Agriculture
Who is a farmer in India?
SEJUTI DAS GUPTA AND ISHITA MEHROTRA The farmers’ protests in India since November 2020 has resurrected the question ‘who is a farmer?’, and with it, the agrarian political economy exercise of identifying rural classes and examining their nature. In classical agrarian political economy scholarship in India, the capitalist classes or the rural rich are variously…
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AQs Shorts: R Ramakumar
Agrarian Questions is pleased to announce a new series of short video interviews with eminent and emerging scholars in the field of agrarian political economy, AQs Shorts. In our first interview, R Ramakumar speaks about the multi-dimensional impact of COVID-19 on the Indian countryside, on the nature of India’s agrarian crisis (differentiated by crop, class,…
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Book review of Pablo Lapegna’s Soybeans and Power
CARLA GRAS In Soybeans and Power, Pablo Lapegna offers a thorough and challenging analysis of the contested terrain of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in Argentina. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the province of Formosa, in the North East of that country, he addresses key issues regarding the new landscapes produced by the expansion…
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‘Problems in the Empirical Analysis of Agrarian Differentiation Processes’: A Reflection
BEN WHITE The ideas in this book chapter published in 1989 began to form themselves in the 1970s. Under the guidance of cultural materialist Marvin Harris, I had written a mainly quantitative dissertation based on detailed time-budget analysis of small-peasant and landless households in a Javanese village. From 1975 to 1980, I was back…
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Gendering Peasant Household Surveys: Who to interview?
CARMEN DIANA DEERE The use of household surveys to analyse the economic activities of peasants has become much more commonplace since Alain de Janvry and I published ‘A Conceptual Framework for the Empirical Analysis of Peasants’ in 1979. However, an issue that has received insufficient attention until recently is that of who should be…
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Land reform in South Africa in 2018
BEN COUSINS Land reform has recently become an explosive political issue in South Africa. Progress in transforming racially unequal patterns of land ownership in rural and urban areas has been painfully slow since the transition to democracy in 1994.
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Rethinking Agrarian Transitions and Left Politics in India
Free Issue of Journal of Agrarian Change to mark 50 years since Naxalbari This post is written by Jens Lerche, Reader in Agrarian and Labour Studies in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS and Editor in Chief of Journal of Agrarian Change, Alpa Shah, Associate Professor (Reader) in Anthropology at LSE, and Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor…
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