SESSION 5 | DEAGRARIANISATION: WHAT ARE THE UNDERLYING REASONS AND EFFECTS WITH FOCUS ON LIVELIHOODS, POVERTY REDUCTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Session Organisers: Sheona Shackleton, Klara Fischer, Flora Hadju

Session Abstract

Deagrarianisation and depeasantisation is seen across the Global North and South, stimulated by various drivers and with different consequences for farmers and societies. A combination of ecological, political and economic drivers has been found to stimulate deagrarianisation: changing urban-rural linkages, new risks associated with climate change, reductions in the flow of remittances, lack of (or inappropriate) government support, the erosion of collective work parties, changes in livestock ownership and herding practices, soil fertility loss, lack of interest in farming from the younger generation. Global trends of the upscaling of farming, concentration of the seed sector, land grabbing, and the supermarketisation of our food systems are other important drivers with impact on deagrarianisation. Importantly, abandonment of farming does not necessarily happen because better opportunities arise, nor necessarily because farming is not valued as important by those abandoning it.

This session is one in a pair, presenting empirical examples from across the Global South and North to discuss how we might understand trends variously discussed as deagrarianisation and depeasantisation. We will discuss how and why trends differ across contexts, and what lessons we might learn from cross-context comparison. We aim at forging a better understanding of the reasons behind and the effects of deagrarianisation across contexts, as well as how smallholder agriculture might be revitalized and food security and sovereignty supported.

PRESENTATIONS

Session abstract:

Farming in the upland forest reserves of northern Thailand has long been a point of contention between smallholders and the state. After a transition from swidden subsistence farming, upland smallholders’ increasingly intensive cultivation of hybrid maize has resulted in a maize boom that has fed the country’s livestock industry over the past four decades. However, smallholders have begun to abandon maize, leading to the question of whether the conservationists’ dream of “returning forests to the state” will finally be fulfilled. This study investigates the causes of the maize bust and accompanying land-use changes from the perspectives of smallholders. Drawing from fieldwork in Nan province, we examined household-level decision making, challenges, and future visions around land use, livelihoods, and participation in greening projects. Data was collected through a household survey of 10 villages (n=347) and semi-structured interviews with 45 smallholders and 8 household members of the next generation. We found that many smallholders are being squeezed out of maize because of surging production costs and labor shortages due to old age and the economic out-migration of younger household members. However, rather than abandoning farming altogether, these smallholders are instead investing in less labor-intensive tree crops to hold onto the land for their families amidst an uncertain future. These findings contribute to understanding the complexity of deagrarianization in the context of cash crop boom-and-busts, tenure insecurity, and sustainability pressures, and hold implications for land-use policies and interventions.

Session abstract:

In the rurality of the Yucatan Peninsula, the prevalent land tenure is a common property land regime known as Ejido. The historical trajectory of Ejidos have colonial precedents, but the processes of gradual change derived from this inheritance are usually disdained or relegated by Mexican scholarship on rural development as merely contextual information. Instead, I argue, Ejidos’ long-term historical trajectory still determines their interactions with the state and the market. This historical foundation is important to problematize the contemporary regional trends of social and territorial change, and to assess the possible outcomes of upcoming mega-projects of modernization that pose new challenges to the fragile and fragmented ecosystems of the region. Currently, there are ongoing processes of de-agrarianization and increasing inequality. But what role do the Ejidos of the Yucatan Peninsula, constituted mostly by Yucatec Mayans play in this scenario? I argue that the Ejidos of the Yucatan Peninsula are defined by an ontological ambiguity that positions them as an ‘organic’ part of a modernization project which has developed since the XVI c., and at the same time they are an ‘Other’ who enacts distinctive socio-cultural and economic practices. My current research project retrieves insights from an ethnographic approach to a case of ‘successful’ community forestry, an engagement with long-term historical analysis, and the discursive analysis of a binding Prior Consultation organized by the Mexican government around a mega-project called the ‘Mayan Train’, which was accepted by consensus of 985 Ejidos.

Session abstract:

Deagrarianisation has long been evident in the former homeland, communal areas of South Africa, and intertwined with complex structural, ago-economic, ecological, social and institutional factors. Even if the precise causes, extent, reversibility and consequences of deagrarianisation remain ongoing topics of debate. South Africa increasingly foreshadows proceses of ‘jobless deagrariansation’, across sub-Saharan Africa and much of the global South, where rural displacement combined with few and precarious footholds in urban and industrial economy, render large swathes of the rural population redundant to the needs of the economy, and therefore impoverished and vulnerable. Against the backdrop, rural livelihoods in the former ‘labour reserves’ of the present day communal areas are marked by high levels of diversification, and migration and ‘externalisation’. Impoverished, rural households are increasingly reliant on often paltry labour market earnings (including urban remittances), state welfare transfers, and informal economic activities, and low levels of subsistence food production. In this context, the place of smallholders in the public policy, within contemporary South Africa, is of interest. Despite rhetoric of support for smallholders, the post-apartheid state has often been ambivalent and contradictory in its approach to small scale farmers and farming. This presentation discusses the vision of smallholders encoded in South Africa’s rural development, agricultural and land reform policy, over the last quarter of a century. It is a vision of smallholders often marked by contradictions, elisions and inattentive to the realities of deagrianisation, and with important consequences in the present.

Session abstract:

In Europe, agrarian modernisation in the post-II World War has brought major changes to agri-food systems and rural areas. These include farm-debt crisis, disappearance of farms, rural depopulation, and agribusiness market concentration. In this presentation, I approach peasants’ histories within agrarian change (deagrarianisation and depesantisation) in Portugal through the lens of subalternity. I thus move beyond approaches to the agrarian/peasant question that focus on the level of commodification of peasants’ subsistence (depeasantisation and repeasantisation), to pay attention to how peasants are adversely incorporated in capitalism and (re)constituted as subaltern groups. After providing an overview of the historical relationships of constituting peasants as subalterns, I shed light on the articulation between economic, political, and cultural resources for their subordination. Then, I analyse how peasants have mobilised, particularly through CNA, a Vía Campesina member organisation, to build an oppositional project, not without tensions. I conclude by discussing how a focus on subalternity contributes to a better understanding of the links between agrarian change, conflict and resistance. I argue that a Gramscian notion of subalternity is a powerful lens to analyse these links for its focus on uneven power relations and by emphasizing the centrality of struggle in transforming the world.m of relations where all knowledge systems and actors can actively participate in policy-making.