An Arctic agricultural frontier is opening as climate change threatens growing conditions in established zones of crop commodity production. Projections of northward shifts of viable agricultural land unleash fantastical interest in the improbable reality of "farming the tundra." Expansion of Arctic agriculture has long figured in Alaska's history, including drawing settlers to the "Last Frontier," where farmers face challenges of extreme conditions, weak infrastructure, and fragile markets. This article, based on joint 2019 fieldwork and ongoing ethnography of landscape change and comparative commodity frontiers by the authors, tracks this imaginative frontier to examine how and why diverse Alaskan agriculturalists seize upon emerging conditions of climate change. We propose "climate opportunism" to frame an understanding of how agriculturalists may gain from changing growing conditions, drawing attention to the values in and beyond monetary gain generated in the social space of frontier imagination and grounded projects of livability in the Arctic. Across differently situated cultivators (a multigenerational immigrant family farm, an Inupiaq Arctic agriculture project, an urban hydroponics enterprise), we find that the changing landscape intensifies investment in embedded local values, while opportunism practiced at various scales both underscores and potentially obscures inequalities in resource distribution and alternatives to apocalyptic narratives of change.
Pesticides and toxicity are constitutive features of modernization in Africa, despite ongoing portrayals of the continent as “too poor to pollute.” This article examines social science scholarship on agricultural pesticide expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We recount the rise of agrochemical usage in colonial projects that placed African smallholder farmers at the forefront of toxic vulnerability. We then outline prevalent literature on “knowledge deficits” and unsafe farmer practices as approaches that can downplay deeper structures. Missing in this literature, we argue, are the embodied and sensory experiences of African farmers as they become pesticide users, even amid an awareness of toxicity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Mozambique and Burkina Faso, we explore how the “toxic sensorium” of using agrochemicals intersects with farmers’ projects of modern aspiration. Th is approach can help elucidate why and how differently situated farmers live with pesticides, thereby expanding existing literature on structural violence and knowledge gaps.
In an era in which conventional agriculture has come under question for its environmental and social costs, regenerative agriculture suggests that land management practices can be organized around farming and grazing practices that regenerate interdependent ecological and community processes for generations to come. However, little is known about the geographies of ‘regenerative’ and ‘conventional’ agricultural lands—what defines them, where they are, and the extent to which actual agricultural lands interweave both or are characterizable by neither. In the context of the Midwest of the United States, we develop and map an index quantifying the degrees to which the agricultural lands of counties could be said to be regenerative, conventional, or both. We complement these results by using a clustering method to partition the land into distinct agricultural regions. Both approaches rely on a set of variables characterizing land we developed through an iterative dialogue across difference among our authors, who have a range of relevant backgrounds. We map, analyze, and synthesize our results by considering local contexts beyond our variables, comparing and contrasting the resulting perspectives on the geographies of midwestern agricultural lands. Our results portray agricultural lands of considerable diversity within and between states, as well as ecological and physiographic regions. Understanding the general patterns and detailed empirical geographies that emerge suggests spatial relationships that can inform peer-to-peer exchanges among farmers, agricultural extension, civil society, and policy formation.
Today, many zones of cultivation for plants like coca, khat, kratom, and cannabis are thriving, in some cases despite protracted, violent, and lethal attempts at containment through state re-territorialization -- and often, state terror. These plants straddle the borders of legality in many places where they are grown, participating in the cultivation of agriculture frontiers characterized by uncertain and unpredictable openings and closings, and changing distributions of harms among plants and human communities. Scholars and activists question the ideology and efficacy of transnational and state programs to eradicate crops and criminalize farmers, bringing new attention to these commodities and the impacts of their contested legal status. There is also a rising appreciation of indigenous and traditional cultivation and of the importance of decolonizing uses of plants, against backdrops of botanical speculation, piracy, colonization, and trauma. Finally, these illicit agricultural frontiers stand to be dramatically reconfigured by changes potential to drug law regimes. For this essay, we invited three scholars to comment on the frontiers of coca, khat, and kratom where they have long been embedded in research: Asmin Fransiska (hereafter AF) in Indonesia, Lisa Gezon (hereafter LG) in Madagascar, and Kristina Lyon (hereafter KL) in Colombia. We, the authors, edited these comments, and put them into a conversation exploring illicit crop frontiers today, and what is shared and distinct among these frontiers, the frictions and countermovements within them, and their actual or potential connections to broader agrarian movements. As we relay the commentaries, we offer a few contours of what (il)licit crops frontiers bring to our understanding of uneven and unequal histories of capitalism and the unending drive for crop commodities in marginal landscapes. We offer a brief typology of these frontiers to punctuate the conversation, and some directions for ongoing study.
Agricultural growth corridors (AGCs) have begun proliferating across the actual and policy landscapes of southeastern Africa. Cast as an emerging megaproject strategy, AGCs combine the construction of large-scale logistics (i.e., roads, railways, ports) with attracting investment in commercial agribusiness and smallholder farming. While scholars have long attended to spatial development schemes in the Global South, literature on the rising AGCs of Africa’s eastern seaboard has only recently shifted from anticipatory to empirical studies as policy implementation reaches full force. The article reflects on a new crop of studies that confront the problem of tracing policy imaginaries to the people, places, practices, and ecologies shaped by AGC schemes. In contrast to scholarship that accepts corridors as given entities, we explore directions for research that interrogate the grounded yet provisional becoming of these megaprojects. At such sites, the return of high modernist development logics encapsulated by the corridor concept may be questioned.
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