New Directions in Political Economy: Global Agrarian Transformations, Volume 1

by Ryan Isakson (Editor)

Overview

How relevant are the classic theories of agrarian change in the contemporary context? This volume explores this question by focusing upon the defining features of agrarian transformation in the 21^st century: the financialization of food and agriculture, the blurring of rural and urban livelihoods through migration and other economic activities, forest transition, climate change, rural indebtedness, the co-evolution of social policy and moral economies, and changing property relations. Combined, the eleven contributions to this collection provide a broad overview of agrarian studies over the past four decades and identify the contemporary frontiers of agrarian political economy. In this path-breaking collection, the authors show how new iterations of long evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.

This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138916395
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/24/2015
Series:	Critical Agrarian Studies
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Madeleine Fairbairn, Jonathan Fox, S. Ryan Isakson, Michael Levien, Nancy Lee Peluso, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones, Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy 2. Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene 3. The problem of property in industrial fisheries 4. The role of rural indebtedness in the evolution of capitalism 5. Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains 6. ‘Like gold with yield’: evolving intersections between farmland and finance 7. Financialization, distance and global food politics 8. Moral economy in a global era: the politics of provisions during contemporary food price spikes 9. The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy 10. Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China: gendered householding, production of space and the state 11. Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’