Category Archives: Rural Development

Standing in Solidarity with Palestinian Farmers in the Occupied West Bank

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This blog was written by Eleni, a student of Wageningen University who traveled to Palestine at the end of last year to support the olive harvest. In this blog, she reflects on her experiences and shares her thoughts on the responsibility of Wageningen University.

While media attention had been focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, media coverage has been minimal in covering increased Israeli military incursions and settler violence in the West Bank, which is home to nearly three million Palestinians. Many of them are being forcibly displaced either due to settler violence attacks or the demolition of their homes by Israeli military forces as part of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing plan of the West Bank.

With more than 500,000 Israelis illegally (under international law) living within the West Bank in settlements and outposts, Israeli settlers are encouraged to destroy Palestinian property, olive groves, and kill animals and civilians. This systematic violence is backed by the Israeli government and often occurs under military protection. I experienced a fragment of this violence during my stay in Palestine.

At the end of October 2025, I visited the West Bank together with my friend Claire. We volunteered at the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Palestinian agricultural organization affiliated with numerous international networks, among them the ‘La Via Campesina’ network. As volunteers, we joined UAWC’s annual olive harvest campaign called “BAQA” (بَقاء), meaning ‘to remain’ in Arabic—expressing steadfastness, rootedness, and resistance against the occupation and colonizer’s violence.

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New article co-published with RSO thesis student on the politics of food loss in Indonesian value chains

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!!New publication based on the RSO thesis of Astrid Olaerts!!

Food loss in horticultural values chains is a key challenge for regional development in Global South. Yet, existing literature tends to focus on the instrumental factors behind food loss, posing technical interventions. In this new article published in Australian Geographer, we argue that we need to understand food loss through a socio-political lens. Applying such a lens to a case study of horticulture values chains in Lembang, Indonesia, the article argues that food loss is shaped by the power dynamics between different actors in interconnected market channels, including the unfair quality standards and trading practices imposed by powerful firms like supermarkets. Producers and other less powerful actors demonstrate resilience in navigating these power imbalances, however they also struggle to mitigate food loss. The article suggests several strategies that could be adopted to empower marginalised actors and reduce and prevent food loss.

You can find the article here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049182.2025.2597081

Congratulations to Astrid for the publication of this important work!

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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Smallholder farming in Western Bahia, Brazil

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Álvaro Schwartz Micheletti

In my MSc thesis, I studied smallholder farming in Western Bahia, a region marked by the expansion of intensive soy production in the Brazilian Northeast. As a part of the area known as MATOPIBA (standing for the parts of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia covered by the cerrado savannah), Western Bahia has been a crucial space for Brazilian agribusiness development since the 1980s, as it offered abundant land with unclear land titling and high agronomic potential.

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Decolonization Agriculture – New Article in Third World Quarterly

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This article, authored by Necmettin Türk from Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities at the University of Hamburg and Joost Jongerden from the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, discusses agriculture in the context of colonization and the debates it has sparked. The authors examine the colonial homogenizing policies of the Syrian Ba’ath regime and the subsequent decolonization processes that led to the emergence of Rojava as a pluriverse.

The Ba’ath regime, in power since 1963, implemented nation-state colonialism in the predominantly Kurdish region, using agricultural modernization as a tool for its colonization efforts. This modernization bolstered the central state, perpetuated the underdevelopment of the region as a periphery, and asserted control through the settlement and land distribution to Arab families loyal to the regime. Following the regime’s collapse in Rojava in 2012, the communities that comprise the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) dismantled the colonial agricultural system. They developed a decentralized governance and agrarian development approach, referred to here as the decolonization of agriculture.

Based on interviews and fieldwork in the region, the article explores the interplay between agricultural development and colonial politics, as well as the critical role of agriculture in the broader struggle for decolonization. The authors conclude that in the anti-colonial struggle, people and the rhizomatic governance structures they develop challenge colonial submission to the central state, exploring life beyond the nation-state, which is crucial for a decolonial shift.

The article is published open access under this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2024.2374521?src=exp-la