Author Archives: Joost Jongerden

The harm supply chain: food, agriculture and colonialism in Kurdistan[1]

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Joost Jongerden

Introduction
Food is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about politics. Yet the political does not always present itself explicitly as political (Day 2022). This is certainly the case for food. While food is essential for the reproduction of biological life and an important cultural and economic artefact, various authors have shown it is political too. Single food products, such as sugar (Mintz 1985), palm oil (Csevár and Rugarli 2025) and soy (Hiraga 2025), have been shown to be inseparable from the histories of capitalism and colonialism. Their examples illustrate how food is entangled with broader systems of power, exploitation, and domination. Similarly, in the development of a food supply chain in Kurdistan, we see that food can both foster life and community, and foil it, serving as a vehicle for the deliberate destruction of political and socio-economic existence.        

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Agricultural Innovation and Social Sustainability: Gender, Social Reproduction and Labour

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This PhD thesis by Daun Cheong explores why social progress towards gender equality in agrarian societies remains slow by analysing policies, academic research, and empirical evidence of farmers’ lived experiences and their interrelationships, paying particular attention to the relationship between agricultural innovation and gendered agrarian labour.

It examines the impacts of innovation that extend beyond the technical and material, investigating the reconstruction and renegotiation of gender and labour dynamics, which ultimately shape the lived experiences of subsistence farmers. By employing post-structuralist feminist approaches, including feminist critical discourse analysis, social reproduction, and capabilities framed as relational autonomy, the thesis demonstrates the gender discourses produced by policies and research, the new subjectivities they construct and frame, and the processes through which they shape reality. Empirically, the research adopted a mixed method approach including micro-focus group discussions, surveys, key informant interviews, and systematic document reviews focusing on women subsistence farmers in Nepal’s Terai region.

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NRC: Drie zij-instromers begonnen een duurzame boerderij: ‘We willen bijdragen aan de voedselproductie én gemeenschapszin’

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De NRC publiceerde op 1 september een achtergrondartikel over de Biesterhof, een boerderij die mede is opgericht door RSO-medewerker Howard Koster, samen met Claudi Rudorf en Eline Wilememaker. Met z’n drieën startten zij een regeneratief landbouwbedrijf dat gezonde voeding wil verbouwen, de bodem wil verbeteren, de biodiversiteit wil bevorderen en een gemeenschap wil opbouwen. “Er zijn momenten dat ik de natuur vervloek.”

Lees het volledige artikel hier: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/09/01/drie-zij-instromers-begonnen-een-duurzame-boerderij-we-willen-bijdragen-aan-de-voedselproductie-biodiversiteit-en-gemeenschapszin-a4904642

Best paper award Jan Douwe van der Ploeg: Rural studies: A new paradigm that integrates previously separated disciplines

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The International Scientific Committee of the REA – Italian Review of Agricultural Economics has awarded the REA Best Paper Award 2024 to Jan Douwe van der Ploeg for his article “Rural Studies: A New Paradigm that Integrates Previously Separated Disciplines”, published in Volume 79 (2024). In this article, Van der Ploeg argues that in reaction to a neo-classical approach, neo-institutional economics (NIE) and rural sociology (RS) equips rural studies with powerful tools to identify and analyse the institutions shaping farming communities.

The abstract of the article writes: “Rural studies are the theoretically informed and empirically grounded integration of disciplines that, until recently, were widely separated. This separation came with different grammars, mutually contrasting problem definitions and different methodological instruments that together resulted in a scattered understanding of countryside, farming, and the processing and distribution of food. The article discusses the main features of rural studies and especially explores the theoretical, institutional and historical backgrounds of these features. It argues that the specificity of agriculture strongly impacts its study and theoretical representation – as much as the resulting theories contribute to shaping the unfolding of agricultural activities over time.”

The full article is available here: https://edepot.wur.nl/687357

Field Notes: On the way

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Today, I’m on my way with a friend to visit an agroecological farm started a few years ago by a group of purged academics—scholars dismissed from their university positions during Turkey’s 2016 political crackdown. Once part of the local university, they turned to cultivating a few acres of land just outside the city. The farm still survives, though not without struggle.

As we bumped along the road toward the fields, our conversation drifted across dozens of topics—including the use of pesticides. Then suddenly, my friend turned to me and asked, “Have you heard of the ‘Black Wounds’—Birîna Reş?”

I hadn’t.

It was the early years of the Cold War. Turkey had been included in the U.S. Marshall Aid plan—not for post-war reconstruction, but for building a strategic alignment near the border with the Soviet Union. Alongside shipments of powdered milk and food came military bases. And toward the end of the 1950s, a shipment of wheat seeds treated with pesticide arrived in Turkey. The government distributed these seeds for free to landowners affiliated with the ruling party. But instead of planting them, many landowners sold the wheat cheaply on the open market. Easy money.

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