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Societal Impact Statement: Multiple cropping, the cultivation of several crops on the same land in a year, occupied an important part of Taiwan's agricultural research from 1950 to 1970. This research originated in the context of Taiwan's land reform and diversification programs and their connections to the government's political ambition to maximize food production. The study of how multiple cropping was politicized and depoliticized by different actors helps to expand the narratives of the Green Revolution in Asia, analyze their legacies, and highlight Taiwan's role in the international exchange of visions of agricultural development during the Cold War. Summary: Scholars have recently expanded the history of the Green Revolution to move beyond the narrative of North–South technological diffusion. This article enriches the scholarship with the case of multiple cropping in Taiwan and its connection to Cold War geopolitics.Rice productivity in postwar Taiwan was boosted through a land reform launched by the Sino‐American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) in the 1950s. Backed by American aid and staffed by scientists from the Republic of China (ROC) government, the JCRR envisioned to turn tenant farmers into landowners so as to encourage labor input and adoption of seeds and fertilizers.By 1960, the JCRR presented its reform as a "bloodless social revolution" and extended its focus to multiple cropping through a diversification program. The JCRR further created the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) in 1971 to spread Taiwan's breeding and cropping techniques. The ROC's diplomatic isolation in the 1970s, however, prompted the center to reinterpret Taiwan's success in multiple cropping from a political achievement to a technological triumph, thus reinforcing the technology‐driven narrative used by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).Through Taiwan's influences on IRRI's rice breeding and multiple cropping research, this paper illustrates that the history of the Green Revolution requires more complex narratives. In addition, with Taiwan's political and economic transition since the 1980s, farmers began to reclaim their voice and influence agricultural policies. The case thus highlights the need of democratic participation in agricultural research, a concern that remains relevant today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The misallocation of land resources is an important factor restricting the high‐quality development of China's economy. Based on the perspective of supply and demand matching, this study proposed a measurement method for the spatial misallocation of land resources and constructed two models for the testing and decomposition of factors affecting land resource spatial misallocation. We used this measurement method and these two models to explore the spatiotemporal characteristics and determinants of the spatial misallocation of land resources in China from 2000 to 2018 with the aim of providing policy recommendations for the correction of land resource misallocation in China and other developing countries. The results showed that the spatial misallocation of land resources in China showed an upward trend with evident spatial differentiation and the proportion of cities with high and severe misallocation increased. Industrial isomorphism and market misallocation are the main driving factors of land misallocation. Government misallocation and factor market abnormal development aggravate land resource misallocation. Extensive economic development and excessive factor agglomeration have a small effect on land resource spatial misallocation. Therefore, strengthening the land supply‐side reform, and implementing differentiated land allocation policies are effective pathways to control land resource misallocation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how beneficiaries of South Africa's land reform programme attempt to navigate the contradictory dynamics of production and social reproduction in collectively owned agricultural enterprises. The Mphuzanyoni Communal Property Association in KwaZulu‐Natal province farms with commercial beef herds and the Mayime Cooperative in the Eastern Cape province is engaged in a joint venture dairy farming scheme in partnership with an agribusiness firm. Severe tensions are evident between the social reproduction of households and the requirements of simple or expanded reproduction of agricultural enterprises. Bernstein's concept of competing 'funds' is used to examine struggles over production and reproduction on the farms, in which members of socially differentiated households contest divergent visions for the collective enterprises. Conflicts centre on how labour and capital should be mobilised, how income and other benefits in kind should be distributed to households and whether or not income should be invested for purposes of simple or expanded reproduction of the enterprise. Challenges of governance are rooted in these conflicts rather than in group ownership as a form of property right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vietnam has experienced a major land policy reform in recent decades, relaxing the previously imposed restrictions on land transfer and accumulation. This paper investigates the relationship between this agricultural land reform and changes in income inequality using a microdata‐based decomposition framework. Results show that agricultural land reform is one of the most important drivers of income growth among middle‐income households in Vietnam, and has contributed to a reduction in income inequality. However, the effect is highly heterogeneous, as it favors households with particular land types; it thus leads to an increase in income inequality in rural areas despite reducing such inequality in urban regions. The findings suggest that the policy effect of land restriction relaxation can be complex due to inequalities in new opportunities as well as the initial landholding distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study how land policy reform affects firm innovation and productivity in China. More specifically, we focus on the impact of the land regulations that controlled the quotas of land supply introduced in 2004. We find that land regulations promote firm innovation but inhibit firm productivity. The regulations constitute land input constraints for firms and make them more difficult in expanding production capacity to fully exploit economies of scale, meanwhile they push firms to invest in innovation to alleviate the adverse effects. It is also found that resource allocation efficiency is deteriorated and aggregate productivity is decreased in the post‐land‐regulation period. Moreover, the effects of land regulations on firm performance are stronger for non‐state‐owned enterprises and industries with a lower level of market competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of inequality between social identity groups is anchored in acts of violent dispossession of freedom and property by the group seeking the advantages of dominance. The beginning of contemporary disparities in income and especially wealth between Black and White Americans follow the same pattern. Of particular significance is the racialized character of U.S. land distribution policies in the aftermath of the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the wider debates on the impacts and outcomes of state efforts to create agrarian capitalists in land reform and agriculture in most countries of the global South. Specifically, this article presents empirical evidence on South Africa's State Land Lease and Disposal Policy (SLLDP) and analyses emerging accumulation dynamics in land redistribution. The evidence presented demonstrates that most of the SLLDP farm beneficiaries are capitalists from non‐agrarian sectors who increasingly see land reform as the new frontier for accumulation with significant opportunities to access state land and production support. Other agrarian capitalists leverage political influence and accumulate through privileged access to public resources. In contrast, accumulation from below through the reinvestment of farming proceeds remains constrained. Promoting a small segment of already wealthy capitalists greatly limits the potential of land reform to transform social relations in property in favour of historically marginalised social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of US‐backed agricultural initiatives under what became known as the Green Revolution (1945–1970) reshaped populations, ecologies, and landscapes worldwide. While most investigations into the implications of this era focus on the development of intensive farming in places such as Mexico, India, and the Philippines, few offer critical analysis of its Caribbean manifestations. This paper examines the role of the Green Revolution in the production of environmental injustice in Haiti. Historically, we situate Green Revolution technopolitics in a broader trajectory of US‐led imperial and neoliberal interventions that spans from the Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) to the 21st century. We draw from our long‐term ethnographic research to show how Green Revolution transformations impact agrarian life in Haiti's lower Artibonite Valley and Central Plateau today. Integral to the Occupation were efforts to (re)establish production of export commodities. We demonstrate how such attempts, regardless of outcome, generated indelible material, social, and ecological entanglements that served to intensify empire. In 1949, the US and Haitian governments established an agency tasked with extending Occupation‐era irrigation infrastructure throughout the Artibonite Valley. After these efforts stalled, 1970s interventionists sought different inroads for increasing agricultural production, particularly of rice. Their initiatives paved the way for post‐2010 ventures that perpetuate many of the same consequences, including hunger, economic insecurity, and environmental degradation. We show how the history of imperial intervention in Haiti created the conditions for the ongoing production of environmental injustice through agrarian reform. Ultimately, we argue that the Green Revolution transformed Haiti's agrarian geographies in ways that intensified environmental harms and advanced a project of US empire that continues to shape Haiti today. We examine the contemporary implications of this century of transformation for farmers, who carry on a legacy of agrarian justice that has contested the project of the Green Revolution since its inception. The Green Revolution describes a series of US‐driven technopolitical interventions that reshaped global agriculture and agrarian life across the globe between 1945 and 1970. In Haiti, this project maps onto a broader trajectory of US‐led imperial and neoliberal interventions that spans from the US Occupation (1915–1934) to the 21st century, which we illustrate through the example of the transformation of the rice sector. We draw on a combined decade of research and engagement in Haiti's lower Artibonite Valley and Central Plateau, where we argue that the Green Revolution transformed agrarian geographies in ways that intensified environmental injustice and advanced a contested project of US empire that continues to shape Haiti today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses an initiative in 2017 to update and digitise textual land records in Telangana, a south Indian state. Its premise is that experiments to modernise land records have not met with pre‐determined standards of success due, primarily, to the historically evolved contradictions around land as a resource and a commodity. In countries like India, the colonial policies on land and the post‐colonial success of landlords to manipulate land records had already left the post‐War task of ensuring conclusive land titles intractable. In more recent times, however, the agenda of land records modernisation has been absorbed by neoliberalism, which aims to create free land markets and replace traditional subsidies with direct cash transfers. This article shows that, consequently, the task of land records modernisation in Telangana became disembedded from agendas of agrarian egalitarianism and was rendered more complex—historical errors and exclusions were reproduced in new ways; technocratic solutions of the bureaucracy made governmental processes opaque; landed sections continued to subvert implementation; tenants were excluded from the land titles; and there were fears that the scheme would be misused to ease corporate land acquisition. Land records modernisation remains important for agrarian reform, but its success remains contingent on a greater appreciation among policymakers for the historical and political economy aspects of land ownership and possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of land tenure reform on grassland quality in pastoral areas of China. Using nearly 40 years of remote sensing combined with survey data in the pastoral area of China, we find that the privatization of land use rights without physical (i.e., fences) or legal (i.e., certificates) protection has little impact on improving grassland quality measured by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The enhanced privatization of grassland use rights with physical or legal security significantly increases grassland quality. We show that after the privatization of land use rights with security protection, grassland quality experienced about a 3% increase. Our results suggest that switching to privatized use rights without security protection from previously cooperatively managed land may undermine the positive environmental effects of land tenure reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of 'state life' — a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published in 1777, J. M. R. Lenz's novella Der Landprediger has been read as a document of Lenz' own intellectual and spiritual disorientation following his banishment from Goethe's Weimar in 1776. As Marcus Twellmann and others have shown, the novella responds to the agrarian reforms initiated by Margrave Carl Friedrich in Baden, which Lenz witnessed first hand. In this article, I argue that the novella's critique of gender and its discussion of economic and social reform are inextricably intertwined. My analysis proceeds from a key insight of recent scholarship in the field of 'literarische Ökonomik', namely that literature and philosophy do not simply exist in opposition to economics, but rather that all three share underlying concerns and, furthermore, that culture is 'complicit' with the 'establishment and solidification of modern economic paradigms' (Gray 2008). Lenz's novella underscores this complicity in a series of episodes that foreground themes of pedagogy, love and marriage, and Enlightenment social reform. Der Landprediger can be said to align with the concerns of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury feminist economics, insofar as it depicts the struggles of the homo economicus as a crisis of masculinity and recognises women as economic actors in the domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1995, family farming in Brazil has been heavily financialized through the federal PRONAF program, which has simultaneously created new opportunities for third parties to capture and control financial resources for themselves. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic research with land rights movements on the southern coast of Bahia, Brazil, this contribution analyses a case of accumulation by agricultural extension, as a predatory form of financial extractivism based on asymmetrical bureaucratic and communicative power, which was carried out by a local agricultural extension firm and export company. Associated with the Odebrecht Foundation, this extension firm promoted a development project to diversify the livelihoods of rural families living in land reform communities affiliated with Brazil's famous Landless Rural Workers' Movement, or the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The firm owner actively recruited families to cultivate palmito, or heart of palm, effectively converting them into a captive productive force responsible for almost all factors of production—land, labour, and capital—but in the service of the extension firm's business interests. The firm was thus able to decouple itself from all hazards involved in production, while the MST community members bore almost all of the risks. In the process, the project gave rise to an exploitative form of production that is barely even recognizable as capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the implications of the political incentive system reform for industrial land supply. We study the stronger political incentive for environmental protection in China that resulted from the Cadre Evaluation System (CES) reform in 2013. Using the interaction of municipalities' pre‐CES environmental quality with the introduction of CES reform, we document dirty cities experience a significantly larger decline in industrial land supply following the reform. Also, the reform may have a larger impact on dirtier industries and wealthier cities, and our baseline results are mainly driven by the local leaders who are more likely to be promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are inconclusive findings on the causal effect of land reform and its crucial channels in the development economics literature. One challenge is to separate the channels, through which land rights operate. This study examines the impact of redistributive land reform in post–World War II Japan on agricultural productivity and investments. This reform imposed a ceiling on landholdings, redistributed above‐ceiling farmland from landlords to tenants, and severely restricted the transferability of redistributed farmland. Thus, we can focus on the tenure security effect (not the tradability and pledgeability effects) as one probable channel. Using rice‐farm panel data before and after the reform (i.e., 1947 and 1948), we exploit the variation in the reform implementation across tenants. The land reform had little effect on total factor productivity and investment in the subsequent season. Our results suggest that the security dimension of land rights alone does not increase short‐run agricultural productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1990s, as peace was consolidated in Cambodia, land conflicts started to replace the Khmer Rouge as the main threat to peace and the social order. Beban's book provides a valuable and detailed account of Hun Sen's Order 01 land-titling initiative. Alice Beban's new book I Unwritten Rule i is an actor-oriented analysis of a land-titling initiative by Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the complex links between land reform and peacebuilding through a case study of Côte d'Ivoire. The country provides fertile ground for analysis given its torturous history of land conflict and civil war, its enduring debates surrounding land reform, and its ongoing efforts to consolidate peace. The article argues that while the failure to address the agrarian dimensions of the country's longstanding conflict undermines long‐term prospects of bridging deep political and societal divides, aggressive attempts to tackle the land question at the outset of the peacebuilding process may have threatened the fragile peace of the post‐conflict period. The analysis thus highlights the political risks involved in undertaking land reform during periods of precarious peacebuilding. In so doing, the article draws upon insights from over 70 interviews with local stakeholders and document analysis of key primary documents from the Ivorian government, the United Nations Security Council, and the World Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habitat alterations resulting from land‐use change are major drivers of global biodiversity losses. In Africa, these threats are especially severe. For instance, demand to convert land into agricultural uses is leading to increasing areas of drylands in southern and central Africa being transformed for agriculture. In Zimbabwe, a land reform programme provided an opportunity to study the biodiversity response to abrupt habitat modification in part of a 91,000 ha dryland area of semi‐natural savannah used since 1930 for low‐level cattle ranching. Small‐scale subsistence farms were created during 2001–2002 in 65,000 ha of this area, with ranching continuing in the remaining unchanged area. We measured the compositions of bird communities in farmed and ranched land over 8 years, commencing one decade after subsistence farms were established. Over the study period, repeated counts were made along the same 45 transects to assess species' population changes that may have resulted from trait‐filtering responses to habitat disturbance. In 2012, avian species' richness was substantially higher (+8.8%) in the farmland bird community than in the unmodified ranched area. Temporal trends over the study period showed increased species' richness in the ranched area (+12.3%) and farmland (+6.8%). There were increased abundances in birds of most sizes, and in all feeding guilds. New species did not add new functional traits, and no species with distinctive traits were lost in either area. As a result, species' diversity reduced, and functional redundancy increased by 6.8% in ranched land. By 2020, two decades after part of the ranched savannah was converted into farmland, the compositions of the two bird communities had both changed and became more similar. The broadly benign impact on birds of land conversion into subsistence farms is attributed to the relatively low level of agricultural activity in the farmland and the large regional pool of nonspecialist bird species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract farming schemes often amplify existing patterns of socio‐economic differentiation. In Zimbabwe, processes of differentiation were underway before the current expansion of contract farming and they have deepened through the Fast Track Land Reform process. This article examines how pre‐existing dynamics of differentiation shape the forms of contract farming adopted, as well as which groups of farmers gain access and on what terms. Social differentiation partly explains the outcomes of contract farming, even if contract farming in turn results in further differentiation. This article contrasts private sector‐led contract farming of tobacco and state‐led financing of maize production (the 'command agriculture' programme) in two high‐potential sites and across different forms of land use. Unlike in many other settings, contract farming in Zimbabwe is highly influenced by the state, through the regulation of private sector arrangements and the establishment of a state‐led contracting programme. The state‐led programme boosted maize production amongst medium‐scale farmers and resulted in an embedding of patronage relations. Meanwhile, the private‐led contract farming has supported a widespread boom of tobacco production, mainly amongst smallholders. We find therefore that contract farming is highly dependent on the contingent, politically mediated processes of social differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2009 land reform in China marks a move toward a more flexible land tenure system in rural areas. This study evaluates the effect of this reform on rental market participation and household welfare in rural China. Using a four‐period nationally representative household‐level panel data during 2010–2016, we find that the 2009 land reform increased rental market participation by 6.6 to 7.0 percentage points on average. The effect varies significantly with village and household characteristics. The welfare impact of rental market participation on rural households depends on the type of participation. Specifically, the households renting in land witness an increase in their aggregated income by 10.7% on average through the expansion of farm production, which is accompanied by an increase in aggregated expenditure by approximately 11.2%. Those leasing out their land lose the portion of income on the farm but the aggregated household income is on average statistically unchanged, possibly due to a higher off‐farm income and the inflow of land rental income. Along with the statistically unchanged aggregated expenditure, the households leasing out land experience no significant welfare changes after the 2009 land reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes to Mexico's Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this 'privatization' with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers' construction of mass 'social housing' developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentieth‐century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers' land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality—on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing—and the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land reform has significantly evolved over time in Latin America. In the early decades of the 20th century, the 'agrarian question' involved different national paths of agrarian capitalism and their contributions to industrialization. Later in the century, agriculture played a secondary role, while market‐led reforms were implemented from the early 1990s in the region. The agrarian question is now related to a new range of global and national inequalities, whereas the land problem remains unresolved. This paper deals with the role of the state and social dynamics in understanding the twists and turns of Latin America's land reforms from the 1900s to the Global Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show how communities in Northern Kenya proactively engage an unfolding megaproject and the temporalities it evokes—the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). We argue that the latitude communities have in contending with megaprojects is broader and more dynamic than passive reception of or outright resistance against the futures promised. By introducing the concepts of entangling and fraying, we emphasise the agency communities create for themselves by appreciating their strategies and expressions of stabilising or troubling the "megaproject". While entangling refers to practices through which communities attach additional features to an otherwise rather stable vision of its "meganess", fraying, in contrast, describes the strands that splice off towards different spatio‐temporal imaginaries. We discuss these practices in four instances of engaging LAPSSET: constructing temporary homes at project sites; engaging in land reform; disputing land acquisition at oil exploration sites; and contesting a planned resort city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy was governed by one party from 1946 to 1993: the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana or DC). Initially, the DC Party adopted policies in the classical and conservative tradition to cope with poverty: agrarian reform, expansive fiscal policies, and social housing. After the Second Vatican Council, which led to growing acceptance of the "preferential option for the poor," a radical change emerged in the DC Party regarding some social‐democratic policies: the party endorsed universal healthcare and social pensions and assistance. The fundamental idea was the "decommodification" of basic services. In these reforms, there were some good results as well as some failures. There were also difficulties with public finances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many Latin American countries, Ecuador responded to COVID‐19 by restricting trade and travel, a decision that disrupted the prevailing model of regional trade integration. Among some analysts, observations have been made that the lockdown represents a new opportunity to revitalize rural livelihoods and smallholder agriculture. This paper evaluates these claims by exploring the impact of COVID‐19 on household food security and smallholder food production in Chimborazo, a highland province that is known for extremely high rates of poverty and the highest concentration of Kichwa‐speaking Indigenous people in Ecuador. Drawing upon original empirical research, it makes the case that the prospects for revitalizing smallholder production remain structurally constrained by a legacy of land inequality and failed agrarian reform. According to our findings, the only sectors that thrived during the lockdown were ones that served local markets. For those requiring significant shipping and storage, merchants and traders were able to drive down farmgate prices, squeezing local producers. At the same time, new government legislation made it easier for employers to terminate wage labourers, undermining a vital source of income and employment for low‐income households. Far from revitalizing smallholder agriculture, the pandemic appears to have further entrenched an economic model of supporting agribusiness at the expense of family farms and migrant labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aside from the very high inequality of land ownership, South Africa is characterised by a dual land tenure system comprising of private ownership and communal land ownership. Using waves 4 and 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study longitudinal data set, a set of econometric methodologies is employed to quantify the impact of ownership and tenure on an index of subjective wellbeing (SWB) constructed from eight self‐reported responses covering general life satisfaction, contrast, social capital, mental health and hope for future. Controlling for the income effect and other pertinent drivers of SWB, the study highlights the non‐income impact of land ownership and tenure on the subjective wellbeing of individuals. To account for possible endogeneity and self‐selection, instrumental variable and matching method‐based treatment effects are computed. This paper has two main findings in relation to land tenure in South Africa: (a) land owners have on average a higher index of SWB compared to those not owning land, and (b) owning land privately, compared to owning land communally, has a positive impact on subjective wellbeing within land owners. These results are consistent and statistically significant across the various estimation strategies and provide additional motivation for expediting land reforms in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupying schools, occupying land. As Tarlau shows, MST activists struggled bravely to get Pronera established and institutionalized in the federal budget. The first part offers a historical analysis of the MST's experience of constructing a national education programme, from the first makeshift land occupation encampment schools to Pronera and the national I Educação do Campo i initiative. [Extracted from the article]

Existing historiography on Puerto Rico's agrarian reform programme in the early 1940s fails to explain why the reform resulted in the nationalization of sugar cane plantations and the formation of "Proportional Profit Farms" rather than land redistribution. This analysis examines the interplay between the New Deal and Puerto Rican political forces in the 1930s to help answer this question. It concludes that land redistribution was preferred among local forces and that the Proportional Profit Farms were a result of federal intervention by the New Deal, embodied most clearly in the figure of Rexford Tugwell, Puerto Rico's appointed governor from 1941 to 1946. This intervention calls for a re‐examination of the New Deal's role in Puerto Rico's long‐term economic development in the 20th century, particularly in laying down a model of dependent development and industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating private property rights and establishing land markets were fundamental to the historical development of capitalism in the Global North and remain at the centre of capitalist development in the Global South. This article contributes to debates about these processes by analysing the relationship between land markets and indigenous peoples in Highland Ecuador. Building on Karl Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities, it elaborates a new concept that makes an analytical distinction between the activation and development of land markets. The former refers to the occasional participation of actors in markets to secure land, whereas the latter relates to the establishment and expansion of markets that regulate the distribution and value of land through market prices. Focusing on indigenous land struggles in the late 20th century, this article shows that the activation of land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to secure land, whereas the development of land markets closed them down. Social and class differentiation among the highland indigenous population increased through this contradictory process. The article connects this historical analysis to recent developments in Ecuador to contribute to empirical and theoretical debates about contemporary land struggles and agrarian change elsewhere in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia's agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post-conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender's constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on surveys conducted in Shandong Province, China, this paper examined the interests of rural residents to move to and settle in cities, as well as the factors that motivate or discourage their potential settlement changes. Results of the binary logistic regression analysis showed that villagers' urban settlement preference was related to sociodemographic factors such as gender, age, and occupation. Overall, the separation of the "three rights" (collective ownership, land contract right, and land use right) associated with rural land has strengthened the urban settlement preference of rural residents. Nevertheless, we did not find significant association between land transfer and the preference for urban settlement. For villagers who expressed interest in urban settlement, better job opportunities, education opportunities, and higher income are the leading "pull" factors that would attract them to cities. The attachment to rural life, high living costs, and high housing prices in cities were the top concerns for villagers who did not want to move. The study also found that villagers' desired urban destinations changed with the changing land parameters, indicating that the outcomes of China's rural land reforms may not be aligned well with the policy goals laid in the country's urbanization and rural development plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural landownership in Japan has changed drastically over the last century due to post‐World War II land reforms and cultural, political, and economic shifts in the subsequent decades. Initial land reform shifted the concentrated ownership of land from the wealthy to small‐scale farmers. But as Japan industrialized and became more urban‐centered, a substantial amount of rural land has been left abandoned or unmanaged by descendants of those farmers. This paper analyzes the attitudes of absentee agricultural landowners in Japan to better understand the prevalence of economically rational versus traditional attitudes toward land ownership. We draw on the rural sociological literature on place attachment to hypothesize why some absentee landowners feel a strong tie to the land of their ancestors, while others would be willing to sell for a reasonable price. We use unique survey data obtained from 466 absentee agricultural landowners in Japan. Logistic regression results indicate that attachment to place, gender, age, educational attainment, and usage of land is significant predictors of whether landowners hold traditional, rather than economic, values. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future of sustainable agricultural land management in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central role that infrastructures of circulation and connectivity—logistical, financial, and digital—have come to perform in the reproduction of agro‐food systems calls for an expanded conception of agriculture that integrates dialectically the production of economic value and its subsequent realization in the sphere of exchange. Through the case of Walmart's expansion in Chile, and on the basis of a critical theorization of the circulation of capital, this paper proposes an agrarian question of circulation in which the apparently distinct realms of food production, transport, storage, and consumption are brought together into a contradictory and yet unitary whole. The case of Walmart Chile is illustrative of how the reconfiguration of spaces of urban mass consumption and the organizational restructuring of agro‐industrial hinterlands constitute each other in intricate ways. An agrarian question of circulation, the paper concludes, bears important political implications for rethinking the scope and extent of contemporary discussions on agrarian reform being put forward by transnational rural organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State formation in post‐colonial societies is often explained with reference to the roles of elites. In Pakistan, landed elites continue to dominate the rural political economy through informal and formal institutions, but the history of its largest peasant movement shows how agrarian class struggle can change the institutional forms and functions of power. The Hashtnagar peasant movement achieved lasting de facto land and tenancy reforms in north‐western Pakistan in the 1970s through forcible land occupations that were regularized by state intervention. I argue that although divisions among elites were important, the state intervened in favour of peasants due to the rising organizational power of tenants and landless labourers under the centralized leadership of the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party. Agrarian class struggle weakened the informal power of landed elites and gave rise to institutions of peasant power. However, other fractions of the ruling class sought to undermine their landed opponents while co‐opting the militancy of the peasant movement by strengthening state institutions to intervene in favour of upwardly mobile tenants. The latter were separated from poorer peasants and the landless, thus demobilizing the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I study small‐scale growers of blonde tobacco varieties from the state of Nayarit in Mexico who had contract farming arrangements with the state‐owned company Tabamex (1972–1990). I refer to them as "well‐off small‐scale tobacco growers" given that in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s, they became one of the subaltern social groups that benefited the most from the Mexican Agrarian Reform. I want to set this research apart from the ones carried out on tobacco growers in Nayarit, which have almost exclusively understood this group as agricultural producers and have perceived as secondary, and even as anecdotal, the impact of the high levels of wage labour hired in the region. I argue that in order to have a better understanding of the social relations at play, it is important to take into account that Nayarit tobacco growers have also been employers of farm workers. Hence in my analysis, I have also included the seasonal farm workers hired by these small‐scale tobacco growers because of their importance in the labour force. More specifically, I have looked into the vulnerability and invisibility of these workers both within this branch of agricultural activity and state institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the "sovereignty problem" in food sovereignty (FS) studies. Contemporary scholarship has largely struggled to answer the question of who or what is sovereign within the realm of FS politics—underpinned by the relocalisation of agrarian production, sustainable nature–society relations, and a radical democratisation of food systems. Although the most recent scholarship has made significant progress on this issue, I offer an alternative historical materialist account of sovereignty understood as the combination of rights and territory. From a critical Marxian perspective, I deconstruct the basis of sovereign power as the intersection between social property rights (exploitation) and territorial governance (political technology) congealed within both capital and the state. This approach thus provides some clarity as to the necessary breaks required to establish an FS regime (self‐directed labour and cooperative territorial governance). The framework is then applied to the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. While witnessing some important achievements, Venezuela's FS experiment has encountered a number of contradictions. As this case study shows, peasant struggles aiming to retake control over production and establish cooperative forms of governance must traverse the entire terrain of the state and thus affect a broader socialisation of society's sociopolitical infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we infer about the effect of polarized politics on the Brazilian policy‐making process? We attempt to answer this question by analyzing the country's political landscape and focusing on one specific policy issue concerning agrarian policies, an area that is exposed to much ideological conflict for both the left and right wing. We show how the mechanism has worked in this case to mitigate the polarization effects. Two political groups monopolized national elections over the past two decades sharing very different positions concerning ideological preferences. In this article, we recognize polarization between the two leading parties, but argue that the Brazilian political system features the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism that mitigates party preferences. We analyze funding data for small farmers and rural settlements for the period 1995‐2016, arriving at the conclusion that the agrarian policy of the competing parties resembled one another, despite political polarization. Related Articles: Ondetti, Gabriel. 2008. "Up and Down with the Agrarian Question: Issue Attention and Land Reform in Contemporary Brazil." Politics & Policy 36 (4): 510‐541. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00120.x Segatto, Catarina Ianni, and Daniel Béland. 2018. "The Limits of Partisanship: Federalism, the Role of Bureaucrats, and the Path to Universal Health Care Coverage in Brazil." Politics & Policy 46 (3): 416‐441. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12252 Wolff, Michael Jerome. 2019. "Sharing Authority: The Politics and Practice of Community Policing in the Brazilian Slum." Politics & Policy 47 (4): 748‐774. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12322 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past four decades have witnessed unprecedented economic growth and rapidly rising food demand in China. This paper provides an introduction to readers with useful information summarising the development of China's agricultural sector and the transformation of its rural economy over the 40 years of economic reform. It is, however, impossible to cover all aspects of this recent and rich history in a single journal special issue. Nevertheless, we are of the view that these papers address the most fundamentally important and insightful topics including: land reform and rural development; technology progress and productivity growth; changing food consumption patterns; rural education and human capital accumulation; and poverty alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has historically perpetuated a dual system of freehold commercial and communal subsistence farming. To bridge these extremes, agrarian reform policies have encouraged the creation of a class of 'emergent', commercially oriented farmers. However, these policies consider 'emergent' farmers as a homogeneous group of land reform beneficiaries, with limited appreciation of the class differences between them, and do little to support the rise of a 'middle' group of producers able to bridge that gap. This article uses a case study of livestock farmers in Eastern Cape Province to critique the 'emergent farmer' concept. The authors identify three broad categories of farmers within the emergent livestock sector: a large group who, despite having accessed private farms, remain effectively subsistence farmers; a smaller group of small/medium‐scale commercial producers who have communal farming origins and most closely approximate to 'emergent' farmers; and an elite group of large‐scale, fully commercialized farmers, whose emergence has been facilitated primarily by access to capital and a desire to invest in alternative business ventures. On this basis the authors suggest that current agrarian reform policies need considerable refocusing if they are to effectively facilitate the emergence of a 'middle' group of smallholder commercial farmers from communal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the process of social differentiation among peasants who were beneficiaries of the 1960s agrarian reform in the northern highlands of Ecuador. Although peasants obtained access to land that was previously in the hands of the haciendas, the incipient process of social differentiation that arose at that time was not halted. Today, peasants are incorporated into a commercial dynamic through milk production for agribusiness that has deepened the process of social differentiation between communities and within them. The supremacy of economic capital in the social field leads to a crisis in the traditional practices of reciprocity and to the incorporation of productive strategies and new "habitus" of consumption that have generated profound transformations in the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the debate concerning the reasons for the emergence of revolutionary movements in Latin America in the post‐Cold War period. It uses the example of the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP, Paraguayan People's Army) to question the hypothesis by McClintock that, whereas political factors were the principal cause of such movements during the Cold War, economic factors have dominated since then. After reviewing the structural context in which the EPP emerged, as well as its history, strategy and ideology, the article offers a contemporary understanding of the insurgency, examines its relevance to the debate about the prospects for revolution in post‐Cold War Latin America and proposes a reformulation of McClintock's hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, Community Policing (CP) secured a central place in Brazilian public security policy, challenging traditional policing modalities known more for their lethal violence than their efficacy. But as the CP model moved from wealthy societies to the Brazilian favela (urban slum), it faced far greater challenges. Tasked with displacing the deeply rooted authority of drug gangs, it sought to extend state authority territorially, as well as to curb criminal violence. Paradoxically, it succeeded at the latter without achieving the former. Drawing on evidence from the Rio de Janeiro's Pacifying Police Units and Bahia's Community Security Bases, this study asks how Brazil's CP programs achieved their goals of reducing violence without displacing criminal authority. I argue that a common interest among police and locally embedded drug gangs in limiting violence led to tacit arrangements between them to share authority as a condition of peace. Related Articles: Moreno‐Jaimes, Carlos. 2011. "Is Local Spending Responsive to the Poor? An Appraisal of Resource Allocation and Electoral Rewards in Mexico." Politics & Policy 39 (6): 1021‐1052. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00328.x Ondetti, Gabriel. 2008. "Up and Down with the Agrarian Question: Issue Attention and Land Reform in Contemporary Brazil." Politics & Policy 36 (4): 789‐815. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00120.x Spalek, Basia. 2010. "Community Policing, Trust, and Muslim Communities in Relation to 'New Terrorism.'" Politics & Policy 38 (4): 789‐815. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2010.00258.x [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the rise and fall of two regional monocultures in Mexico: the henequen zone in the southern state of Yucatán and the cotton‐growing area of La Laguna. Both regions experienced a dramatic expansion of commodity production between 1870 and 1910, but their key crops came to be cultivated under different labour regimes: debt peonage in the case of henequen and wage labour in the case of cotton. The process of class formation that unfolded in each region culminated in the 1930s in different kinds of crises. In Yucatán, a political struggle between hacienda owners and the federal government resulted in an agrarian reform "from above." In La Laguna, class conflict between rural wageworkers and the landed bourgeoisie forced an agrarian reform "from below." These previously distinct labour regimes converged in subsequent decades, however, as rural producers became de facto wageworkers on state‐organized and state‐administered production units known as collective ejidos. Ultimately, changes in the global markets for cotton and henequen, combined with the inability of the Mexican state to reconcile the political logic of agrarian clientelism with shifting commodity chain dynamics, resulted in the collapse of these regional monocultures in the late 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giovanni Arrighi joined together questions of agrarian political economy with questions concerning the livelihoods of rural migrants and the fate of peasant communities as they dissipated. In this article, we apply Arrighi's concerns to the case of Iran to examine how processes of agrarian transformation link with trends in social stratification and upward mobility. First, we argue that land reform implemented during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi contributed to a heterogenous social differentiation of the Iranian peasantry. Second, we claim that the widening of access to credentials fostered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic laid the tracks by which peasants and rural households could convert landholding assets into newly accessible forms of cultural capital. The benefits of these transformational processes, however, fell disproportionately to the rural middle strata created under the Pahlavi monarchy. Through the use of a new survey dataset, we show how pre‐1979 land reform in Iran favoured segments of the peasantry, not for those who remained in rural agricultural production, but instead for those who utilized landholdings as a means to transfer status and opportunities to their children after the 1979 Iranian revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and "land grabs" more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to labour when major redistributive land reform restructures a system of settler colonial agriculture? This article examines the livelihoods of former farmworkers on large‐scale commercial farms who still live in farm compounds after Zimbabwe's land reform. Through a mix of surveys and in‐depth biographical interviews, four different types of livelihood are identified, centred on differences in land access. These show how diverse, but often precarious, livelihoods are being carved out, representing the 'fragmented classes of labour' in a restructured agrarian economy. The analysis highlights the tensions between gaining new freedoms, notably through access to land, and being subject to new livelihood vulnerabilities. The findings are discussed in relation to wider questions about the informalization of the economy and the role of labour and employment in a post‐settler agrarian economy, where the old 'farmworker' label no longer applies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish land reform, involving the breakup of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and was justified on economic and political grounds. This article employs new provincial data on landless workers, land prices, and agrarian wages to consider whether government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930, before the approval of the 1932 Land reform during the Second Republic (1931–6). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made plots of land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy; and structural change that drained the rural population from the countryside Given that shifts in factor prices were already helping workers gain access to land by the 1930s, the economic arguments for introducing reform at that time remain unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Special Period in Peacetime' plunged Cuba into an austerity programme of great severity. The crisis forced agriculture to shift dramatically from a model based on trade dependency (sugar exports providing most of the foreign currency) to one prioritising food import substitution. This alternative brought about major transformations in the country's agriculture. It revolutionised food production and decentralised land ownership. This article asks whether or not these changes reduced food dependency in Cuba. It provides an updated picture of Cuba's food import dependency, with a particular emphasis on the increased role of small farmers in food production during the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]