Category Archives: Agriculture

Why EU Policymakers Should Not Rely on the Farmers’ Horizon Ipsos Report

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Kees Jansen*

The Ipsos market study “Farmers’ Horizon: One Year After Farmers’ Protests” (2025) aims to capture “the pulse of the farmers population and address the current situation” following a period of farmers’ protest in different EU countries. The study seeks to determine whether farmers perceive any change in their financial situation one year after the protests, whether they are satisfied with the measures adopted by the European Union (EU) and national authorities, and what further actions might be undertaken to support EU farmers in coping with ongoing challenges. After a careful initial reading of the report, I conclude that the study is flawed in several fundamental aspects. Although it gives the impression of scientific rigor, methodological robustness, and representativeness, each of these aspects is, in fact, problematic.

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Agriculture in Rojava and the Making of a Decolonial Future

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How a grassroots revolution in northern Syria is redefining democracy, ecology, and decolonization from the ground up. An blog-post/article by Joost Jongerden and Necmettin Türk

When the Syrian civil war fractured the authority of the central state, a new kind of revolution took root in the country’s north. In the Kurdish-majority regions known as Rojava, communities seized the opportunity not to build a new state, but to build a new society based on self-administration. Much of the existing scholarship on Rojava has focused on this network of self-organized communes and regions, particularly in relation to questions of recognition, namely the development of a governance model that is inclusive of various cultural, ethnic, and religious communities. Yet far less attention has been paid to the decolonization of Rojava’s agrarian economy—a transformation that is equally fundamental to the region’s broader project of liberation.

read more here: https://theamargi.com/posts/agriculture-in-rojava-and-the-making-of-a-decolonial-future

Constructing Ties: How Security Narratives Led to the Defunding of UAWC in Occupied Palestinian Territories

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The thesis “Unpacking the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Decision to Stop Funding UAWC” examines how security narratives led the Netherlands to end its funding in 2022 for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). For many years, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had supported this Palestinian NGO, which worked to improve the livelihoods of Palestinian farmers, particularly in Area C — the part of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli military control. The research into the reasons behind the decision to defund UAWC is based on documents obtained through the Dutch Transparency Act (Wet Open Overheid, or WOO), comprising more than 1,100 pages of written communications.

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Book review: Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado

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In 2018, I was researching the revitalization of agriculture in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The violence wrought by forced collectivization and urbanization under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime had left the agricultural sector in disarray since the 1980s. After winning de facto autonomy in 1991, the partyfamilies ruling Iraqi Kurdistan often spoke of the region’s fertile, water-rich land as a source of promise; in practice, the sector was largely neglected. In many seasons, farmers abandoned their produce to rot in the fields, unable to compete with cheap imports from Iran and Turkey flooding the local markets. Meanwhile, the ruling party-families showed little genuine interest in agricultural renewal. I vividly recall one meeting in 2018 when a senior official casually mentioned the possibility of making the land attractive for lease to investors interested in growing potatoes for export to markets in the Emirates. I was stunned. Only after reading Andrew Ofstehage’s Welcome to Soylandia did I begin to fully grasp the underlying logic: investors are drawn to farmland where they can grow their capital without forming long-term attachments to the land or the farmers who manage it.

Read more: https://authorservices.wiley.com/api/pdf/fullArticle/100356915

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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