《Journal of Agrarian Change》第22卷第1期目录及摘要
全文链接：
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14710366/2022/22/1
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLES
Twenty-five years of Living Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world
Mark Vicol, Niels Fold, Caroline Hambloch, Sudha Narayanan, Helena Pérez Niño
What kind of labour regime is contract farming? Contracting and sharecropping in Java compared
Ben White, Hanny Wijaya
Land and contract farming: Changes in the distribution and meanings of land in Kilombero, Tanzania
Lotte Isager, Niels Fold, Anne Mwakibete
Contract farming and everyday acts of resistance: Oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines
Caroline Hambloch
The fragmented politics of sugarcane contract farming in Uganda
Giuliano Martiniello, Arthur Owor, Ibrahim Bahati, Adam Branch
Producing industrial pigs in southwestern China: The rise of contract farming as a coevolutionary process
Qian Forrest Zhang, Hongping Zeng
Private and state-led contract farming in Zimbabwe: Accumulation, social differentiation and rural politics
Toendepi Shonhe, Ian Scoones
Cashing in or driving development? Cross-border traders and maize contract farming in northeast Laos
Robert Cole
Formal and informal contract farming in Mozambique: Socially embedded relations of agricultural intensification
Gert Jan Veldwisch, Philip Woodhouse
Living under value chains: The new distributive contract and arguments about unequal bargaining power
Amy J. Cohen, Mark Vicol, Ganesh Pol
The afterlife of living under contract, an epilogue
Peter D. Little, Michael Watts
BOOK REVIEWS
The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America by Matilda Baraibar Norberg. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. Pp. xxv + 404. 50,28 € (ebook). ISBN 978-3-030-24,586-3
Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4604-0270
African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, Policy, by Christopher Cramer, John Sender and Arkebe Oqubay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv+319. £35.00. ISBN 978-0-19-883233-1
Peter Lawrence
ncehttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0326-0361
The political economy of agrarian extractivism: Lessons from Bolivia, by Ben McKay. Black Point: Fernwood Publications. 2020 172 pp. $20.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9781773632537
Alexander Dunlap
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4604-0270
Twenty-five years of Living Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world
Mark Vicol Niels Fold Caroline Hambloch Sudha Narayanan Helena Pérez Niño
Abstract：The expansion of contract farming schemes through regions of the developing world in the era of the globalization of agriculture raises questions that are central to the study of agrarian political economy. Contract farming has extended the footprint of commodity production and integrated land and labour not otherwise captured in forms of direct production and marketing. 25 years after the publication of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a foundational collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, it is necessary to take stock of the most prominent developments in the practice of contract farming and in the political economy literature studying it. The ultimate contribution of Living Under Contract was framing contract farming as expressing the unevenness of power relations in agriculture and grounding it in specific political, historical and social contexts that were not examined in the mainstream accounts. This introduction to the special issue revisits the questions that have remained relevant or re-emerged in the political economy literature on contract farming; it raises new questions that reflect contemporary developments and it explains how the papers in this collection contribute to the expansion of the theoretical and empirical horizons of the research on contemporary contract farming in low and middle-income countries.
What kind of labour regime is contract farming? Contracting and sharecropping in Java compared
Ben White Hanny Wijaya
Abstract：This article compares contract farming with share tenancy, another labour regime in which smallholder farmers are bound by contract to deliver produce to another, usually more powerful party. Based on research in the Javanese village of Kaliloro, we explore contracting and sharecropping as labour regimes, each with their own specific mechanisms of surplus transfer from producers to non-producers. The cases compared are sharecropping of irrigated rice, contract farming of watermelon, and contract farming of poultry. There are important differences in how labour inputs are organized, how decisions are made, how costs are divided between landowner/contractor and farmer, and in the mechanisms of surplus transfer between the contracting parties. Exploring these differences allows us to understand and compare the role of the two labour regimes in the penetration of capital into the rural economy. Neither contract farming nor share tenancy are in themselves “win-win” or “win-lose” relationships, good or bad for small-scale cultivators. The actual balance of burdens and benefits—often contravening the provisions of written contracts or state regulation—is determined by power relations between the contracting parties.
Land and contract farming: Changes in the distribution and meanings of land in Kilombero, Tanzania
Lotte Isager Niels Fold Anne Mwakibete
Abstract：In the context of contract farming of sugarcane in an outgrower scheme in Tanzania, this paper explores how the scheme has fundamentally altered people's relationships with the land over the last 50 years, in particular, since 1999, when, after three decades, the sugar parastatal was privatized. The paper reviews the literature on the mutual relationship between contract farming and land ownership and examines the scheme with a focus on long-term changes in the forms of land acquisitions and land use. We argue that the meaning and importance of landownership in contract farming schemes needs to be reassessed if participation in contract farming entails a departure from previous forms of acquiring land, generates new spatial patterns of agricultural production, and necessitates additional economic and social resources in order to transform land into an economic asset.
Contract farming and everyday acts of resistance: Oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines
Caroline Hambloch
Abstract：Contract violations are critical issues determining the success and sustainability of contract farming (CF). This paper challenges the common portrayal of the “powerful” company versus the “powerless” landowners/smallholders by using the literature on labour agency in global value chains to understand minor contract violations of contract farmers such, as side-selling, refusal to harvest, and burning/felling of oil palm trees. This paper conceptualizes these violations as acts of minor agency or everyday acts of resistance. The analysis highlights how CF has created chains of dependency, in which smallholders are integrated into the modern market economy through new relations of debt and power. In response, contract farmers attempt to influence and shape the CF relation by using these different acts of minor agency. This paper finds that acts of minor agency, in the aggregate, can have important effects on contract relations, governance, and organizational structure of the chain and has the potential to lead to broader changes in the underlying social relations of contract. It highlights how individual acts of minor agency may contribute to the development of a consciousness of collective opposition to the contract relation.
The fragmented politics of sugarcane contract farming in Uganda
Giuliano Martiniello Arthur Owor Ibrahim Bahati Adam Branch
Abstract：In the last decade, contract farming has regained momentum among policymakers and global development agencies as a tool to promote inclusive rural development and responsible investments. Integrating smallholders within global, regional and national agricultural value chains, we are told, represents the sine qua non for alleviating rural poverty. In Uganda, under the label of out-grower schemes, contract farming is currently undergoing massive expansion, driven especially by the boom in sugarcane cultivation. Drawing from three case studies of sugarcane contract farming in Uganda, the paper re-politicizes the debate around contract farming by looking at the power relations within which these schemes are embedded. We argue, what is seen in Uganda's expansion is a political dynamic derived both from the major dislocations and dispossessions required to establish the plantation estate and its work force, as well as from the effort to bring many smallholders using unimproved methods on land with sometimes unclear tenure arrangements into contracted arrangements for supplying sugarcane. The result has been highly contentious politics around sugar's expansion, where struggles over land dispossession merge with those around exploitative wage labour, around the loss and transformation of livelihoods, and around debt, power inequalities and environmental harm, a matrix in which state violence and co-optation are ever-present.
Producing industrial pigs in southwestern China: The rise of contract farming as a coevolutionary process
Qian Forrest Zhang Hongping Zeng
Abstract：The literature on contract farming (CF) has to date focused on how outside capital uses CF to vertically integrate non-capitalist producers into agro-industrial value chains. We argue that in places where multiple dynamics of capitalist growth co-exist, CF relationships can also emerge between different types of capitalist producers that are already in capitalist production using other organizational forms. In this situation, the well-studied drivers that fuel the spread of CF become less consequential; the emergence of CF is instead more contingent on the complex interactions between producers and the specific conditions and events in the local environment. We conceptualize the emergence of this type of CF as a coevolutionary process and develop an analytical toolkit from this perspective to study the rise of CF in industrial pig farming in a Chinese county. Our analysis traces the evolution of agro-industrialization over a decade (2006–2016) and shows the emergence of CF as a coevolutionary outcome shaped by the unique biography of the contract producers, the “historical accident” of a market downturn, and the reciprocal responses between contract producers and agribusinesses.
Private and state-led contract farming in Zimbabwe: Accumulation, social differentiation and rural politics
Toendepi Shonhe Ian Scoones
Abstract：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.
Cashing in or driving development? Cross-border traders and maize contract farming in northeast Laos
Robert Cole
Abstract：Contract farming is receiving renewed attention in research and policy in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, as countries continue to undergo varied agrarian transitions and agri-food production has become increasingly regionalized. In northeast Laos, previously isolated upland communities have experienced rapid transformations resulting from contract production of hybrid maize, mainly for industrial feed processing and livestock in Vietnam. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands, this article explores the quasi-“developmental” functions assumed by cross-border traders, in the context of unfulfilled rural policy objectives, in which these “micro-investors” provide informal extension and infrastructure to enable agricultural commercialization. The article examines the extent to which this dynamic is adequately captured by notions of patronage, or whether subtle mutual dependencies are at work, as livelihoods are rebalanced between subsistence and commodity crops in remote border landscapes.
Formal and informal contract farming in Mozambique: Socially embedded relations of agricultural intensification
Gert Jan Veldwisch Philip Woodhouse
Abstract：This paper explores the role of contract farming arrangements in agricultural intensification in sub-Saharan Africa, combining secondary literature and original case material from Mozambique. The paper extends the scope of “contract farming” beyond the formal contracts between large companies and small-scale producers to include less formal credit agreements between farmers and traders. It argues that such informal contract arrangements are evidence of farmers' agency in “real markets.” In the studied cases, farmers use contract farming opportunities to intensify agricultural production by investing in irrigation and inputs. While informal contracts typically concern locally consumed crops, thus with more possibilities for side selling than formal contracts for export crops with company-controlled markets, informal contract compliance reflects closely knit social ties between the contracting parties. In both formal and informal contracts, purchasers tend to seek out producers who are already irrigating, thus obtaining gains from farmers' earlier investments. This also implies contract farming as a mechanism for accelerating social differentiation arising from unequal access to irrigation. The paper argues that the significance of informal contracts in the studied cases raises the possibility that informal contract farming by local traders plays a more important role in agrarian transformation in Africa than formal contract farming by large companies.
Living under value chains: The new distributive contract and arguments about unequal bargaining power
Amy J. Cohen Mark Vicol Ganesh Pol
Abstract：In the 1980s and 1990s, during the high-water mark of Washington Consensus development, rural sociologists and geographers critical of contract farming described contract as a legal fiction—one that imagines formally equal and voluntary relations between large firms and small farmers and hence that functions purposefully to obscure unequal social relations. Today, however, development planners, who argue for contract farming as an integral part of value chain agriculture, describe unequal bargaining power as a problem for rural development to solve. Our article analyzes how proponents have domesticated what was once a radical critique of contract farming—a phenomenon that we suggest tells of value chain development more broadly. Via a qualitative case study of India, we describe how a range of actors—development planners, state officials, and farmers—now all make arguments about unequal bargaining power and yet hold disparate understandings of what bargaining inequalities mean and what reforms should therefore follow. More specifically, we show how and why common reform proposals—for contract regulation and farmer aggregation—remain constrained by the inequalities they would challenge and thus why farmers themselves speak different possibilities to the problem of unequal bargaining power.
The afterlife of living under contract, an epilogue
Peter D. Little Michael Watts
Abstract：This epilogue summarizes key challenges in the critical study of contract farming (CF) that are highlighted in this special issue, and it utilizes our co-edited volume Living under contract as the platform to ask what has been learned and what questions remain nearly three decades after the book's publication. It discusses the political and historical moment of the late 1980s when our CF project was started and the neo-liberal roots of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) were firmly implanted, especially in Africa—the regional focus of our book. We argue that this neoliberal turn continues to shape many topics addressed in this special issue, including the role of the state, labour and land (and ecology) relations, and the vertical integration of CF within global values chains. The epilogue concludes with a plea for more systematic comparisons and “big picture” analyses that highlight how space, local agrarian formations and classes, state powers, and materiality (the commodity itself) shape the character and dynamics of CF schemes.
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