This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global ...

This chapter focuses on the rural dimensions of the ‘two economies’ debate, and in particular on the question of what contribution land and agrarian reform can make to reducing inequality and addressing the structural nature of rural poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. It suggests that the problem needs to be conceptualised in terms of an ‘agrarian question of the dispossessed’, that can on...

Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970's, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral la...

By the end of the 19 and during the early 20 centuries, the majority of the Swedish population lived off the land. In 1870, 72 percent of the population were engaged in agriculture, and 82 percent of the population lived in the countryside. Of the farmers, the majority were smallholders, as 64 percent of all Swedish farms had between 2 and 20 hectares arable land. This structure did not change ...

This paper examines the empirical data relevant in the analysis of the agrarian transformation of England in the Middle Ages. It presents an empirical analysis of available data that investigates the role and extent of resource scarcity in 14th-century England. The analysis offers a way forward for economists and historians to reach a plausible consensus about the reality of what may be one of ...

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the political conditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualization of agrarian reform and its politics -which presents a near impossibility in typical political configurations -is too limiting. The traditional economic focus on intersection of landed rights, agricultur...