In person icon Everything Old is New Again: Continuity and Discontinuity in Agrarian Land Transformations

Abstract

As we enter a new conjuncture defined by converging and escalating crises, we also see the return of new debates, conflicts and struggles over agrarian land. Diverse actors, ranging from finance companies and asset managers, to environmentalists, small farmers and social movements for land justice and Indigenous land return present various ‘novel’ solutions and ‘new’ imaginaries aimed at resolving or overcoming these struggles. These solutions are often advocated for or critiqued as a radical break with previous and existing land relations–whether positive or negative. Yet in many cases, questions remain regarding the genuine novelty of these proposals. Land grabbing has historical precedents, colonial and otherwise. Finance has always been central to capital accumulation. Land trusts often reproduce existing models of property ownership, even as they struggle to transform it. Labour relations on ‘sustainable farms’ are often indistinguishable from those on larger or more ‘industrial’ holdings. On the other hand, there are sites of struggle which may represent a genuine break with existing politics of land. Indigenous-led, anti-colonial movements for Land Back and sovereignty challenge hegemonic arrangements of political power and land tenure. Some public land owners are reimagining their land towards new socio-ecological outcomes. New agricultural trade unions are challenging unjust labour relations in the sustainable farming sector, and a new generation of social movements is articulating an emerging desire for land and agrarian reforms that question the very basis of private property and the ownership model of agrarian landscapes. What can these struggles teach us about what a transformation of land relations that genuinely moves beyond colonial capitalist modes of agricultural production look like? This panel will consider the question of agrarian land transformations in this emerging conjuncture in the context of historical and existing agrarian land relations and the longue durée of colonial and capitalist land relations. Papers may speak to the following questions: - What agrarian transformations are taking place today and how are these challenging and/or reproducing the current order of agrarian relations? - What are the continuities and differences with previous conjunctures and times of agrarian transformation? How is today’s agrarian question shaped by colonial capitalist histories of land? - What is the evolving role of finance in farmland? - What might a ‘non reformist reform’ of land/property relations look like today? - Who is the political subject of today’s agrarian question? Who is going to work the land? - What are today’s power struggles over land?

Title	Details
Land, Coercion and State Building in Colombia	View Paper Details
Collective Farmland Ownership in Aotearoa: Radical Potential or Trojan Horse?	View Paper Details
Trees Devouring Sheep: Climate Rentierism and the Financialised Land Grabbing of Welsh Farmland	View Paper Details
“We Don’t Feel Exploited”: Agroecological Exceptionalism and Neoliberal Subjectivity in Un(der)paid Agroecological Internships	View Paper Details
Entangled Livelihoods in the Lincolnshire Fens: Agrarian Racial Capitalism, Supermarket Intensification and the Decline of ‘Council Farms’	View Paper Details