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"Distress in the Fields: Indian Agriculture After Economic Liberalization" is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of neoliberal policies on small-scale farming households in India. The book examines various aspects of the agrarian political economy, including land ownership, prices, subsidies, credit, and marketing, to provide a critical account of the transformations in India's agriculture sector between 1991 and 2020. The authors argue that these policies have led to increasing inequality, immiseration, and rural distress, with larger-scale farmers benefiting at the expense of small-scale farmers. The book highlights the need for sustained pro-poor rural public action and redistributive agrarian reform in India. [Extracted from the article]

This article reviews the literature on the social dynamics influencing small-scale agriculture in South Africa. These include three primary factors: the trans-local character of livelihoods; the role of social hierarchies of gender, age and marital status in allocating rights and responsibilities at home; and the ceremonial economy. South African land reform policies must recognise these local practices of distribution and social reproduction as integral to people's livelihood strategies. By doing so, land reform can move beyond the narrow emphasis on productivity and 'self-reliance,' instead focusing on aligning policies with the strategies of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agroecological transitions in the Global North are inhibited by the cultural and legal norms of a 'ownership model' of property that underpins agrarian capitalism. The resulting property system limits asset transfers to agroecological regimes and co-produces technologically oriented reforms. Scotland's land reforms are emergent legal interventions to reshape land ownership within a Western legal context. By examining legal manoeuvres, mobilizing discourses, and governance considerations in Scotland, we sketch a roadmap for rethinking property in regions where the ownership model is entrenched. This case suggests that existing property law can be leveraged to achieve shifts in property norms towards promoting agroecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land policy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two decades. In contrast with earlier distributive land reforms, contemporary policies reflect an amalgamation of neoliberal, state territorial, and social justice agendas. This paper demonstrates how land policy changes reflect the spatially extensive and multi-scalar politics of land contestation and control, employing the cases of Myanmar and Laos. Myanmar's short-lived democratic transition enabled civil society actors to exert uneven influence on policy reform. In contrast, communist party and state dominance in Laos has constrained, although not wholly obstructed, policy intervention by non-governmental groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new generation of activists and peasant leaders have taken up the banner of food sovereignty amid an even more challenging and violent situation for rural people around the world. In this interview Morgan Ody, the new General Coordinator of La Via Campesina International, discusses her vision for rural movements. Originally from a small dairy farm, Ody is a second-generation militant in Confédéracion Paysanne. Ody speaks about land reform, climate politics, the perils and potential of state policies, rising populism, and the power of the peasantry: in short, about where the movement has been and where we are headed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxist understandings of the peasantry focus largely on class relations and seek to locate rural households within wider sets of class structures and dynamics. This article reviews debates and controversies amongst Marxists on the classic agrarian question, class differentiation within processes of transition from pre-capitalist to fully capitalist societies, land reform and class relations, whether or not to characterize peasants as petty commodity producers, the relationship between class and other forms of social differentiation such as gender, race, ethnicity and caste, and the role of class differentiation in peasant politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines relations between state and customary land claims in Francophone West Africa. This region, despite a broadly common legal heritage at the time of independence, experienced a wide variety of changes at the national scale to the point where these countries now form a full spectrum of statutory/customary relations. After a historical review of rural property rights in Francophone West Africa, this article proposes a typology of State vs. Customary ownership in the region with a focus on four exemplary cases: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and Mauritania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores whether mechanisation affects patterns of accumulation and differentiation in Zimbabwe's post land reform where policy consistently disadvantages smallholders. Is the latest mechanisation wave any different? The article considers dynamics of tractor access and accumulation trajectories across and within land use types in Mvurwi area. Larger, richer and well-connected farmers draw on patronage networks to access tractors and accumulate further. Some small to medium-scale farmers generate surpluses and invest in tractors or pay for services. Thus, accumulation from above and below feeds social differentiation. Tractor access remains constrained yet mechanisation is only part of the wider post-2000 story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no doubt that Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Program resulted in repeasantization. As several studies point out, it also resulted in accumulation from below by a majority of the resettled peasantry. Our study focuses on an area where counter-agrarian reform is in motion and accumulation from below is constrained. In this location, we argue that repeasantization is severely being contested as indicated by the re-emergence of a dual-mode of production and the subsequent 'virtual' dispossession and proletarianization of the land reform beneficiaries. Our findings shed more light on the dynamics of capitalism and agrarian politics in a context where land reforms are implemented under neoliberalism. In this enclave, peasants after accessing land through the land reform collectivized their land and parceled it to the downsized and nearby capitalist farming system. The capitalist farming system engages in spatio-temporal fix by moving from one rural site to another as it follows the dictates of accumulation. While the possibility of full-scale land dispossession exists, the current state ownership of land and the peasantry's resistance provided some brakes to full-scale land dispossession. At the same time, the state's limited support to land reform beneficiaries fuels this localized land dispossession. The peasantry's exploitation in this enclave ranges from corvee labor to coercion into the mini-land enclosures; these are implemented by village heads, who are local state functionaries. This study also recasts the relevance of the Marxist framework in understanding rural dynamics more specifically; it revisits Karl Kautsky's arguments on the coexistence thesis of the peasantry and capitalist farming and illustrates the Zimbabwean state's ambivalence with regards to the conditions of peasant and capitalist farming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exploration of COVID-19 in Zimbabwe and the consequent responses have blind spots in relation to peasant communities. Despite the peasantry featuring in Zimbabwe's agrarian reform literature, such literature is lacking when it comes to the interrogation of how this diverse and sometimes less recognised group responded to the novel virus. The article explores peasant life in a time of COVID-19 and lockdown in Zimbabwe, paying special attention to the impact of the pandemic on their 'total way of life', their agency in responding to the pandemic in an agrarian context, and implications for the present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twentieth century land reform centred on landlords, tillers, and a revolutionary or reform-producing state. The twenty-first century version involves a wider array of actors and diverse agendas including good governance and the mitigation of climate change. Commons, co-ops and corporations figure large in the twenty-first assemblage where they enable different parties to align around a progressive neoliberal platform that sets insurrectionary demands aside to focus on what seems plausible and fundable within existing constraints. Focusing on Indonesia where land reform recommenced circa 2016, I consider both the elements that comprise the land reform assemblage and the elements excluded from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, studies of peasants and pastoralists have run in parallel, creating mutual blind-spots. This article argues that, despite contrasting research traditions and conceptual framings, there are many commonalities. The classic problematics of agrarian studies – around production, accumulation and politics – apply as much to pastoralists as they do to peasants. Processes of social differentiation and class formation, the role of wage labour and questions around mobilisation and politics are consistently relevant. However, a reflection on a large literature on pastoralism across nine world regions reveals that there are nevertheless some important contrasts with classic representations of a settled peasantry. These are: living with and off uncertainty; mobility to respond to variability; flexible land control and new forms of tenure; dynamic social formations; collective social relations for a new moral economy; engaging with complex markets and a new politics for a transforming world. The article concludes by arguing that, under contemporary conditions, these are all important for understanding settled agrarian systems too, as today pastoralists and peasants face many of the same challenges. These seven themes, the article argues, offer a new set of lenses for examining pastoral and peasant settings alike, helping to expand perspectives in agrarian studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the role of the state in the contemporary food regime and argues that it is best understood as the outcome of uneven regulatory development. This concept centers the ways that legacy institutions and practices of previous food regimes persist and combine with neoliberal regulation. It is developed through an in-depth case study of agro-food regulation in the Dominican Republic, focusing on domestic rice production. The analysis speaks to the possibilities and limits of progressive food sovereignty politics in contexts where states simultaneously undermine socially transformative demands and mitigate some pernicious effects of hyper-marketization to secure state legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper highlights the mechanisms through which outgrower contract farming creates dependencies at the local level. Using sugarcane case study in Malawi, we show that dependencies are created through redefinition of use rights to customary land and through the redefinition of cash flows into outgrower communities. Through this two-dimensional process, corporations can secure access to land, exert control over local communities and transform the local social relations of reciprocity serving as the pillars of resistance. Our results indicate that contract farming changes rural agrarian relations, transforms local family institutions by carefully selecting a few household members with influence into the scheme and selectively dispossessing the poor community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two generations, livestock loss and hunger, caused by violent conflict and drought, have driven many transhumant agro-pastoralists living in central Karamoja to resettle in unpopulated areas more suitable for agricultural production. These areas, mostly located in the southern and western parts of the region, were historically used by herders as dry season grazing rangelands, while they presently house permanent settlements populated by now sedentarised 'marginal farmers', town-based workers and patriarchal elites. In this article, I advance the concept of 'de-pastoralisation' to explain the process of dispossession of the major means of social reproduction, which causes an increase in livelihoods diversification and in social differentiation. Through the concept of de-pastoralisation, this article aims to investigate the historical dissolution of pastoralism and its socio-economic consequences, characterised by exploitative inter and intra household relations of production, leading to processes of general proletarianisation and male elite accumulation that reproduce inequality over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factors influencing household participation in and withdrawal from a World Bank-funded voluntary resettlement scheme moving 15,000 low-income farming households within and across rural districts in Malawi. Using a survey of 203 beneficiary households, focus groups and in-depth interviews, we identify a lack of access to land and conflict over land in the area of origin as salient participation factors in resettlement, while withdrawal factors include lower access to infrastructure and poor soil quality in resettlement areas. We also highlight limited prior awareness of actual conditions in resettlement areas, low and biased participation in the decision to move, a greater desire for formal land titles due to loss of customary entitlement as a result of resettlement, and widespread ambiguity and confusion over titles for resettled plots. In this context, we point to a pattern of 'negative resettlement', in which households remain resettled despite major grievances, for lack of an alternative option, contrasting with 'positive resettlement', where households remain by choice. We suggest that intra-district resettlement is more likely to be successful than inter-district resettlement when there is a risk of informed consent deficiency. These findings point to the relative failures of this particular resettlement scheme, and suggest possible improvements for land redistribution schemes from agro-industrial projects to poor households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families' translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the 'livelihoods perspective' on agrarian change, approaches focusing on 'global householding', and the cultural reproduction of class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist governmentality. Looking at South Africa's stalled agrarian transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa's unresolved democratic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this special issue is to advance heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx's 200th birth anniversary. Scholarship on the origins of agrarian capitalism and the contrasts between agrarian and industrial capitalism have been a vital part of debates over and within Marxism for more than a century and have been central to the social scientific and historical understandings of the modern world system. At the same time, since the seminal debates associated with the ‘classical agrarian question,’ agrarian studies is marked by durable tensions and polarities in theoretical approach. While Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. It is the premise of this special issue that much of this debate has reached something of an impasse. This is in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism, and because new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself, offer exciting new horizons. Contributions to this special issue help point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrate that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxist agrarian political economy has focused largely on the problematic of accumulation and its politics, but the dynamics of social reproduction in rural contexts remain somewhat under-theorised. These are explored through consideration of empirical evidence from communal areas and land reform farms in South Africa. Key arguments advanced are that social reproduction in such contexts include the reproduction of distinctive forms of marriage, systems of kinship and community membership, as well as of property relations that are not characterised by private ownership. Much social reproduction occurs outside of (direct) market relations, but it is nevertheless deeply conditioned and shaped by the dynamics of the wider capitalist economy, including in relation to wage labour and small-scale agricultural production. As a result, social reproduction in rural areas involves contradictions, tensions and contestations, and these are often at the centre of local forms of politics. The wider significance of these findings is discussed, and it is suggested that similar dynamics may be at work across the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution draws on original data relating to a land settlement case in Araponga, an administrative area in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The settlement of the land and subsequent building of robust, more self-dependent, land-based livelihoods have followed a joint experimentation trajectory in which the agro-ecologicalisation of agrarian production practices to regenerate and enrich the resource base has been coupled with effective institutional reform and the creation of a favourable institutional setting. Key to this grassroots transformation process has been the enrolment of various strategic actors in a collaborative support network by a mediating change agent. The paper argues that the Araponga case represents a particular expression of re-peasantisation. The Araponga project has evolved without the involvement of landless peoples' social movements such as theMovimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra(MST). This has been crucial to its character and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like that in other post-communist states, Tajikistan's agricultural decollectivization was initiated through top-down measures. However, the implementation process has not been uniform across the state's territory; in some districts collective farms were quickly and thoroughly broken up, while in others the process is just now beginning. In this paper, we investigate spatial variation in Tajikistan's decollectivization process. Through analyses of diverse data, we reveal that low cotton yield is a necessary condition for farm individualization in districts that are distant from the capital. We interpret this result as indicating that farm managers responsible for unproductive farms often have little incentive or capacity to resist the break-up of farms. In contrast, managers of productive farms have both an incentive and the capacity to maintain collective farming. Furthermore, although human capital dimensions, including family size, off-farm income and education, affect an individual farmer's preference for private farming, these are not necessary conditions for widespread farm individualization at the district level. In other words, we did not find evidence that farmers had the capacity to directly determine collective farm dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of Brazil's agricultural labor movement have generally neglected its relationship to the struggle for land, but this is neither fair nor accurate. Analyzing the rural labor movement's historical contributions to the land struggle in Brazil, this contribution has been organized into three main periods, emphasizing social relations, institutional activism and policy changes. It argues that despite the peculiarities of different historical contexts, rural labor consistently provoked protest against policies that privileged large landholders, whose concentration of power over land and labor resources continually worsened Brazil's ranking as one of the most unequal of nations. For more than half a century, the most constant opponent of this situation among the peasantry has been the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture (CONTAG), a corporatist organization of rural labor unions founded in 1963. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This contribution draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of ‘participatory parity’ to analyze the reproduction and contestation of inequalities internal to land reform settlements affiliated with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) located in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil. These inequalities are variously manifest in unequal control over land and legal documents, disparities in status and what Fraser calls ‘voice'. These circumstances help account for quantitative evidence that shows a strong preference among local landless populations for land reform organizations that are more decentralized and less hierarchically organized. These circumstances also motivate direct actions undertaken by grassroots MST settlers seeking to destabilize the conditions that ground these inequalities. This research highlights the importance of attending to local histories and interactions through which participatory disparities are christened and reproduced; indicates potential methodological consequences; and examines the interplay of transgressive action, dialogue and recognition as settlers struggle to bring about ‘participatory parity' – or what they might call genuine ‘friendships' – in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant corporate structure of South Africa's agro-food system has led many to suggest there is limited value in redistributing land as a scarce economic resource, or in providing support to black small-scale farmers when large agribusinesses are capable of meeting food needs. Agrarian reform (land reform plus black small-scale farmer support) is not a necessary component of the existing economic system in South Africa. Yet it has tremendous political importance, especially in the context of a stagnant or declining job market. After considering the development of the corporate agro-food system in South Africa, and its impact on agrarian reform, this paper concludes that agrarian reform as a political project and a vision retains the potential to contribute not only to a more just society, but also to progressive economic transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I explore a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000, a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Los Trabajadores (APT), or the Worker's Property. Following mass protests between 2001 and 2004, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Las Tunas Accords which provided redistributed land from 18 of those coffee estates to 2500 families. Drawing on interviews with movement participants carried out between 2003 and 2012, I argue that the roots of the control grab and the resistance movement can be traced to the contradictions of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)-led agrarian reform in the 1980s, the conflicts over property in the post-war period and the failed consensus on how rural labor should organize and be represented in the face of land re-concentration and capitalist consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment. The Rwandan government has adapted neo-liberal tools, such as ‘performance management contracts’, which make local public administrators accountable for agricultural development targets (often explicitly linked to corporate interests). Activities of international development agencies are becoming intertwined with those of the state and foreign capital, so that a variety of actors and objectives are starting to collaboratively change the relations between land and labour. The global ‘land grab’ is only one aspect of broader patterns of reconfiguration of control over land, labour and markets in the Global South. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the state is orienting public resources towards private interests in Rwanda, through processes that have elsewhere been termed ‘control grabbing’ [Borraset al.2012, 402–416]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agrarian reforms do not constitute linear processes: rather, they are based on the interconnection between the crystallization of land governance in formal tenure rules and the way societies organize around a set of identities and power mechanisms. This paper focuses on how the misinterpretation of this two-way relationship, in setting up a new normative framework, can generate unintended consequences in terms of conflict. The recent wave of land conflicts in Bolivia shows how changes in the allocation of strategic resources inspired by the so-called ‘politics of recognition’ triggered processes of political ethnicization and organizational fragmentation, eventually contributing to fuelling new tensions between indigenous groups and peasant unions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on rural peasant social movements involving agrarian reform and land tenure during the 21st century. It presents information on the food sovereignty movement La Via Campesina (LVC), discusses a workshop and seminar on land reform which was held in Bukit Tinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia, from July 10-13, 2012 , and provides personal narratives from agrarian reformers including Indra Lubis, Faustino Torrez, and Elizabeth Mpofu.

A ‘pink tide’ swept over Latin America following Hugo Chávez's 1998 election to the presidency in Venezuela, bringing to power multiple left or center-left governments. What possibilities for and obstacles to social change were presented by their having attained power through the ballot box? This question is explored through an examination of Venezuela's agrarian reform and the promotion of agroecology within it. The article paper concludes that, while the reform has been successful in providing resources to the land-poor and landless, the landed class has not passively acquiesced to this redistributive effort. Moreover, a situation of ‘dual power’ – in which parts of the government remain in the hands of the previously predominant class, while the newly powerful class gains influence in others – characterizes the Venezuelan state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring on land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents. Against this background, I question acceptance of an inevitable agro-industrial future which makes millions of Africans ‘surplus’ to the needs of capitalist investment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the midst of neoliberal restructuring and a project of market-led agrarian reform (MLAR), Guatemalan rural communities and peasant organizations have fought to access, reclaim, or hold onto communal land through direct action. This essay explores the dynamics of organized agrarian struggle in contemporary Guatemala, arguing that three forms of organizing that have been labeled officially as ‘agrarian conflicts’ – historical land claims, rural labour disputes, and land occupations – together account for more peasant land access than has been delivered through the MLAR system. The difficulty of escaping the neoliberal model is also discussed, and the essay concludes that even the most successful grassroots campaigns for land have fed into the implementation of neoliberal restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article proposes an approach to the agrarian question that focuses on the establishment of absolute private property rights over land in Brazil and Mexico. The author argues that current land struggles are conditioned by the property regimes inherited from past struggles. The author examines the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and argues that the balance of class forces led to the slow establishment of absolute private property in Brazil, while in Mexico they triggered the Revolution of 1910–1917, which limited agrarian capitalism. The author then turns to the consequences of these different property regimes in the twentieth century and argues that capitalist social relations have been more dominant in the Brazilian than in the Mexican countryside. The conservative modernization of the 1960s and 1970s is identified as a turning point in the fully capitalist development of agriculture in Brazil. The shift toward food imports, the elimination of subsidies, and the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution signal the re-establishment of the conditions for capitalist development of agriculture in Mexico. The article ends with an assessment of the MST and EZLN's strategies to protect peasants’ access to land and to influence the institutional setting determining access to land. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of Russian oligarchs in search of new frontiers, and the 2002 land code allowing land sales, land began to attract investment. Land grabbing expands at a rapid pace and in some cases, it results in dispossession and little or no compensation. This paper describes different land acquisitions strategies and argues that the share-based land rights distribution during the 1990s did not provide security of land tenure to rural dwellers. Emerging rural social movements try to form countervailing powers but with limited success. Rich land owners easily escape the implementation of new laws on controlling underutilized land, while there is a danger that they enable eviction with legal measures of rural dwellers. In this sense Russia appears to be a ‘normal’ case in the land grab debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Against the backdrop of post-Apartheid neoliberal reform, South African landowners have gained the option to acquire full ownership over wild animals on their land. Corresponding with this, approximately one sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production (i.e. hunting, ecotourism, live trade and venison production). This article analyzes the institutional process in which authority concerning access to wildlife is being restructured, and argues that the unfolding property regime leads to an intensified form of green grabbing. To demonstrate this, the article singles out three particular wildlife policy institutions which make clear (a) how private property rights to wildlife are negotiated and implemented, (b) how wildlife ownership is firmly interlocked with land ownership, (c) how natural entities are being converted to robust political and economical assets, and (d) what social consequences this has for rural South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the past two decades agrarian (‘land and farm’) reforms have been widespread in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), following earlier ones in Asia (China and Vietnam). However, independent family farms did not become the predominant sector in most of Eastern Europe. A new dual (or bi-modal) agrarian structure emerged, consisting of large farm enterprises (with much less social functions than they had before), and very small peasant farms or subsidiary plots. The paper compares five case studies, looking at agrarian actors, property rights, state influence, and rural poverty. These are Russia, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in the EECCA region, and China's Xinjiang province in Asia. The paper concludes that state influence is still substantial, property rights regimes are quite diverse and rural poverty remains medium to high. State-led agrarian reform, in particular where a redistributive (or restitution-based) land reform was implemented led in some cases to land-based wealth redistribution, but policies and institutions were lacking to support the individual farm sector. More often the outcome was a rapid transfer of land in the hands of corporate farm enterprises, reversing the initial process of ‘re-peasantization’. It seems that the old ‘Soviet dream’ of mega-farm enterprises in the ‘transition to capitalism’ has regained prominence, with huge agro-holdings ‘calling the shots’, providing an insecure future for agricultural workers, peasants and farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces a discussion of gender dimensions into the growing debate on large-scale land deals. It addresses the current information gap on the differential gender effects of large-scale land deals through (1) an overview of the phases of large-scale land deals and discussion of related effects on rural men and women based on new literature on large-scale land deals and past literature on the gender effects of commercialization and contract farming; (2) a presentation of further evidence using several case studies on the gender effects of large-scale deals; and (3) a conclusion that looks at knowledge gaps and areas for further research as well as broad recommendations for gender equitable large-scale land deals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the momentous transformations in the agrarian social order of contemporary Ethiopia. It argues that the contemporary world economic, food, and energy crisis is accelerating processes of commercialization and enclosures that are profoundly altering the social and physical landscape of smallholder farming. These dynamics have taken a spatially divergent pattern that maps onto older imperial socio-spatial and cultural hierarchies. In the historically core regions and their socio-cultural extensions, a vigorous process of smallholder commercialization is being promoted, while in the surrounding lowland peripheries an extensive process of enclosures is creating an archipelago of large-scale mechanized farming that is displacing the subsistence sector. The contrasting forms of displacement and dispossession generated by these processes, and the patterns of social-property relations they are engendering, can be understood as outcomes of the uneven and combined dynamics of state formation and the differentiated incorporation of the regional peasantries into the dominant social orders constitutive of twentieth century Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The return to ancestral lands has been at the centre of the land reform rhetoric in Zimbabwe. This argument is premised on the fact that many communities were displaced from their ancestral lands during the colonial period hence they saw the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000 as an opportunity for them to ‘return’ to their old homes. This article explores and analyses the issues surrounding land disputes in one village model A1 after the land reform programme and the role played by the regime of traditional authorities in determining how belonging is negotiated. It also analyses the conflicts between autochthons and migrants over the control of the new resettlement areas and over the authority of village heads and chiefs. Claims to land based on ancestral graves and autochthony are also analysed in view of the power of political authorities in land allocation. This paper offers an analysis of the intricacies of land reform in the newly resettled areas and examines the interface between politics and traditional authority on how belonging is negotiated in these contexts. The article is largely based on qualitative interviews with resettled farmers in Gutu, informal interactions as well as personal observations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper extends the analysis of Zimbabwe's Fast Track land reform to the district of Chipinge in Manicaland province in south eastern Zimbabwe, where particular agro-ecological, political and social dynamics are important. In the three A1 resettlement schemes studied, political loyalty and patronage largely explain how the new beneficiaries acquired land. Most scholarly work, media and advocacy reports acknowledge the role of political patronage in the acquisition of A2 farms but they underplay this on A1 resettlement schemes. Based on empirical data, I argue that some A1 land reform beneficiaries are clients of patronage networks. Even though the new A1 farmers have other legitimate claims to land they are being subordinated to a partisan state and authoritarian ruling party that is willing to exclude other ‘ordinary’ people with ‘wrong’ or weak political ties in a highly politicised landscape. Thus, the paper argues that in these cases the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)'s governing elite manipulated autochthonous, historical, political, social reproduction and livelihoods grievances among different groups of people to set in motion a party politicised Fast Track Land Reform (Fast Track) project meant to reassert its political hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The fast track land redistribution programme generated new agrarian labour relations altering the tying of labour on the large farms to tenancy, supplemented by casual labour from the communal areas. Job losses and displacement occurred, but this is not the whole story as new and diverse sources of rural employment have emerged, including high levels of self-employment on small farms (A1) supplemented by casual employment. Large farms dependent on wage labour experience labour shortages despite the mechanisation drive. However, communal areas and A1 farmers continue to provide labour to large farms, although labour supplies are negotiated on new terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss articles published within the issue on the 2000 Zimbabwe land reforms focusing on land reform beneficiary selection, changes in land use and agrarian structure, and women's relationships to land reform.

Women's access to land and the shaping of livelihoods after fast track land reform should be viewed with a new social and economic lens in Zimbabwe. This paper examines the extent to which negotiations and bargaining by women with the family, state, and traditional actors has proved to be useful in accessing land in one semi-arid district, Mwenezi, in southern Zimbabwe. Based on multi-site ethnography, it shows the complex and innovative ways women adopted in accessing land and shaping non-permanent mobile livelihoods. I challenge the assumption that Western notions of individual rights to land are the best mechanisms for women in Africa; rather it is the negotiated and bargaining processes that exist in patriarchal structures that lead to cultural contracts enabling women's land access. Off-farm activities involving trading in South Africa became a major activity undertaken by the women. Trips to South Africa intensified due to land acquisition, leading to new market searches beyond national borders. The role of collective action and women's agency in overcoming the challenges associated with trading in South Africa is examined within the ambit of the livelihoods analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Questions of who was allocated land under Zimbabwe's Fast Track land reform programme and how productive the beneficiaries have been are highly controversial. This article presents detailed empirical data on beneficiaries who were small and medium-sized commercial farms (the A2 model) in Goromonzi district, land allocation processes, and land use. Goromonzi District is one of the four districts that share a boundary with Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. A questionnaire survey targeting 65 A2 beneficiaries was implemented in 2003, while key informant interviews were done in 2006. Drawing on both primary and official data, the article shows that official criteria for selecting beneficiaries for A2 farms that emphasized the potential to use the land productively were ignored in practice. The institutions responsible for land allocation were captured by members of the ruling party and by representatives of the state security apparatus, and most beneficiaries were drawn from the governing or the local elite. Many lacked sufficient capital to invest meaningfully in commercial agriculture, did not have relevant farming experience, and were unable to put the bulk of their land into production for several years. As a result, in Goromonzi District the impact of Fast Track land reform on commercial agriculture has been negative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Redistributive land reform and agrarian reforms since 2000 progressively changed some of Zimbabwe's agrarian relations, particularly by broadening the producer and consumption base. However they fuelled new inequities in access to land and farm input and output markets. These complex structural changes are explored using a series of surveys, secondary sources and official documents. Findings show that exploitative agrarian labour practices continue despite the diversification of labour towards numerous farms and other enterprises. Agricultural output declined primarily due to reduced inputs and credit supplies, and frequent droughts, but has been rising since 2006. Increasing export production now involves more producers, driven by the diversification of agrarian merchants and contract farming. Agro-industrial capital has gradually increased its domestic operations in the supply of inputs and marketing, especially after re-liberalisation in 2008. Many new farmers accumulate assets although some struggle for social reproduction. Agrarian politics now entail new struggles over agrarian markets, land and labour rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fast track land reform led to the restructuring of agrarian relations in Zimbabwe. This paper explores the emerging forms of local agency on selected A1 farms in Goromonzi and Zvimba. It analyses how A1 beneficiaries have formed local farmer groups (LFGs) and the extent to which these have contributed towards relieving farm production challenges that include the unavailability of productive assets, limited household labour and unavailability of inputs. Through case studies of local farmer groups this paper manages to examine the internal dynamics of local agency, the nature of participation and the extent to which these formations actually provide a relief to members and provide the first line of defence of the newly found land rights. The findings provide important clues regarding local agency in a context where lineage forms of organisation do not exist and in most cases ‘strangers’ from different places have been resettled next to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the heat of the discussions about the fast-track land reform programme (FTLRP) in Zimbabwe, little attention is given to the experience with land reform immediately following independence. Understanding these past experiences is useful to contextualize current challenges. Although the farmers resettled in the early 1980s started out in a completely different political and economic environment, the challenges in establishing their farms and communities were, at least to some extent, very similar to those reported today. However, livelihoods developed by the farmers in the old resettlement areas have been severely constrained by the macro-economic context. We argue that any discussion on the success of FTLRP should acknowledge the impact of the devastating macro-economic context on the opportunities for smallholder farmers to establish their farms and become agriculturally productive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most commentary on Zimbabwe's land reform insists that agricultural production has almost totally collapsed, that food insecurity is rife, that rural economies are in precipitous decline, that political ‘cronies’ have taken over the land and that farm labour has all been displaced. This paper however argues that the story is not simply one of collapse and catastrophe; it is much more nuanced and complex, with successes as well as failures. The paper provides a summary of some of the key findings from a ten-year study in Masvingo province and the book Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities. The paper documents the nature of the radical transformation of agrarian structure that has occurred both nationally and within the province, and the implications for agricultural production and livelihoods. A discussion of who got the land shows the diversity of new settlers, many of whom have invested substantially in their new farms. An emergent group ‘middle farmers’ is identified, who are producing, investing and accumulating. This has important implications – both economically and politically – for the future, as the final section on policy challenges discusses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people's land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people's relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders' access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced. As a consequence, agovernment institution's control over land does not represent or reflect pre-existing sovereignty. It producesit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]