Against Single Stories of ‘Left Behind’ and ‘Triple Win’: On Agricultural Care Chains and the Permanent Subsistence Crisis

Abstract

The single story of Moldova as the “country without parents” is unsettling. While it is true that villages in Moldova, as in other post-Soviet regions and global peripheries, are affected by intensive outmigration and labor mobility, the image is incomplete. In this article, I propose a different telling of this story: one that looks at and challenges the structural power relations visible in people’s lives in rural Moldova. It is a telling that points to the overall subsistence crisis in Europe and the relationship between neocolonial entanglements and agricultural care chains. As such, this article aims to bring together reflections on labor migration, well-being in rural areas and the global care economy while seeking to decolonize subsistence production through the abolition of the international division of (re)productive labor.

Labor Recruitment and Coloniality in the Agricultural Sector: On Plantation Archives, Underclassing, and Postcolonial Masculinities in Switzerland

“…As Swiss farmers are challenged to produce food amid a capitalist logic of competing national economies and liberalized markets, their demanding conditions are passed on to temporarily employed workers. This entails outsourcing the costs of (re)production of the workers to themselves and to their communities (Bolokan, 2021). The agri cultural sector is, therefore, not just subsidized by direct payments, but also heavily relies on both the unpaid (re)productive labor of communities of workers in global peripheries and nuclear family members, especially farmers' wives.…”