Gaurav Bansal (CASAS’ member) and Mark Vicol have published a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Contract Farming and Development.

Abstract: This chapter examines how rural-agrarian social movements in the Global South have responded to the growing prevalence of contract farming (CF) arrangements. While the dominant understanding is that social movements tend to see CF unfavorably, this chapter takes a closer look at these movements to provide a more nuanced perspective. It first examines how the transnational food sovereignty movement, particularly La Via Campesina (LVC), presents a strong political critique of CF, built around a notion of small farmer autonomy. It then examines the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest Movement as an illuminating case study to reveal the complex and contradictory approaches to CF within a social movement. This chapter outlines four important ways in which the movement’s relationship to CF was ambiguous: (i) ideological tensions and conflicts within the movement regarding CF, (ii) contradictions within different classes of farmers in their opposition to the CF law, (iii) the movement’s limited ability or unwillingness to tackle caste-based oppression and exploitation of Dalit agricultural workers and other oppressed groups and, lastly, (iv) the movement’s inability to take an anti-capitalist stance, restricting itself to a strategic negotiation over the terms of market integration and state protection within an already-capitalist agricultural framework.

Read the chapter here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003513674-33/contract-farming-social-movements-gaurav-bansal-mark-vicol

CASAS

The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.