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Publications
Publications (53)
This article engages with the role of technological upgrading for work in agriculture, a sector commonly disregarded in debates about the future of work. Foregrounding migrant work in Dutch horticulture, it explores how technological innovation is connected to the scope and security of employment. Besides, it proposes a heuristic that connects work...
After three decades of post-Soviet agrarian change, farming structures in Tajikistan remain dynamic. Despite a centralised reform agenda pushed forward by international donors, the local implementation of reforms has resulted in striking differences in agrarian structures across the country. This paper investigates Tajikistan’s geography and agrari...
The myriad potential benefits of digital farming hinge on the promise of increased accuracy, which allows ‘doing more with less’ through precise, data-driven operations. Yet, precision farming's foundational claim of increased accuracy has hardly been the subject of comprehensive examination. Drawing on social science studies of big data, this arti...
While corporate social responsibility (CSR) in emerging and developing countries has attracted increased attention, most research still focuses on firms that conduct CSR under pressure from the West. We studied how CSR takes shape domestically in an emerging economy (Russia), in remote rural areas, outside the reach of international mechanisms enfo...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have been shown to derive from external and internal motivations of a company. Little attention has been given to motivations of managers in large farms and agroholdings to undertake CSR activities thanks to individual values and pressure from institutions. We therefore investigate the types of CSR a...
Agribusiness social responsibility in emerging economies: Effects of legal structure, economic performance, and managers' motivations Abstract While corporate social responsibility (CSR) in emerging and developing countries has attracted increased attention, most research still focuses on firms that conduct CSR under pressure from the West (e.g., t...
Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what disti...
This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the regi...
Unfortunately there has been a severe mis-referencing in the published article. Therefore the article has been updated.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of the former Soviet Union’s borders, cross border interactions between the former Soviet Union states and China have augmented, and particularly the impetus given by the Chinese authorities to the Belt and Road Initiative has increased the presence of various Chinese actors in the countries...
Drawing on our long-term research experiences, in this deliberately provocative but also reflexive paper we argue that international food and agriculture studies constitute a research area that would particularly benefit from insights obtained from research conducted in the world's peripheries—in this case, specifically from insights on East Europe...
The majority of the world’s smallholders live in countries that experience(d) socialism, but they largely remain invisible in agrarian studies. This special issue puts the spotlight on post-socialist smallholders, asking whether, and how, they (1) fulfil important functions in society; (2) engage in resistance (against the state or corporate actors...
This article investigates the regionally varied changes in social support and responsibilities of large-scale farms vis-à-vis household plot holders and their rural communities in post-Soviet Russia. Ongoing marketisation puts pressure on the Soviet-inherited symbiosis between large farms and household plots. We observe that large farms’ shift to A...
The contemporary process of financialization has been a major driver of the remarkable changes witnessed in global food and agricultural markets over the past decade, contributing to the rise and subsequent volatility of food and agricultural commodity prices since 2006. In the wake of these developments it has become clear that the turmoil has int...
This article critically analyzes the assumption that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that, therefore, farmland values are bound to rise across the globe. It investigates the process of land value creation, as well as its flipside: value erosion and stagnation, looking at the various mechanisms involved in each. As such, it is a study of ho...
50 free eprints: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DGHxHe7SWn9tx6gQZBm6/full
Through a study of agricultural service cooperatives in Russia’s Belgorod region, this article addresses two gaps in the literature: first, the dearth of empirical studies on cooperatives in post-socialist Russia; second, the lack of attention to top-down cooperatives in...
A significant post-Soviet agricultural trend is the rise of super-large scale agroholdings. The emergence of these farming companies has occasioned a debate on whether such farms are economically and socially optimal: are they are more efficient than smaller scale farms, and are they squeezing out smaller producers from the market? In this debate,...
This article analyses how Sarajevo’s young adults from a middle class, interethnic background deal with the rigid ethnic categorisation enforced by state institutions and society. Their strategies (exit, reframing, and partial separation) appear to be unsatisfactory to the actors themselves, and wield generally no influence on the institutions they...
markdownabstractIn the wake of the 2007–08 food crisis, we have seen the combined development of a rapid financialization of agriculture with the expansion of large-scale corporate farming through large-scale land deals, in particular in developing countries and emerging economies. The rapidly growing appetite for agriculture among financial invest...
This symposium introduction brings together two debates; the debate on global food prices and speculation, and the debate on so-called global ‘land investment’ or ‘land grabbing’. Both debates are examining two sides of the same phenomenon – the growing role of private financial investors in the global agri-food value chains and the myriad conseque...
What does food sovereignty look like in settings where rural social movements are weak or non-existent, such as in countries with post-socialist, semi-authoritarian regimes? Focusing on Russia, we present a divergent form of food sovereignty. Building on the concept of ‘quiet sustainability’, we present a dispersed, muted, but clearly bottom-up var...
Expectations of Russia becoming a global ‘breadbasket’ have been nurtured by its rise to the top group of global wheat exporters, the abundance of abandoned land, assumed yield gaps and the apparent ‘success’ of agroholdings. It is argued here that becoming a global breadbasket is hindered by substantial costs of re-cultivating abandoned land, mana...
After more than two decades of agrarian change in Tajikistan, farming structures seem to
crystallise. The first signs towards farm individualisation were observed only around 2000,
which were the result of significant pressure from outside, when the post-conflict state was
highly susceptible to pressure from multilateral institutions. Over time, st...
Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia tod...
In this paper we argue that Russian discourses on and practices of food sovereignty strongly diverge from the global understanding of this concept. We distinguish two approaches to food and agriculture that are crucial for understanding food sovereignty à la Russe. The first one is what we term ‘food security in a sovereign state’. This approach is...
This paper aims at conceptualising the re-emerging Russian peasantry by looking at objective characteristics (land use, production mode, and market relations) and subjective ones (peasant identity, land attachment, and cross-generational transfer of peasant culture) of the contemporary rural population, involved in individualized agricultural produ...
This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regar...
This article analyzes the politics of memory around the Estonian government's decision to relocate Tallinn's World War II memorial of a Soviet soldier. It shows why and how legitimizing national discourses resonated with and influenced personal narratives among ordinary Estonians. It also discusses discourses of Estonians who took a more critical s...
'Land grabbing' in Africa by China, and other populous, high-income Asian countries such as South Korea, has received considerable attention, while land grabbing in post-Soviet Eurasia has gone largely unnoticed. However, as this article shows, foreign state and private companies are also acquiring vast areas of farmland in this region. The article...
Institutional Transformation in the Agricultural Sector of the former Soviet Bloc
This article discusses popular explanations for the demise of farm enterprises in Mongolia, such as: reduced state funding, corrupt and self-interested rural elites, and the (supposed) drastic central privatisation policy. It argues that these factors are insufficient...
Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virt...
While ‘land grabbing’ in Africa by China, and other populous, high-income Asian countries such as South Korea got quite some attention, land grabbing in post-Soviet Eurasia has gone largely unnoticed. However, as this paper shows, recently also in the latter region foreign state and private companies are accumulating vast expanses of farm land. The...
After short-lived growth in the early 1990s, Russia’s private family farming sector has been characterized by stagnation, while ownership of former collective and state farms is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rural elite. This accumulation turns the rural dwellers, who (formally) had become landowners in the early 1990s, again into a...
The continued existence and predominance of large farm enterprises (LFEs) in Russian agriculture during the transition to a market economy is analysed using theories of transaction costs, coordination mechanisms and networks. A comparative analysis is presented of farm restructuring in two, highly contrasting survey regions. That analysis shows tha...
A DECADE AFTER THE BREAK-UP of the Soviet Union in 1991 this article presents an overall review of the state of agrarian reform in the new states that were formed in its demise. It will show that the development of a new, economically viable agricultural sector, based on private farm enterprises, is still a far cry in most parts of the former Sovie...
While ‘land grabbing’ in Africa by China, and other populous, high-income Asian countries such as South Korea got quite some attention, land grabbing in post-Soviet Eurasia has gone largely unnoticed. However, as this paper shows, recently also in the latter region foreign state and private companies are accumulating vast expanses of farm land. The...
Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialist capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis shows striking resemblance with the informal workings of Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture, a large ´virtual economy´, the inability of agencies to get insight int...