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Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization

Article in Journal of Rural Studies · January 2010

DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.10.003

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M. Rezaul Islam
University of Dhaka
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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached
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Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 26 (2010) 81–84
doesn’t show us how that can happen, but he shows us clearly that
this is the challenge we face.
E. Melanie DuPuis
Department of Sociology, University of California, 206 College Eight,
Santa Cruz, CA 95064, United States
E-mail address: emdupuis@ucsc.edu
doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.10.002
Transnational agrarian movements confronting globalization,
Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay (Eds.).
Wiley-Blackwell (2008). 362 pp., £19.99 pbk, ISBN: 978-1-4051-
9041-1
Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization is
a volume in which a number of research papers on transnational
Agrarian movements are presented from a global perspective. The
particular aim of this volume is to introduce the readers to the
peasants and farmers who struggle at home and traverse national
borders to challenge the World Trade Organization (WTO) and
other powerful global institutions. The foreword of this volume is
written by H. Bernstein and T. J. Byres who were the editors of
the Journal of Peasant Studies and then the Journal of Agrarian
Change in which most of the papers were published.
The volume explores the issue of ‘confronting globalization’ in
the context of South America (such as Brazil and Mexico), Asia
(China, India, Philippines, Indonesia and Burma), and Africa (South
Africa). The introductory paper written by S M Borras Jr, M. Edel-
man and C. Kay presents a brief history of global transnational
agrarian movements and explains their socio-economic, cultural
and geographical consequences. The authors describe some
common issues, claims and agendas, and explain the ideological
and political differences of these movements and their strategies.
This discussion is generally interesting and represents useful back-
ground evidence for the reader. I agree with their view that it is
difficult to compile the whole range of socio-economic and
cultural factors of these movements in a global context though I
still feel that the readers may spot gaps in insight relating to Asian
countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Bangladesh. In second
chapter, P. McMichael describes how peasants make their own
history. He accurately mentions how capitalist modernity and
the WTO, IFM and EU in particular impacts on the movement. It
is true that Marxist ideology played a significant role but this
movement was interrupted by state politics where capitalist
aggression was more successful. I would argue that the food secu-
rity programme could not give freedom to the peasants but rather
they became dependants on external institutions such as WTO
and IFM. The peasant movements still exist in those Asian coun-
tries where many agrarian issues such as land reform are not
resolved yet.
From chapter three to eleven, the volume includes nine case
study papers with examples of country contexts and themes of
the agrarian movements. Within these papers the authors intro-
duce a number of agrarian movements and show how these were
confronted with processes of globalization. Peasants and global-
ization is a debate for the ‘agrarian question’ from its early
formulation in the late 19th century (Akram-Lodhi & Kay,
2008). Central America was one of the key zones where contem-
porary transnational peasant organizations emerged in the
period from late 1980s to the mid-1990s (Chapter 3). A number
of movements were started in the international arenas such as
the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR) by La via
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Campesina (Chapter 4), peasant networks and grassroots organi-
zations in Brazil and South Africa (Chapter 5), and those mobi-
lizing against genetically modified crops in India, South Africa
and Brazil (Chapter 6). Chapter seven to eleven considers
different facets of agrarian movements such as issues of trade
and biotechnology in Latin America (Chapter 7), environmental
movements in Indonesia (Chapter 8), local production for
distance consumers (Chapter 9), migrant organization and home-
town impacts in Mexico (Chapter 10) and everyday politics in
China (Chapter 11). Most of these papers look at how these kinds
of movements were run and affected by globalization at national
and international political scales. In general these authors tend to
analyse the common influencing factors when comparing global
impacts across countries, often at the expense of recognising
the political, cultural and social circumstances that might differ-
entiate them. A very interesting paper concludes the volume. Its
author K. Malseed shows how agrarian movements were inter-
rupted by the military government in Burma and provides
some guidelines as to how the peasants of Burma can initiate
a movement for their freedom.
This volume contains a number of interesting areas of debate
surrounding transnational agrarian movements confronting global-
ization. Nevertheless the editors miss one opportunity to put a brief
concluding chapter with a synthesising analysis, bringing out the
connections between the chapters. Notwithstanding this, the
book will be a useful reference and source for those students and
researchers working on these issues across the humanities and
social sciences.
M. Rezaul Islam
UNESCO Centre for Comparative Education Research,
School of Education, University of Nottingham,
Wollaton Road,
Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK
E-mail address: rezauldu@gmail.com
doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.10.003
Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice,
D. Maye, L. Holloway, M. Kneafsey (Eds.). Elsevier, Oxford
(2007). 358pp., £80.95 hbk, ISBN: 978-0-08-045018-6
This intelligent and thoughtful book will make compulsive
reading for anyone interested in ‘local’, ‘sustainable’, ‘organic’ or
‘slow’ food. These four production systems represent just some of
the many faces of what has recently become known as the ‘alterna-
tive’ food sector – and it’s a thriving industry.
It’s also a diverse industry, and it is this diversity of theory and
practice that this book deals with so well. At the heart of this edited
book is the question of ‘what is alternative’? With so many disparate
approaches to food production, consumption and marketing – from
‘free-range’ to ‘organic’ and everything in between – how can we
possibly hope to identify a common version of ‘alternative’ that is
acceptable to everyone?
The answer the book gives is, of course, that we can’t, because
‘alternative’ food – just like its antithesis, ‘conventional’ food – is
a relational concept, rather than a discrete and separate sector
that exists in isolation from other parts of the food economy. To
quote the editors on this point: ‘‘Categorising spaces of economic
activity as part of either ‘alternative’ or ‘conventional’ systems of
supply is too simplistic and arbitrary. Rather, we would argue that
food provision in general is best understood in terms of the construc-
tion of complex, changing and multiple sets of relationships. The