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The purpose of this paper is to provide a contemporary perspective on post land reform Zimbabwe with special focus on the youth. It uses the social reproduction conceptual framework to show that two decades after land reform, there are generational questions which are now arising in the new resettlement areas which need deeper, empirical and more nuanced analysis to comprehend. In a context where some countries in Southern Africa are grappling with the best ways of dealing with their land questions, it shows that from a youth perspective, the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) has important lessons.

The study was largely qualitative and grounded in an interpretive research paradigm. It employed various data gathering instruments and solicited for responses from 151 young people as well as 11 key informants. The study used the social reproduction perspective as a conceptual and evaluative tool to ascertain the outcomes of the FTLRP from a social reproduction perspective with special focus on young people.

The study showed that there are some young people in the resettlement areas who blame the land reform programme for the challenging socio-economic situation which they are facing. It also shows that for the youth, the FTLRP has had multi-dimensional impact; while some are complaining, others have managed to use their agency to access natural resources and land, which has seen them “accumulating from below”. For some young people, land reform has positively transformed their lives, while others feel that it has limited their opportunities.

The paper provides new and contemporary insights on post land reform Zimbabwe. This is an area which is increasingly gaining traction in scholarship on the FTLRP. In addition, the paper provides a unique perspective of looking at the issue of the youth from a social reproduction perspective; this is a unique academic contribution. Lastly, the paper is useful insofar as it transcends the debates on the FTLRP to proffer a unique analysis on the social reproduction dimensions of the FTLRP.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of microcredit and agronomic technology on farm households’ prosperity, and to determine important factors affecting farmers’ access to microcredit and technology adoption in Indonesian intensive farming.

The focus of the study was farmers engaging with chili-based agribusiness in rural areas. Data for this study were compiled from a survey that interviewed 250 farm households. Samples of the study were randomly selected from chili farming community in three regions of Java during 2013–2014. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Microcredit provided positive direct and indirect impacts on household prosperity. Microcredit indirectly impacted the well-being through the mediation of technology adoption. Farmers’ characteristics and agribusiness environment determined farmers’ decision to access microcredit and adopt advanced technology. Microcredit and technology have enhanced farmers’ well-being through pathways that enabled farmers to develop farming scale.

The government should offer more alternatives to advanced technology and flexible procedures of access to credit at the same time to ensure sustained pathways of rural economic growth in Indonesia.

This paper applied a SEM to a proposition of simultaneous causal interrelations among microcredit, technology and farmers’ prosperity.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new gender- and class-sensitive framework for research on rural women entrepreneurship by focusing on the women’s agricultural cooperatives in Turkey. Although these cooperatives have been promoted as ideal bottom-to-top organizations to integrate women into economy as entrepreneurs, there has been significant decline in their numbers. This paper tackles with this contradictory situation and intends to offer an alternative research framework on the viability of the women’s agricultural cooperatives in Turkey.

The paper is built on a critical assessment of the existing literature. It argues that a framework that brings together macro-, meso- and micro-factors will provide a springboard to unfold the gendered processes integral to rural female entrepreneurship in Turkey. Drawing on intersectional theory, the multilayered factors which operate to rural women’s (dis)advantages through the cooperatives are unfolded as policymaking, policy implementation and everyday experiences.

For policymakers and implementers, it points out the need for a holistic and integrated understanding of rural female entrepreneurship and for re-formulation of policies at the state level. For rural women, it draws attention to the measures required to be taken at the cooperative level to overcome inequalities.

This paper is original in making explicit social, political and economic embeddedness of female entrepreneurship in rural Turkey.

The article offers a study of the central food marketplace in Santiago, Dominican Republic. The purpose of the study is to explore how changes in the marketplace reflect transformation of urban food systems resulting from neoliberal restructuring during the final decades of the twentieth century.

Drawing on long-term qualitative research conducted during the late 1990s and early 2000s, including ethnographic and survey methods, the article illustrates how central urban marketplaces offer a window into transitions in both international and domestic food economies.

Research findings illustrate that the marketplace in Santiago operated in a state of economic hybridity, intermixing long established regionally produced domestic crops such as yuca, plantains and pigeon peas deeply rooted in Dominican agrarian culture with products dervived from liberalization of the Dominican economy such as imported rice, beans and eventually numerous Dominican food staples.

The study is limited by the scope of analysis which is one urban marketplace. More sites for researching marketplaces could be added for more comparative analysis.

The research findings have implications for how governments define social and economic policy that impacts domestic food producers and intermediary brokers that aggregate and debulk food to feed cities.

The scholarship raises questions about how the social and economic organization of urban marketplaces in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere reflect historical transitions in local, national and global economies.

According to the published report by the National Sample Survey 2014 the data says that the incidence of indebtedness among households in the rural areas of Maharashtra, India, is almost twice that of other rural places in India. Around 64 percent of rural households are indebted in Maharashtra as against 31 percent other households in India. The purpose of this paper is to examine which source of credit is creating more distress among the farmers. Further the researchers also wanted to find out the reasons why the farmers choose private moneylender over the formal financial institutions.

To achieve the objective, the authors used the mixed method methodology. The qualitative study was done using the ethnography approach .In depth interviews were conducted and coded accordingly to find out the themes. The interviews conducted were semi structured and had open ended questions in it, followed by a structured questionnaire. Different statistical tests were also applied on the responses obtained from the questionnaire to check the reliability and validity of the interviews. This methodology gave a robustness to the findings of the study.

The results show that sources of loan play a major role in causing farmer distress in Maharashtra. The findings also show major reasons like grapevine bureaucracy, lengthy documentation, etc. as the major reasons for choosing private lenders over the formal financial institutions. The most interesting finding of the study was a phenomena observed during the field study. The borrowers first borrow from financial institutions for their credit needs, when they fail to repay the debt borrowed they again borrow money from the private money lenders and with this borrowed money they try repaying a part of the old existing loan in order to make themselves eligible for the next loan cycle.

The limitation of the study is that due to time constraint only two districts with high number of farmer suicide could be visited. Given more time and fund a comparative study can be done among different states of India.

This study will help the policy makers in identifying the real cause of farmer distress. The motive behind the policies made by the government is very noble but the implementation of these policies is inadequate and without a strong research base. The paper will be able to highlight how much the state intervention is required at multiple levels in order to ensure that the benefits reaches to those who deserve it.

It is imperative that we have yet not realized the gravity of the situation where people belonging from a community which is so essential to the economy are killing themselves because of lack of money. This is not just about the fact that the people who give us food are unable to access food themselves.

The paper contains significant information with regard to indebtedness. It focuses on the issue troubling the authorities the most. It provides the ground realities of the incidence of indebtedness in Maharashtra, one of the most distressed states of India. Lot of studies have been done in the past but very few studies have used mixed methodology to study this incidence of debt among the farmers of Maharashtra. This study also unveils a new phenomena of borrowing happening among the farmers of Maharashtra.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the role of culture in general, and social distance in particular, in influencing the choice and efficiency of various contractual modes in developing country agriculture. It aims to focus on sharecropping, but the model of social distance can be applied to any contract, mainly those in close‐knit village societies.

Principal components analysis (PCA) is used in the study to develop a social distance index for all sharecroppers, which is included as an independent variable in land productivity ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions.

Findings indicate social distance is a key determinant in sharecropping efficiency for marginal tenant farmers in rural Nepal. Specifically, social distance is found to be a significant factor in explaining land productivity differentials between owned land and sharecropped land.

Future research hopes to see whether social distance is also a significant factor in the efficiency and choice of bonded labor contracts. It intends to use simple OLS regressions for sharecroppers and bonded laborers separately in which: input use and land productivity are separate dependent variables, and the various factors or proxies of social distance are independent variables to test for their particular impact; each type of contract is the dependent variable to see the extent to which social distance affects the choice of tenancy; and social distance is the dependent variable so one can see the specific impact of different proxies. Given the small sample (although representative), the strong results in this paper are limited.

From a policy standpoint, the results suggest that a relatively egalitarian agrarian structure, insofar as it results in lower social distances among parties to land and labor contracts, would have a positive impact on productivity. Therefore, the object of agrarian reforms should not be to alter or constrain the form of contracts (for example by banning sharecropping) but rather to improve the social relations among contracting parties.

This paper is original and provides value in three ways: a conceptually and theoretically innovative model that explains sharecropping efficiency independent of standard explanations of market imperfections, transaction costs, and risk; in developing a new measure of social distance that allows the data to determine the weights of the independent variables in constructing social distance; and to see the need to more importantly study the changing social relations on which contracts are based and are often only one element of.

Marxism‐Leninism has played an instrumental role in the achievement and consolidation of a hitherto unparalleled concentration of power by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The key aspects of this ideology are: (1) the concept of a Vanguard Party led by professional revolutionaries which possesses the true Marxist class consciousness unattainable by the workers themselves; and (2) Lenin′s distinction between strategy and tactics. While the ultimate strategic goal is the worldwide overthrow of capitalism, the tactical steps by which this goal is to be achieved must continuously be adapted to the prevailing requirements of time, place and circumstances. There is no indication, so far, that perestroika represents the abandonment of the strategic goal of world revolution; rather, it is one more tactical response to the newest and most severe Soviet crisis. Like past “reforms”, it is aimed at saving the power of the Communist Party and the new class it has created.

The agricultural sector has undergone extensive changes in the 20-30 years since the peak academic debate on family farming. Still today, the understanding and concept of family farming has political implications in the processes of rural and agricultural policy. The purpose of this paper is to study the development of agrarian structure by analysing the gendered and family relations of family farming.

This paper examines the concept of the family farm and its utilisation and diversity in the current Swedish agricultural sector from a gender perspective, using empirical data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network. The paper operationalises a situated agrarian typology and examines the gendered position and temporalities of family farms in Sweden, based on patterns of labour use.

A workable, fruitful typology of the agrarian structure suitable for future comparative studies is revealed. It also demonstrates the gendered time in the farm labour process, the different temporalities involved and their interconnection between gender, family and various spheres. The spatial and geographical implications, as well as the increased dependence on family and hired labour in different farm types, are emphasised.

The focus of this study contributes to the understanding of spatial-temporal relations of family farm business and organisation in general and in Sweden particularly. It also provides empirical basis for developing and gender mainstreaming rural and agricultural policies.

State policies have played a significant role in shaping the structure of agrarian economy in both advanced and under‐developed capitalist societies.(1) The influence of the state over the rural sector is not simply confined to its agricultural policies but covers a large array of policies and actions that may have direct as well as indirect effects on the rural population. This paper deals with the factors that influence agricultural policies of the state in the specific case of state policies towards Oriental tobacco production in Turkey.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants that determine the investment behaviour of rural farmers. This study further examines the moderation effect of socio traits in the association between investment behaviour and its determined factors.

This study used a cross-sectional research design to gather information. The information for this research survey was gathered using a structured questionnaire from 400 individual investors in the rural area of Punjab, who participated in the study. It has been decided to use the Cronbach’s alpha test to determine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. To evaluate the hypothesis, structural equation modelling has been used in the research process.

The results of this study reveal that attitude, financial risk inclination, financial planning and investment intention determine the investment behaviour of the rural people of Punjab. The results for the interaction effect of socio traits with investment intention, financial risk propensity and investment attitude were found statistically significant amongst rural people. The results of the moderation effect stated that interaction between the attitude and investment intention and financial risk propensity and investment intention is significantly influenced by age of respondents. The results further reveal that marital status of rural people affect the interaction between attitude and investment intention and financial risk propensity and investment intention. Nothing about education seems to be a moderating influence on any of the relationships studied.

The authors contribute to the literature in two aspects. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study of its kind that focuses on the investment behaviour of farmers. Secondly, by looking at the farmer’s investing behaviour, the moderation effect of demographic variables is also studied which set this study apart from another existing scholarly research. This study contributes to the growing literature on investment behaviour of farmers in developing and developed markets.