Abstract
When large-scale common land is taken from villagers by investors with little compensation, their labour unneeded, villagers’ livelihoods tend to be largely destroyed. This implies a tendency to focus on what has been taken from villagers during the land-based change, which has valid and has far-reaching social relevance. But as the rise of the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector in Guangxi shows, some villagers are capable of having their livelihoods maintained and even expanded when big investors come and acquire massive amounts of land. This seems to be an anomaly at a first glance, considering what has been taken from villagers, but these unexpected and positive livelihood changes can be explained when one closely examines the dynamic of what is taken and what has been left to villagers. During this ITP boom, although large-scale collectively owned forestland is taken by investors and few work opportunities are created to incorporate those affected, villagers’ control over farmland plots and their access to off-farm work opportunities remain (including the land system and labour dynamics). This paper highlights the importance of analysing “taken-left” dynamics to more fully capture diverse livelihood changes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1171-1184 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Agriculture and Human Values |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 6 Jan 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Acknowledgements:The final write-up work of this manuscript is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) grant to the RRUSHES-5 project (grant No. 834006). I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Writeshop-Workshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like to thank the investigated villagers for their patience and support. I am sincerely grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments that helped us sharpen our argument and improve the overall quality of the paper. I would like to thank Linda McPhee for the excellent copyediting of the text.
Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).
