Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization

367 Pages·2008·1.74 MB·English

by  Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization
Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting G lobalization Edited by Saturnino M. Borras, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay
© 2008 The Authors. ISBN: 978-1-405-19041-1
Transnational Agrarian Movements
Confronting Globalization
Edited by

Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman
and Cristóbal Kay
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2008
Originally published as Volume 8, Issue 2/3 of Journal of Agrarian Change
Chapters © 2008 The Authors
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01 2008
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres
Foreword ix
1 Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay
Transnational Agrarian Movements: Origins and Politics,
Campaigns and Impact 1
2 Philip McMichael
Peasants Make Their Own History, But Not Just as They Please . . . 37
3 Marc Edelman
Transnational Organizing in Agrarian Central America:
Histories, Challenges, Prospects 61
4 Saturnino M. Borras Jr
La Vía Campesina and its Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform 91
5 Brenda Baletti, Tamara M. Johnson and Wendy Wolford
‘Late Mobilization’: Transnational Peasant Networks and
Grassroots Organizing in Brazil and South Africa 123
6 Ian Scoones
Mobilizing Against GM Crops in India, South Africa and Brazil 147
7 Peter Newell
Trade and Biotechnology in Latin America: Democratization,
Contestation and the Politics of Mobilization 177
8 Nancy Lee Peluso, Suraya Afiff and Noer Fauzi Rachman
Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental
Movements in Indonesia 209
9 Harriet Friedmann and Amber McNair
Whose Rules Rule? Contested Projects to Certify ‘Local Production
for Distant Consumers’ 239
10 Jonathan Fox and Xochitl Bada
Migrant Organization and Hometown Impacts in Rural Mexico 267
11 Kathy Le Mons Walker
From Covert to Overt: Everyday Peasant Politics in China and
the Implications for Transnational Agrarian Movements 295
12 Kevin Malseed
Where There Is No Movement: Local Resistance and the
Potential for Solidarity 323
Index 349
BOJJ11©>XONNOo44lXoo xraTu77iAfttXgcoeehr11Ciknrssne--dwa00 a ooA,l33el nn Uou56lAl ft86KCCrP hAtoooiucgrnnbl.re ttlaJirrssiirobbhiauuuinnrttnoog Carr ssLlh tcadonmgepilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. ByresN. otes on Contributors
Suraya Afiff is at the Department of Agriculture, University of Indonesia,
Jakarta, Indonesia ([email protected]).
Xochitl Bada is at the Sociology Department, University of Notre Dame, IN,
USA ([email protected]).
Brenda Baletti is at the Department of Geography, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA ([email protected]).
Saturnino M. Borras Jr is Canada Research Chair in International
Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
([email protected]).
Marc Edelman is Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology,
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
([email protected]).
Jonathan Fox is Professor of Social Sciences, Latin American and Latino
Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA ([email protected]).
Harriet Friedmann is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for
International Studies, University of Toronto, Canada
([email protected]).
Tamara M. Johnson is at the Department of Geography, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA ([email protected]).
Cristóbal Kay is Professor of Development Studies and Rural Development at
the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, Netherlands ([email protected]).
Kathy Le Mons Walker is Associate Professor of History, Department of
History, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA ([email protected]).
Kevin Malseed is Program Fellow in Agrarian Studies, Yale University,
New Haven, CT ([email protected]), and founder and researcher with the Karen
Human Rights Group, 1992−2007, Thailand.
Philip McMichael is Professor of Development Sociology, Department of
Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
([email protected]).
viii Notes on Contributors
Amber McNair is at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto,
Canada ([email protected]).
Peter Newell is Professor of Development Studies, School of Development
Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK ([email protected]).
Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Society and Environment, Department of
Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California,
Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]).
Noer Fauzi Rachman is at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy
and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
([email protected]).
Ian Scoones is Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies,
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ([email protected]).
Wendy Wolford is Associate Professor of Geography, Department of
Geography, University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
([email protected]).
BOJJ11©>XOFFOo44oolX xraTu77irrAfXgceeohr11Ciknwwrne--dwa00a ooA,l33el rr Uoudd56lAl ft86KrP hAtoiucgrbl.re laJissrohiauinnrng Ca Llh tcadonmgepilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres. Foreword
HENRY BERNSTEIN AND TERENCE J. BYRES
In 2008 we retired from a combined total of 56 years of editorial leadership of
the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) and then the Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC).
The Journal of Peasant Studies was founded by T.J. Byres in 1973 and we edited
it together from 1985 to 2000. We started the Journal of Agrarian Change in 2001
to continue the intellectual project of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Once the
Journal of Agrarian Change was firmly established and thriving, we decided that
the moment was right to hand over to a new editorial team in 2008. They are
Deborah Johnston, Cristóbal Kay, Jens Lerche and Carlos Oya. In the final
period of our editorial office we had agreed the preparation of a special double
issue on Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization with Jun
Borras, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay as guest editors. It duly appeared as
the Journal of Agrarian Change Vol 8 Nos 2−3, and is now also published as this
book. It was a pleasure to receive the initial proposal for the special issue from
its three editors, to discuss it extensively with them and support them in their
efforts, and we are privileged by their invitation to write a Preface for this book
version.
In using this brief Preface to commend the imagination and illumination
evident in the work of the editors and their contributors, we can also locate the
importance of their achievement in the changing historical contexts of agrarian
issues over the last 35 years since the Journal of Peasant Studies started. Its initial
agenda manifested the intense intellectual and political currents and concerns of
a particular conjuncture, characterized by continuing struggles against
imperialism in which rural people were major actors (notably the Vietnamese
struggle for national liberation); the prospects for economic and social
development in the recently independent, and mostly agrarian, former colonies
of Asia and Africa, as well as Latin America; and the ways in which those
prospects could be explored through investigating practices, experiences and
theories of socialist transformation of the countryside (in which China loomed
large). These concerns were informed by a materialist political economy and a
strongly historical approach. Thus the Journal of Peasant Studies from 1973 to
2000 presented a cornucopia of articles on agrarian social formations before
capitalism; transitions to capitalism in its original heartlands and subsequently;
agrarian change in colonial conditions and in the revolutionary circumstances of
the USSR and China, Vietnam and Cuba; processes of agrarian change in the
independent countries of the Third World in the contexts of their various
projects of ‘national development’; and later the demise of the very different
types of state socialism in the USSR, China and elsewhere, and its consequences.
x Foreword
The Journal promoted investigation and debate of the social relations and
dynamics of production and reproduction, property and power, in agrarian
formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary. As
its name suggested, much of the terrain of its concerns and inquiries was
inhabited by rural producers defined in one way or another as ‘peasants’, who
might be considered both victims and active protagonists in the historical dramas
of the making of modernity. This also suggests that our understanding of
political economy, which guided the Journal’s approach to ‘peasant studies’, was
an expansive one that incorporated and engaged with many issues of sociology
and politics, culture and ideology.
There are, of course, often lags between the rhythms of intellectual inquiry
and changes in the wider world, sometimes as rapid as they are contradictory.
As the Journal of Peasant Studies was establishing its distinctive intellectual
identity and international reputation, the conjuncture which inspired its
founding and development was starting to undergo profound changes that
became more evident over the next two decades. One such change was the
accumulation crisis and subsequent restructuring of the international capitalist
economy from the 1970s, namely ‘globalization’, and the political and policy
agendas devised by capital to manage and promote it from the 1980s, namely
‘neo-liberalism’. International divisions of labour in farming and agribusiness,
and markets for agricultural products, were reshaped by the dynamics of
globalization and neoliberalism (or ‘neoliberal globalization’), albeit subject to
the usual unevenness of capitalism. This had widespread effects, both direct and
indirect, for ‘peasants’ and others in the countrysides of ‘the South’ (as indeed
for farmers in ‘the North’). One manifestation of these comprehensive changes
was the end of the international food regime constructed under US hegemony
after the Second World War, as analysed in the pioneering work of Harriet
Friedmann and Philip McMichael, both contributors to this volume.
A very different kind of change, albeit no doubt connected in some ways, was
that the 1970s arguably marked the end of the long period of ‘peasant wars of
the twentieth century’ over the previous 60 years, famously explored in the
work of Eric Wolf. It began to seem that the upheavals of ‘classic’ peasant revolts
and rebellions − a world-historical dynamic central to the making of modernity
from the French revolution to the victory of the long Vietnamese struggle for
national liberation − were now over. This did not mean, of course, that forms
of agrarian and rural politics, of resistance and opposition, other than the epic
instances of ‘peasant wars’, lost their relevance. Indeed, the Journal of Peasant
Studies presented material across the range of the political sociology of the
countryside, including two special issues (also published as books) on ‘everyday
forms of resistance’, highlighted in the work of James Scott, and on the new
farmers’ movements of India that rose to prominence in the 1980s. In the 1990s
the Journal also began to publish articles on the new conditions and effects of the
internationalisation of agriculture generated by ‘globalization’.
This carried over to the Journal of Agrarian Change from 2001, which has also
published a number of strong articles on the contemporary politics of land, and
Foreword xi
of land reform, recently revived in the agenda of neoliberal development
discourse and policy, for example, by the World Bank, and by agrarian social
movements in different parts of the ‘global South’. The latter typically articulate
their claims in terms of the interests of ‘peasants’, ‘family farmers’ or ‘people of
the land’, and sometimes celebrate what they consider processes of ‘re-
peasantization’, thereby resonating older traditions of agrarian populism and
reasserting their salience to opposition to neoliberal globalization.
One striking manifestation today of the ‘new’ politics of agrarian resistance is
the emergence of ‘transnational agrarian movements’ (TAMs), the subject of
this collection. International organizations of farmers, of very different social
composition and political complexion and purpose, are not entirely novel, as the
editors usefully show in their introductory chapter. However, current transnational
agrarian movements − constituted on a regional and transcontinental level − can
plausibly claim new forms of mobilization and action in their opposition to
neoliberal globalization and the havoc it wreaks. If research on globalization
helps our understanding of the accumulation strategies of contemporary
agribusiness, and their effects for farming and farmers, that political economy
needs to be matched by a similarly rigorous political sociology. This is a
formidable challenge, on which this collection makes its own distinctive and
significant mark. As the editors observe in the conclusion to their introduction:
Transnational agrarian movements are political projects with deep histori-
cal roots in diverse national societies, multiple and shifting alliances, varied
action repertories, and complex forms of representation, issue framing and
demand making . . . By acknowledging TAMs’ contradictions, ambiguities
and internal tensions . . . (the authors in this collection) also seek, from the
standpoint of engaged intellectuals, to advance a transformative political
project by better comprehending its roots, past successes and failures, and
current and future challenges.
This intention is formulated with admirable clarity, thoroughness and precision
in the editors’ own introductory essay, which also provides a valuable contribution
to current explorations of ‘new’ social movements more broadly. The combination
of political engagement with intellectual sobriety and responsibility, to which
they refer, is a necessary antidote to ‘movement’ voluntarism and triumphalism,
and is expressed in exemplary fashion in their discussion of ‘silences in the
literature’ to date. Those silences concern such issues as class relations, and other
bases of social differentiation and inequality, among ‘farmers’/‘people of the
land’ − always a central concern of agrarian political economy − as well as complex
questions of political representation, legitimacy and leadership, ideological and
political differences within transnational agrarian movements and, indeed, their
constituent organizations, and the very uneven political geographies of transnational
agrarian movements.
The introductory chapter thus provides an excellent springboard for the
diverse and rich contributions that follow. These take on board both familiar
themes like demands for land and (other) public support for small farmers, and