Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    The agrarian transition in the Mekong Region: pathways towards sustainable land systems
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Ehrensperger A; Nanhthavong V; Beban A; Gironde C; Diepart J-C; Scurrah N; Nguyen A-T; Cole R; Hett C; Ingalls M
    The agrarian transition, with its rapid growth in land-based investments, has radically altered agrarian and forest landscapes across the Mekong Region. These processes were enabled and accelerated by choices of actors in the public and private sectors with the aim of alleviating poverty and boosting socioeconomic development. We examine to what extent these goals were achieved and for whom, with a focus on poverty alleviation, gender equality, and forest conservation. Our descriptive assessment shows that the sustainability outcomes of the agrarian transition offer a highly variegated picture that is often not reflected in national level statistics used for monitoring the distance to target towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. Based on our findings, we sketch pathways for a more sustainable agrarian transition in the region. These pathways are explored in greater detail in three framing papers of the special issue “Agrarian Change in the Mekong Region: Pathways towards Sustainable Land Systems’.
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    Surviving cassava: smallholder farmer strategies for coping with market volatility in Cambodia
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-03-15) Beban A; Gironde C
    Cassava has become a ‘must have’ crop for many Cambodian smallholders; yet, the market is volatile and yields are uneven. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Kampong Thom and Ratanakiri provinces, we analyse how farmers cope with volatility. We argue that multiple pathways have emerged: some farmers have ceased producing cassava; some have expanded production; while most farmers engage in ‘ambivalent repeasantisation’, striving to gain autonomy from market fluctuations through the survival work of everyday gendered labour, including investing family and community labour into cassava, shifting back to food crops, managing debt, and creating relationships with traders, while also imagining a life beyond cassava. Uneven fortunes with cassava contribute to land redistribution, deepening class, gender and ethnic divides. The case of smallholder cassava pathways in Cambodia shows us that agrarian transition is neither linear nor unidimensional, and dynamics of ‘depeasantisation’, ‘repeasantisation’, and ‘intensification’ through crop booms cannot be assumed a priori.