On Monday 4 December 2023 at 16.00 CET Maite Hernando Arrese will publicly defend her PhD thesis entitled ‘Let it flow: Navigating hydropower conflicts in southern Chile’. The defense will take place in the Omnia Auditorium and will also be broadcasted live (a link will appear in the events box, in the upper left corner of the screen). The full thesis can be read online or downloaded (usually from the first day after the PhD defense onwards) from the repository of Wageningen University PhD theses or by clicking on the DOI link.
What is a ‘dignified life’ for those people who migrate to South Spain to work in ‘the orchard of Europe’? How their working conditions are connected to their life quality? Does working in agriculture make people socially vulnerable?
Abstract This study analyses the dynamics of agency and social vulnerability of international migrant agricultural workers in intensive agriculture in Murcia (South-East Spain). It engages with the work of a group of scholars who analysed the emergence and reproduction of Murcia as an intensive agricultural enclave by taking an expanded vision of social reproduction, which includes a subjective and contextual dimension in the definition of what constitutes a ‘dignified life’. Based on a qualitative study of the life stories of foreign migrant agricultural workers and ex-workers in Murcia, two main arguments are developed. Firstly, the idea of migrant workers’ agency as intrinsically positive is evaluated as problematic. Secondly, agricultural labour conditions should be conceptualized as an independent social vulnerability driver. These findings contribute to the existing literature on migrant agricultural labour in Europe’s intensive agriculture by pointing at migrants’ exploitative and undesired labour market position rather than just at their suffered citizenship inequalities.
In this article published in Geoforum Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden discuss the politics of citizenship in Turkey – and how voices that represent “otherness” – Kurds, peasants, women – are supressed.
Insurgent movements rely on popular support using varying strategies to build supportive constituencies, including forms of rebel governance. The rebel governance literature explicitly limits its scope to insurgent cases with territorial control, excluding all groups that did not obtain territorial control, areas of weaker insurgent presence and early phases of mobilisation. This article focuses on Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) use of rebel governance (1977–1980) through municipal politics prior to the launch of its insurgency. The article makes two important contributions: firstly, it demonstrates the need to broaden the scope of the rebel governance literature to include phases where insurgent movements do not control territory. Secondly, it critiques the linearity of retrospective readings of insurgent trajectories that downplay the role of interactions and contingency in early mobilizational phases. It is based on original data including primary source documents and qualitative interviews with people involved in the PKK’s municipal politics between 1977 and 1980 in Batman and Hilvan, towns marked by conflicts among (agricultural) workers, villagers, and landlords.
‘Gesloten vanwege stikstof‘ is een nieuw boek van Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, emeritus hoogleraar Rural Sociologie, die zich grondig heeft verdiept in en verbonden met vernieuwingsprocessen in de landbouw en op het platteland, zowel in Nederland als internationaal, en uitgesproken is over waar het zijns inziens naar toe moet en waar het aan schort. Hij was onder meer lid van de Raad voor het Landelijke Gebied en adviseur van de Europese Commissie. Hij was ook nauw betrokken bij de eerste agrarische natuurverening in Nederland in de Noardlike Fryske Wâlden.
In dit nieuwe boek betoogt Jan Douwe van der Ploeg hoezeer het stikstofprobleem is uitgegroeid tot een megacrisis. En dat falend landbouwbeleid en Wageningse theorieën daarbij een belangrijke rol hebben gespeeld. De megacrisis van nu vertakt zich internationaal en is ecologisch, economisch, sociaal en politiek van aard. Ondertussen zit Nederland op slot.
Woensdag 15 november wordt het ‘eerste’ exemplaar wordt overhandigd aan voormalig gedeputeerde Douwe Hoogland, tevens oud-voorzitter van de Noardlike Fryske Wâlden.
Zondag 12 november was Jan Douwe van der Ploeg te gast in het radioprogramma Vroege Vogels. Het gesprek valt hier terug te beluisten.
On the 15th of May 2019 Jan van Loon defended his PhD thesis about the history of Dutch potato breeding. This thesis was written in Dutch (see thesis cover below). Over the past two years we (Jan and his supervisors) have been working on a paper in English, summarizing the main findings of his thesis (which is over 400 pages). This was quite a challenging endeavor, but we are pleased that the paper was accepted by Potato Research and was published online this week as an open access article.
Abstract of the paper The Netherlands has a world-leading position in potato breeding, but little is known about the factors that led to this success. This paper analyses the factors that have influenced the development of potato breeding in the Netherlands. This study is based on research of the grey and scientific literature and interviews with various representatives from the Dutch potato breeding sector. We distinguish four periods: (i) Before 1888, no potato breeding in the Netherlands existed whereas in other countries first crosses occurred. (ii) 1888–1940, more individuals started breeding out of interest and hobby to overcome the commonly observed degeneration of potato. (iii) 1940–1967 the emergence of a corporate set up of breeding by private companies collaborating with small breeders. (iv) 1967–present, towards full-fledged breeding industry supported by the new Seeds and Planting Materials Act (ZPW) in 1967 including the breeders’ rights. Many factors including cultural practices, diseases, and market that determine the strategy of breeding have been analyzed. The development is most of all ‘crop driven’ to maintain the level of production. But it was also ‘export driven’ leading to the development of an export-oriented seed potato sector. The conclusion is that three elements were dominant in the development of a strong potato breeding sector: (1) the broad cooperation among all players in the potato chain, (2) the design of the institutional infrastructure, and (3) the remuneration of the breeding work through legislation regarding plant breeders’ rights. The study ends with an outlook on future trends, one of them leading from an open to a more closed business culture.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 