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Rearticulating Caste: The Global Cottonseed Commodity Chain and the Paradox of Smallholder Capitalism in South India
Abstract
Cottonseed is an aspirational crop for smallholders newly incorporated in the global cottonseed commodity chain as own-account cultivators in South India. The labor to produce cottonseeds, which are hybrids, in the field is excessive. Multinational and Indian corporations depend on hybridization to protect their intellectual property rights in branded seeds. As wage rates rise and seed prices do not, the outsourcing of cottonseed production to smallholders is attractive to capital. It is mostly the unpaid, family labor of smallholders which now generates exchange value. While smallholders dream of spectacular gains and some success stories seem to support this, growing cottonseed is a risky business and, at times, the returns to smallholders are so low that the very costs of reproducing family labor are unmet; many go into debt. Yet, smallholders from a formerly untouchable caste, or Dalit, community, who just a short while ago worked as ‘cottonseed children’ for rich farmers are, for the first time, proudly growing cottonseed on ‘their own plots of land’ and ‘laboring for themselves’. To explain this paradox I propose a vernacular calculus of the economic, a noneconomistic grid, for understanding why Dalit smallholders continue this form of production even when they could earn more from wage labor. I argue that the rearticulation of caste in terms of dignity and perceptions of autonomy shape this calculus. I argue further that Dalit smallholders experience the inherent contradictions of capitalism through a ‘structure of feeling’ marked by perplexity. At a time when smallholder contract farming is being suggested as a new development strategy by the World Bank and questioned by its detractors, a vernacular calculus of the economic and affective experiences marked by perplexity may be more widely relevant as generalized characteristics of smallholder capitalism.
... As a part of GPNs, hybridized seeds are produced by global companies and then sold to cultivators who grow cotton commercially for fibre. However, while the cotton-producing farmers depend on a patented insect-resistant global seed technology from the multi-national corporations (MNCs), the MNCs in turn depend on cottonseed farmers to produce cottonseed at pre-fixed prices and to sell it back to them exclusively (Ramamurthy 2011). Though companies do not directly contract with seed farmers but operate through intermediaries known as 'seed organizers' (Khandelwal et al. 2008;Venkateswarlu 2004), they still exert substantial control over farmers and seed production processes by fixing the procurement price (price paid to farmers), advancing capital, specifying non-employment of child labour, extending technical advice regarding the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and providing precautions to be observed while conducting crosspollination and laboratory testing of the seed quality. ...
... Since 2005-2006, MNCs like Bayer, Monsanto and DuPont have held special campaigns, introduced price incentives and blacklisted farmers to curb the use of child labour (Venkateswarlu 2015). This has resulted not only in a major shift in the production of Bt cottonseeds from Gujarat to Rajasthan (McKinney 2013), but also in the outsourcing of cottonseed production to small-holders who employ unpaid family labour that generates exchange value (Ramamurthy 2011). Consequently, many Bhil tribal households supply land, resources and labour for production, supporting seed companies and elite farmers. ...
... The pistil of the emasculated bud is tagged with a red plastic square. The purpose of emasculation is to prevent selffertilization in the female parent flowers(Ramamurthy 2011;Venkateswarlu 2004).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions.
... As a part of GPNs, hybridized seeds are produced by global companies and then sold to cultivators who grow cotton commercially for fibre. However, while the cotton-producing farmers depend on a patented insect-resistant global seed technology from the multi-national corporations (MNCs), the MNCs in turn depend on cottonseed farmers to produce cottonseed at pre-fixed prices and to sell it back to them exclusively (Ramamurthy 2011). Though companies do not directly contract with seed farmers but operate through intermediaries known as 'seed organizers' (Khandelwal et al. 2008;Venkateswarlu 2004), they still exert substantial control over farmers and seed production processes by fixing the procurement price (price paid to farmers), advancing capital, specifying non-employment of child labour, extending technical advice regarding the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and providing precautions to be observed while conducting crosspollination and laboratory testing of the seed quality. ...
... Since 2005-2006, MNCs like Bayer, Monsanto and DuPont have held special campaigns, introduced price incentives and blacklisted farmers to curb the use of child labour (Venkateswarlu 2015). This has resulted not only in a major shift in the production of Bt cottonseeds from Gujarat to Rajasthan (McKinney 2013), but also in the outsourcing of cottonseed production to small-holders who employ unpaid family labour that generates exchange value (Ramamurthy 2011). Consequently, many Bhil tribal households supply land, resources and labour for production, supporting seed companies and elite farmers. ...
... The pistil of the emasculated bud is tagged with a red plastic square. The purpose of emasculation is to prevent selffertilization in the female parent flowers(Ramamurthy 2011;Venkateswarlu 2004). ...
... Farmers have lost the practice of conserving native seeds. Further, as observed by Ramamurthy (2011), as a spin-off to commodification, small-holder capitalists in rural areas have forayed into the retailing of hybrid seeds and other inputs, thus acting as a favorable medium for corporates to transfer new and emergent technological practices to farmers. ...
... Tractors, threshers, Happy Seeders, and herbicides have reduced employment opportunities for elderly women from less privileged caste groups. On several occasions, we could connect with Ramamurthy's (2011Ramamurthy's ( , p. 1036 observations that these women continue to "experience the inherent contradictions of capitalism through a 'structure of feeling' marked by perplexity." ...
The article showcases the nature of climate colonialism by examining the transitions in heirloom seed conservation practices in the context of climate change. Insights for this article are drawn from an action research project implemented among heirloom seed keepers and small-scale farmers in Tamil Nadu, India. Local knowledge systems and indigenous seed conservation practices play a crucial role in strengthening the resilience of small-scale farmers to climate variability and extreme weather events. Throughout India, traditional seed keepers have voluntarily taken up the responsibility of collecting and conserving native and heirloom seeds for future generations. These practices also ensure that sustainable farming practices are adopted. However, the modernization and commercialization of agriculture since the colonial and post-independence periods have displaced several such practices, paving the way for the mass consumption of hybrid seed varieties and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. With the advent of climate change as both global discourse and locally experienced phenomena, yet another layer of dispossession and the cheapening of nature has occurred. The key argument of this article is that climate change adaptation has become a new commodity frontier, dispossessing and alienating small-scale producers.
... end (in terms of value addition) and low-wage work is often undertaken by workers from marginalized caste groups Ramamurthy, 2011). Similarly, a lawsuit against the technological giant Cisco and its managers for caste discrimination in 2020 2 in California (and the subsequent outlawing of caste-based discrimination in US cities and regions such as Seattle, California state, and universities such as Brown, Columbia, Harvard, etc.) demonstrate that caste is not a local, geographically-contained phenomenon, but that it deserves attention in terms of wider circulation of commodities and labour in the global economy. ...
... In the case of smallholder farming, for example, the increase in wages even as prices remain stable has resulted in the exit of dominant caste farmers, while production has now shifted to the Dalit and other marginalized-caste, smallholder farmers. Despite the volatility and risks of agricultural commodities, the latter have adopted such farming as it endows them with more control over labour and resources ('our labour for ourselves') and ties them to their lands (Ramamurthy, 2011). ...
... There is a much to unpack in this single day of seed buying. Like Dalit farmers, Shiva is among the first generation of Banjara farmers to move from full-time wage labor to farming in pursuit of the cultivation of the kind of modernity promised by India's neoliberal reforms (Pandian 2009;Ramamurthy 2011;Vasavi 2012). The recommendations and tacit endorsement of Vikram Rao push Shiva toward ATM, while the clerk tries to rush him out of his shop. ...
... In the shop, manci digubadi cuts through advertising and uncertainty regarding Jackpot, justifying a gamble on an unknown seed. Ramamurthy (2011) has called this kind of rationalization the vernacular calculus of the economic, in which marginalized communities historically denied land tenure aspire to upward mobility through commodity agriculture. Although Telangana cotton agriculture is rarely profitable for the most marginal farmers (Gutierrez et al. 2015;Reddy 2017), the economic calculation to grow cotton is structured less by cost-benefit analyses than by an aspiration to overcome historical marginalization and generational poverty. ...
... While debate over the nature of ongoing capitalist transformations of agriculture in India remains vigorous (Lerche, Shah, and Harriss-White 2013;Byres 2016;Carlson 2018), on at least two fronts there is consensus: first, patterns of agrarian change are sharply uneven across regions and second, the modal condition of existence for a rural majority is increasingly one of semi-proletarianization (Lerche 2011;Ramamurthy 2011;Levien 2018)with such households neither able to survive exclusively on land-based activities such as agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, and so on; nor (willing or able to be) fully dependent on wage work. In fact, agrarian studies scholars have persuasively documented that combinations of farm work and non-farm wage labor, disguised wage labor, indentured work, self-employment, and various forms of petty commodity production 4 , are now all routine elements in the livelihood repertoires of impoverished rural households (Bernstein 2010;Lerche 2010;Harriss-White 2012;2014). ...
... This is because the 'creative practices' of cultural production are frequently marked by 'in between-ness': in between intended and unintended, deliberate and tacit, witting and unwitting, dissenting and desiring of the familiar (cf. Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003;Ramamurthy 2011). Margaret Archer reminds us that being human is to not be a figure into whom 'is funneled a social foam which penetrates every nook and cranny … [such that all] she is left with are her molecules: society supplies her with her meaningand there is nothing between the two' (Archer 2003, 317). ...
Our paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of ‘cultural production’. Our term ‘middle migrants’ characterizes households that have managed to establish a foothold in cities, even as they remain enmeshed in their rural lives through translocal householding and cultural dispositions to difference.
... Where speculation distorts market signals, small-scale producers are at risk of producing too much or too little based on artificial price movements (Isakson, 2014). At the same time, for many small-scale producers, their participation in specialized production for global commodity markets is viewed as an important means of emerging out of poverty and marginalization (Jansen, 2015;Ramamurthy, 2011). ...
... This is unsurprising, given the dynamics of prohibition and legalization: government repressed the market; the market must be liberated; the market will deliver liberation from state repression. That formal market participation can lead to a sense of freedom and liberation should not be discounted (Ramamurthy, 2011). Yet, one only needs a cursory understanding of agricultural capitalist markets to know that markets do not always (or even often) deliver justice-social, environmental, and otherwise. ...
Oddly, criminal prohibition can lead to “commoning,” when individuals, left unprotected by state and formal property rights, innovate collective systems to access, use, and benefit from illegalized resources. “Legalization” entails the conversion of these prohibited commons to legal property systems, bringing new freedoms and liberties as well as the dispossession of collectively generated assets (material, relational, and otherwise). This paradox of legalization is currently playing out among U.S. states moving to legalize cannabis. Motivated by the failures of cannabis prohibition and its grievous harms, the question looms: How will states and markets grapple with the collectively generated assets and relational systems generated under prohibition? Building from ethnographic research and survey data, this article argues for recognition of the commoning practices that produced the resources upon which the legal market is based. These practices illuminate ways that legalization may deliver not only markets and regulation but also emancipatory justice in the wake of the War on Drugs. First, we document the commoning practices of cannabis cultivators, the collective benefits they generated under prohibition, and how legalization is affecting these practices and dynamics. Second, we explore strategies, like allotment and pricing systems, that build from prohibited commoning practices to achieve greater collective benefits and the emancipatory potential of legalization.
... Furthermore, the self-assertion of respectability in stigmatized work, most commonly seen in work performed by Dalits (Aktor and Deliège 2008;Rao 2012) and a strong imperative to assert personhood among Dalit groups (Ramamurthy 2011;Rawat and Satyanarayana 2016), provided a platform for domestic workers to organize and sustain their energies. The Govandi domestic workers' movement was able to cut across multiple registers of denied claims. ...
In India, many women from former untouchable caste groups (Dalits) are domestic workers. Despite attempts at seeking formal, legal recognition, they continue to be seen by the state as part of a broad, ambiguous category of “informal workers” whose work is stigmatized and not legislated for. In this essay, I suggest that the discourses and practices of a neighborhood‐level Dalit domestic workers’ union in Mumbai reconceptualize domestic work as “formal” work. The workers assert themselves as formal workers (kamgaar) owing to their long histories of work in specific neighborhoods, relationships of trust with employers, and their ability to negotiate long‐standing employment with them. Though domestic work does not align with the state’s definition of formal work (for example, through the presence of written contracts), for the workers, it was their own qualities, origins, social positions, and relationships that defined the formality of work rather than the other way around. Centering respect and dignity in their own work, their union also facilitated the articulation of the caste and gender‐based prejudices that have not only kept domestic workers outside the ambit of formal recognition but also have brought about routine encounters with violence and harassment for Dalit women in the local neighborhood.
... Importantly, however, SC youth did not discourage the activities of their GC peers but were generally supportive: For example, they praised Kunwar Singh's school and approved of health-focused initiatives developed by GC youth that included SCs as a target population (cf. Anandhi, Jeyaranjan, and Krishnan 2002;Ramamurthy 2010Ramamurthy , 2011. The Dalits with whom we spoke broadly endorsed the efforts of young people such as Kunwar Singh to develop urban-style services in the village. ...
Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban–rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as performances of gender empowerment imagined as urban with a view to improving the functioning of their village and preventing migration to cities. Through analyzing these practices of “selective urbanism,” we point to the production of ideas of urbanism and rurality beyond the metropolitan and large city regions usually studied and the importance especially of the performance of urban fragments in people’s conceptions of rural futures. We also examine how value is attached to ideas of the rural and urban and how people deploy as well as problematize the rural–urban binary.
... Actually, suicides peaked in the late 1990s, before GM cotton was available to farmers, and have plateaued since its introduction. While both pro-GM and anti-GM voices claim that suicides will support their narrative, a recent exhaustive study reveals an obvious, if painful, truth (Gutierrez et al. 2015 ): (a) farmers are still committing suicide, with historically disenfranchised communities facing the greatest risks (Vasavi 2012 continue to lack access to credit or water infrastructure that would make them more productive (Taylor 2013 ); and (c) the risks that farmers assume are part of a larger story of aspiration and desire (M ü nster 2012, 2015aRamamurthy 2011 ). This disconnect between aspirations and possibilities in the cotton sector can seem devastating. ...
... This, in turn, means that 'any effects beyond protection against specific bollworm […] infestation' are not guaranteed (gaurav and Mishra, 2012: 3). Moreover, while cotton is generally regarded as a risky crop in terms of yield variability, gaurav and Mishra (2012: 3) argue that the yield fluctuations of Bt cotton are even higher than the variability of conventional cotton (see also glover, 2010: 492; More et al., 2017: 161;Ramamurthy, 2011). These circumstances gain further significance when the higher production costs, such as higher seed costs, and recently even higher pesticide costs, associated with Bt cotton are considered (arora and Bansal, 2012: 102;gaurav and Mishra, 2012: 13;glover, 2010;Kathage and Qaim, 2012: 2;Kranthi and Stone, 2020;Morse et al., 2007). ...
Since its introduction in India, Bt ( Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton technology has been the object of controversial scholarly and non-academic debate. The recent return of pink bollworm ( Pectinophora gossypiella) pests in several Indian states has provided cause for concern about widespread resistances in Lepidopteran pests towards the endotoxins produced in Indian Bt cotton plants as well as about severe setbacks in regard to cotton farmers’ livelihood security. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence on the socio-economic consequences of recent bollworm attacks in India based on an exploratory study conducted in Karimnagar district, Telangana, India. It analyses the changed vulnerabilities that smallholders currently face and identifies the reasons why some peasant farmers can only deal with the consequences of this technological failure to a limited extent.
... Much of the anthropological scholarship on agrarian issues in India has dealt with rural people's struggles as they are incorporated into commodity markets (Ramamurthy 2011;Stone 2007;Vasavi 2012). A. R. Vasavi (2012) has argued that rural India represents a "shadow space": a space of neglect, exploitation, and desperation. ...
Ethnographic fieldwork in Bihar, India, reveals paradoxes at the core of contemporary agriculture. Rural people view growing their own food as a crucial bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market but prioritize off‐farm employment to meet rising household expenses. Landowners who cultivate crops often refer to themselves as unemployed while complaining about a lack of laborers to work the land. They do not always refer to themselves as farmers, while many people who do not call themselves farmers nevertheless perform farm work and rely on agriculture as a livelihood. These paradoxes point to the fuzziness and incoherence surrounding the term “farmer” as both an identity and analytical concept. Ideologies of agricultural labor are shaped by different subject positions and social categories, such as caste, gender, and age. The fractured, fluid, and contingent nature of agriculture, in which people move between different locations and identities, provides the grounds for problematizing scholarly categories of agricultural labor—categories like farmer, landlord, peasant, sharecropper, and laborer. The on‐the‐ground realities of agriculture necessitate reframing the conceptual language to attend to the specificity and materiality of labor in particular sites and moments while also foregrounding the ambivalence, vulnerability, and incompleteness that inheres in agricultural labor.
... Geographers have demonstrated how capital plays a role in the making of uneven development (Bair et al. 2013;Castree 1999;Harvey 1989). The contradictory characteristics of capital's power-geometries riddle space with processes of growth and contraction, revaluation and devaluation, and integration and disarticulation with commodity chains (Bair and Werner 2011;Hough 2011;Ramamurthy 2011;Werner 2016). The remaking of space is critical to capitalist restructuring, but space, as a multiplicity that is always in process, cannot be reduced to capital's logic and the social domination it produces. ...
In response to calls by scholars to deepen theoretical engagement in research on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), in this article we critically discuss and assess major theoretical approaches deployed in the study of AFNs. After highlighting the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach, we provide an alternative framework – which we refer to as the Geographical Political Ecology of Food Systems – that integrates the contributions that have emerged in the study of the alternative geographies of food with an understanding of capitalist processes in the food system. We do this by bringing together literature on the political ecology of food systems and multiple spatialities, including Doreen Massey's understanding of space as a heterogeneous multiplicity and Eric Sheppard's conceptualization of sociospatial positionality. We utilize research on agrarian change and AFNs in Eastern Europe to elaborate this approach. We argue that this new perspective helps navigate tensions in AFN scholarship, and provides new avenues for research and action. We focus particularly on the ability of AFNs to provide a sustainable livelihood for participating farmers, thus far a neglected topic in AFN research in Europe.
Keywords: Alternative Food Networks, Eastern Europe, spatialities, positionality, livelihoods
... Indebtedness to Krishnappa causes social-ecological consequences that influence the feminization of agriculture, livelihood choices, and a decrease in landholding quality. First, the positional vulnerability of women becomes apparent as they become targets of contracts and contractors, experiencing multiple hidden consequences (Rahman 2008;Ramamurthy 2011;Gerber 2013). Women of Ramulu's household are obliged to work in cotton fields, and young girls in similar households are embedded with particular social skills during their upbringingskills that suggest to them that women are delicate and have the nimble fingers necessary for cottonseed farming. ...
Expanding access to credit remains a key central government strategy for promoting agricultural development and livelihood diversification in south India and more widely. Smallholders borrowing from multiple credit sources are faced with obligations in addition to financial repayment. Available evidence on the consequences of indebtedness extending beyond monetary debt and its influence on vulnerability is incomplete in important ways. This paper presents an integrated vulnerability framework and illustrates the framework through case studies of three pairs of smallholder clients and credit sources. Using process-tracing and progressive contextualization methods, this paper shows the diversity of feedbacks that shape indebtedness and provides examples of social-ecological consequences. Unpacking these consequences in individual cases demonstrates indebtedness as an important root cause of vulnerability, which is in contrast to an examination of proximate causes, such as credit policy or temperature, that is the focus of a large share of scholarship. The paper shows that different credit sources are associated with different sets of obligations, leading to varied livelihood and agricultural consequences. Suggesting ‘credit stacking’ as an important adaptation strategy and research agenda item, the paper makes a plea for careful analysis of the conditions when credit is a factor in adaptive capacity and indebtedness of vulnerability.
... Men continue to be excluded from sewing jobs on the production floor and women workers from rural areas face seemingly insurmountable barriers to enter management positions. Thus, Goger's analysis connects with recent feminist scholarship, which suggests that the incorporation of gendered labor into commodity circuits is less a matter of recruiting already constituted workers than a process that requires the ongoing production and mobilization of social difference in place ( Ramamurthy, 2011;Salzinger, 2003). In Christian Berndt's (2013) paper there is a similar discussion of the way labor is standardized as 'modern' in Mexico's maquiladora plants and how these framings connect with spatial boundaries in the plants and in the city, creating an 'outside within'. ...
This exchange urges economic geographers working within several major extant schools of thought to pay greater attention to uneven economic development in general and the dark side of the economic geographies in particular.
... However, seed-saving remains problematic for the users of the filial-1 hybrid seeds which, though not sterile, produce off-spring with irregular phenotypes, thereby forcing farmers to be market-dependent for each planting (Gutierrez et al., 2015). Therefore, it is hybridization, not Terminator technology, that makes Bt. cotton farmers market-dependent (Ramamurthy, 2011). Furthermore, Kranthi and others allude to the fact that yield increase and insect resistance are greatly contingent upon the cultivar into which the soil bacterium Bt. is planted rather than the trait itself, which is solely toxic to bollworms and few other insects (Kranthi, 2012;Stone & Flachs, 2015;Herring & Rao, 2012;Naik et al., 2005). ...
Indian Biotech opponents have attributed the increase of suicides to the monopolization of GM seeds, centering on patent control, application of terminator technology, marketing strategy, and increased production costs. The contentions of the biotech opponents, however, have been criticized for a lack of transparency in their modus operandi i.e. the use of methodology in their argumentation. The fact is, however, that with the intention of getting the attention of those capable of determining the future of GM cotton in India, opponents resorted to generating controversies. Therefore, this article will review and evaluate the multifaceted contentions of both opponents and defenders. Although the association between seed monopolization and farmer-suicide is debatable, we will show that there is a link between the economic factors associated with Bt. cultivation and farmer suicide. The underlying thesis of biotech opponents becomes all the more significant when analysed vis-à-vis the contention of the globalization critics that there has been a political and economic marginalization of the Indian farmers. Their accusation assumes significance in the context of a fragile democracy like India where market forces are accorded precedence over farmers' needs until election time.
... However, seed-saving remains problematic for the users of the filial-1 hybrid seeds which, though not sterile, produce off-spring with irregular phenotypes, thereby forcing farmers to be market-dependent for each planting (Gutierrez et al., 2015). Therefore, it is hybridization, not Terminator technology, that makes Bt. cotton farmers market-dependent (Ramamurthy, 2011). Furthermore, Kranthi and others allude to the fact that yield increase and insect resistance are greatly contingent upon the cultivar into which the soil bacterium Bt. is planted rather than the trait itself, which is solely toxic to bollworms and few other insects (Kranthi, 2012;Stone & Flachs, 2015;Herring & Rao, 2012;Naik et al., 2005). ...
Indian Biotech opponents have attributed the increase of suicides to the monopolization of GM seeds, centering on patent control, application of terminator technology, marketing strategy, and increased production costs. The contentions of the biotech opponents, however, have been criticized for a lack of transparency in their modus operandi i.e. the use of methodology in their argumentation. The fact is, however, that with the intention of getting the attention of those capable of determining the future of GM cotton in India, opponents resorted to generating controversies. Therefore, this article will review and evaluate the multifaceted contentions of both opponents and defenders. Although the association between seed monopolization and farmer-suicide is debatable, we will show that there is a link between the economic factors associated with Bt. cultivation and farmer suicide. The underlying thesis of biotech opponents becomes all the more significant when analysed vis-à-vis the contention of the globalization critics that there has been a political and economic marginalization of the Indian farmers. Their accusation assumes significance in the context of a fragile democracy like India where market forces are accorded precedence over farmers’ needs until election time.
... In spite of the veritable efflorescence of work on global production networks (GPN) during the last decade and a half, there is a resounding consensus that questions of labour continue to be marginalized in this literature (Bair, 2005;Coe et al., 2008;Cumbers et al., 2008;Taylor, 2010;Rainnie et al., 2011;Stringer et al., 2014). The fact that this conclusion has been reiterated so frequently is somewhat surprising, given the proliferation of contributions during roughly the same period that would appear to fill this very lacuna (Collins, 2003;Hale and Wills, 2005;Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010;Hough, 2010;Ramamurthy, 2011;Werner, 2012;Kelly, 2013). This leads us to ask if repeated calls to 'bring labour in' may be less a lament of labour's absence from this work than an expression of dissatisfaction with the way that labour is being conceptualized in analyses of global production. ...
... In spite of the veritable efflorescence of work on global production networks (GPN) during the last decade and a half, there is a resounding consensus that questions of labour continue to be marginalized in this literature (Bair, 2005;Coe et al., 2008;Cumbers et al., 2008;Taylor, 2010;Rainnie et al., 2011;Stringer et al., 2014). The fact that this conclusion has been reiterated so frequently is somewhat surprising, given the proliferation of contributions during roughly the same period that would appear to fill this very lacuna (Collins, 2003;Hale and Wills, 2005;Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010;Hough, 2010;Ramamurthy, 2011;Werner, 2012;Kelly, 2013). This leads us to ask if repeated calls to 'bring labour in' may be less a lament of labour's absence from this work than an expression of dissatisfaction with the way that labour is being conceptualized in analyses of global production. ...
... For Bair and Werner (2011: 992), 'Commodity chains were one way that world-systems theorists understood relationships between these three regions' -core, periphery and semi-periphery -'of differentiated, but singular, capitalist development'. However, and partly via analyses of agricultural production, processing, distribution and trade in so-called Global South settings, involving such varied commodities as beef, cowhide, powdered milk and coca leaf in Colombia (Hough, 2011), tomatoes in Mexico and Morocco (Berndt and Boeckler, 2011) and cottonseed in South India (Ramamurthy, 2011), the GCC/GVC approach has come under sustained critique (see the 2011 and 2013 special issues of Environment and Planning A, vols. 43 and 45 respectively). ...
This report focuses on the now substantial international rural geography literature on the emergence of so-called ‘resource peripheries’, linked to the economic expansion of rapidly industrializing nations such as India and China. The report outlines the major foci and key arguments of this body of work, noting its connections to, but also elaborations of, important concepts used within rural geography, including global commodity chains and their multi-scalar governance, involving, in part, political, economic and social relations between corporations and local communities. Noting the influence of numerous Marxian concepts in this body of work’s intellectual development, the report draws further potential links with the ‘dis/articulations’ scholarship that has recently emerged out of a critique of the global commodity/value chain research, including notions of dispossession, disempowerment and primitive accumulation. Relatedly, aspects of multi-scalar and multi-sector governance in natural resource extraction are highlighted.
... By way of his re-examination of the concept of food regimes, Araghi proposes that the subordination of the problematic of labor to the problematic of development has the consequence of aligning Marxism with teleological theories of underdevelopment, and of constructing questions of class, exploitation, and dispossession as secondary to concerns of bourgeois nationalisms of the Global South. A narrowly economistic analytical lens trained on capital as opposed to labor renders unintelligible disparate impacts on individuals and communities and their struggles and negotiations thereof (Ramamurthy, 2011). As such, Araghi argues 'for a return to the social problematic of labor and the local/global contextualization of its existence and reproduction. . . ...
In this paper, I articulate a notion of ‘social dispossession,’ an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women’s social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities.
Using the lens of affect, this article argues that understanding the sensibilities and allegiances of postcolonial experts is vital to determining who constitutes the expert’s “public” and, thus, who benefits from state interventions and who doesn’t. Following environmental sustainability initiatives in the wake of a parasitic infestation of tobacco in Andhra Pradesh, I analyze experts’ concern for landowning farmers in contrast to their passive neglect and active resentment of landless laborers. The article draws parallels between the experts’ pedagogies and the parasite’s deceptively attractive bloom, which hides complex entanglements between parasite and plant beneath the soil surface. I show that a postcolonial emotional regime idealizes landowning farmers and renders invisible the experts’ and farmers’ common cultural milieu of landownership and collective dependence on caste-based labor. Invoking nostalgia for a lost past, experts’ pedagogies are productive, subsidizing monoculture while neoliberalizing farmers’ subjectivities. By their absenting, laborers face climate precarity and the reproduction of resentment against them.
This article traces the coming of a genetically modified (GM) cotton-agrochemical complex to highland eastern India. In this region of rich biodiversity and Indigenous systems of food and agroecology, GM cotton cultivation has seen a meteoric rise over the past decade. I explore how this shift from a no-input polyculture cultivation of community-held heirloom varieties to market-provisioned cotton seeds and agrochemicals marks a rupture that is fundamentally transforming the relationship of cultivators to land, seeds, and knowledge systems around agroecological practices. I contextualize this ongoing material and knowledge rupture in the specificities of location—both in an agroecological space and in a sociohistorical matrix of caste and region. Thus, what enables or erodes agroecological practices and ways of knowing is not simply the socioeconomic marginalization of smallholder cultivation, but more fundamentally a caste-prejudiced logic in India that, on the one hand, disrupts ecological ties of Indigenous communities to seeds, biodiversity, and land, and on the other denies the contributions of Indigenous knowledge, agriculture, and food cultures toward sustainability and biodiversity. This coming together of an industrial productivist logic with casteist prejudice is what I call casteist capitalism. Casteist capitalism structures both state programs of “tribal development” and agribusiness strategies in the region. Together they work to deride long-standing agroecological practices, and the Indigenous communities which practice them as “backward” and in need of reform toward a modern, commercial agriculture, as represented by chemical-intensive cotton monocropping.
The chapter seeks to trace the trajectory of ecological deterioration of the two aquaculture zones in question, the Bhitakanika National Park in the district of Kendrapara and Chilika Lake due to intensive shrimp farming and its impact on the local fishing community. It examines how the State and the environmental elite’s response to this deterioration has been to selectively produce a vilifying discourse around the figure of the ‘Bangladeshi infiltrator’ (anuprabeskari) under the rubric of conservatism. The paper argues that implicating Bangladeshi immigrants of the region as responsible for the ecological crisis has deflected attention from effectively identifying true causes that have led to this grave ecological ruin. The increasing demand for seafood, related profit along the value chain and the unequal control of market capital are reasons to be examined in order to understand the ecological declines of coastal Odisha. This paper attempts to bring together a web of relations of capital, community and ecology that continue to shape the rapidly changing life of the east coast and which have, thus far been overlooked. It is to centre the understanding that environmental concern in the region, therefore, is not reducible to a simplistic human-nature conflict and has to account for the profit driven economic structure as well as the role of the state, the legal apparatus and community relations.
This briefing offers an analytic frame for understanding how the politics of irrigation for food crops are imbricated with the politics of gender and the re/production of caste-based hierarchies in contemporary India. The briefing focuses on how we might understand industrial pollution, particularly of rivers used for irrigating crops, as well as the increased propensity of drought due to climate change, in relation to the ways in which the boundaries of gender and caste-based identity are buttressed and mobilised by Hindu nationalism and concomitant crony capitalism. While ‘gender’ usually appears in the literature on food politics as a sign for women and the domestic, this briefing offers a counterpoint by framing women both as householders and preparers of food domestically, and as informal sector agricultural labourers who deal directly with the impacts of casteism, industrial pollution and climate change. The briefing offers a new frame, termed ‘caste capitalism’, as a way of disrupting the elisions amongst three related but ostensibly distinct processes: 1) climate-related water crises and industrial pollution, 2) the social and legal enforcement of caste – and gender-based categories and, therefore, hierarchies, and 3) religious nationalism. In the frame of ‘caste capitalism’, understanding the politics of gender is necessary for understanding how religious nationalism and Hindu supremacy in India rely on deregulated industrial production, including a lack of oversight on industrial waste. This is imbricated with the endogamous reproduction of caste and enforcing caste – and gender-based categories through violent means. Pollution here is the physical effluent of inequality, directly impacting women who are working as agricultural labourers and maintaining household access to water and food, while reaping the ill health effects of an environment that is increasingly unliveable. The briefing offers a framing of the Anthropocene in India in the terms of ‘caste capitalism’ as a counter point to ‘crony capitalism’ for understanding the imbrications of caste, class, gender and environmental change, particularly in respect to agricultural irrigation and the growing crisis of India’s water sources.
This paper focuses on seasonal labour migration in rural India to examine how migrant returnees sought to reconstitute historical and hierarchical social relations in their home villages. I use qualitative research conducted in Maharashtra state in western India from 2014–15 among landowning farmers, landless returnees, and nonmigrant laborers. I demonstrate that for the returnees, an important element of social and cultural change in their home communities was their ability to upend and replace ‘residual culture,’ based on expectations of continued exploitation and performative hierarchy, with an ‘emergent’ one. I claim that the mechanics of counter-hegemony in rural Maharashtra includes a struggle for vernacular equality to eliminate caste-based practices of humiliation, including labour exploitation. I show that the attempts by returnees to reconstitute social relations in their home communities were undercut by the limits of cultural politics, in its inability to usher in the change that entails the redistribution of resources and substantive political power. This research contributes to theoretically textured scholarship in cultural geography on contestations between elite and subordinate cultures, particularly on the question of efforts to erase unjust historical practices of humiliation and how spatial, social, and economic mobility of the returnees, in part, enables this effort.
In 2017, the Philippine government boosted its campaign on Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) reintegration, a set of programmes designed to aid returning Filipino labour migrants. In this paper, I examine migrant reintegration through the case of returned migrants to the province of Benguet, Philippines. Rather than use “sustainability of return” as main focus of assessment, I foreground instead the historical geographies undergirding the current reiteration of this migration policy. By doing so, I demonstrate how the “gambling” practices of returned migrants can be read as not an easy acquiescence to the neoliberal imperative for self‐entrepreneurship encouraged by the Philippine state. In highlighting gambling as an embodied strategy emerging from and through imperial histories, I argue that migrant reintegration gets revealed as rehearsal of certain colonial logics that have oriented certain peoples to the labour of serial risk taking for survival. Close attention to return migrants’ gambling practices raises urgent questions regarding the relentless push for entrepreneurship as development solution.
Sikkim, one of the smallest Indian states is now one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical hubs in the country. Pharmaceutical factories are spaces where gender, technology, dependency, profit, and livelihood operate simultaneously. They represent sites of capital accumulation as well as continuous re-calibration of gender and race relationships. Pharmaceutical companies rely on local women from rural and peri-urban areas for assembly-line and other manual labour; work, which exposes them to new spatial and temporal patriarchal norms. Most importantly, these norms are enforced by migrant men who occupy a distinct and often subservient position in the local social matrix. Inside the factories, migrant men have more power and authority over the local population. Beyond the factory walls, local hill-groups assume positions of authority and control the spatial order, while the factory supervisors and technicians are reduced to a somewhat insignificant group of migrant men. Focussing on pharmaceutical factories in Sikkim, the paper will illustrate (i) how industrial labour exposes women to new temporal and spatialised patriarchy; (ii) how human resource frontiers emerge in recently industrialising borderlands; (iii) and how development creates a flux in identities and relationships between local and migrant communities.
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labour that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labour that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labour to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
Agriculture is now more dependent on pesticides than ever. The value of global pesticide imports increased 3x faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s. Structural transformations in the industry – including reduced innovation, increased regulatory costs, consolidation, and a dramatic shift to generic pesticides largely produced in China – have shifted prices, supply chains and formulations. The ‘supermarket revolution’, migration, and rising labor costs are driving an increase in demand. The result is a pesticide complex that is multipolar, where commodity chains and environmental impacts are less legible, requiring a hard look at the chemical nature of agrarian capitalism.
In India's contemporary model of extractive industry, the Company Town has been replaced by the ‘company village.' Private sector firms throughout India's mineral belt now occupy sectors that were, until recently, almost exclusively state-owned. Once the great hope for India's industrial modernization and developmentalist effort, extraction continues to cause immense social and environmental dislocation but now offer few avenues of employment. Operating in the resettlement colonies of those displaced by land acquisition and in peripheral villages, extractive companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs attempt to mediate and redirect rural aspirations away from plant gates and mine sites, though often with only limited success.
Renewable energy transitions are accelerating in the Global South. Yet many large-scale renewable energy infrastructures are developed on public lands with unknown impacts on commons access and usage. A prime example of this is the Gujarat Solar Park (GSP) in India, which is one of the world’s largest solar photovoltaic facilities. The GSP is situated on 2,669 acres of previously common property, which has historically been used by female pastoralists for firewood collection. In this paper, we examine the following research questions: How do gender and caste power shape natural resource access in this region?; Does the Gujarat Solar Park exacerbate already gendered social-economic-political asymmetries? Our study utilizes a feminist political ecology framework to analyze the social dimensions of the GSP, drawing on recent work in this vein that uses a postcolonial and intersectional approach to examine the production of social difference through the spatial processes and political economy of solar energy generation. We find that the enclosure of public ‘wastelands’ to develop the Gujarat Solar Park has dispossessed resource-dependent women of access to firewood and grazing lands. This spatial dislocation is reinforcing asymmetrical social power relations at the village scale. Intersectional subject-positions are (re)produced vis-à-vis the exclusion of access to firewood in the land enclosed for the solar park. Affected women embody this dispossession through inter- and intra-village emotional geographies that cut across caste, class and gender boundaries.
Based on the evidence found in two case studies of intensive agriculture in Southern Spain, this article analyses the impact of business strategies aimed at devaluing packaging plant work in the competitive integration processes currently taking place in the global agri-food value chain. The article explores three business strategies: the feminisation, segmentation and deskilling of labour, along with ethnic substitution and labour recruitment outsourcing mechanisms. Although it acknowledges the importance of the dynamics of global competition, the article focuses mainly on how firms articulate their strategies in packaging plants within the political, family and sociocultural frameworks of specific local contexts. The analysis uses a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews and participant observations.
‘Peasant’ has been a favourite, if not romantic, topic of academic explorations. The boundaries that peasantry shared with others in society were stark and amenable to dichotomous treatments of deprivation and exploitation. Closely intertwined, nature and peasant were both exploited by landlords and industries. Surging economies distanced themselves from the primary sector in favour of propelling further growth while inflicting considerable social and ecological externalities on nature and the peasant alike. The accumulation of these conflicts in production landscapes created vast inequalities in outcomes, agency and voice, that often resulted in violent unrests. Thus, questions of justice, equality, dignity and human rights have been the subject of agrarian literature for a long time. As ‘peasant’ in its pure old-world imagery began to fade away, a more complex entity started emerging—the smallholder family farm. While other rural occupations like weaving, carpentry, leather and metalworks, backyard poultry, folk art, etc., disappeared almost entirely from the rural livelihood basket due to falling demand and competition from mass producing industries, crop cultivation and dairying survived as the last bastions of small-scale household production, coexisting with new non-farm activities.
This article explores the pivotal place of early memories of racial violence in the lives of racialized women, what these women inherit from such encounters and the kinds of racial literacies (Twine, 2010) they subsequently develop. This article makes two primary arguments. First, building on black feminist scholarship, the analysis highlights the intergenerational transmission of racial literacies and the familial care and affective instruction to protect loved ones from racial harm. I argue that the loving labour of such home based practices are essential in fostering knowledge about racism but are often overlooked in thinking about projects of social change. Second, this article enables us to appreciate both the political labour and disparate practices that racism and knowledge about it generate. So often, racialized women are caught between feelings and experiences that materialize oppression in their daily lives and neoliberal horizons that evacuate collective histories and interventions.
This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.
Although many urban areas around the world have grown steadily in recent years, the structural transformation, wherein an economy goes from relying primarily on agriculture and natural resources to relying primarily on manufacturing, has eluded many developing countries. In those countries, contract farming, whereby processors contract out the production of some agricultural commodity to growers, is often seen as a means of spurring the development of an agribusiness sector, and thus launch the structural transformation. As a result, economists and other social scientists have extensively researched contract farming over the last 30 years. We review the findings of the economics literature on contract farming and discuss its implications for development policy and research. In so doing, we highlight the methodological weaknesses that limit much of the literature on contract farming in answering questions of relevance for policy. Despite valiant research effort, many of the core features of contract farming imply substantial challenges for researchers aiming to study the question “Does contract farming improve welfare?” We conclude with a discussion of where we see the literature on contract farming evolving over the next few decades.
From the tales of nineteenth century British explorers to contemporary tourism advertising, representations of Darjeeling circulate far and wide. Across more than a century and a half, Darjeeling is repeatedly pictured as ‘a summer place’: a picturesque landscape of misty tea gardens, quaint cottages, and elusive mountain views. This chapter explores the colonial origins and historical persistence of this ‘tourist gaze’ in producing Darjeeling. Approaching this representational history from a vantage point grounded in the questions of belonging forcefully raised by the Gorkhaland movement, the chapter illustrates how commodified Darjeeling is defined more by its scenery than by its inhabitants, pictured as a place you visit rather than a place of belonging, and sold as a consumable good. It argues that, as this tourist gaze leaves notions of inhabitation and belonging obscured, its global reach and historical persistence complicates ongoing quests for local autonomy in Darjeeling.
This chapter uses the National Sample Survey (NSS) data from 1983 to 2008 to investigate the socio-economic correlates of economic, follower, and marriage migration by women to urban India. The results indicate that low urban female economic migration rates are not a statistical aberration due to incorrectly designed survey methodology and that a lack of supply of decent jobs may be reinforcing male breadwinner norms. Instead the analysis shows that both falling economic and rising marriage migration rates for urban Indian women are correlated with increasing urban economic inequality and insecurity.
In spite of serving as the purported goal of the global production network (GPN) approach, development has been left undefined in the GPN literature, with ‘GPN 2.0’ now offering an impoverished understanding of development. This article reviews the elaboration of the ‘core concepts’ of the GPN approach: value, power, embeddedness – and development. I argue that the dis/articulations perspective is useful in offering a critical interrogation of d/Development, and that this has implications for value, power and embeddedness. The disarticulations perspective takes the determination of value into account and highlights the role of borders and discursive boundaries in structuring power relations
The relationship between value and nature has become central to critical resource geography (and other nature-society geography). While research demonstrates the problems with efforts to extend capitalist monetary value to ecosystem services or externalities, few scholars have anchored their critiques in their own theory of value. This report reviews this bourgeoning research through a theory of value anchored in Marxian political economy. Drawing from a few basic postulates, I attempt to fill some gaps and clear up some ambiguities in this research. First, I examine research on environmental valuations schemes (e.g. pricing externalities, or payments for ecosystem services). Marx’s value theory (rooted in abstract labor) can help us to explain why these projects seem so destined for failure. Second, I examine research into how resources and value flow through commodity chains or global production networks. Marx’s focus on labor and abstraction can help us to better understand the violence within these chains toward humans and nonhumans alike. Third, I examine research into the financialization of environmental goods in services. I suggest Marx’s value-theoretical approach to the ‘totality’ of capitalist social relations can better help us to theorize financial capital’s contradictory relationship to value production in the realm of production. I conclude by suggesting a unified theory of value can yield a more radical critique of the diverse failures of capitalism in dealing with our current ecological crisis.
Intense struggles are currently underway within and between the African National Congress and its Alliance partners. In an effort to make sense of these struggles, this essay revisits earlier South African debates over race, class, and the national democratic revolution. Its focus is on multiple and changing concepts of articulation and their political stakes. The first part of the essay traces important shifts in the concept in Harold Wolpe's work, relating these shifts to struggles and conditions at the time, as well as to conceptual developments by Stuart Hall in a broader debate with Laclau's work on populism, and with Laclau and Mouffe who take the concept in a problematic post-marxist direction. I then put a specifically Gramscian concept of articulation to work to explore how the ruling bloc in the ANC has articulated shared meanings and memories of struggles for national liberation to its hegemonic project - and how a popular sense of betrayal is playing into support for Jacob Zuma.
There is no abstract for this paper.
Indian civilization is made up of many strands, woven together by the invasions, assimilations, and proselytizings which have characterized its history and prehistory. Generally, however, elements of the Sanskritic culture brought in by Aryan invaders (conjecturally from the Middle East) around 1500 B.C. are dominant, though the farther one gets from the northern regions of India, the less apparent this dominance becomes. The question whether the culture of southern India is a remnant of the pre-Aryan civilization of India or also was imported has never been resolved. However, regional differences in culture within the framework of a Sanskritic civilization are not disputed, nor is the fact that southern India is less Sanskritic in culture than northern India.
Such differences manifest themselves in a variety of customs, artifacts, arts, languages, and rituals.
The formation of the Praja Rajyam Party in Andhra Pradesh has been received with conflicting attitudes and expectations by the two major dalit castes in the state. While the Malas embraced the party as the champion of social justice, the Madigas opposed it as the party of the Kapus. Rather than seeing the PRP in these binary and oppositional lenses, it is necessary to view the party as a new choice for dalits. A brief history of caste politics in Andhra Pradesh is also undertaken in this essay.
This paper uses recent field research to challenge the widely held view that a “Dalit revolution” is occurring in North India. Drawing on two years' ethnographic research in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, the authors uncover the growing importance of a generation of local political activists among Dalits (former untouchables) while also showing that these young men have not been able to effect a broad structural transformation at the local level. The authors use this case to identify a need for further research on South Asian political change that links party political transformation to questions of local level social practice and subaltern consciousness.
Hybrid cottonseed production is a major site for the feminization of agriculture in India. A central argument of this article is that the feminization of agriculture is an index of the changing relationship between labor and capital. By gendering agricultural work and analyzing the feminization of the conditions of this work, I widen the framework for theorizing feminization. Based on ethnographic research, I demonstrate how feminization is related to reconfigurations of global and Indian capital in the cottonseed industry. I argue that the relationship between capital and labor is, but is not only, a skewed economic relationship; it is simultaneously a series of culturally meaningful interactions that suture labor and smallholder household strategies of survival to the social reproduction of capitalism in contemporary agriculture. The essay makes four contributions: it differentiates biological reproduction from the social reproduction of labor and of capital; it recognizes cultural production and heeds the selective processes through which some limiting forms—gender, age, and caste—get culturally reproduced to become the subjective conditions for the creation and circulation of value; it is attentive to gender as symbolic power, even when not humanly embodied; and it considers affect in the everyday living of relations between labor and capital.
This essay revisits aspects of the ‘Lenin–Chayanov debate’ which was so prominent in the formative period of The Journal of Peasant Studies: to distinguish some of its various strands, to identify some of its tensions and ambiguities, and to reflect on the legacies of Lenin and Chayanov. The resonances and ramifications of Lenin's and Chayanov's work encompass so many aspects of the world-historical, and highly charged, theme of the fate(s) of the peasantry in the making of modernity – the development of capitalism and (once) socialism – that the observations and suggestions presented here can only be selective. They are offered in the hope of clarifying and stimulating consideration of patterns of agrarian change today: how they differ from, and might be illuminated by, past experiences and the ideas they generated.
Cultural patterns and activities and attitudes are developed in precise conjunction with real exigencies, and are produced and reproduced in each generation for its own good reasons. Patterns of the development of labour power for a specific kind of application to industry must in every generation be achieved, developed, and worked for in struggle and contestation. If certain obvious features of this continuous reproduction and ever freshly struck settlement show a degree of visible continuity over time this should not lead us to construct iron laws and dynamics of socialization from this mere succession of like things.Learning to Labour (p. 183)
The world's demand for food is expected to double within the next 50 years, while the natural resources that sustain agriculture will become increasingly scarce, degraded, and vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In many poor countries, agriculture accounts for at least 40 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employment. At the same time, about 70 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. World Development Report 2008 seeks to assess where, when, and how agriculture can be an effective instrument for economic development, especially development that favors the poor. It examines several broad questions: How has agriculture changed in developing countries in the past 20 years? What are the important new challenges and opportunities for agriculture? Which new sources of agricultural growth can be captured cost effectively in particular in poor countries with large agricultural sectors as in Africa? How can agricultural growth be made more effective for poverty reduction? How can governments facilitate the transition of large populations out of agriculture, without simply transferring the burden of rural poverty to urban areas? How can the natural resource endowment for agriculture be protected? How can agriculture's negative environmental effects be contained? This year's report marks the 30th year the World Bank has been publishing the World Development Report.
Seeds of child labor, signs of hope: child and adult labor in cottonseed production in India'', study commissioned by International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN), and Stop Child LabouröSchool is the Best Place to Work
- D Venkateswarlu
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Rise of the Dalits and the renewed debate on caste
- R Kothari
Kothari R, 1994, ``Rise of the Dalits and the renewed debate on caste'' Economic and Political Weekly 29 June, pp 1589 ^ 1594
The errors of classical economics: an outline for the concept of historical time Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: a disarticulations perspectiveA tangled web: subdivision of SC reservation in Andhra Pradesh
- L Althusser
Althusser L, 1997, ``The errors of classical economics: an outline for the concept of historical time'', in Reading Capital Eds L Althusser, E Balibar (Verso, New York) pp 91 ^ 118 Bair J, Werner M, 2011, ``Guest editorial. Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: a disarticulations perspective'' Environment and Planning A 43 988 ^ 997 Balagopal K, 2000, ``A tangled web: subdivision of SC reservation in Andhra Pradesh'' Economic and Political Weekly 25 March, pp 1075 ^ 1081
The modes of production controversyAndhra Pradesh. Data highlights: the scheduled castesDalits, Praja Rajyam Party and caste politics in Andhra Pradesh
- S R Charsley
Charsley S R, no date Madiga and Dalit: Exploring the Heritage http://www.indianfolklore.org/ journals/index.php/NFSCBM/issue/view/76/showToc Foster-Carter A, 1978, ``The modes of production controversy'' New Left Review number 107, 47 ^ 77 Government of India, 2001, ``Andhra Pradesh. Data highlights: the scheduled castes'', Office of the Registrar General, Census of India Gundimeda S, 2009, ``Dalits, Praja Rajyam Party and caste politics in Andhra Pradesh'' Economic and Political Weekly xliv(21) 50 ^ 58
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Jaffrelot C, 2003 India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics (Permanent Black, Delhi) Jeffrey C, Jeffery P, Jeffery R, 2008, ``Dalit revolution? New politicians in Uttar Pradesh India'' The Journal of Asian Studies 67 1365 ^ 1396
A tangled web: subdivision of SC reservation in Andhra Pradesh” Economic and Political Weekly 25 March
- K Balagopal
The modes of production controversy
- A Foster-Carter