the Sri Lankan plantations. It provides a powerful description of their struggle for a dignified life within and outside the plantations, what Jegathesan calls their ‘desires for…
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Contract farming in the developing world: a political economy approach
A new special issue in the Journal of Agrarian Change (Vol. 22, Issue 1) takes stock of critical developments in the political economy of contract farming.
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AQs Shorts: Lyn Ossome
In our new AQs Shorts view, Lyn Ossome discusses the impact of neoliberal globalization on labour relations in the global South, especially in relation to forms of labour organizing.
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AQs Shorts: Carla Gras
In our new video for the AQs Shorts series, Carla Gras speaks about the challenges of capital accumulation in the Chaco region in Argentina and the strategies used by corporate agribusiness to overcome these challenges. She also reflects on how agribusiness expansion in shaping labour regimes, social differentiation and social reproduction. Carla Gras is Senior…
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[Call for Papers] The Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change: Feminist Political Economy & Rural Transformations in the Global South
Call for Papers For a Special Issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change Edited by Elena Baglioni, Hannah Bargawi, Alessandra Mezzadri, Lyn Ossome and Sara Stevano The Covid-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences have exposed the centrality of social reproduction for the functioning of global capitalism (Mezzadri 2020, Stevano et al, 2021). A set of…
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Who is a farmer in India?
SEJUTI DAS GUPTA AND ISHITA MEHROTRA The farmers’ protests in India since November 2020 has resurrected the question ‘who is a farmer?’, and with it, the agrarian political economy exercise of identifying rural classes and examining their nature. In classical agrarian political economy scholarship in India, the capitalist classes or the rural rich are variously…
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AQs Shorts: Lucilla Salvia
In the third video for our interview series ‘AQs Shorts‘, Lucilla Salvia discusses how agricultural commodity chains in central Italy have been reconfigured under neoliberalism and its implications for labour relations and labour contracting. And she reflects on whether the term ‘modern slavery’ is applicable to these labour relations. Lucilla Salvia teaches at ‘La Sapienza’…
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AQs Shorts: Tania Li
In the second video for our interview series AQs Shorts, Tania Li reflects on the nature of ‘development’ ensuing as a result of corporate plantations and agribusinesses, on the question of ‘surplus populations’ and smallholders for the agrarian question, and class differentiation – all drawing on her work on oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Tania…
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Lockdown Chronicle: The Story of a Migrant Workers’ Platform Across India’s Lockdown
ORLANDA RUTHVEN Editors’ Note: In one of the most brutal lockdowns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, India witnessed the haunting spectre of scores of migrant workers walking back to their villages hundreds of kilometres away along highways and railway lines. A critical agrarian political economy lens must recognize the multitude of ways in which…
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‘Problems in the Empirical Analysis of Agrarian Differentiation Processes’: A Reflection
BEN WHITE The ideas in this book chapter published in 1989 began to form themselves in the 1970s. Under the guidance of cultural materialist Marvin Harris, I had written a mainly quantitative dissertation based on detailed time-budget analysis of small-peasant and landless households in a Javanese village. From 1975 to 1980, I was back…
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