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This work explores an efficient integration of IoT devices based on context awareness in the agricultural sector. A four-layered framework is proposed in which automation techniques are embedded to get real-time context aware insights from the ecosystem of IoT. The framework is evaluated using a strategic tool called threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths (TOWS) matrix to measure the performance of automation techniques. This analysis points out various opportunities to innovate the livelihood of agrarian society around the globe.

In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To address this question, I combine insights about debt from rural political ecology and development finance scholarship in order to analyze the relationship between changing agroecological practices and household indebtedness in a Cambodian rice- farming village. In the past two decades, Cambodians have borrowed from commercial microfinance institutions at the highest rate per capita of any country in the world. With fewer Cambodians farming, and agricultural production increasingly commodified, researchers have begun to study how the fast growth of Cambodia's microfinance industry contributes to these changes. By building upon the concept of financial landscapes, which highlights the diversity of social and material relations of debt in rural economies, I argue that agrarian change in Cambodia is entangled with rising household debts used to fund both agricultural production and social reproduction. I describe how non-monetary debt obligations underpinned labor-intensive rice agricultural practices in the 1980s and early 1990s, but have since been replaced by monetary debt used to fund household basic needs and commodified agricultural production. To make my argument, I draw upon 20 months of ethnographic research within a farming village in Kampot Province. This article contributes to rural political ecology and development finance scholarship by exploring debt in its diverse material and social forms at a time of deepening financialization, and how these debt relations in turn shape the economic and agroecological contours of contemporary agrarian change.

In spite of the insight commonality may have concerning agrarian practice, fact is that nowadays agricultural science diligence is accurate, precise, data-driven, and vigorous than ever. The emanation of the technologies based on Internet of Things (IoT) has reformed nearly each industry like smart city, smart health, smart grid, smart home, including “smart agriculture or precision agriculture”. Applying machine learning using the IoT data analytics in agricultural sector will rise new benefits to increase the quantity and quality of production from the crop fields to meet the increasing food demand. Such world-shattering advancements are rocking the current agrarian approaches and generating novel and best chances besides a number of limitations. This paper climaxes the power and capability of computing techniques including internet of things, wireless sensor networks, data analytics and machine learning in agriculture. The paper proposed the prediction model of Apple disease in the apple orchards of Kashmir valley using data analytics and Machine learning in IoT system. Furthermore, a local survey was conducted to know from the farmers about the trending technologies and their effect in precision agriculture. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges faced when incorporating these technologies in the traditional farming approaches.

With 76% of the total main workforce in agriculture and more than 50% small and medium landowning households, the village provides an important case study for understanding agrarian resilience. The conceptualisation of resilience has been majorly confined to a system or a territorial boundary. Agrarian resilience too is commonly assumed to be driven by forces within the agriculture and the rural. i.e. land ownership remains constant, the labour of the peasantry is spatially limited to agriculture, the capital is generated within agriculture and the networks and skills of the peasantry is also confined to agriculture. This has underscored the role of factors and processes working outside the agriculture in conceptualising agrarian resilience. While the primacy of the agrarian processes cannot be denied, there are often processes working outside an agrarian system that can also enable resilience. i.e. the rural workforce can diversify its labour outside agriculture in the urban non-farm sector, capital can also be generated from sources outside the agriculture. In this context, using the case study of a village dominated by small and medium landowning households in the Patiala district of Punjab in India, the paper shows that resilience is driven by processes both within and outside agriculture.

Unlike the rest of the state of Punjab in India, cotton remained the dominant monsoon crop in the southwest region till the 1990s. As it has been increasingly replaced by paddy in recent decades, this paper asks what this shift in cropping pattern reflects about the state’s agrarian capitalism. Towards an analysis of this question, it builds on James Scott’s idea of ‘political crops’ in the earliest states and places it in conversation with scholarship in critical agrarian studies, political ecology and commodity studies to account for relations of power under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on intensive primary research in the region, the paper contrasts the power relations generated by the production and circulation of the two crops. It shows that larger farmers are more likely to cultivate paddy due to better access to irrigation, and that the shift to paddy is threatening to make redundant the labour of landless Dalit women, who do cotton-picking, and increasing dependence on migrant male labour for paddy-transplanting. It also demonstrates how the different end uses of the two crops and the predominance of the private sector in the cotton markets versus the hitherto state-led nature of the paddy markets produce differential risks for farmers and traders. The paper concludes by suggesting that the shift from cotton to paddy represents capital intensification in response to Punjab’s mature capitalist conditions in agriculture but also results in new contradictions and axes of political struggle.

Protected geographical indications (PGIs) are an increasingly popular strategy for securing price premiums on food products in the interest of preserving associated rural livelihoods, however they often fail to show clear benefits for small or otherwise marginalized farmers. Their environmental record for supporting low-impact farming practices is also mixed. This case study of the PGI for Spanish almond-based desserts Turron de Jijona and Turron de Alicante details a yet unstudied form of such failures, where manufacturers seeking to scale production removed the requirement to source their primary ingredient (almonds) from the region's low-input farms and opted for intensively produced ingredients imported from abroad. This uprooting of turron from its agroecological origins highlights how the GI designation creates tension between the need to legitimate a product as rooted in traditional agrarian lifeways and the incentive to expand exports by industrial means. While previous studies show how such tension can result in agricultural intensification benefitting larger landholders within a given region, I argue this inequity and ecological risk operates at a global scale. Importantly, the turron case reveals that “quality” of a product is a moving target shaped not only by culinary legacies but also forged by a global political economy of agriculture suffering chronic overproduction. Finally, the role of the state in structuring PGI institutions more inclusively and adjudicating conflicts among actors along the value chain is fundamental to the capacity of these programs to achieve social and environmental goals.

This study examines agrobiodiversity production and consumption among indigenous people and smallholders engaged with cascading migration, coca, and water resource changes. Addressing the questions if and how agrobiodiversity is viable amid intensifying extra-local influences, it combines the theorization of a pathway that has emerged via infrastructure entanglements and the extended case study of local utilization practices. The theoretical orientation integrates key elements of political ecology and social-ecological systems. We undertook surveys, interviews, and ethnographic participant observation in 10 communities and villages of Cochabamba, Bolivia, between 1990 and 2013. Results show how agrobiodiversity was utilized at moderate-high levels in the land and water systems, foods, and other uses of indigenous peasants and smallholder farmers in the 1990–2013 period even as certain minor crops were significantly reduced. Moreover, the results reveal how agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods have functioned in production and consumption amid the infrastructure entanglements of migration, roads, and irrigation. Embeddedness as both quotidian resource capacities and contingent sociocultural symbols was hinged to agrarian change in these accelerated entanglements. Mobilities of both meaning and people in recent infrastructure entanglement is characteristic of the unfolding utilization of agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods. Social power in the complex contours of accelerated entanglement have furnished meanings ranging from the resistance politics of indigenous people and smallholders to the purposeful agendas of more powerful groups. The conclusion highlights how dynamic agrobiodiversity utilization has emerged via the pathway of indigenous people and smallholders who are engaged in cascading, extra-local entanglements.

Violent conflicts are frequently associated with detrimental or neutral effects on economic, social, and environmental development; by extension, one might expect similar effects on agrobiodiversity. However, as this study suggests, the impacts of conflicts are not necessarily all negative or neutral. Indeed, conflicts may also create favorable political conditions for the implementation of community-driven agrobiodiversity management. Drawing on ethnographic research in the indigenous central region of Chiapas, Mexico, where the insurgent Zapatista movement (EZLN) has a strong influence, we examine the impact of the agrarian conflict between this indigenous movement and the Mexican government on the development of agrobiodiversity conservation initiatives. Two research questions guide this paper: (1) What has been the impact of the conflict on communities’ subsistence agriculture and seed sovereignty? and (2) To what extent has the local seed sovereignty movement—an outgrowth of the Zapatista conflict—influenced agrobiodiversity conservation? Our findings suggest that the conflict has led to the implementation of grassroots agroecology and food and seed sovereignty projects that could ultimately strengthen agrobiodiversity in the communities under the influence of the Zapatista movement. We suggest that these projects highlight two elements essential for long-term agrobiodiversity conservation: first, the strategic relationship between agrobiodiversity conservation and these communities’ food security and seed sovereignty, particularly in the context of conflict; and second, the central role that peasant communities play in the preservation, reproduction, and evolution of agrobiodiversity. We conclude that the overall long-term impact of the Zapatista conflict on local agrobiodiversity has in fact been positive.

Drawing on political-ecological vulnerability theory, this paper analyzes the impact of illegal-drug cultivation and its related violence on smallholder agrobiodiversity in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is a global agrobiodiversity hotspot where cannabis and opium poppy have been widely cultivated for decades. The study is based on 76 structured/semi-structured interviews with imprisoned farmers, harvest gatherers, and former soldiers in four state prisons. Results show that illegal-drug crops and native-food crops complement each other until a threshold of violence is crossed, which leads to the abandonment of agriculture due to murder, imprisonment, and out-migration. The specialization of smallholder agriculture in illegal-drug crops tends to favor crossing the threshold of violence. In most municipalities in this study, however, rather a diversification process took place in which illegal-drug crops were incorporated to food production systems, reducing both the exposure and the sensitivity of smallholders to structural and direct violence. Other adaptation strategies involved local organization and militarization of smallholders for collective-risk management and territorial control. Ultimately, by comparing five vulnerability scenarios, this paper argues that the combination of peasant organization, militarization, and crop/livelihood diversification in Oaxaca mitigates the violent agrarian change associated with this illegal economy, while conserving agrobiodiversity.

The analysis of agrobiodiversity has mostly neglected conditioning by violent conflict and related processes of social and agrarian change. Similarly, the violent conflicts literature has rarely considered interactions with agrobiodiversity, which involves social as well as biophysical processes. Considering their frequent spatial overlaps around the world, this paper introduces a themed issue investigating how agrobiodiversity and violent (post)conflicts transform each other and are often interdependent. To do so, we bring into dialogue previously disparate lines of research and present the empirical and theoretical contributions of the papers included in the themed issue. Based on this collective work, we call for further synthesis, whereby research working on agrobiodiversity meet and converge with research on violent conflict from various disciplines. The papers that compose this issue evidence how an integrative approach is not only analytically beneficial but also necessary for research supporting the sustainable resolution of conflict, the related conservation of agrobiodiversity and equitable human-environment relations.

Crisis provides opportunities for social and environmental reorganization. States claimed responsibility for much agrarian development during the first half of the 20th century through massive development projects in countries like India and the United States, but rural communities now encounter a plurality of legitimate responses to crisis. As Max Weber and his critics have shown, crises are opportunities for charismatic actors who may appear in the form of programs, tools, plants, and leaders – provided they assemble a passionate coalition of political supporters and offer a way to fulfill an aspiration derailed by the crisis. Plural models of alternative agrarian development reorganize political, social, and ecological relationships through commodities and didactic educational programs. In each case, charisma is tied to political relationships with potential for both collective action and violent Othering. Case studies from Indian agriculture at three scales show how such crises break from state and local programs, and how charismatic entities capitalize on that void to forge new alliances.

A survey was carried out on ethnoveterinary practices used by Fulani agropastoralists for maintaining the health and treating of livestock diseases in Ido agrarian community of Oyo State, Nigeria. Information was collected from fifty cattle herders using interview method with the help of Hausa interpreter and with the aid of questionnaires. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (cross tabulations) to generate frequencies and percentages. Plants used for various ethnoveterinary and ethnomedicinal purposes were revealed. Information on the type of animals kept and management practices used by the respondents show that 48% kept cattle, goat and sheep. 14% kept cattle and goat, 36% kept cattle and sheep, while 2% kept cattle only. All the respondents agreed to stomach and intestinal worms as the prevalent ruminant diseases in the area. However, 86% of respondents reported seasonal appearance of worm infestations during wet season, while 14% both seasons. Higher percentage of respondents (80%) adopted the use of traditional medicine and conventional drugs in treating animals. 88% showcased the effectiveness of such combination of traditional and conventional drugs as being very effective. 20% of the respondents used the whole plant in formulating herbal preparations. Urbanization, seasonal variations and unquantifiable dosage have been highlighted as challenges encountered in the use of ethnoveterinary medicine in Ido agrarian community. 12% used decoction method of preparation, 50% used infusion, while 30% mixed plant with non-plant to formulate herbal preparations in solving the problem of helminthiasis and other diseases. The respondents who used local remedies claimed the knowledge of ethnoveterinary was passed from the parents to the children, and this keeps going from generation to generation. The results obtained from this study show that the awareness and the availability of ethnoveterinary plants among Fulani agropastoralists in Ido agrarian community of Oyo state is high, and this is responsible for the high patronage and usage of ethnoveterinary plants in this community. Intestinal worm infestations are the prevalent livestock disease encountered by the Fulani agropastoralists in the study area.

Amidst growing concern about the displacement of rural populations exposed to climate change, new financial instruments are increasingly being presented as key tools for the management of climate risks. Index-based agricultural insurance (IBAI) is a particularly key example. Recent critical work has pointed to the deeply neoliberal character of IBAI and like interventions. However, the promotion of new financial instruments in response to crises of agrarian production has a much longer history in Africa and elsewhere. This article draws on Marx’s concept of ‘latent’ surplus populations to trace out and explain parallels between IBAI and colonial interventions in Senegal’s groundnut basin. Approaching the question in this way, the article highlights the long-run historical co-production and interdependence of the Senegalese state and a political ecology of groundnut production in which relations of indebtedness and the exposure to variable rainfall of a fragile relative surplus population has often been crucial to the mobilization of cheap labour for groundnut production. IBAI is thus positioned as part of a recurrent trajectory of emergency financial interventions aimed at smoothing out the contradictions implicit in this socio-ecological configuration.

Agritourism has often been framed as a means to revitalize a declining rural economy by improving and diversifying household incomes, forestalling rural flight, and preserving agrarian cultures. We argue, however, that it can also have the propensity to create a different kind of rural revitalization, one that accentuates the production of spectacle, at times at the expense of food production. We draw from qualitative field research to examine the growing agritourism movement in the Philippines, a country with a struggling rural sector. We observe that agritourism sites in the Philippines negotiate space and work in multiple ways and highlight the tensions that farmers increasingly perceive on the ground. Some farmers persist in maintaining the production of food, while others shift more towards the staging of experience and spectacle to serve urbanite imaginations of the rural. We present various tendencies in the process of transitioning from farm to agritourism and argue that attention to the production of rural spectacle is important in understanding agrarian transitions at the farm and community level, and ultimately agritourism’s implications on rural revitalization.

Livelihood insecurity emerges from the interaction of factors and pressures affecting people’s ability to cope with change. Yet, the effects of interactive stressors on the dynamic nature of livelihoods and their underlying gendered relationships are still unexplored. We evaluated a case study in Maria La Baja, a municipality in the Colombian Caribbean severely affected by the Colombian armed conflict and oil palm expansion. With the pacification of the conflict in the late 2000s, traditional inhabitants aimed to reconstruct their livelihoods amidst a context of reduced access to resources. We assessed how local livelihood strategies have been affected by the interplay of socio-political distress, agrarian change, agrobiodiversity loss, seasonality, and unequal access to resources for men and women. We conducted surveys and interviews to 1) characterize local livelihoods and their transformations; 2) evaluate current livelihood insecurity and pressures; and 3) assess whether disruptions in local livelihoods have equally affected men and women, and influenced their mechanisms to cope with change. Current livelihoods in Maria La Baja have been largely characterized by months with water, crop and income scarcity. These effects have been shaped by the reduced access to resources and social control that resulted from the armed conflict and oil palm expansion. Such pressures also induced the spatial segregation of women. Diversification of livelihood activities was a coping strategy to overcome the effects of resource scarcity. Despite segregation by gender, diversification was greatly conducted by women. Women-led diversification may become more important in contexts of increasing socio-ecological change.

Geographers' engagements with environmental crises have taken a number of forms. Some scholars argue that crises judgments are revelatory and expose the contradictions of modes of production through interruptions to socio-economic life that can no longer be ignored. Others contend that crises judgments conceal more than they reveal through the framing of crisis as “error” and the focus on technocratic solutions to political-economic problems. In this article, we argue that the judgment of seasonal air pollution as a crisis is contingent on contestations over livelihoods and worldviews, and in doing so demonstrate how attention to chronopolitics reveals the nuanced ways people account for uncertainty in the causes and effects of anthropogenic environmental change. Based in northern Thailand, the paper focuses on what is described by many residents as the region's annually recurring “haze crisis”. In recent decades, broad shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture and increased volumes of agricultural biomass burning have reportedly exacerbated the production of air pollution in the form of haze—an airborne mixture of pollutants that includes gasses, fine soot particles and carbon dioxide. Once a quotidian phenomenon of relatively little concern, today seasonal air pollution is described as a haze crisis. While causal uncertainty exists surrounding the precise combination of the socio-ecological drivers of haze production, multiple narratives circulate throughout the region, in which blame is frequently placed on smallholder farmers who have recently entered into new market relations. Situated within broader regional agrarian transitions, we draw on mixed ethnographic, archival and geospatial methods to examine the chronopolitics of seasonal air pollution and by what mechanisms such pollution comes to be constituted as a crisis.

This article combines perspectives from feminist agricultural economics and agrarian feminist Marxism to conceptualize the spatial process of translocality from a gender perspective arguing for the resurrection of the household as a unit of study in the context of translocality. Engendering the emerging field of translocal livelihoods research requires understanding the household both as a process, but also as an institution that upholds patriarchal control over resources and gender based norms, in relation to its members as well as the broader community. Gender roles may be renegotiated as a result of translocality but they occur in contexts that uphold broader patriarchal norms. The material, social and emotional bases for engaging in processes of translocal householding and re-negotiating gender roles differ, in relation to the livelihood options of particular households, but also with respect to broader social and economic processes.

This article contributes an economic geography perspective on the envisioning and implementing of mega-infrastructure projects in Africa. Focusing on development corridors and their implicit spatio-temporality of “global integration,” we conceptualize corridors as spatial imaginaries for strategic coupling processes. We distinguish between emptying the future and claiming space as two fundamental mechanisms of spatial imaginaries. Together, these mechanisms can render crucial territorial and relational “insides” and “outsides” available for coupling processes. Spatial imaginaries are then sources of power in the coupling between corridor regions and global production networks. Empirically, we focus on the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) in relation to the coupling process between global fertilizer manufacturer YARA International and the Tanzanian agricultural market. Facing unfavourable coupling conditions with Tanzania’s fertilizer sector, the early mobilization of SAGCOT served to promote a narrow imaginary of Tanzania’s agrarian future, thereby making a soft claim to territorial (through the corridor) and networked space (through a network of corridor stakeholders). Although YARA and Tanzanian counterparts initially capitalized on SAGCOT’s mobilization due to its promise to transform Tanzanian agriculture, a gradual disenchantment with SAGCOT’s vision and its subsequent disintegration jeopardizes these coupling process today. Approaching corridors as spatial imaginaries reveals therefore their instrumental but fragile power in coupling processes. Such power is not about blunt domination or coercion, but rather builds on persuasion and consent. Only when spatial imaginaries succeed in maintaining persuasive arguments about the future, is their function of initiating and stabilizing otherwise unfavourable coupling processes available.

Precision agriculture is an assemblage of data-driven agricultural technologies, discursively articulated as a clever gambit against climate-induced food insecurity. Agritech companies engage in data grabbing as an accumulation strategy and to influence farmers’ behaviors, opening new agrarian frontiers for surveillance capitalism. Wielding big data to manage and optimize species within food production systems becomes a biopolitical calculation of “make bloom and let wither,” with implications for the agrarian question of labor. Drawing on mixed methods fieldwork from South Dakota and Vermont, we document how different actors perform and contest agri-algorithmic subjectivities, producing novel terrains of food politics and neoliberal state-citizen relations.

Precision agriculture (PA) is restructuring farmer livelihoods and identities through a panoply of technologies that generate and process big data to influence agricultural practices. In this paper, we ask the question: How does algorithmic rationality impact farmers' trust in PA? We focus on the modalities of power wielded by agritech firms through PA that socially construct a form of moralistic trust, the politics of knowledge and knowledgeability, and the internalization of new social identities. This research study utilized a mixed methods approach that included focus groups and follow-up surveys with social actors along the PA value chain. We found that agritech firms have successfully positioned their knowledge products as superior to farmers' experiential knowledge, thereby ensuring farmers’ sustained engagement with PA technologies for the purposes of data capture and capital accumulation. Farmers internalize the algorithmic rationality of PA and position themselves along a moral register through governmentalized actions that ostensibly demonstrate moralistic trust in the system. This process has the effect of transforming social identities, interpellating farmers as the architects of their own alienation. Agritech is increasingly adept at digitally abstracting farm knowledge away from farmers. PA is a battleground wherein the politics of agrarian knowledge are contested.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many – but generally not to farmers and rural communities. We interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive today? What historical forces underlie the recent resurgence of reactionary politics? How does resistance emerge from and produce authoritarian power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two agricultural regions – California and the Midwest – we find some answers. California has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, the Midwest sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing that at times led Heartland politics in emancipatory directions. Synthesizing our cases offers the following lessons: First, capitalist growers and business allies in both regions developed new strategies to assert class power through authoritarian populist ideologies and tactics, paving the way for national right-wing successes. Second, socially conservative cultural norms and alliances have been central to organizing this incipient authoritarian populist hegemony. Third, radicalism, liberalism, and liberal policy changes have often fueled the rise of conservative populisms. Fourth, working towards emancipation among non-elites has required working across differences. These lessons provide a roadmap for intersectional and cross-sectoral organizing in contemporary times.

Rosewood is currently the most trafficked endangered plant species globally, with much of this illegal trade originating from Africa. To regulate rosewood extraction, many African countries have adopted centralized forest governance approaches. Following several partial bans, the government of Ghana placed a comprehensive ban on rosewood extraction in March 2019. Despite these bans, illegal extraction and export of rosewood continue to persist. Drawing theoretical insights from political ecology and based on empirical research in northern Ghana, we explore the drivers of the persistent illegal extraction of rosewood. Our findings reveal a complex mix of multiscalar processes including the rapid deployment of transnational capital into local agrarian communities by transnational rosewood dealers; selective enforcement of statutory bans; hierarchical corruption; and ecological and socioeconomic vulnerabilities as key drivers. These drivers are embedded in intricate processes of down-scaling and up-scaling among diverse actors. This study contributes to the literature on scale jumping in political ecology and demonstrates how global forces interact with local processes to shape environmental degradation.

While scholars and policy makers have increasingly focused on transnational labour migration (TLM) in Asia, few comparative studies have analysed how TLM shapes poverty, livelihoods, vulnerability, and agrarian-forest change across different rural contexts. Based on focused comparative fieldwork and a critical review of the secondary literature, this paper identifies the salient patterns of TLM-led change affecting rural livelihoods and agrarian-forest landscapes in three migrant-sending Asian countries: Nepal, Indonesia and Laos. Depending on how social relations, including those based on gender and ethnicity, and how specific geographic places are integrated into migration pathways, TLM can result in patterns of changes involving agricultural deactivation and de-agrarianisation, as well as incipient re-agrarianisation. We also find that where remittances are integrated with diversified livelihood portfolios, and where state policies play a supportive role, transnational labour migration may improve household livelihoods. In the absence of these factors, the transformative potential of TLM can be overestimated, and TLM may end up reproducing underlying structural drivers of rural poverty and vulnerability. We, therefore, challenge the simplistic narrative that TLM provides an easy solution to the limitations of rural development in agrarian Asia. We suggest policy innovations that ameliorate critical issues of migrant vulnerability and precarity, and that support the mobilisation of labour remittances for agricultural development and livelihood diversification.

Amid the growing interest on renewables to fight back the current ecological and social crises, crops like oil palm and trees like eucalyptus, with ever-growing and flexibly interchangeable uses as carbon sinks and sources of renewable energy and biomaterials, are praised as climate stewards and vehicles of transition to sustainable development. Hence, flex crops and commodities complexes consolidate within former strongholds and set off to new territories to take down today's crises. Bridging critical and intersectional political economy, ecology and sociology perspectives, and grounded in Guatemala from 2005 onwards, I discuss the implications of the rise of the flex crops and commodities complexes in transitions to sustainability for jobs, labor regimes, and socioecological reproduction. Specifically, the operations of the flex (sugar)cane and (oil) palm complexes in Guatemala involve a predatory form of agrarian extractivism which is driving a process of ‘impairing destruction’. This works by means of a job-poor, culturally insensitive, toilsome and unpaid labor-based ‘productive’ model, and the manufacturing of environmentally and socially toxic landscapes, to fuel a purge of the countryside that leaves nothing and no one, neither friend nor foe, unscathed. However, the purge hits harder on the many working families (and especially on women) who are deemed redundant for the new renewables-led corporate model of sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Many struggle to avoid falling into this outcast condition. But the life purging agro-extractivism of the cane and palm companies both increases and stagnates the reserve army of labor, while simultaneously pushing the relative surplus population to the limits of subsistence. These findings about ‘renewable but unlivable’ futures call into question business as usual, non-transformative climate stewardship and sustainable development initiatives that constrain the (re)production of fairer and more climate-proof, culturally-sound, and youth-friendly life projects.

In this paper we advance the conceptualisation of the ‘good farmer’ through integration of Bourdieusian concepts with DeLanda’s assemblage theory. Considering new farms as assemblages is useful to unlock the relative power of association amongst component parts, and to understand what drives the emergence of a farm. Utilising an empirical case study of new entrants to crofting in Scotland, we assess the interlinked processes of new symbolic capital formation and new croft establishment. Following Bourdieu, the ‘good farmer’ concept provides an approach to identify how established and shifting norms of crofting shape new holding establishment. Findings develop the materiality of social and cultural capital formation, with ‘good crofting’ ideals coded in relation to land capacity, practical experiences working the farm, multifunctional transitions and crofting legislation. New entrants actively ‘territorialise’ (define) their crofts by integrating new markets and management practices. The historicity of new farm assemblage is evident in the active mobilisation of historic images to inform expectations of productivity. The authors argue that integration of assemblage theory with Bourdieusian concepts elucidates the flexibility of farming forms and identities, the role of ‘more-than-human’ actants in farming identity construction, and the role of legislation in shaping understanding of what farming should entail. This is important for academics and policy makers alike concerned with the efforts to revitalise rural and agrarian economies.

Development policy narratives about gender in African agriculture have often emphasized that women tend to farm more for subsistence while men tend to farm more for cash. This gender division of labour is an important aspect of social inequality and food insecurity. However, gender divisions of labour are neither fixed nor universal. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted in northern Ghana, this article examines assumptions underlying development policy and practice about the gender relations of farming and food. This study argues that gender norms in the case do not neatly align with the prevailing conceptions that have shaped interventions. Male smallholders described their primary farming objective as being to produce enough food to feed their family, while women smallholders tended to describe their farming largely in terms of cash generation. This article also considers some of the negative consequences of this misalignment between projects and gender norms. In particular, projects geared at female farmers to support their subsistence production risk adding to their household responsibilities. Support to women only also risks alienating men, potentially causing conflict around the use of project support because women are not autonomous agents. Women rely on and negotiate their labour, harvests and family landholdings, as well as that of others. This negotiation can be disrupted due to interventions and wider environmental and agrarian changes. In short, programs that differentiate support based on misconceptions of context specific gender relations can have unanticipated negative consequences. This study suggests these consequences can persist even in practice that rectifies the tendency of practice to exclude women. Ultimately, development practice should be context specific and consider how gendered agriculture and food relations may be changing.

Recent research on the origins of domesticated herd animals and bronze metallurgy in China suggests that the Ejiin gol in western China was a primary conduit of trade between northern pastoralists and southern agriculturalists (Jaang, 2015). It is within the context of long-distance trade in luxury goods that we see the shift from isolated populations of pastoralists in the mountains of western Mongolia to the widespread adoption of pastoralist cultural traditions. Based on evidence of interaction between Gobi Desert groups and agrarian villages to the south, we see this desert region as the geographic core of cultural transformations among indigenous populations, and at the forefront of a third stage of advance in the spread of East Asian pastoralism. Evidence presented here for increased trade in luxury goods at the beginning of the second millennium BC, when production was at its height, combined with the rapid pace of transformations in burial culture during the mid-second millennium BC suggests that the movement of goods held extreme significance for the spread of pastoralism. Therefore, the role that Gobi Desert groups played in the formation of early trade networks is vital for understanding the spread of pastoralism in Mongolia. Here, we present new evidence for stone bead production and dairying in the Gobi Desert, and discuss the full range of evidence for the role of Gobi Desert groups in emerging long-distance trade networks.

In recent years, rural studies have transitioned from analyzing internal agrarian dynamics within peasant societies to exploring contractual relationships in a vertical manner between agribusiness and peasants with respect to food production and marketing. The present study follows the tradition of classical agrarian research in order to develop an ascendant Foucauldian analysis that is both genealogical (historical) and critical (addressing current effects) of peasant micropower that domestic groups reproduce in their local agrifood supply system in six ejidos of the Sierra Madre region of Chiapas, Mexico. This study used a mixed methodology consisting of a regional ethnography, surveys regarding the peasant economy with 120 domestic groups, interviews with founders of the rural communities and directors of local peasant organizations, factorial statistical and cluster analyses, and visualization of social networks. As a result of the study, we (a) elucidate sociohistorical conditions that have resulted in differentiation among different types of peasants within the micro-region, (b) analyze contemporary social dynamics that have led to polarization between two principal sets of domestic groups based on their means of production, and (c) show how the fact that the majority of domestic groups of the micro-region experience seasonal food scarcity and lack formal employment has led to low rural wages and monopolization of the internal agrifood supply system by those peasants who have greater means of production. We conclude by reflecting on peasant micropower as a phenomenon that can be found in social relations of many agrarian regions around the world, in which the challenge would be to understand its processes of reproduction, analyze effects of this micropower, and propose alternative academic approaches that may contribute to generating public policy and political action to counteract rural inequality.

This paper examines the land grab processes dominated by a domestic state-owned enterprise in Vietnam. We examine the case of a rubber plantation in an ethnic minority area in the Northwest of the country. In doing so, the paper seeks to address how the Vietnamese socialist State – often considered a ‘strong state’ because it has pursued egalitarian land distribution policies over the past three decades – proceeds with domestic land grabbing in a context where the local people follow customary land use practices. The field research revealed the following. First, the Vietnamese government, while maintaining land distribution policies for its rural farming population, has increasingly sought to bring these policies more in line with the global trend of large-scale land acquisition at the expense of the traditional interests and livelihoods of the local population. By seeking to justify their essentially non-egalitarian land grab processes through the policy of post-land grab ‘egalitarian land re-distributions’ in areas with disembedded customary control, the domestic state actors deployed a cunning duplicity in their persistent adherence to agrarian egalitarianism. Second, with the supports from the local and central governments, a state-owned enterprise named Vietnam Rubber Group, carved out its land grab processes with more freedom, leverage, and power than similar firms investing abroad through land concessions. Last, the post-land grab redistribution of land rights materializes state formation through re-territorialization of and re-legalization within the frontier zone.

In many countries, agrarian political parties are important both to rural political representation and to government formation. Nevertheless, relatively little scholarly attention considers who votes for agrarian parties, or how institutional changes affect the relative electoral strength of such parties. This article postulates that cosmopolitan, globalized worldviews are particularly likely to lead voters to prefer alternatives to agrarian parties, and tests the argument with information about emigrant voters, a large bloc of identifiable voters tending to exemplify cosmopolitan perspectives. Analysis of elections across twenty-three European countries confirms that out-of-country voters are less likely to support agrarian parties than are their in-country counterparts, suggesting that forces leading to more cross-cultural, cosmopolitan identities may reduce the electoral weight of rural-focused parties. Evidence from Estonian elections shows that this reduced emigrant support for agrarian parties occurs whether migrants come from urban or from rural regions.

Small-scale mining involves extremely heterogeneous labor arrangements. While previous research has highlighted differences between mining contexts, relatively few scholars have focused on the diverse forms of labor that constitute individual mining localities. Fewer still have analyzed the consequences that emerge from these varied arrangements. In response, this article offers a close examination of small-scale mining labor in the Pongkor gold mining region of West Java, Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and concepts from agrarian political economy, I argue that heterogeneous labor arrangements critically shape the local informal gold economy as well as participants’ experiences within it. First, I outline the various labor roles, configurations, and relations involved in informal gold production in Pongkor. I then analyze how this diversity has helped expand livelihoods and gold extraction, but simultaneously produced inequalities. Particular positionings within the production process cohere with different opportunities, constraints, and risks, ultimately leading to trends of socioeconomic differentiation. Scholars and policymakers must consider the dynamics of informal mining's internal heterogeneity to avoid reinforcing these inequalities.

In cooperatively breeding species, extended living in natal families after maturity is often associated with limited breeding possibilities and the ability to gain indirect fitness from helping relatives, with family dynamics, such as parental presence and relatedness between family members, playing a key role in determining the timing of own reproduction. How family dynamics affect marriage and the onset of reproduction in humans is complex and less well-understood. While paternal absence can be associated with both earlier puberty and reproductive behaviour, or with delayed reproduction if marriage requires parental resources, in step-parent families, half-siblings could further decrease the benefits from helping and delaying own reproduction compared to families with only full-siblings. Such costs and benefits are likely age-dependent, but have not been addressed in previous studies. Using data from pre-industrial agrarian Finland, we investigated if parental loss and remarriage affected marriage probabilities of their differently-aged sons and daughters. We found that parental composition had divergent effects across adulthood: loss of a parent resulted in a higher probability to marry in early adulthood, whereas parental presence increased later adulthood marriage probability. Whilst the death of either parent was linked to an overall lowered marriage probability, remarriage of the widowed parent, especially mother, could mitigate this effect somewhat. Additionally, the presence of underage full-siblings lowered marriage probability, suggesting postponement of one's own reproduction in favour of helping parental reproduction. Overall, our results support the idea that humans are cooperative breeders, and show the importance of considering both relatedness and age when investigating family dynamics.

Labor migration and large-scale land enclosures are increasingly central to the story of agrarian change throughout the Global South. Nonetheless, there remain limited understandings of how recent explosions of mobile labor and new sources of smallholder capital shape and are shaped by ongoing land use and property transformations. This article reviews this gap in Southeast Asia – a region where labor and capital are highly mobile and where the expansion of industrial agriculture and forestry has been particularly rapid. We begin by synthesizing recent labor migration trends in Southeast Asia and discussing key conceptual frameworks for studying labor mobility and agrarian transformations. We then summarize shifts in land use, land control, and labor relations linked to both labor mobility and large-scale land enclosures. We conclude by highlighting two questions deserving of further study. First, how do large-scale industrial agriculture and forest concessions affect rates and patterns of labor migration out of nearby communities? Second, how do new patterns of household resource control and labor allocation from labor migration affect land use and land cover, particularly in sites dominated by large-scale commodity concessions? These questions cannot yet be answered fully though work has begun to address them both directly or indirectly. We use the existing literature to highlight directions for future research on these themes.

In this article, I consider what an attention to embodied experience can add to our understandings of the Green Revolution and other currents of agrarian change in north India. I present and analyze organic farmers’ narratives of agrarian change in Uttarakhand, demonstrating how these accounts foreground issues of embodiment including health, disease, bodily strength, sensory perception, and memory. Developing these narratives toward a political ecology of the body, I consider how these embodied perceptions shape farmers’ accounts and valuations of agrarian change, inform farmers’ decision making, and potentially motivate them to become involved in forms of collective action. In closing, I reflect on how a focus on farmers’ embodied perceptions might complicate histories of the Green Revolution and inform on the ground efforts to support transitions to more sustainable forms of agriculture in north India.

Livelihood studies have highlighted social support networks as critical sources of social capital and as an important feature of rural households' resilience, however so far, have contributed little the understanding of network capital's socio-spatial patterns. Accordingly, livelihood studies have tended to omit relevant determinants of rural households' resilience, especially in emerging and developing countries, such as Thailand, where rapid agrarian change and migration have resulted in increasing translocal connectedness between rural and urban areas and unevenly distributed livelihood outcomes. This paper aims at closing this gap, by systematically assessing the socio-spatial patterns of rural households' translocal networks in Northeast Thailand. Applying a translocal network approach combining methods of formal social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative network research, we find that translocal network capital matters more for accessing advice than for labor, but particularly for accessing financial support. Although poor households have less translocal network capital at their disposal, they depend more critically on translocal networks than rich households. While poor households rely particularly on migration-related bonding ties to provide financial means for coping with precarious livelihood conditions, rich households can leverage institutional translocal bridging ties to access advice and finance for the transformation towards market-oriented agriculture. These findings suggest that, in Northeast Thailand, translocal network capital contributes less to the poors' than to the richs' resilience. We conclude by calling for a more nuanced consideration of the socio-spatial patterns of network capital and propose applying a translocal network perspective as a fruitful means to this end.

Resilience has surged to the forefront of conversations in the increasingly intertwined development and adaptation communities of practice. However, their use of this concept lacks an implementable vision of the connection between resilience and the sorts of transformations that are central to their goals. Instead, these communities implicitly privilege stability and persistence, a framing that neither represents the current state of resilience thinking in the literature, nor addresses the substantial body of critique concerned with the lack of attention to agency, power, and difference in resilient systems. In this paper, I argue that this state of affairs is a symptom of an approach to transformation in practice that lacks an explicit theorization of agency, power, and difference in socio-ecological resilience. To address this issue, I offer one such theorization, framing resilience as the outcome of context-specific socio-ecological projects manifest in livelihoods and aimed at achieving safety and stability for the widest number of people. By employing the Livelihoods as Intimate Government approach, which makes power relations, social difference, and agency central to explanations of observed livelihoods decisions and outcomes, this theorization identifies dynamics of socio-ecological resilience distinct from those of purely ecological resilience. I illustrate these distinctions through various cases in the literature, including studies of development projects, agrarian livelihoods, and socio-ecological system dynamics, and from these illustrations suggest larger lessons about socio-ecological resilience. Among these lessons is a clear message for the development and adaptation communities of practice: the path to the transformative goals of these communities lies in a focus on alleviating shocks and stresses on socio-ecological projects, as opposed to merely addressing their material outcomes.

Government officials and representatives of corporations and international organisations promoting oil palm argue this crop brings development by creating numerous jobs for the rural poor, even through large-scale plantations. This study critically assesses this narrative as deployed in Mesoamerica and analyses oil palm labour regimes in two study regions in Mexico and one in Guatemala where both smallholders and private sector plantations are producing oil palm. Following a political ecology framework, we analyse labour practices as embodied and political, taking into account larger processes of agrarian change. Based on interviews and surveys of producers and field labourers, we found oil palm production was characterised by low employment rates (one job or less for every 10 hectares of land) and flexible labour regimes under which field labourers face uncertain, poorly paid and risky circumstances at work. The palm oil industry defines development narrowly, as access to income without social change, while it profits from contemporary and historical inequalities that have turned young men, many of them indigenous Maya, rural women, and Guatemalan peasants into cheap labour. However, in oil palm production, profit oriented neoliberal arrangements by the private sector clash with a peasant moral economy that emphasise the value of physical labour and smallholder-worker solidarity. Despite being highly profitable, the palm oil industry offers limited livelihood opportunities for field labourers.

In this paper we describe social change and the potential of agricultural innovation processes to create, or expand, spaces for women to exercise agency in economic and agricultural decision-making in Kenya. Rural communities are increasingly drawn into global processes that create local economic and agrarian change, with marked influences on gender relations, roles and responsibilities. We draw on a qualitative case study with 140 research participants from rural and peri-urban villages in Western Kenya. We examine how global processes have fostered local level changes in the last decade to contextualize innovation processes. Economic changes related to paid work and an evident increase of women's participation in rural development programs reflect, in part, a gender, often women-centred development agenda that targets women in rural programming. Next, we describe a more recent agricultural innovation process to explore decision-making about time use, access to and control over productive resources. Lastly, we describe patterns in gender relations, roles and responsibilities that have changed in response to broader community change and how innovation specific decision-making may create spaces for women to exercise agency in local contexts. We draw on feminist geographic perspectives to better understand these processes through an exploration of everyday practices. Our focus on gender relations and agency as spatial phenomena facilitates an understanding of how roles and responsibilities are created, reproduced and, in some cases, transformed to increase women's agency in particular spaces. Our key findings highlight how economic pressure and agricultural programs that focus on women have brought women into public spaces in new ways and created gendered opportunity spaces amidst persisting roles of men as authorities and final decision-makers and women playing supportive roles. Innovation processes often replicate gender patterns through decision-making in productive assets, however access to agriknowledge offers avenues for women to expand their opportunity spaces by expanding social networks and their ability to negotiate for resources in the household. We recommend further studies that draw on feminist geography to inform the design of agricultural innovations and interventions to benefit women, men and to improve overall livelihoods.

This article explores the history of the Honduran palm oil industry, through a case study of the Bajo Aguan region in the North Coast. This region went from being a supposedly “empty” space before the 1960s, to the home of a colonization project that became the centerpiece of the Honduran agrarian reform and the palm oil industry, during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s it came to be known as the “capital of the agrarian counter-reform,” as a cycle of dispossession led to the concentration of most of the land distributed during the previous period by a handful of large private companies. From the 2000s onwards, a new consensus has arisen regarding the centrality of the crop in the country's rural development strategy. However, this apparent consensus has been contended in the Aguan by a set of peasant organizations who question the legality and legitimacy of the deals that led to the control of the industry by these companies. It argues that to better understand the current configuration of the Honduran palm oil industry and the relation between the different types of small-holding producers and the larger companies, it is necessary to take into account their particular histories and forms of articulation with the industry as a whole.

Along the last century there has been an unprecedented growth in both global food production and related socioecological impacts. The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of long-term metabolic patterns of agrarian systems on land use and cover changes (LUCC). We have developed an Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis (ELIA) of agroecosystems to measure the energy storage (E) and the information (I) represented by the complexity of internal energy cycles, in order to correlate both with the energy imprint in the landscape functional-structure (L) that sustains biodiversity. ELIA values are used to assess the agro-ecological landscape transitions in different case studies analysed in North America (Canada and USA) and Europe (Austria and Spain), demonstrating their sensitivity and robustness for case study comparisons on farm-driven environmental change. The results show two stages of the socio-metabolic transition: a first period (from 1830 to 1956) characterized by a non-significant decrease in energy reinvestment (E) and a decrease in energy redistribution (I); and a second period (from 1956 to 2000) with a significant loss of E·I optimal values and associated landscape patterns (L). To overcome the socioecological degradation that these trends implied requires a low external input strategy based on an innovative enhancement of cultural knowledge kept by rural populations, which may help to empower farm communities in the markets and in the public arena. Further research could help to reveal how and why different strategies of agroecosystem management lead to key turning points in the relationship between energy flows, landscape functioning and biodiversity. This research will be very useful for public policies aimed to promote more climate and socioecological resilience of agricultural landscapes and food systems worldwide.

A central feature of China's “green” development plan has been the creation of conservation zones across the peri-urban fringes of major cities. In these conservation zones, rural land and housing are being unevenly incorporated into urban space, leading to a diverse set of experiences for dislocated villagers. In this paper, I develop a volumetric approach to analyze the spatial politics of agricultural and urban transitions in China's conservation zones. I advance theories of vertical and volumetric space, which consider relations across heights, depths, and surfaces, through attention to the temporalities and everyday experiences of volumes. My volumetric approach provides a foundation for delineating how the uneven valuation and compensation of rural land and housing shapes social differentiation, as well as how villagers navigate and experience rural-urban transitions. Furthermore, I argue that a volumetric account of three-dimensional space exposes the interconnections between agrarian and urban questions, which are usually considered discretely. The central contribution of this paper, therefore, is to reorient the agrarian and urban questions in relation to one another across horizontal, vertical, and temporal axes.

In the tropics, the interdependence between animal pollinators and smallholders is imperiled by the expansion of industrial agriculture. We discuss some of the intersections between animal pollination and agrarian change through an empirical case study of Anolaima, formerly considered “the fruit capital of Colombia”. The paper draws on 22 months of field research that included surveys with 320 households and more detailed interviews and participant observation with 16 focal families. Agrarian change has directly and indirectly driven the declines of animal pollinators necessary to the production of a large proportion of foods with high nutritional value, increasing the socio-ecological vulnerability of rural people. We describe an ironic and vicious cycle of inequality in Anolaima, where smallholders—especially older farmers and large families with small farms—once benefitted from nutritionally-rich, animal pollinated foods grown on their diverse agricultural plots. Now their agricultural production is threatened by pollinator declines driven by agroindustrial practices, which are conducted by wealthier households who secure food access by purchasing foods that include fruits dependent on animal pollination formerly grown locally. These dynamics leave low-income farmers surrounded by simplified, chemical-laden landscapes inhospitable to the bees upon which their agricultural livelihoods depend; and faced with food insecurity, unable to afford or access the culturally important foods they used to cultivate. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of traditional, diversified smallholder agriculture, its contribution to a large fraction of food consumed worldwide, and its role in biodiversity conservation in rural landscapes.

After a spout of optimism surrounding Myanmar's so-called democratic transition in the post-2010 period, civil-society organisations and academics are beginning to highlight rampant and violent resource grabs unfolding across the country. Delving into the Northern Tanintharyi landscape in the Southeast, this article aims to understand interrelated dynamics of coastal and agrarian transformation during the state-mediated capitalist transition of the past 30 years. Conceptually developing a landscape-approach that sees individual ‘grabs’ in a relational manner and as part of broader political-economic struggles, the article shows how the Myanmar military regime sought a conjoined ocean and land control-grab in pursuit of rent extraction from productive foreign capital in fisheries and off-shore gas sectors. Empirically, these dynamics are traced from the scale of regional geopolitical struggles down to two particular villages in Northern Tanintharyi – highlighting resulting processes of differentiation along lines of class and gender. This conceptual framework and explanation of drivers behind ocean and land control-grabbing, in turn, complicates prevalent policy solutions in Myanmar (and elsewhere) that reduce the question of resolving resource-grabs to the pursuit of an elusive ‘good governance’.

The livestock sector in Europe is currently undergoing multiple transformations. The challenges posed by these changes must be faced by an increasingly aged workforce. Promoting the incorporation of young farmers into the livestock sector would be crucial for ensuring that these challenges are met in the best possible way. It is generally agreed that young farmers face these challenges with greater dynamism, flexibility and adaptability. In spite of this, young people have to face many difficulties when trying to join the livestock sector. This study analyses different ways young farmers experience the process of incorporation into the livestock sector in one of the main livestock regions in Spain (Catalonia). The Q-Methodology was used to identify five pathways: the Traditional pathway, the Neo-rural pathway, the Business pathway, the Industrial pathway and the Agroecological pathway. The fact that these five pathways coexist evidences the complex and multidimensional nature of the process of incorporation of young livestock farmers into the sector. Finally we also observed that the incorporation of young livestock farmers, its possibility or impossibility, and the pathway followed by them, are largely conditioned by five main drivers: (i) the presence or absence of an agrarian family tradition; (ii) the capacity to access adequate land; (iii) the education level; (iv) the degree of innovation in livestock activities; (v) the degree of autonomy in decision-making.

Background Many societies and their medical practitioners throughout the world have historically linked lunar phases to the frequency of births. During more recent decades, academics have discussed this alleged relationship using modern data, obtaining differing results. Objectives The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between the phases of the moon and the frequency of deliveries in a rural historical context without electricity, and among women of low nutritional status. These characteristics are similar to some current rural areas in certain developing countries. The exceptionality of this case will allow us to test several of the existing theories on how the moon could influence births, particularly those related to lunar light. We will also analyse nulliparous and multiparous differences over the very long term. Study design This study is a retrospective cohort analysis. In total, 23,689 births have been considered for 1484 lunar cycles between 1810 and 1929. Birth registers have been obtained from the Catholic parish archives of 10 rural Spanish agrarian villages. All the deliveries analysed were natural, without any medical follow-up, within the home and with little medical assistance. Results Using simple descriptive statistical techniques, we can conclude that there is no pattern with which to link lunar phases with the frequency of births. We can also conclude that neither electricity nor the rural environment affects this alleged relationship; neither have we found any relationship related to either the nulliparous or the multiparous and lunar phases. Conclusion The analysis of a 120-year period has shown that there is no predictable influence of the lunar phases on the frequency of births. The myth of such a lunar influence can claim no scientific evidence from a historical perspective. Neither the arrival of the electric light nor the lower number of deliveries per woman have modified birth patterns. Deliveries by rural women of low nutritional status are not linked to the phases of the moon, and consequently the medical services in developing countries should disregard this belief; they do not need to take account of the phases of the moon with respect to their daily organisation.

This paper examines the effects of transnational labor migration from Myanmar (Burma) on upland land use practices on the Chinese side of the China-Myanmar borderland, particularly in the context of out-migration and the aging of the local labor force. The study is based on a combined framework, with economic and geopolitical dimensions, and using in-depth fieldwork. The findings are as follows: (1) The increase of available labor from Myanmar, as a substitution for and supplementation of the outgoing local labor force that is migrating to China’s cities, helps local villagers cultivate crops, thus influencing smallholder land use. (2) This inward migration from Myanmar to China is long-term (rather than only being seasonal), based on the year-round nature and demands of China’s farming activities. (3) Due to the in-migration of labor from Myanmar, local villagers will flexibly adapt to planting cash crops that provide stable market prices. Such practices may delay the marginalization of farmland use. We argue that agricultural intensification can be achieved in the upland of the China-Myanmar borderland in the context of out- and in-migration. Smallholders can obtain profits from agricultural activities by hiring Burmese laborers, which helps to avoid a land abandonment scenario. This paper contributes to the existing body of literature on agrarian changes and rethinks agricultural growth in the upland rural society.

This paper builds on the literature on green grabbing. It makes a fresh contribution by bringing in aspects of green grabbing that are less visible and obvious. These are subtle, fluid and indirect interconnections between climate change politics and land grabs. It is difficult to see these interconnections from an ‘either black or white’ perspective. It is likely that the extent of this ‘grey area’ intersection in terms of affected social relations, nature and land use change is quite significant globally, even when such interconnections tend to operate below the radar of dominant governance institutions and database tracking. This situation calls for more nuanced understanding of governance imperatives, and for constructing the necessary body of knowledge needed for appropriate political intervention. This paper offers preliminary ways in which such interconnections can be seen and understood, and their implications for research and politics explored. It concludes by way of a preliminary discussion of the notion of ‘agrarian climate justice’ as a possible framework for formal governance or political activism relevant to tackling such grey area interconnections.

Rural decline is an inevitable process as human society transforms from the agrarian to the urban-industrial economy, and further on to the knowledge economy. Through an extensive literature review, this paper aims to interpret why some rural areas decline while some others do not. The findings show that it is by the interactions between rural areas and the external environment that rural communities either grow, decline or even vanish. The paper emphasizes the necessity to improve rural communities' resilient capacity through adjusting their internal components' function and structure to survive the external changes. In this process, rural livelihood diversification, the creation of market oriented institutions and strong social capital are considered to enhance rural resilience and build up sustaining rural communities. Finally, three conditions for sustainable rural development in the knowledge economy are discussed: 1) development of new economic activities that can respond to potential urban demand; 2) local entrepreneurship that can establish and expand these new activities; and 3) social capital that can support the entrepreneurship in new activities with access to credits, labor, human capital, external markets and external knowledge for learning and innovation.

Evolutionary anthropologists have been remarkably successful in developing ‘dual inheritance’ theories of gene/culture coevolution that analyze the interaction of each of these factors without reducing either one to the other’s terms. However, efforts to extend this type of analysis to encompass complex, class-divided hierarchical societies, grounded in formal laws, political institutions, and trajectories of sustained economic development have scarcely begun. This article proposes a provisional framework for advancing such a multi-level co-evolutionary analysis that can encompass multiple forms of social organization from simple hunting/foraging groups to agrarian states and empires, up through the global capitalist system of our own day. The article formulates tools to conceptualize some of the ways in which ‘selection’ and ‘adaptation’ operate at every level to bring genes, cultures, states, and market exchange into provisional alignment with one another. It considers some of the ways in which modes of production’, ‘modes of coercion’ and ‘modes of persuasion’ interact complexly, at different societal levels.

It is a general belief that agricultural area, particularly in developing countries, is decreasing with rapid urbanization. This is an important phenomenon in the form of land use land cover change (LULCC) as these countries depend on agriculture to a great extent for food and economic growth. Using Landsat data our investigation in the rural area of Varanasi district revealed that agricultural area, which constituted about 50% of land cover, increased by 37% in the 1993–2013 period and built area increased by 236%. A Relative Rural Development Index (RRDI) was formulated to find out the comparative development in rural blocks of the district. RRDI was based on built, green and agriculture land use, and the number of agricultural workers, LAC and LCR. Kashi Vidyapeeth (KV) and Chiragaon (CG) rural blocks present in close proximity of the urban core had the highest RRDI score and change in Land Absorption Coefficient (LAC) and Land Consumption Ratio (LCR). Proximity to the urban area influenced rural development in the form of agricultural and built area increase. The study can be helpful for focussing development and policymaking efforts to a rural area according to its RRDI score.