Suchergebnisse

The relationship that mountain communities have with global capitalism are complex, being mediated by a diverse topography and ecology, both of which provide opportunities for capital accumulation, while also isolating older, "pre-capitalist" modes of production. This paper takes a case study valley from Nepal's eastern hills, tracing over two centuries of agrarian change and evolving interactions between "adivasi" and "semi-feudal" economic formations with capitalism. In recent years, the expansion of markets, rising demand for cash, and climate stress have solidified migrant labour as a core component of livelihoods, and the primary mechanism of surplus appropriation from the hill peasantry. Through a focus on three altitudinal zones, however, it is demonstrated how the trajectory of this transformation, including the interactions with persisting pre-capitalist formations, is mediated by both political–economic processes and the local agro-ecological context.

Collective farming has been suggested as a potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transforming peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we reflect on the extent to which collective farming enables marginalized groups to engage in smallholder agriculture. We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by an action research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small landholdings and a high rate of marginalised and landless farmers. We analyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across scales, (2) intersectionality and (3) emotional attachment. Our results in Saptari/ Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotional attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land, produce and capital. We find that unequal gender relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action, land tenure and water management, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relational understanding of collective farming processes. Our analysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can complement commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming.

This working paper was produced under the European Union Horizon 2020 funded AGRUMIG project and traces the impact of Covid-19 on migration trends in seven project countries – China, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal and Thailand. The context of global migration has changed dramatically due to the coronavirus pandemic. Both within and between countries there has been a substantial curtailment of movement. As a result of multiple lockdowns, economic activity has severely declined and labor markets have ground to a halt, with mass unemployment in industrialized economies looming on the horizon. For both migrant hosting and origin countries – some are substantially both – this poses a set of complex development challenges. Partners of the AGRUMIG project undertook a rapid review of impacts across project countries, exploring the impacts on rural households but also identifying the persistent desire to migrate in spite of restrictions.