The Political Economy of Chronic Poverty

Without the blanket of the land: agrarian change and biopolitics in post–Apartheid South Africa

“…For now it is enough to say that these traditions, along with recent innovations in Global Value Chain (GVC) and Global Production Network (GPN) theory, have critiqued policy discourses that naïvely link the prospects for equitable social change in South Africa's rural areas to prescriptions for inclusion in capitalist growth, access to markets and global financial integration (Mbeki 2003;CDE 2006;Prahalad 2006;De Soto 2010). Inter alia, a Marxist account of South Africa's 'stalled agrarian transition' shows how capitalist development has led to the adverse incorporation of the fragmented classes of labour, locking them into dependence on the capitalist economy while marginalising them as workers, farmers, producers and traders (Murray 2002;Bracking 2003;Du Toit 2004;Bernstein 2006, Oya 2009Du Toit and Neves 2007;Li 2009).…”

Integrating Poverty and Environmental Concerns into Value‐Chain Analysis: A Conceptual Framework

“…Furthermore, poverty should be analysed in terms not only of exclusion (from value chains, for example) but also of the (pre-)conditions and terms of participation (Murray, 2002;Bracking, 2003;du Toit, 2004a and b;Hickey and du Toit, 2007). People may be thoroughly incorporated in a particular value chain, but highly marginalised or excluded in another sense: African migrant workers, for example, picking fruit in the Western Cape region of South Africa are highly integrated in global agro-food value chains, but thoroughly marginalised within local patron-client relationships.…”

The Dynamics of Adverse Incorporation in Global Production Networks: Poverty, Vulnerability and 'Slave Labour' in Brazil

“…The empirical record demonstrated clearly that inclusion through employment was not uniformly and always associated with a beneficial process of what might be called "social upgrading" for workers, and indeed was at least as often associated with exploitative conditions of work, and a perpetuation of poverty and disadvantage. The notion of "adverse incorporation" was therefore developed in order to conceptualise poverty not (only) as a condition of socio-economic exclusion, but as shaped by the terms on which different social groups are included and incorporated into global economic activity (Wood, 2000(Wood, , 2003Murray, 2001;Bracking, 2003;Hickey and du Toit, 2007;Ponte, 2008). It refers to those situations in which people have few or no prospects for accumulation through work or employment nor, consequently, for the alleviation of their chronic poverty and vulnerability.…”