Critical Agrarian Studies: An Introduction A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Trent University Peterborough, Canada https://sites.google.com/site/aharoonakramlodhi/ Freie Universität Berlin GLOCON Workshop on Critical Agrarian Studies 12 May 2017

Critical Agrarian Studies key point of departure: the importance of analyzing agrarian social classes and the political-economic forces that call them into existence or make them disappear, and that facilitate or impede their reproduction

This is the terrain of the agrarian question: whether, and if so, how, the transformation of rural society is taking place in ways that are socially, economically and ecologically detrimental to female and male small-scale farmers

1. production * the distribution of productive assets * technical change * labour commodification 2. accumulation 3. politics

1. who owns what? 2. who does what? 3. who gets what? 4. what do they do with it? This is embedded within the food regime, which is the international relations of food production and consumption that can be directly linked to forms of accumulation

The corporate food regime has produced four dynamic processes: 1. the global crisis of the peasant economy, processes of de- and re-agrarianization, and the rise of precarious and feminized waged labour in the countryside 2. land concentration, land grabbing and the rise of agro- industrial capital 3. the financialization of food and agriculture 4. the undermining of the biophysical foundations of agriculture

5 key issues: 1. rural poverty and inequality

2. pro-poor gender-responsive redistributive agrarian reform 3. regulating politically-constructed markets 4. further increasing agricultural productivity through agroecology

Agroecology: 1. a system of farm practice and management that is based on ecological inputs and processes, and which provides ecosystem services 2. a discipline 3. a social movement

5. With agroecology being the basis of sustainable agriculture, it becomes possible to construct a food system based on food sovereignty