Does land ownership make a difference? Women's roles in agriculture in Kerala,India

Drawing on a 12-month study, this paper explores the role of women in agriculture in Kerala, India. Despite claims that women enjoy high status in Kerala, economic, social, and cultural factors interplay to reinforce gender differences in ownership, control over, and access to critical agricultural resources, including land. Although women may gain access to land through inheritance, marriage, or informal networks, none of this guarantee effective control over it. The traditional rights of women to land have not been adequately recognized: the gender gap in the ownership and control of property is the only most significant contributor to the gender gap in the economic well-being, social status, and empowerment of women. The existing socioeconomic changes and crisis which render agricultural land as a main source of livelihood, is leading nair women's share of land being sold, with gains going to men, thus decreasing women?s ownership of land to the status of male-controlled dowry. The case of the Christian succession laws in Kerala illustrate that legal provisions alone can have a limited impact on changing gendered power structures. The role of women in agriculture needs to be recognized, and institutional support must be increased in order for women to gain access to agricultural inputs and technology, which in turn, leads to better agricultural practices and a higher income from farming in the country. Most importantly, there should be a concerted effort to enable women to function as independent farmers who control their own land.     

Institutional Conditions of Economic Globalization: Effects of Antitrust and Merger Laws on the Global Integration of the Acquisition Market1

A central insight from institutional theory about markets is that they cannot operate without governing rules to guide interactions among actors. Because most of these rules are made and enforced within national borders, international economic transactions are said to suffer from an “institutional abyss,” the lack of institutional arrangements for economic exchanges. Scholars have found that the abyss can be filled by two factors: network connectedness, such as inter-governmental organizations, and intercountry economic agreements, such as the World Trade Organization or free trade. This article proposes a third factor: the global diffusion of governmental regulations. When countries adopt highly standardized regulations on a particular transaction, it provides legal familiarity for foreigners and reduces procedural uncertainty surrounding how the transaction should be executed. Using fixed-effects models on longitudinal data, I show that the adoption of antitrust and merger laws increases the volume of cross-border mergers—the transaction the laws are meant to regulate. This result stands in direct opposition to financial scholars’ predictions that antitrust and merger laws will reduce cross-border mergers because the laws are meant to restrain, not liberate, the transaction. This article theorizes how the diffusion of regulations, not the elimination of regulations, can facilitate global market integration.     

Traditional low intensity farming: Evidence of the role of vente directe in supporting such farms in Northwest France, and some implications for conservation policy

This paper examines the findings of research which examined the profile of farms in the French vente directe sector, i.e. farms that valorise their produce with direct processing and sales. In particular, evidence was sought concerning the degree to which vente directe might have a conservation role through helping to valorise traditional low intensity farm produce. The evidence suggests that vente directe can help to support small, low intensity farms in landscapes of high conservation value. However, as often as not, such farms are more unorthodox than traditional—both socio-economically and in terms of farm enterprises. When, occasionally, more conventional farms enter the vente directe sector, they are as likely to exhibit modern, intensive characteristics as they are to follow low intensity farming systems.     

Conventionalization, civic engagement, and the sustainability of organic agriculture

It is often assumed that organic farming is synonymous with sustainable agriculture. The broad goals of sustainable agriculture include economic profitability, environmental stewardship, and community vitality. However, the “question of sustainability” (Ikerd, 2008) can be asked of any type of farming, including organic production. One way to assess sustainability is to consider farmers’ perceptions of the sustainability of their operations. I draw on data from a survey of certified organic producers in Washington State to broaden our understanding of the sustainability of organic agriculture. Specifically, I consider certified organic producers’ perceptions of the degree to which their operations contribute to broad sustainable agriculture goals. Moreover, I use multiple regression to investigate how these perceived contributions are influenced by farm conventionalization variables (e.g., organic acreage, non-organic sales, and specialization) and civic engagement variables (e.g., direct marketing, community group membership, and participation in sustainable/organic agriculture organizations) while controlling for farmer demographics and farm location. Farm conventionalization appears to have a significant negative effect on perceived contributions to environmental and social sustainability, but a significant positive effect on perceived contribution to economic sustainability. Civic engagement appears to have a significant positive effect on perceived contributions to environmental and social sustainability, but no effect on perceived contribution to economic sustainability.     

Formation of land market institutions and their impacts on agricultural activity

The process of transformation of Bulgarian agriculture from a centrally controlled economy to a market-oriented economy is resulting in land reform, which will necessitate the immediate development and operation of land markets. On the one hand, the land reform is restoring land to those who owned it in the year 1947, or their heirs, who not only have very small and scattered holdings, but who often live in urban areas far from the claimed land and do not practice farming. On the other hand, farming is being changed by the liquidation of the former collective farms and the emergence of privately managed farms and new forms of co-operatives. These new operating units may or may not have their own land claims, but in most cases, do not have immediate access to sufficient land for adequately sized operations. Without land market institutions for information, contracting land use, and enforcement of contractual rights, the transaction costs of bringing the suppliers of land together with those demanding land will result in unused land and distorted agricultural activity. The paper explores both the formation of institutions and the evidence of transactions, as well as the possible impacts on farming.     

Children and the Modern Farming Movement

In the twenty‐first century, a small percentage of U.S. children have ties to family‐based agriculture. Yet with the rise of the modern farming movement that emphasizes local and family‐based production, new spaces may exist for involving children and youth in farming. This article focuses on the social value of children to family‐based agriculture in the contemporary era. Drawing on a qualitative study of families that farm in the capital region of New York—an epicenter for the modern food movement—we consider why families farm, how they involve children in their farms, and how they understand children's contributions. Interviews with 76 adult members of 50 families show children to be central to families' goals; they often rationalize farming as a lifestyle choice undertaken for the benefit of their children. Families also actively involve their own children—and other people's children—in their farms. By documenting the way families talk about children and farming, we shed light on the logic used to incorporate children into modern productive enterprises. The centrality of children, we argue, helps explain the success of the modern food movement and the persistence of family‐based agriculture despite conditions that make it economically difficult to accomplish.     

Women and Their Work on Australian Farms

Traditional definitions of farm work have been narrow and commodity-based, allowing the efforts of women to be discounted because they have not been viewed as directly contributing to production. This paper examines the structural gender arrangements that operate to render farm women powerless and to discount their contributions. Data are presented on the extent of women's economic contribution on Australian farms.     

Sometimes (but Not This Time), a Gun Is Just a Gun: Masculinity Threat and Guns in the United States, 1999–2018

Today, despite national campaigns and mass shootings, gun sales continue to rise. The majority of gun owners in the United States are men, and prior research has documented the complex relationship between masculinity and gun ownership. However, a majority of the research has remained on the micro level. In this article, we look at the effects of men’s unemployment on gun ownership. Using both national- and state-level Federal Bureau of Investigation background-check data as well as economic indicators, we find that worsening economic conditions for men (relative to women) lead to increases in gun sales. Moreover, this effect is exacerbated by the prevalence of guns in an area. We supplement these analyses with nationally representative survey data showing a strong relationship between perceptions of threat to men’s gender identities and opposition to laws limiting access to guns.     

A Story of Post‐Fordist Exploitation: Financialization and Small‐Scale Maize Farmers in Turkey

After the implementation of economic restructuring policies in Turkish agriculture, farming communities experienced significant changes in the patterns of agricultural production over the last decade. The dramatic shift from labor‐intensive field crops to maize farming represents such a change, particularly for small‐scale farmers, since high‐yield maize farming is driven by private agrifood corporate demand. In this article, I explore how this shift influences the relations of production in agriculture through a commodity‐system analysis of the maize sector in Turkey. Through the qualitative analysis of the semistructured in‐depth interviews and secondary data, I find that small‐scale farmers are able to participate in maize farming, even as their dependence on production credits to participate in industrial maize farming crucially reduces their bargaining power with private industry. I argue that the traditional Marxist approach, accumulation by dispossession, is not sufficient to explain the participation of small‐scale farmers. Instead, I propose a new concept, entrepreneurial exploitation, to describe the participation of small‐scale investors in the post‐Fordist regime. Thereby, I point to the important role of expansion of credit markets as a consequence of financialization.     

Care Farms in the Netherlands: An Underexplored Example of Multifunctional Agriculture—Toward an Empirically Grounded,Organization‐Theory‐Based Typology

For agricultural and rural development in Europe, multifunctionality is a leading concept that raises many questions. Care farming is a promising example of multifunctional agriculture that has so far received little attention. An issue that has not been examined thoroughly is the strategic mapping of different care farm organizations in this emerging field. The objective of this article is to develop a typology for care farms in the Netherlands and provide insight into the diversity of care farms. We have used different concepts from organization theory and information from regional organizations of care farmers to identify key dimensions and develop a typology of care farms. Key dimensions are the ratio between agriculture and care, the background of the initiators, and the degree of collaboration with formal care institutions. We found six main types of care farms with different identities, four of which were initiated by the farmers' families (mainly female partners). The other two types were started by new entrants in agriculture. On the basis of our findings, we confirmed, disputed, and supplemented insights to multifunctional farming literature. As a further contribution to that field, drawing from the organization theories underlying our typology, we have sought to understand how different types of care farms could emerge.     

Wind farms in rural areas: How far do community benefits from wind farms represent a local economic development opportunity?

Although the large-scale deployment of renewable technologies can bring significant, localised economic and environmental changes, there has been remarkably little empirical investigation of the rural development implications. This paper seeks to redress this through an analysis of the economic development opportunities surrounding wind energy development in rural Wales. The paper concludes that the economic development outcomes to rural areas from wind generation projects to date have been questionable. Increasing the flow of conventional economic benefits to rural economies in terms of incomes and jobs is shown to be difficult because of the nature of the local supply side in remote areas. Partially as a consequence of this, developers of wind farms have come to routinely provide diverse forms of community benefits to ‘affected communities’, but these have yet to evolve into significant tools of economic development. In any case, the flows of revenues from community benefits are dwarfed, in quantitative terms, by the revenue streams that might be channelled to rural areas through a broader community ownership of wind energy projects. However, although a few local successes have been achieved, the scope for realising the returns from community ownership remains low in the Welsh case, with a series of impediments considered. We close the paper by suggesting means through which economic outputs might be improved.     

Commodity Agriculture,Civic Agriculture and the Future of U.S. Farming*

Abstract Commodity agriculture and civic agriculture represent two distinct types of farming found in the U.S. today. Commodity agriculture is grounded on the belief that the primary objectives of farming should be to produce as much food/fiber as possible for the least cost. It is driven by the twin goals of productivity and efficiency. Civic agriculture, on the other hand, represents the rebirth of a more locally oriented agriculture and food system. Using data from the 1992 and 1997 Censuses of Agriculture and other secondary data sets, we examine factors and conditions associated with the presence and growth of both types of agriculture. Our findings show that civic agriculture is associated with particular commodities and with specific social, economic and demographic characteristics of localities. Commodity agriculture, on the other hand, is more sensitive to the classic economic factors of production, namely, land, labor, and capital.     

Gendered Elements of the Alternative Agriculture Paradigm

Abstract The alternative agriculture paradigm has been a useful device to both define and direct a social movement toward a more sustainable agriculture. But because that paradigm was defined by male movement leaders, it reflects their gendered perspective and may be lacking elements that make it more useful for both women and men. In-depth interviews of women involved in sustainable farming organizations and on family farms experimenting with new practices validated the elements of the Beus and Dunlap paradigm: independence, decentralization, community, harmony with nature, diversity, and restraint, but also suggested the addition of two other elements that the women identified as part of an alternative agriculture vision: quality family life and spirituality. The highly gendered nature of agriculture in the V.S. and Canada, where male identity is highly conflated with the role of farmer in the conventional paradigm, may make it more difficult for men who have just joined the' movement to articulate the aspects of quality family life and spirituality which the women saw as critical.     

Neither ‘family’ nor ‘corporate’ farming: Australian tomato growers as farm family entrepreneurs

For the past two decades there has been much debate about the future of family farming. The basic question on which this debate has turned is whether current pressures on family farm systems should be understood as symptomatic of a terminal condition, in which farmers are replaced progressively by corporate ownership; or whether family farms will persist as a social formation, albeit increasingly subsumed by off-farm interests. Using evidence from the Australian processing tomato sector, this article documents the changing social and economic formation of ‘family farming’. We argue that in this industry, the appropriate way to describe farmers is through the deployment of that a new category of farming; farm family entrepreneurs. This phrase is coined to describe the situation where family units remain at the social and economic heart of farm ownership and operation, but in the context where they relate to their land-based assets through legal and financial structures characteristic of the wider economy. As this article explores, this formation seems to represent an accommodating modus operandi for farm units within neo-liberal agricultural governance. Nevertheless, however, this duality of family-based structures and capitalist entrepreneurialism inevitably provokes a series of tensions, whose resolution requires a variety of organizational strategies to be put in place.     

Squaring Farm Security and Food Security in Two Types of Alternative Food Institutions*

Abstract Even though both farmers' markets and community supported agriculture were first developed to provide markets for farmers, recently the goals of food security have been attached to these market‐based alternative food institutions, based on their potential to be 'win‐win” economic solutions for both small‐scale farmers and low‐income consumers. This article reports on survey and interview research conducted in California during 2004–2005 designed to examine to what extent CSAs and farmers' markets are addressing food security in both concept and practice. Findings show that managers of these institutions generally support the idea of improving the affordability of the food they provide, and most have made an effort to do so, although these efforts vary with institutional capacity. Still, some hedged their interest in supporting food security goals with countervailing concerns such as the need to support farmers first. It is ironic, then, that the way that private CSAs and farmers' markets achieve some elements of food security is by virtue of the support of public food assistance programs.     

L’art des bergers et les moutons qualifiés Les figures sociales en jeu sur le marché agricole

On the basis of meticulous chronicles kept about the making of mutton in the Barèges valley in the French Pyrenees, this sociological study of markets examines changes in the complex relations formed between economic interests and local identities in farming. In the 1970s, pressure to standardize mutton for sale on a national market tended to efface the specific characteristics of local produce from this area in particular. In the 1980s however, producers tried to resist in various ways — direct sales in 1984, a brand name strategy in 1987 — against this loss of specificity in an undifferentiated marketplace. In 1995, a label of origin (AOC) was drawn up that not only singled out and stabilized local produce but also redefined groups of actors, ranging from producers who now focus on quality produce to consumers who increasingly look like gourmets searching for “originality”. Furthermore, this certification process led to closely linking the production and sale of produce to the promotion of a redefined local identity, which we might have imagined as being threatened owing to the expansion of business rationales.     

Finding Farms: Comparing Indicators of Farming Dependence and Agricultural Importance in the United States

Abstract Many scholars have commented on the changing significance of farming for understanding the dynamics of social and economic change in contemporary rural America. Quantitative analyses of relationships between farming, local socioeconomic conditions, demographic trends, and policy have often relied on an indicator of “farm‐dependent” (FD) counties developed by the USDA Economic Research Service. In this article, we argue that measures of economic dependency imperfectly identify the places in the United States where farming is significant, and can paint an incomplete picture of the contemporary geographic distribution and structure of agriculture in the United States. We propose an alternative categorical indicator—agricultural importance (AI)—that provides a better direct measure of the relative size and intensity of farming across diverse U.S. counties. We compare the characteristics of FD and AI counties along a set of dimensions and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each typology.     

“Profits to the Danes,for us – Hog stench?” The campaign against Danish swine CAFOs in rural Lithuania

The paper analyzes a grass-roots campaign to limit the expansion of Danish-owned industrial hog operator Saerimner in Lithuania. The industrialization of livestock production as well as local responses to the restructuring of meat production are interpreted within the broader context of the incorporation of peripheral regions into global agro-food markets. Unlike in Western Europe and North America where the industrialization of hog production is proceeded by the displacement of small hog producers, in Eastern Europe the expansion of multinational corporations is occurring by the buying up, retrofitting and modernizing of factory-farms inherited from the socialist-era. It is argued that the bitter environmental legacy of Soviet-era factory farming has shaped rural population responses to the new wave of multinational acquisitions in the region. Anti-corporate hog campaigning is analyzed within the context of growing activism among rural constituencies displaced from commercial agriculture. The importance of effective organization and leadership in grass-roots activism is emphasized as well as the growing role of non-farming interests is shaping the rural policies of the country.     

WHY CORPORATIONS INSURE

Corporations insure to reduce the shirking-information problem of joint production. Insurance encourages specialization in ownership, increasing the returns to monitoring and lowering shareholders' demand for a more diversified portfolio; it enhances the credibility of specific capital as a performance bond; and it lowers the cost to shareholders of compensating other members of the team for investing in firm-specific assets. Tax and other factors may further encourage individual corporations to insure.     

Organic Farming,Gender, and the Labor Process*

Abstract This paper seeks to explain variations in gender participation in farm production and decision‐making through an analysis of organic farm types, sizes, and orientations. Based on both survey and case study data, the analysis shows that female farmers on vegetable farms and mixed livestock/cash crop farms are more likely to be involved in farm production and management than women on field crop farms, where mechanization and capital intensive production is much higher. The links to ideological orientations and motivations are also examined, suggesting that farmers with more conventional orientations to organic farming are also less likely to support gender equality.