Deagrarianisation and depeasantisation is seen across the Global North and South, stimulated by various drivers and with different consequences for farmers and societies. A combination of ecological, political and economic drivers has been found to stimulate deagrarianisation: changing urban-rural linkages, new risks associated with climate change, reductions in the flow of remittances, lack of (or inappropriate) government support, the erosion of collective work parties, changes in livestock ownership and herding practices, soil fertility loss, lack of interest in farming from the younger generation. Global trends of the upscaling of farming, concentration of the seed sector, land grabbing, and the supermarketisation of our food systems are other important drivers with impact on deagrarianisation. Importantly, abandonment of farming does not necessarily happen because better opportunities arise, nor necessarily because farming is not valued as important by those abandoning it.
This session is one in a pair, presenting empirical examples from across the Global South and North to discuss how we might understand trends variously discussed as deagrarianisation and depeasantisation. We will discuss how and why trends differ across contexts, and what lessons we might learn from cross-context comparison. We aim at forging a better understanding of the reasons behind and the effects of deagrarianisation across contexts, as well as how smallholder agriculture might be revitalized and food security and sovereignty supported.

UNDERSTANDING DEAGRARIANISATION AS A GLOCAL PROCESS: DIVERSE DRIVERS, PROCESSES AND CONSEQUENCES IN RURAL EASTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA
Deagrarianisation and underlying pressures against small-scale farming are globally present, and yet local examples show that the process is not uniform across contexts. Diverse drivers include increasing environmental challenges, social change and a general struggle of small-scale farming to compete with the economies of scale. While deagrariansiation in some places is cushioned by rural people finding other livelihood opportunities, perhaps linking up to the globalized economy, this process in other contexts may lead to deepened poverty as people are “adversely incorporated” into markets. This paper presents a case of two rural South African villages, surveyed in 2002 and 2016. While smallholder field agriculture on plots of 0,5 – 3 ha was abandoned completely in this time, kitchen gardening continued being popular, but often changed focus to become more specialized and less subsistence-driven. Drivers and consequences of deagrarianisation and agricultural reorientation also differed between households, showing the importance of understanding specifically what kind of processes we are observing. This paper makes a case for understanding deagrarianisation as a ‘glocal’ process – where glocal is taken to mean that diverse and locally specific processes can amount to global-scale trends, although every locality may experience its own unique process that is not necessarily resembling or conforming to another locality’s process. A glocal understanding of deagrarianisation moves us away from blanket statements about problems and solutions towards more nuanced understandings anchored in local realities, while not losing sight of the global aspect of this trend.

Individual Presentation Submission

Zimbabwe's Fast-Track Land Reform Programme has given rise, since its inception at the dawn of the 21st-century, to a new agrarian political ecology. On the one hand, this new landscape is characterised by emergent class formations and rapid expansion of small-scale commercial agriculture, occurring against a background of de-industrialisation undermining the viability of urban livelihoods. On the other hand, Zimbabwe's climate has already changed dramatically in recent decades, and in ways which highlight the vulnerability and precarity of much – though by no means all – small-scale commercialisation efforts. These trends are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the uptake of tobacco by almost 125,000 small-scale farmers, a crop which prior to land reform was the preserve of perhaps 1500 mostly white, large-scale farmers in 1980.

This picture forms a contrast with the deagrarianisation that has been underway for decades in nearby countries like Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa, and raises important questions. To what extent do these dynamics constitute an instance of 're-agrarianisation', and how is this new agrarian political ecology refashioning rural-urban relations, lives and livelihoods in Zimbabwe? There is a burgeoning literature on 21st-century agrarian change in Zimbabwe, but as yet very little consideration given to these dimensions. This presentation will take on these questions and set out a future research agenda in this area.