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Posted on December 1, 2024 | 33 Comments
Problem: how to keep this blog ticking over while I write my book.
Solution: another guest post
Much as I abhor nepotism, sometimes there’s nothing like family when it comes to getting you out of a hole. So I’m pleased to bring you the piece below from my son Jake, based around the research he’s doing with small-scale farmers in Bangladesh as part of his PhD at the London School of Economics. Over to Jake –
Bangladesh is a small country that sits within the Northeast of South Asia with India wrapped around it, and Myanmar to the South. Despite its small size and relatively recent independence, Bangladesh plays an oversized role in the way poverty, development, climate change and urbanisation are imagined globally.
Often in discussions of climate change the conversation turns to Bangladesh as a country imagined to be sinking, throwing out waves of climate migrants across the world. For many reasons this vision is wrong. I don’t have space to go into this in depth here (see further references below). Instead, I want to tell a different but connected story about Bangladesh, urbanisation and the environment. One that seeks to elevate the kind of conversations I have had with Bangladeshi people in years of travelling to and working in Bangladesh.
When I tell people I study rural to urban migration within Bangladesh people often either talk about climate migration or discuss what a relief it must be for these people to leave agriculture and move to the city where they imagine the quality of life to be better. This agrarian escape narrative invokes remarks by Joel Scott-Halkes in saying “Eighty percent of food may come from peasant farmers, but most of them have awful, awful lives, they hate being small farmers, it’s crushing, they die in their 50s, they would absolutely love not to be small farmers”.
In one sense this narrative is right, it’s very hard being a small farmer, but in an arguably more important sense it’s wrong, many people pushed out of farming desperately desire to return, and this is the driving force of their life while they are in cities. Scott-Halkes’ assertions could be reworded like this: “Eighty percent of food may come from peasant farmers, but most of them have awful lives, they find it hard to make a livelihood from farming, this is crushing, so they move to cities and struggle to make a living, it’s also crushing, they would absolutely love to be able to be a small farmer and to make a living if they could”.
To find an explanation for this one needs to look at broader structural factors, like international political economy, which put pressure on poor people in both rural and urban spaces, as well as more local, culturally situated desires, preferences and relationships to place. In my experience it is not as simple as rural bad, and city good, but instead the preferences of people worldwide are informed by local, national and international influences that make generalities about what whole groups of people like small farmers want a dangerous and futile leap of faith. What people coming from agrarian spaces say they want frequently cuts against the conventional wisdom in the West.
In Bangladesh, a culture around agriculture and place-attachment often draws people to farming, yet a complex global and local political economy pushes them off the land towards the cities. So, it’s more complex than the oversimplified narrative of the impoverished and immiserated farmer favoured by ecomodernists. I’m not going to critique ecomodernism further because that’s my dad’s speciality and I don’t want to tread on his toes on his own website. However, for those who want to draw a connection, it’s not difficult to see how modernist restructuring of landscapes and environments based around largely Western ideas of productivity, efficiency and political economy connects to ecomodernism, and how these approaches emanating from particularly Western ways of viewing the world contribute to the ‘awful lives’ so many do experience in the world today in urban spaces as well as rural ones.
As is often the case when writing against the grain of common perceptions I’ve found it a bit hard to know where to start telling this story. Really you don’t have to look very far in Bangladesh to see the way the agrarian suffuses the national imaginary. The national anthem ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, meaning My Golden Bengal, seemed as good a place as any. The song written by Tagore begins:
“My Bengal of gold, I love you
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune
as if it were a flute,
In Spring, Oh mother mine, the fragrance from
Your mango groves make me wild with joy-
Ah, what a thrill!
In Autumn, Oh mother mine,
in the full-blossomed paddy fields,
I have seen spread all over – sweet smiles!”
The love of the skies, the golden fields of rice, and the mango groves speaks to a love for agrarian culture. That is not to say that a national anthem necessarily represents its people, one would be a fool to think ‘god save our gracious King’ represents all the people within Britain, or even most. The song was written by Tagore in 1905, when Bengal was partitioned by the British, to attempt to unite Bengalis who had been divided by religion and as such was trying to access a shared identity that transcended religion.
It’s interesting and informative that in this historical moment Tagore chose such an agrarian image to unite Bengalis. Tagore was much less enamoured with the rural than Gandhi who advocated for a vision of agrarian and village-based self-sufficiency. In many ways Tagore was a moderniser both in his art and in his wider political philosophy. While appeals to rural idylls are a common trope in modernist nationalism, to anyone familiar with the culture of Bengal the vision represented in “Amar sonar Bangla” makes a lot of sense. Bengal’s agrarian history is reflected in much Bengali culture. For example, when meeting people for the first time it is not uncommon to ask “apnar bari kothay?”, meaning “where is your village?”, highlighting the way in which even for urbanites of multiple generations a connection to agrarian place remains important in locating themselves and others.
These connections to the village are maintained by many. In Dhaka around Eid, a city infamous for its traffic and streets full of people is almost empty, with much of the population returning to their ancestral village to see family and friends, and to eat and distribute meat among the community. Eid-al-adha is known as Qurbani eid, where those who can afford to purchase cattle and goats and ritually sacrifice them distribute the meat throughout the community. For weeks before people will purchase cattle, and lorries full of livestock will travel into Dhaka to be assessed and purchased. This leads to much conversation with people moving through the city being asked how much they paid and the merits of the animals being discussed widely.
The massive temporary migration as people return to their villages speaks to a deep connection to place beyond the bounds of the city, with most people opting to escape their lives in the city at least temporarily and return to the rural areas from which they or their ancestors came. In these moments the clear distinction between the agrarian and urban common in the West becomes complicated with livestock invading the cities, and many urban dwellers returning to the countryside.
My point is the agrarian history of somewhere like Bangladesh is different to much of the West and plays a different role in the broader culture, in the relationships people have, and in the skills people possess, for example in selecting good livestock. This is not to say that it has ever been a perfect or bucolic idyll, but that people’s experience of agriculture is situated within a particular cultural identity specific to the region from which they come. Thus, the assumption so often made in the West that the people in agriculture are the people who are unfortunate enough to have been left behind by modernisation is deeply flawed.
Knowing much of this history it still came as a surprise to me when I began researching seasonal labour migrants from Southwestern region of Bangladesh how emphatically these migrants described their desire for a future in which they could return to farming and agricultural labour and stop migrating to urban areas to work in brick fields. Of the twenty or so people I spoke to, not a single one said they who enjoyed working in the urban economy. Instead, each described their desire to return to some sort of farming.
The reason this group of migrants weren’t farming wasn’t because they had been lucky enough to escape, but because they had been unlucky enough to live in an area identified as bountiful in resources that could help provide for the economy of first the British and then the Pakistani government of the region. Between 1947 and 1971 Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan and was part of the broader Pakistani state. This was largely an extractive relationship with the political and economic centres based in West Pakistan and Bangladesh providing much of the resources to the young country.
In an attempt to increase the productivity of the coastal region the Pakistani state worked with the World Bank and Dutch engineers to create a network of embankments to reduce the time in which land was flooded. Instead of increasing productivity this served to reduce fertility and increase salination, making it harder to grow vegetables and rice. In turn shrimp farming was suggested as an adaptation which would contribute to the Bangladeshi economy but required much less labour and so served to reduce the potential for agrarian livelihoods for many in the population. Much has been written about this (see references below), but the key point is that people are leaving the land not necessarily because agriculture is backbreaking and they are desperate to leave, but instead because of the way colonialism, induction into the global economy and political power work.
While sat in a large muddy treeless expanse, surrounded by the brownish turquoise of shrimp ponds in 2022 a shrimp farmer explained to me that when he had been growing rice and vegetables in the early 2000s, he required about 100-125 labourers across the year for his 25 acres of land, but with shrimp he only needed fifteen. While this might seem to some a brilliant business innovation that saved labour costs, he seemed sad as he signalled to a fisherman sat next to him who I had been speaking to moments before and explained almost apologetically that the fisherman was only a fisherman because he couldn’t access land or work in agriculture, to which the fisherman enthusiastically agreed.
The fisherman explained that everyone wanted to grow rice, and knew how to grow rice, but they couldn’t because of salination, and issues related to accessing land. It is clear in these sorts of conversations that rather than agriculture being the problem that people are trying to escape it is a problem for them that they are being pushed out of or excluded from agriculture. The fisherman’s life came with its own challenges. He described how during Cyclone Sidr in 2007 he was caught at sea in the build up to the cyclone and was forced to find shelter on a small island with a group of other fishermen. As the cyclone hit the island it killed some of the fishermen, and they were forced to bury the bodies on the island. While this may have also been his fate if he was on the mainland, I doubt he would have anything polite to say to someone who explained to him at least he wasn’t farming.
Most of my interlocutors worked in brick fields, which is maybe closer to the urban industrial economy that many imagine for those leaving the land. However, this isn’t an escape from backbreaking work so much as a different type of backbreaking work, and one with less autonomy. Workers are given advances at the beginning of the season and need to work off the advance through piece rate wages. If rain or other disruptions lower output, the workers themselves bear the costs.
Exiting agriculture and agricultural labour often means induction into precarious labour relations far from home moving heavy bricks, or working in staggeringly hot brick kilns, with some reports of temperatures around the brick kilns of above 50 degrees centigrade. This is not to say that these fishermen or brick field workers wouldn’t jump at the opportunity for better paid employment, but they may well dream of funnelling the funds received back into improving their lot in the rural economy from where they came if they could, potentially purchasing land and realising the dream of returning to farming. However, this is made hard by processes beyond their control with them more likely to become involved in aquaculture than agriculture because of a history of modernist interventions in the landscape.
Even in urban settings conversations are infused with connections to the rural and agrarian. People will often discuss wistfully the land their family owns in their bari, or village. A close friend who I have lived with for much of the time I have spent in Dhaka described how their cousin was looking to return to their village to take on some of the family land to live and farm. They are no doubt privileged and even within the same country the way he is likely to farm will look very different to some of those mentioned above. However, despite having a relatively successful career in the civil service he is drawn back to farming.
I talked to many of my friends this summer about their relationship to the rural and many liked the idea of escaping the city. Not necessarily to farm, but even for the middle class the city can be a place of stagnation, frustration and constrained ambition. It was exactly this stagnation that saw students take to the streets to oppose the quota system that allowed the grandchildren of freedom fighters priority access to places in the civil service. Students from elite public universities began a protest to reform these quotas that were joined by students from private universities and then much of the population, which in turn toppled the dictatorship that had been in place for fifteen years. I wouldn’t want to put words into the mouths of the diverse groups of people who took part in the movement, but I know from conversations with people I know who participated that it became something bigger than simply a movement for quota reform and became instead a protest about the stagnation, corruption and oppression that were so common in urban life.
So often the urban is discussed as though it is a solution to problems in the rural, and in this narrative the problems of the urban itself are made invisible. It’s more complex than that, and many of the same processes of dispossession and modernist restructuring that push people out of agriculture exist in towns and cities in a different guise. Targets of the looting and vandalism in the protest movement included an express road allowing moderately wealthy car owners to avoid Dhaka’s infamous traffic, and the brand-new metro. This infrastructure represented a vision of a new Bangladesh which excluded much of society and signified something so imbued with the imagination of the elite that it was one of the first targets of the civil unrest. If leaving agriculture is good for poor people, which many scholars argue it is not, is the city that much better?
When people talk about the backbreaking toil of agricultural work, they so often ignore the political economy that makes these people’s lives hard. Instead, they focus on the individual farmer as though everything that makes it hard for them to farm is out of anyone’s control. This replicates a nascent neo-liberalism through creating the farmer as an individual who is failing in the free market, thus should leave for his and his family’s welfare.
Instead, one needs to look at the broader context in which the farmer exists. Histories of colonial land management policies and modernist Green Revolution policies have served to push many small farmers off the land, while favouring richer industrial farmers. These systems of thought foster the assumption that people don’t want to be farming, rather than paying attention to what the farmers themselves want.
This is not to say that farmers don’t want more secure, fulfilling and comfortable lives, but often if you speak to them, it is not escape from farming that they see as route to this but access to agriculture on better terms. While my experience and knowledge are deeply grounded in the Bangladesh context, research literature on rural to urban migration in much of the Global South tells a similar story – not so much people escaping farming but people being pushed out of farming to make way for modernist schemes, capital accumulation and land use change. ‘Development’ schemes are often justified in terms of poverty reduction (for example, the Green Revolution), but the voices of the people affected by these schemes often aren’t heard precisely because of their poverty. In the introduction I highlighted that narratives of small farmers escaping farming abound in Western discourse but so often the farmers voices are lost because people don’t think to look for them.
Further reading:
Paprocki, K., 2021, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dewan, C., 2021, Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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Hello Jake, and welcome!
I was listening to a podcast earlier today that mentioned the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the rumour that it was started by a cow kicking over a lantern in a barn. Perhaps this is tangential to anything about Bangladesh, but I wonder if our 21st century vision of urban areas being somehow separate from agriculture is actually pretty recent. Granted, many inhabitants of Chicago at the time had come from Britain (or were direct descendants of those who had come) to escape enclosure, famine and so on, so it isn’t as if colonialism was absent from the picture. I suppose what I’m trying to figure out is when this idea (or propaganda) of city life as completely separate from agriculture emerged.
The other question I have is whether urban life has ever really been more attractive than small farms without the intervention of one ruling class or another to ensure that small farmers were having a miserable time. Enclose the commons and deny people the opportunity to produce some of their own food at home and yes, of course they’ll be miserable with the resulting losses of autonomy, security and community.
I’ve never lived on a farm, but can quite easily count myself among those who would like to start farming, if I could get meaningful security of tenure before I get too old to start over. Instead I have decided to start where I am and I grow most of my household’s fruit and veg on my allotment, or forage it from urban and suburban parks. The result is that we eat more fruit and veg, and more variety of fruit and veg, than most people I know. (Also I’m more obsessed with collecting materials to compost, much to the bemusement of my spouse.) Seasonal eating, too, has become necessary: I can’t possibly preserve and store all the apples/tomatoes/cucumbers/whatever in our small-ish kitchen, so we eat as much fresh as we can, and that means sometimes we eat a lot of cucumbers and sometimes we don’t. (I also donate substantial amounts to the soup kitchen at my church.) And the one thing that really gives me pause about the idea of a more rural life is that I’d need to start over with foraging, likely in a location with a lot less access to public outdoor spaces.
I don’t claim that this is the same as “real” peasant farming, but nonetheless I do lead a remarkably agrarian lifestyle for someone living in London in Zone 3. I may be an oddity, but I suspect that a lot more urban dwellers than might be imagined are involved in some kind of local self-provisioning, judging by the number of other foragers and gardeners there are around. Meanwhile last time I visited any relatives who are professional farmers in the Canadian prairies, some of them didn’t have a vegetable garden at all. (And some did.)
I am not saying that cities as we know them today are viable without relying on a much larger area in which to grow food for urban dwellers, of course, or even that they have ever been viable without that. But I do suspect the urban/rural dichotomy is a very imperfect mapping, even in the West, and I wonder who is best served by the ideas associated with it.
I shall try and put my reply into some kind of coherency. Basically I think you are right. There seems to be a quiet and increasing number of people, either singly, as part of a family unit, or as part of a wider network, that is seeking this return to a localised ‘re-ruralisation’, even within dense urban conurbations such as London, or Salford, where I live.
For instance, this weekend I took part in hedgerow planting as part of the Lifelines project, run out of St Ethelbuga’s Peace and Reconciliation centre. Anyway, Lifelines has been running a hedgerow planting project for the last two years. It’s extremely popular, and groups of people from a primarily urban community come together to plant hedgerows for farmers in exchange for bed and breakfast. What was interesting though was the variety and diversity of people who are doing this now. This weekend for instance half the group consisted of a lot of Muslim women, who had set up an initiative called the Green Deen Tribe, whose primary aim is to remind Muslims of the sacred nature of God’s Creation and their duty of stewardship towards it. The other half of the group consisted of members of the Christian Climate Action Network.
We planted the hedge for an organic farmer in Suffolk, who was himself a former journalist, and had inherited the 1000 acre farm from his parents. He was also half Arabic, but his Arabic ancestors were traders who settled in Singapore. He told us about the landscape recovery project that his farm had joined.
There’s a quiet reformation taking place away from the eye of neo-liberalism, or so it seems to me. I hope it stays invisible so that the basis of the small farm future may be established when the ‘time of endings’ is fully established
Hi Kathryn and Hoong,
I agree that I think the urban and the rural have grown apart over the years. I think this is likely to be a process of elite visions of the city taking hold, but also the role cities play in imperial and neo-colonial networks. Where certain cities in the global system have evolved into quite a different role to other cities despite having a similar origin in dispossessed peasantries.
On your second question, I agree. I think urban life is preferable either if you are rich, and even then you are likely to have access to the rural in different ways such as holiday cottages, if you are from the city and it is what you know, or where conditions elsewhere were so bad, largely for historic and political economy reasons, that the city feels like an escape. Something that is interesting, but not picked up on enough in the academic literature, is just how many first generation (and sometimes 2nd and 3rd generations) of the ‘urban poor’ have some vision of returning to the rural just on different terms. For example, interviews with Rickshaw pullers who describe their goal as being to buy land and become/return to farming.
I think in practice without largescale re-alignments in the markets around food, land and livelihoods then lots of people will turn towards more urban agriculture. Which one sees the world over. My partner has begun growing herbs on the windowsills of our 1st floor flat, which if it wasn’t for the squirrels knocking them off would give us great pleasure. I think once one experiences more seasonal eating one begins to better understand how crazy the globalized food system is. I was asked years ago by a very earnest Bangladeshi farmer when mango season was in the UK, i joked ‘all year!’ meaning the ready supply of mangoes in the supermarkets. He looked rather perplexed as you would imagine, having never been at the Western consumption end of the global food system.
Hoong, I love your framing of a ‘quiet reformation taking place away from the eye of neo-liberalism’ and think both your experiences of supporting a farmer in hedge planting and Kathryn’s self-provisioning that leads to sharing food with the community are good examples of this. Where much of capitalist and neoliberal political economy discusses how to get people to spend more, finding ways to spend less with what people have and opt out of the market systems as currently constructed while reorientating to community and mutual aid is an important part of building a new better system. An example that sticks in my mind of a ‘quiet reformation’ is in Seb Rumsby’s 2023 book Development in Spirit which largely looks at religious conversion in Vietnam but he mentions that for some farmers the introduction of high yield GM rice has allowed them to return to subsistence farming by reducing the space dedicated to cash crops/grain and drawing just enough out of the global market economy that they no longer have to commit to it so fully.
I can’t quite remember the reference offhand and am not in a position right now to find the citation (Steve someone? tanner maybe?) but I’m sure there’s a study or book somewhere on the “captured garden” — coal miners in Kentucky were given (tied?) housing attached to enough land to grow a decent subsistence garden, and paid a lower wage on the grounds that they didn’t need as much money if they could meet some needs that way. This feels like a sort of inverse of the situation you describe with high-yield modern rice meaning more space for subsistence horticulture…. but it would only take a rent or tax rise or two, or a collapse in rice prices, to drive farmers to put the entirety of their available growing space to cash crops.
For my part, my self-provisioning is only possible because my spouse earns hard currency with which we can pay rent — not just on the allotment, but our home — and I suspect that some similar kind of division of labour in household economies has long been the norm in partially-peasant societies. That doesn’t mean my self-provisioning is a failure, it’s more… a reflection of the need to have diverse modes of production within a household, maybe? While that diversity has more potential points of failure (e.g. long-term unemployment or long-term crop failure would both make our current situation much more difficult), it is also a more resilient strategy to certain short-term shocks: when my spouse was unemployed for a few months in autumn 2023 we had plenty of food in the house and so could stretch our savings further, and I don’t know very many people whose grocery spending has gone down rather than up since 2020 (I first took on the allotment in December 2019). I would be happier if we owned both the land I grow on and the home we live in, but even in my food production I employ a strategy of diversification, with allotment plots on different sites (with vastly different microclimates), and incorporating substantial amounts of foraged food.
So maybe part of the problem with the urban/rural divide as it exists today is around a profound lack of diversity in provisioning that happens in both rural and urban areas when money as a medium of exchange is all we measure.
Yes, it’s Steven ‘Ramp Hollow’ Stoll you’re thinking of, Kathryn.
Thanks Simon — I knew someone here would know!
Ramp Hollow is a great book. Here’s an interview Jason Snyder did with Steven Stoll on the Doomer Optimism podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4FdOqbdLQ&ab_channel=DoomerOptimism
Jason lives in Appalachia, but I think he got the book recommendation from me, which is kinda fun.
Change the date to 1850 .
Change the place to England
Then you have the UK during the industrial revolution .
Hi Diogenese10,
Yes, I agree that in many ways it would look similar. Although importantly I think people are grounded in very different sets of economic, social and cultural relations in the two times and places. Where the industrial revolution happened at the center of a network of imperial relations, industrialization looks very different for many in the Global South. So the comparison only goes so far and there is a risk in drawing too strong connection between the two as it suggests the route to affluence and modernization looks the same everywhere and obscures the histories of violent colonial and capitalist expansion that shape modern uneven development.
The pesantry then as now has little say in how the world works , working in a cotton mill in Lancashire then or somewhere in Bangladesh now is the same kind of wage slavery for the poor . ( and of what I have seen of England now poverty levels are not much better )
I honestly wish the west had stayed home and left the rest to their kings and emperors .
Thanks for the interesting guest post. It’s refreshing to hear of a national anthem devoted to themes of nature and family (not to mention food crops).
The national anthem of Bangladesh, sung to music, can be heard at this page:
https://archive.org/details/amar-shonar-bangla-bangladesh-national-anthem
Thanks Jake, great post. I have read Paprocki’s work also, so I am familiar with the context and the terms and it is wonderful to see this cultural and personal insight you give here.
My partner Alice made me keenly aware of farmer suicides in India, and the whole of the fashion and textiles supply chain follows this same heart breaking cycle of enclosure. It is as Diogenes says, the same dispossession in a different time and place.
I am interested if there are any strategies forming in Bangladesh among the dispossessed? Subsistence farming in community can provide our needs, outside of and despite capitalist and colonial forces. Are there any examples of resistance?
Also, Bookchin’s ideas about the ‘urban’ as destructive of both the city and the rural spaces, how do these figures in your thinking. Bookchin invokes the Athens, a city built by farmers, a democracy run by farmers, and the city as an antidote to tribalism (echoes of Tragores nationalism?) Is there a space where the city and the rural form a circuit, or whole?
Hi Joel,
There are quite a lot of different movements forming in Bangladesh which articulate often disparate claims that I am not sure I could do justice to here. I do think the previous 15 years + of increasingly autocratic government has limited this to a certain extent though. In terms of claims around agrarian issues the group Nijera Kori, which Kasia talks about in her work, is a very good example. There are also various NGOs that do interesting things as much as possible throughout the country. However, I wouldn’t necessarily say there is a movement through the whole country among the dispossessed, instead lots of localized struggles.
I am not familiar with Bookchin’s ideas on the city/urban, although I am slowly making my way through his The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Yes, I think it is possible for the city and the rural to be part of a circuit or a whole but I think it requires a rethinking of the way the global economy is structured and a move away from a globalised economy to something more local. A rather controversial development of the debates in urban studies has been the proposal of Planetary Urbanisation basically arguing that all processes are urban now. This is problematic in many ways, but I think pertinent here is that often it is not ‘urban’ demand that drives exploitation of resource frontiers but global demand, which often benefits those in urban areas in the Global North but not exclusively. In many ways the move towards shrimp for export is an application of Ricardian comparative advantage to the disadvantage of many who live in that particular region. So for cities and the rural to form a circuit or a whole they would need to be much more situated within the surrounding area, working towards food sovereignty rather than drawing from disparate globalised patchworks of resource production built around unsustainable and extractive monocultures.
I hope that made sense. It’s late here and a little worried I have provided you with a bit of a word soup.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/12/04/landman-a-tv-series-that-tells-the-truth-about-energy-billy-bob-thornton-in-two-minute-clip-offers-a-stirring-defense-of-the-american-energy-industry/
For those that don’t live here in the USA this is a new tv series coming out , the language is spicy but the gist of what is said is a discription of the future , there are several clips that condense our dilemma . the idea that us oil production is endless is of course a fairy tale .
Hi Jake, Welcome.
How about a borderline rhetorical question ? Since you have studied the situation afflicting small farmers in Bangladesh ( which may differ in details but is universally familiar), have you thought about solutions ? Do you think there is a way to reform agriculture without first crashing the entire capitalist / colonial / consumer economic system ?
It’s kind of crashing anyway. I haven’t read too much about it yet, and being Malaysian I tend to take pronouncements by MY.gov with a bit of salt, but it would seem that some countries which have a primarily agricultural economy have grown wary of the globalisation of commodities especially since food inflation has started to hit their populations. So after years of being an increasing member of international trade Malaysia for instance has now decided to aim for 100% self sufficiency in staple foods (rice, fish, chicken, vegetables, fruit). And one of the ways they’re going to do this is by reversing the youth drain from the rural areas to the cities. I’ll need to do some more reading but I have seen some of this myself when I have gone home
This all ties in the Matt Colborn’s comment from the last post –
“How can we create social structures in a post-collapse world that encourage the best in human beings and contain the worst?”
Those structures, systems, techniques would be useful even now.
Hoon – that’s very interesting about food security & rural policies in Malaysia. Do let me know of any written analyses you come across about it.
Re Matt & Greg – “How can we create social structures in a post-collapse world that encourage the best in human beings and contain the worst?” Book coming soon with all the answers…
This is an article from the Malay Mail. Not an analysis but it gives a flavour. I will dig up some research analysis if I can. I’m going back to work after some time off; my mental health took a dive because of the US election results. Not ashamed to admit it, but return to work might mean that I will not be posting as frequently
https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2023/09/09/malaysia-needs-100pc-self-sufficiency-food-security-ministry-official-says-amid-soaring-global-prices-for-white-rice/89843
Thanks Hoon – appreciate your comments here, and wish you well for your return to work. The present multiple crises can afflict us in different ways – solidarity & warm wishes.
Thanks for article.
A recent research article by Flora Hajdu and colleagues from the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, published in Journal of Rural Studies, emphasizes the need to take the social relations and conditions into account when discussing smallholders. They call it “rendering the smallholder social”. Based on 36 studies in 19 countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia they formulate five social themes that are essential for understanding smallholders’ behaviour and development paths. I believe that your account supports most of what they say. I wrote about that article in this post. https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-social-life-of-a-peasant
On another topic, you write: “Thus, the assumption so often made in the West that the people in agriculture are the people who are unfortunate enough to have been left behind by modernisation is deeply flawed.”
I have noted that while the big flow is migration of rural (poor) to cities, there is also a small current of rich people settling in the country-side, not only billionaires buying a ranch, but rich people actually investing in farming. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/athlete-farmers
When I worked in East Africa, quite often the so called “progressive” farmers were actually from this category and the main reason they were “progressive” (which meant commercially oriented) was that they had resources to invest. I would like to explore this topic further. Are you (or any other commentor) aware of any studies of this phenomenon?
Perhaps you’ve already seen this paper, “Africa’s Changing Farmland Ownership: The Rise of the Emergent Investor Farmer” (which was the first result of my search on Google Scholar with the search terms: investor farmers).
“The rapid rise of emergent investor farms in the 5 to 100 hectare category represents a revolutionary change in Africa’s farm structure since 2000. In most countries examined, the majority of medium-scale farms are owned by urban-based professionals or rural elites, many of whom are also public sector employees. About half of these farmers obtained their land later in life, financed by non-farm income. The rise of investor farmers is affecting the region in diverse ways that are difficult to generalize. Many investor farms are a source of dynamism, technical change and commercialization of African agriculture. In densely populated areas, however, the growth of investor farms may be displacing the potential for agricultural land expansion of small-scale farming communities. Investor farmers tend to dominate farm lobby groups and influence agricultural policies and the allocation of public expenditures to agriculture in their favor.”
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/212028/?v=pdf
(has link to free PDF download)
Thanks Steve, very interesting. In a bigger perspective it makes me wonder if the view of “agriculture driven ” development, i.e. the idea that “development” originates in the agriculture sector that accumulate surpluses which in turn moves into industries, is not telling the whole story. I would not be surprised if you could find the same patterns e.g. in Sweden some 100-150 years ago, that there was quite some investment into agriculture from people getting rich from trade, mining or manufacturing.
John Ikred thinks the fatal flaw in Get Big or Get Out in the US is that they didn’t consider the social aspects or rural communities, the churches, schools, small businesses on Main Street, etc.
HI Gunnar,
Thanks for the paper, I hadn’t seen it but it looks like a very interesting read.
I have seen some interesting discussions of de-urbanisation and agree it is largely a phenomenon of rich people moving to the rural, which is quite interesting in itself. Around this time last year I did a small research project where I spoke to farmers about how they felt about the gentrification of a local town in Somerset. They kind of contested the framing of gentrification, and for the most part benefited in quite interesting ways. Although in some cases the effect on property value was quite negative to them as the increased size of the town meant they needed to compete with housebuilding to continue to farm (Which is something the government should probably have thought about before this recent inheritance tax policy, ie. farming not being the only value for land).
I’m not sure I would describe it as a literature as yet, but I found a very interesting paper on poor Brazilians who had left the city after generations and had begun to farm on the edge of the amazon. Of course, there are probably complexities about how they engage with the Amazon rainforest but interesting all the same. The paper is called ‘From Prison to Paradise’ which I think is interesting; https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0305750X22002674.
There is also an interesting literature that pushes back against the idea that urbanisation necessarily means people are ‘urban’ represented in discussions of global ruralisation and agrarian urbanism. I think one of my favourite papers in this oeuvre is by Baird (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20438206221102953) where he describes meeting a taxi driver in Bangkok who identifies as a farmer and returns to his farm to harvest rice while making most of his income from taxi driving.
Thanks for all the comments, and thanks Jake for writing & following up with folks here.
I’m very interested in the discussion inaugurated by Gunnar, which has its resonances here in the UK too. Please do send any further info/references on this topic my way. In terms of bootstrapping industrial development from an agricultural base, land or tax reform policies that return surplus to small farmers are surely also important – as in cases like the modern economic development of Japan, Taiwan, China, S Korea etc?
Greg, can you give a reference to the John Ikerd piece?
Also very interested in any further information pertaining to Hoon’s points above about food securitisation in Malaysia and any similar instances.
Hi Chris,
The new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, is making similar noises, e.g.:
‘Mexican president unveils agricultural plan for food ‘self sufficiency’ (https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/mexican-president-unveils-agricultural-plan-self-sufficiency – access the whole article here: https://12ft.io/)
John’s comments came in response to a question during a session at the 2024 Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference. It was a Roundtable session so I don’t know if a recording exists. The session ( Friday 1:30) was titled “Cultural Change – Energy towards a Small Farm Future”. Guess whose book was discussed…
George Monbiot’s?
https://hinduexistence.org/2024/12/07/iskcon-centre-burnt-down-in-dhaka-attacks-on-minorities-unabated-in-bangladesh/
Just wandered around the news and found this .
I know that years ago there was a charity collection g money to drill water wells in Bangladesh ( I contributed ) then they found out that the water was contaminated by cyanide and locked all the wells .
Thanks for your article Jake, very interesting, and having worked on-and-off in India over the years, very familiar. I just remembered this article in the Hindustan Times from 2009, that pretty much captures the elite ideology cheering on urbanization, lamenting policies that supposedly hamper this process:
‘Bright lights, dim policy: Farm policies hinder the movement of rural Indians to cities. This undermines their progress. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri elaborates.’
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/bright-lights-dim-policy/story-wZ4zccjF09irfHJ5ke3uZL.html
Apart from the absurdities of the arguments, development policies then, and now, do exactly the opposite, viz. kick rural-dwellers into cities, as you have described in Bangladesh too. Around the time of the article (2009) was when India’s ‘Special Economic Zone’ (SEZ) policy was ramping into high gear, with the government seizing land to hand over to corporations to turn into regulation-free industrial enclaves. All of these sparked massive protests and spirited resistance from farmers and other rural dwellers who would be (and were/are in many cases) displaced in the process, who it turns out didn’t want to lose their land and agrarian livelihoods to petrochemical and steel hubs among others and be thereby forced to migrate to cities in search of paid work. The elites pushing this policy tried to sell SEZs as ’employment-generating’, since to them, subsistence farmers are by definition unemployed.
Thanks for that Alex, and your other recent comments – very informative
Hi Alex,
Thank you so much for the link to the article. That is really useful.
I don’t know if it is on your radar but there is an amazing book on the SEZs in India called Dispossession without Development by Michael Levien which I read earlier this year and would highly recommend if you haven’t read it already. It is very much touches on the points you have raised around the SEZs.
https://academic.oup.com/book/6076