ABSTRACT Pesticide use is expanding rapidly across sub‐Saharan Africa, while regulatory oversight and public protection structures remain weak, leaving smallholder farmers exposed to mounting health and environmental risks. In response, agrochemical industry actors have launched ‘safe use’ initiatives that emphasize training and personal protective equipment as evidence of corporate responsibility. This paper critically examines one such intervention in Uganda: the Spray Service Provider (SSP) model, developed by CropLife, which trains selected farmers to become professional pesticide applicators offering spraying services to peers. Drawing on survey data from 110 SSPs alongside interviews with programme managers, we analyse how the model is framed, implemented and experienced in practice and assess its implications for pesticide governance. Findings reveal that the promised professionalization is fragile and uneven. Limited follow‐up, inadequate monitoring, worn‐out PPE and widespread outsourcing to informal ‘spray gangs’ undermine claims of risk reduction. Despite rhetorical commitments to Integrated Pest Management (IPM), SSP operations remain strongly centred on pesticide application. We argue that these shortcomings reflect structural contradictions within the ‘safe use’ paradigm and the neoliberalization of pesticide governance, wherein regulatory and extension functions are increasingly being delegated to private actors with vested interests. Rather than disrupting the pesticide treadmill, the SSP model normalizes and legitimizes chemical dependence, shifting responsibility for risk management onto precarious rural labour. It, thereby, risks entrenching rather than alleviating the harms it purports to address. Moving beyond industry‐led stewardship toward the meaningful protection of health and the environment requires implementing robust public regulation and investment in agroecological alternatives, not deeper reliance on voluntary corporate initiatives.
ABSTRACT Dependency has long structured agrarian political economy, explaining how producers are embedded in markets, capital circuits and regulatory regimes. This paper argues that dependency remains indispensable yet analytically incomplete without attention to evaluative authority. I distinguish between authorial discretion—the power to define optimization criteria, thresholds and performance metrics—and responsive discretion—the latitude to manoeuvre within externally defined frameworks. Across cross‐compliance systems, insurance architectures, certification regimes and digital platforms, evaluative criteria are increasingly stabilized upstream and embedded infrastructurally in everyday production. Farmers may retain agency in implementation while lacking control over the logics by which performance is judged. This stratification reorganizes authority within dependent agrarian relations without necessarily altering ownership structures. Drawing on agrarian political economy, infrastructure studies and feminist scholarship on gendered authority, the paper argues that contemporary agrarian transformation can also be understood as a reorganization of authorial discretion.
ABSTRACT While most frontier studies associate commodity expansions with dispossession, I argue that such expansions can also function as ‘civilizational’ projects aimed at overcoming traditional farming and creating new rural subjects better suited to the needs of capitalist development. Using a Gramscian approach to study subsumption, I analyse three state interventions that promoted oil palm across southern Mexico: the 1950s Papaloapan project (Veracruz) that sought to transform lowland campesinos and highland indigenous communities in the image of commercial mestizo (Spanish‐speaking) farmers to support industrialization; the 1970s Acapetahua project (Chiapas), which promoted cooperatives to modernize smallholders and achieve food self‐sufficiency during the Cold War; and, more recently, the Los Ríos intervention (Campeche), where neoliberal policies positioned employment in corporate plantations as best for landless peasants to ‘improve themselves’. This research shows how the state conceived of rural classes as obstacles to development, and aimed to reshape their farming, culture and even morality.
The 'sustainability turn' in China's development paradigm is in part a response to the sustainability challenges-both ecologically and socially-that China's agrarian transition has generated. This article characterizes China's agrarian system as an 'industrial agriculture of small farmers' (IASF): industrial in method and social metabolism, yet predominantly smallholder in scale and social organization. Over four decades, this configuration delivered national food security, inclusive livelihood improvement and accumulation without the mass dispossession characteristic of agrarian transitions elsewhere. Yet the processes driving these achievements also generated three interconnected structural strains: an ecological strain from IASF's industrial methods and the scale-biased state interventions they provoked; an infrastructure strain produced by the capitalist restructuring of conditions on which smallholder viability depends; and a demographic strain resulting from the dissolution of IASF's social reproduction foundations. Analysing seven cases of state interventions in Chinese agriculture, articles in this collection show that these efforts-despite genuine ambitions in ecological and social restoration-consistently reproduce the scale biases and class dynamics that accelerate smallholder marginalization rather than arresting it.
This article examines how long-standing local conflicts concerning the nature of common property, the distribution of access and administrative rights associated with it, and more broadly the nature of the community and the forms of citizenship that organise its governance shape demands for justice regarding land transfers to outside investors in a Mexican ejido. It describes how local actors mobilise a complex portfolio of legal, political, administrative and media resources to demand justice with the aim of transforming local power structures and the very definition of the community, far beyond what is denounced as land grabbing. It illustrates how demands for land justice can reshape the relationship between different categories of local citizens and the definition of local citizenship itself.
This article examines peasant and Indigenous movements in Mexico since Morena's rise to power in 2018 through the lens of collective empowerment theory, a theory of political-cultural formation. Beyond offering an empirical assessment, the theory is refined and formalized through an analysis of these movements and their relationship to progressive state intervention. Starting from the recognition of empirically verifiable advances in income distribution, the article examines whether these state-level achievements have been accompanied by a strengthening of organized collective subjects. Through a comparative analysis of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), Movimiento Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI (MPASXXI) and other movements, the article shows that the government's organizational disintermediation model produces a structural ambivalence: It may reduce clientelist practices while simultaneously weakening collective organizational capacity. The article concludes by identifying three interrelated determinants of transformative collective empowerment-organizational autonomy, democratizing interaction with the state and popular-democratic structural incidence. It argues that durable popular-democratic societal transformation depends on their dynamic articulation in Mexico and beyond.
This paper examines the role of the state in its ability to enact environmental regulations. Specifically, this study investigates how Malaysian state actors changed, shifted and betrayed various, oftentimes competing interests to ban paraquat, an acutely toxic herbicide. Using state-relational theory, I identify three roles played by the state over the four-decade long contest to ban paraquat: dissenter, partner with the private sector and re-regulator. The analysis reveals that, far from simply forming a sequence of governance approaches, these roles overlap and intersect, offering insight into the trajectory of postcolonial environmental governance. The agri-food system remains an important site where state sovereignty is produced, and actors continue to move into various regulatory spaces at significant political and economic moments. Ultimately, I argue that an analysis of state roles in regulating crucial inputs, particularly in global south countries, is necessary to deepen our understanding of how states navigate and overcome regulatory challenges.
Following recent calls to deepen understanding of the Global Pesticide Complex, this article delves into the China-to-Australia supply chain of a single herbicide-paraquat. First released in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, acutely toxic paraquat is now primarily produced in China. It is widely used in Australian broadacre farming, where, in response to the growth of no-till cultivation and rising herbicide resistance, it is used as a 'double knock' strategy with glyphosate. Through interviews and secondary data collection on the China-to-Australia paraquat supply chain, we connect upstream and downstream processes, examining the three nodes of production, distribution and use. We find a complex and at times slippery materialisation of the Global Pesticide Complex enabled by cheap Chinese formulations but also profoundly shaped by Australia's regulatory politics, specific farming practices and environmental conditions.
This article presents a new way of obtaining deep explanations of environmental problems. We expose the production strategies, corporate strategies and state actions that have been taken by firms and state agencies to facilitate the geographical expansion of the wood-based commodity frontier at the expense of reindeer pastoralists among the Indigenous S & aacute;mi people. Through qualitative analysis of archival material and historical research, drawing on commodity frontier theory and a state theory of modern landed property, we explain what happened to forests on S & aacute;mi lands in northern Fennoscandia and why it happened during three historical phases: the colonial-capitalist breakthrough, the industrial capitalist breakthrough and the intensification breakthrough. We show how these phases were critical to the appropriation and transformation of forests on S & aacute;mi lands and provide deep explanations of environmental problems for reindeer pastoralists. Finally, we discuss the relationship between commodity frontiers, different forms of landed property and the natural environment.
Why have Indonesia's decennial agricultural censuses defined their key unit of analysis, the 'agricultural household', differently? How do changes to that category shape knowledge production among those who rely on census data? This paper compares definitions of the agricultural household across seven censuses with international recommendations to show Indonesia's state causes the shifts in meaning endogenously. Undertaking a critical assessment of the classifications and results reveals both the persistence in the scale of Indonesia's small-scale farming and the state's construction of an entrepreneurial and male agrarian nation. Doing so is useful for situating studies of local agrarian change and as a basis for comparing how other states see their countrysides.
The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) primarily organized occupations of large-scale farms, forcing the redistribution of land for creation of agrarian reform settlements. In the past 20 years, however, land occupations and the establishment of new agrarian reform settlements have consistently declined, while the MST shifted strategies to strengthening existing agrarian reform settlements, increasing marketing mechanisms through government purchasing programs and direct rural-urban connections, cultivating new financial instruments, advancing agroecological transformations to strengthen production and contesting space in governance and discourse about sustainability, rural development and socio-ecological wellbeing. We argue this shift represents not an abandonment of the agrarian question but its adaptation, reflecting transformations of agrarian capital and social, ecological and political dynamics nationally and internationally rather than internal decisions within the MST alone. Thus, we theorize why, where and how new agrarian questions change in specific places over time, transforming and being transformed by social movements.
Although inequality between actors in agricultural value chains has been extensively studied, informal and semiformal arrangements in domestic value chains involving small-scale actors have been explored less than formal arrangements involving large firms. This study contributes to this literature, firstly, by suggesting a novel analytical framework for analysing inequality and exploitation and the agency of actors within an unequal value-chain relationship; and secondly, by applying it to the relationship between rice millers and rice farmers in Gulu in northern Uganda, i.e., to one node in a larger rice value chain. This study explores this relationship in a situation of high levels of competition between millers, potentially strengthening farmers' bargaining power. The form and degree of inequality and exploitation in the relationship are analytically disentangled by applying the analytical framework, combining Graeber's conceptualization of exchange and hierarchy with Snyder's definitions of exploitation. The study shows that, although the relationship is still characterized by inequality and has exploitative features, farmers can and do exit from the relationship.
Large-scale irrigation schemes are central to agrarian transformation in sub-Saharan Africa, yet their political implications are often reduced to questions of land redistribution or agrarian differentiation. Although existing scholarship has documented how irrigation restructures agrarian relations and generates dispossession, less attention has been paid to how successive development interventions reshape the institutional arenas through which grievances are formulated and political claims are articulated. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of the Bagr & eacute; irrigation scheme in Burkina Faso, combining interviews, archival sources and secondary literature, the article traces how successive phases of settlement, dam construction, resettlement and growth-pole expansion reconfigured land governance over time. The analysis shows that irrigation development generated cumulative distributive, procedural and epistemic injustices that were progressively reorganized through the institutional devices of development projects, including compensation procedures, safeguard policies and grievance mechanisms. These devices did not eliminate conflicts but reshaped how grievances were formulated and addressed. As a result, political claims increasingly became directed towards project institutions rather than exclusively towards customary authorities or the state. The article conceptualizes this dynamic as the emergence of project-based citizenship: a procedurally mediated and territorially bounded form of political belonging in which rights, obligations and claims are negotiated through development institutions.
In countries in the Global South, citizenship is often closely tied to access to water and land ownership. In Latin America, the literature has primarily explored social mobilisation and identity reconfiguration in response to development-driven processes of land and water dispossession affecting peasants, rural and Indigenous communities. However, the relationships between land and water dispossession, legal mobilisation and the construction of citizenship remain underexplored. This article analyses the sociopolitical effects of land and water dispossession in a rural community in a semi-arid valley in northern Chile, where the expansion of agribusiness has profoundly transformed both collective and individual property regimes. Focusing on the Estero Derecho Valley, this study examines the role of local elites-members of the educated middle class-who position themselves as intermediaries and legal advocates for the comuneros most affected by dispossession. Through an analysis of internal power dynamics and the strategic mobilisation of both local and national law, this article shows how community leaders contribute to the construction of repertoires of action and the emergence of intertwined citizenship that reproduces a social hierarchy deeply rooted in colonial legacies and post-colonial configurations.
