Contemporary global agriculture has been undergoing transition towards different pathways. In developed countries, a shift from productivist agriculture to multifunctional agriculture has begun since the 1980s (Wilson, 2007). In the developing world, agricultural modernisation is still the primary strategy for agricultural development, and driven by urbanisation and industrialisation, deagrarianisation of rural society has been widely identified (Bryceson, 1996; Rigg, 2006a). As the largest developing country in the world, China embarked on market reform three decades ago and has ever since experienced dramatic socio-economic transition towards modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Significant levels of academic attention have focused on empirically identifying economic and policy drivers of Chinese agricultural production from a structuralist standpoint, largely neglecting the agency of smallholders and sociocultural factors. To address the resulting literature gap, this thesis adopts an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis through an in-depth case study of a rural community in southwest China. A multi-methods approach is used to collect data, including questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focus groups, participant observation and the analysis of secondary data. The results suggest that Chinese smallholder agriculture has been dramatically transformed by an array of socio-economic forces. The “intensive, sustainable, diverse” Chinese smallholder agriculture which Netting (1993) portrayed, has been progressively shifted towards extensive, unsustainable and less diverse pathways. It suggests that the “perfunctory agriculture” performed by Chinese smallholders is the outcome of interactions and negotiations between various political, socio-economic and institutional constraints and farmers’ agency. Another key finding is that moving out of agriculture is becoming the norm in Chinese rural society. Most smallholders show willingness to rent out agricultural land and to enter into a capitalist relationship with employees, rather than primarily being cultivators of their land. Land transfer markets have become increasingly buoyant at the local level, and large-scale capitalist agriculture seems to be the desired future of Chinese smallholder agriculture for both the Chinese government and smallholders. Besides, based on the case of Hu Village, this thesis discusses the convergences and divergences between the road of Chinese agricultural development and that of developed countries and other emerging BRIC economies. Lastly, based on the findings of this research, four policy implications are proposed including sponsoring agricultural mutual aid groups, strengthening agricultural extension services, enhancing farmers’ negotiation power through laws, and initiating comprehensive socio-economic reforms to facilitate farmers’ pursuit of non-farm employments.

This thesis considers the influence of agrarian thought on contemporary food movements.

While the movement for fair trading practices in the world market dates back to the 1940s, the labeling and certification initiative “Fairtrade” has existed for about 25 years. My thesis is based on independent research I conducted in November 2013 in La Convención Valley, Peru. Through in-depth interviews with fifteen small farmers and several cooperative officials at La Central de Cooperativas Agrarias Cafetaleras (COCLA), I examine the discrepancies between what Fairtrade’s claims and what farmers themselves perceive to be the benefits and failures of the certification system. I argue that while in theory farmers receive a competitive price for their Fairtrade coffee, in reality this price is subject to many deductions at the cooperative level such that many certified farmers express little understanding of their role in Fairtrade. Additionally, claims of corruption within the cooperative point to deeply entrenched local hierarchies of power. Comparing La Convencion’s history of exploitative feudal systems to present-day complaints of farmers – that the majority of money remains in the hands of cooperative officials, who limit farmers’ access to important market information and flaunt a higher quality of life – suggests that Fairtrade is actually reproducing harmful conditions of the past. I conclude that Fairtrade certification fails to empower farmers to escape local hierarchies of power and the exploitative conditions of the capitalist neoliberal world market. Making global trade truly fair requires an emphasis on an alternative international economic world order that holds consumers more accountable and places more value on the lives and experiences of producers.

This dissertation explores the relationship between land tenure and livelihoods in pre-Saharan Morocco as an ethical struggle over subsistence rights and the definition of community. Research in an oasis valley of southern Morocco indicated how changing land use practices framed contestations over community, political authority, and social hierarchies. The dissertation specifically examines the extension of settlement and cultivation from the oasis into the arid steppe. The research methodology contextualizes household decision-making around land use and livelihood strategies within the framework of land tenure regimes and other regional, national, and global processes. Households with the resources and prestige to navigate customary tenure regimes in their favor used these institutions to facilitate land acquisition and investments in commercial agricultural production. Rather than push for capitalist land markets, they invoked a discourse of communalism in support of customary regimes. In contrast, marginalized families without access to land mobilized to divide collective lands and secure individual freehold tenure. This complicates a prominent critique in agrarian studies that privatization signals the immersion of peripheral lands into neoliberal tenure regimes. The research shows that in southern Morocco, resistance to communal tenure regimes favoring elites was rooted in a discourse of subsistence rights and ethical claims to membership in a just community rather than a simple acquiescence to the power of neoliberal property relations. The dissertation therefore explores the shifting fault lines of social differentiation and the political and cultural embeddedness of land in processes of "repeasantization," the resurgence of rural peasantries in the context of the growing industrialization of global food production. The research draws on cultural anthropology, geography, and political economy to explore an understudied issue in the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: the economic and environmental dimensions of agrarian livelihoods and rural social dynamics from a critical theoretical perspective.

Ever since the development of farming humans have been implicitly linked with the landscape. Influences include the manipulation of natural environments by woodland clearance, field developments and animal husbandry. Development can also be determined by the identification and distribution of soils developed and modified by the addition of organic and inorganic components. Anthropogenic or amended soils have been identified in many forms across north west Europe that retain distinctive physical and chemical indications of historical agrarian and settlement history. This thesis researched the on-site distribution of anthropogenic and amended soils across different landuse areas and identified and quantified a range of black carbonised particles in order to investigate their role in the soils ability to retain high elemental concentrations of manuring and elements associated with domestic activity and industrial processes. Three sites in contrasting environments were chosen for analysis; in Fair Isle, the Netherlands and Ireland on the basis of an excellent agararian and settlement history and previous analysis of anthropogenic soils. The fieldwork results showed extremly deep plaggen soils in the Netherlands but considerably shallower horizons of amended arable soils on Fair Isle and in Ireland contrary to previous analysis. There was however, clear evidence of a reduction in anthropogenic and amended soils with increased distance from the farm centres as a result of less manuring. The soil pH, organic matter, particle size, magnetic susceptibility and bulk elemental analysis results showed unexpected increases in the amended soils of Fair Isle and Ireland and reflected a similar manuring process. In the Netherlands the deep plaggen soils had very low results reflecting modern arable farming. The micromorphology results illustrated distinctive characteristics associated with localised manuring techniques. On Fair Isle and in Ireland the main organic manuring material was peat and burnt peat, whereas in the Netherlands the plaggen soils were predominantly composed of meadowland and heathland turf. At all three sites there was a large number of black carbonised and black amorphous inclusions and point counting and image analysis results showed a decrease with depth and distance from settlement nucleii mirroring the fieldwork observations. The elemental analysis conducted has proved to be an extremly useful tool for the identification of various forms of black carbon and for identifying the provenance of high elemental concentrations. The oxygen:carbon ratios confirmed the origins of organic components used in the development of the amended and anthropogenic soils and the elemental analysis showed that at each site over 80% of visually unidentifiable amorphous black carbon particles were heavily decomposed carbonised inclusions. Overall the elemental concentrations within the black carbonised particles was very low but this reflected the elemental results found in the bulk soils and the inclusions contained higher concentrations of P, Ca, K, Fe and Al and considerably lower concentrations of elements associated with domestic activity or industry Zn, Cu, Ba, Cr, As and Pb.

<p>This study approaches Óscar Romero by attending to his intimate involvement in and concern for the problematic surrounding the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflict over property and possession underlying it. In this study, I situate Romero in relation to the concentration of landholding and the production of landlessness in El Salvador over the course of the twentieth century, and I examine his participation in the longstanding societal and ecclesial debate about agrarian reform provoked by these realities. I try to show how close attention to agrarian reform and what was at stake in it can illumine not only the conflict that occasioned Romero’s martyrdom but the meaning of the martyrdom itself. </p><p>Understanding Romero’s involvement in the debate about agrarian reform requires sustained attention to how it takes its bearings from the line of thinking about property and possession for which Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum stands as a new beginning. The enclyclical tradition developing out of Leo’s pontificate is commonly referred to as Catholic social doctrine or Catholic social teaching. Romero’s and the Church’s participation in the debate about agrarian reform in El Salvador is unintelligible apart from it. </p><p>What Romero and the encyclical tradition share, I argue, is an understanding of creation as a common gift, from which follows a distinctive construal of property and the demands of justice with respect to possessing it. On this view, property does not name, as it is often taken to mean, the enclosure of what is common for the exclusive use of its possessors—something to be held by them over and against others. Rather, property and everything related to its holding derive from the claim that creation is a gift given to human creatures in common. The acknowledgement of creation as a common gift gives rise to what I describe in this study as a politics of common use, of which agrarian reform is one expression. </p><p>In Romero’s El Salvador, those who took the truth of creation as common gift seriously—those who spoke out against or opposed the ubiquity of the concentration of land and who clamored for agrarian reform so that the landless and land-poor could have access to land to cultivate for subsistence—suffered greatly as a consequence. I argue that, among other things, their suffering shows how, under the conditions of sin and violence, those who work to ensure that others have access to what is theirs in justice often risk laying down their lives in charity. In other words, they witness to the way that God’s work to restore creation has a cruciform shape. Therefore, while the advocacy for agrarian reform begins with the understanding of creation as common gift, the testimony to this truth in word and in deed points to the telos of the gift and the common life in the crucified and risen Lord in which it participates</p> / Dissertation

In India, the 1992 Reservation Law and the 2006 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have formalised women as legitimate actors in rural development. These gender-inclusive policies do not necessarily conform to the traditional domestic role of women, which often precludes them from formally engaging in political processes and labour outside the home. In Northern India, these major policy shifts are illustrated in ancient irrigation management systems. With growing rural outmigration and climatic variability aggravating water resources and food security issues, irrigation management is increasingly dependent on the active participation of women. Yet irrigation management is still widely perceived as a male responsibility. This thesis investigates how women adapt and respond to new institutionally mandated responsibilities and expectations as female leaders and as water users. The research is presented in four complementary papers based on quantitative and qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Three major findings emerged to contribute to theories and evidence of the role of public policies in shaping gendered outcomes for common pool resource management in irrigation system in India. First, gender norms affect women differently depending on their public role in the community. Unlike non-political women, female leaders, as public figures, must secure communal approbation to gain power, credibility, and socio-economic networks. As a result, female leaders shape their political behaviour and policy preferences around local notions of femininity, female morality, and labour-based ideas of expertise. Second, for female water users, gender inclusive policies that legitimise their role as participants in formal political processes and the labour force for irrigation management increase their likelihood to defy gender-based restrictions and engage in formal political processes around irrigation management. Third, providing that formal/legal structures legitimize their actions, women will readily breach gender norms if they are to economically benefit from it. The implication of this research are that policies aimed at providing legal support for women to engage in formal rural development, combined with formalised economic opportunities for women are effective eroding agents of gendered institutions and are catalysts in facilitating the engagement of women in all areas of rural development. Given worldwide concerns over rural development, this study encourages such governmental actions to enable the effective and full engagement of future generations of women in the formal management of common pool resources.

Face aux changements globaux et aux défis du développement soutenable, l'approvisionnement alimentaire urbain doit à la fois être analysé à travers les processus qui le sous-tendent et quantifié en termes de mobilisation des ressources naturelles et d'émission des polluants dans l'environnement. On s'est intéressé dans le cadre de cette thèse à comprendre le mécanisme d'approvisionnement en viande et en lait frais de l'agglomération parisienne sur une période longue de deux siècles et à déterminer, produit par produit, l'empreinte environnementale de l'approvisionnement en termes d'emprise spatiale, de mobilisation d'eau et de flux d'azote entre les agro-systèmes et l'environnement au début des XIXe, XXe et XXIe siècles. On a utilisé des données statistiques nationales et internationales de transport et de production agricole pour déterminer et suivre l'évolution de l'aire géographique d'approvisionnement, évaluer la fraction des subsistances régionales que réclame la capitale pour son approvisionnement, reconstituer à l'aide des modèles de rationnement et des tables d'alimentation les rations des animaux approvisionnant Paris, déterminer, en termes à la fois de biomasse, d'énergie et de protéines, le rendement en viande et en lait du fourrage aux différentes dates et enfin calculer, de manière spatialisée, l'étendue des terres agricoles (empreinte spatiale) - et les flux d'azote et d'eau impliqués dans la production. L'empreinte hydrique a pour objectif de mesurer le volume des prélèvements d'eau (pluviale et d'irrigation) et le taux moyen de mobilisation des apports d'origine pluviale. L'empreinte azotée brute désigne le tonnage total d'azote mis en jeu dans la production, dont le partage entre la production d'aliments et les pertes environnementales dépend de la manière dont fonctionnent les agro-systèmes et caractérise la profondeur de l'empreinte urbaine. On propose ainsi d'élargir la notion d'équivalent habitant (Equ/Hab) classiquement considéré comme représentatif des émissions individuelles d'azote dans les eaux usées urbaines et de définir un équivalent habitant amont qui englobe en quelque sorte tous les rejets individuels d'azote en amont de la ville, relatifs à la production de la nourriture d'un citadin. Depuis le début du XIXe siècle, l'étendue de production par habitant s'est réduite d'un facteur six (pour une consommation de viande et de lait égale à environ 2 kg N/hab/an au début du XIXe siècle comme actuellement) – la réduction étant pour 30 % environ relative au doublement du rendement en viande et en lait du fourrage - mais l'intensité d'utilisation de l'eau et la profondeur de l'empreinte par hectare ont respectivement doublé et quadruplé. On estime qu'actuellement, 45 % des pertes d'azote - soit 5,1 kg N/hab/an ou 60 kg N/ha - proviennent des fumures laissées à l'abandon, faute de n'être reconduites à l'agriculture végétale. Etant donné que la somme des importations de viande bovine, porcine et de lait représente 25 % de l'apport protéique total dans l'alimentation du Parisien et sachant que la fraction végétale de l'alimentation est à priori caractérisée par moins de pertes d'azote que la fraction animale, on estime l'équivalent habitant amont de l'ensemble de l'alimentation du Parisien, à environ 7 Equ/Hab / For the sake of the sustainable development as a measure against global environmental change, urban consumption needs to be studied through the processes that underlie production and assessed in terms of resource use and pollutant emissions into the environment. This PhD thesis devotes to understand the mechanisms in supplying meat and milk to Paris over two hundred years and measure the land requirements, water withdrawals and nitrogen flows between agrosystems and the environment to supply each product in the early 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. We used agricultural and transport statistics from French and international data sources to locate the Paris hinterland at each date, quantify the urban food supply as a proportion of the regional potential food production, precisely model the diets of the livestock according to the animal productivity and the feed availability in the regional and global markets at the dawn of each century, compute the nitrogen, energy and feed conversion efficiencies in the meat and milk production and, finally, assess both the size and the geographic pattern of the Paris acreage (spatial imprint) and of the nitrogen and water flows in support of the production. The water imprint is used to account for the water withdrawals (irrigation and rainwater) in terms of volume and use intensity. The N imprint measures on the one hand the total amount of reactive nitrogen entering the agrosystems and the partitioning of these inputs between the food production and the environmental losses. The latter are referred to as “the depth” of the urban imprint which provides a measurement of the indirect contribution of urban areas to the alteration of the N cycle. When expressed on a “per capita” basis (kg N/cap) the depth of the imprint shows the emissions of reactive nitrogen to supply the diet of one person as opposed to the direct individual N discharge in urban wastewater. When expressed on a “per hectare” basis, it shows the intensity of the upstream urban N emissions and can be used as a tool for assessing urban sustainability beyond the city limits. Since the early 19th century, the land requirements for the “per capita” meat and milk consumption in Paris (equaling about 2 kg N/cap/year in both the early 19th and the early 21st centuries) reduced six-fold – with about 30 % of the reduction relating to the doubling of the nutrient conversion efficiencies in the secondary production – but the water use intensity and the “per hectare” depth of the imprint respectively doubled and quadrupled. We estimate that currently, about 45 % of the N losses - meaning 5.1 kg N/per/year or 60 kg N/ha – stem from abandoned manure. As the beef, pork and fresh milk imports to Paris currently account for about 25 % of the protein intake of a Parisian and given that animal production is a priori more wasteful that primary production, we estimate that the “per capita” emissions of N for providing the whole diet equal over 7 times the urban N discharges, meaning that a city's wastewater treatment plants handle less than 15 % of the total (direct and indirect) food related N emissions of the citizens

One of the greatest legacies of the Sandinista Revolution was agrarian reform. Despite the amount of land redistributed, this process happened without any form of legal documentation to support the transfer of property from one owner to the next. The end of the civil war, the peace accords and the transition of power from left to right-wing parties produced conflicting policies that would bring high levels of complexity to the system of land tenure in the country. The case of the state-owned sugar mill, Ingenio Victoria de Julio – El Timal is of one the most emblematic examples of how slow and inefficient Nicaraguan institutions have been in solving land tenure issues in 26 years.

No description available.