Saju T.S.
Department of Geography
Abstract
The transformation of the urban and rural landscapes within the last few decades has increasingly been dominated by the demands of capitalist utilization. Political Ecology and Production of Space theory argues that Capitalism relies on specific kind of ‘produced space and nature’ for its endurance. Current local-scale changes in the landscape interweave with larger forces of globalization, time-space compression and media proliferation altering the face of landscape, both rural and urban, around the world. These larger forces span all sectors of human activity and inform a new cultural economy of space, creating new landscape spatialities that require a reformulation of landscape definitions, as well as new conceptual models and methodological approaches. This paper examines one such conflict in a rural landscape in Muthalamada, Kerala, India an earlier subsistence agro-ecosystem locale that experienced a rapid commercialisation of agricultural system and rural gentrification with the introduction of a high value horticultural crop – mango – in the last few decades. An analysis of the changing spatial experiences of women from a subsistence agricultural production system to a capitalist production system shows how the spaces are reorganized and produced as new landscapes. Capitalisation of agricultural production system may also generate new food-security risks with which marginal farmers and landless labourers may find it difficult to cope. The capitalist production system produced a male oriented landscape where the access to resources to women is highly restricted. This “gendered production of spaces” has been much more tangible impact on women’s lives in Muthalamada.
Key words: Political Ecology, Gender, Production of Landscape, Food Security.
Shadowed Memoirs: Gender and Production of Landscape in a Rural Kerala Region.
The politics of soil and dust is the politics of humans and society.
- Anand
(Soil and Dust, 2010)
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
- Aldo Leopold
(The Sand County Almanac, 1968)
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to examine a conflict over resources for livelihood in a rapidly “developing” agricultural landscape in a rural agricultural region of Kerala. It explores escalating demand for land based resources, for a fast growing export–oriented horticultural crop – mango, and its implications in terms of rural gentrificationi, changing pattern of access to resources between marginal local population, especially women and immigrant capitalist growers and the resultant production of new landscapes. Situated within the broadly defined political ecology tradition, this paper draws on emerging theorizations of human-nature relations to analyze how the nature of the conflict is shaped by social power, discourse and nature’s agency, as well as how the conflict, and attempts to address it through the production of an agro-ecosystemii change assessment, configure uneven socio-spatial outcomes at the local scale.
The paper starts by outlining the contemporary theoretical strands in the discipline of Geography on nature, one of its core inquiries. The first section reviews theories related to society and nature, production of nature, hybrid or social nature, that further attempts to conceptualize nature as simultaneously social and material, and proceeds to consider emerging critical perspectives on ‘scientific’ understandings of nature, that question both its supposed neutrality and its role in producing ‘facts’ to underpin policy. This section ends by presenting recent applications of a political ecology approach to environmental change and these perspectives to gender and land use change, through the concept of the production of landscape, that simultaneously considers the agro-ecosystem changes and the ways in which “nature” is also controlled and shaped by social power relations and institutions, and which forms the analytical framework for the empirical case. The section that follows presents the case study of the material and discursive conflict over land resources in Muthalamada region, focusing in particular on competing representations of failure of subsistence agricultural practices and visions of solutions through agricultural commercialization and market integration of small holder farming. The final section evaluates an agro-ecosystem change assessment that was undertaken to respond to this situation and the socio-spatial implications of the resultant landscape and its analysis from a gender perspective.
Section I
Problematising Nature
Nature has always been a major issue for societies worldwide. What is changed is the way we talk about and act towards those things conventionally called ‘natural’. Historically, ideas about nature have changed dramatically. Yesterday’s ‘truths’ about nature often seem absurd to us in the here and now. Nature continues to be understood in a multitude of ways, many of them incompatible to each other. Indeed, the struggle to get a ‘proper’ understanding of nature is one of the defining struggles of any era. One common definition of nature is that it is the non-human world. According to this definition, the word ‘nature’ is more or less synonymous with the word ‘environment’. Even without having to formally describe any of the non-human elements as ‘natural’, it is implicit that this master category encompasses them according to conventional usage. But ‘nature’ also reminds us of ‘the essence of something’ as well. Using this second, broader definition we see that nature also encompasses humans too (Castree 2005). Thus, to utter a phrase such as ‘It’s in their nature’ is to say that a person has certain physiological or psychological qualities that help to make them the kind of person they are. This links to an even broader conception of nature as the inherent force ordering both humans and non-humans.
The emergence of industrial capitalism is responsible for setting contemporary views and visions of nature (Smith 1990). Contemporary visions of nature have been deeply affected by the ongoing interaction and interpenetration of science, nature, and society. These new visions appear to be more complex than older visions of nature and at the same time they seem to challenge our notions of authenticity. The global transformation of nature shaped by industrial and financial capitalism dominates both physical and intellectual consumption of nature. This experience filters out old, incompatible consumptions of nature and precipitates new ones. Yet despite the centrality of this experience, at the level of individual daily life as well as that of society as a whole, our current consumption of nature is not simple nor is it at all a mere conceptual reflection of the relatively recent social experience of nature. With time, industrial capitalism has cut into the accumulated meanings of nature so that they can be shaped and fashioned into concepts of nature appropriate for the present era. The concept of nature is extremely complex and often contradictory. Nature is material and it is spiritual, it is given and made, nature is order and it is disorder, it is the gift of god and it is product of its own evolution (Castree 2005).
An Apparently Natural Nature
If we remember that the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1798) maintained that while resources can only be increased in an arithmetical progression (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.), population numbers can increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16 etc.). In the modern era, ‘the overpopulation’ thinking is associated with the neo-Malthusians of the early 1970s, where the global population will number some 9.3 billion by 2050, a 200 per cent increase on the 1950 total. The alarmist books like Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith et al. 1972), The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1970) and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) predicted a dire future where a finite natural-resource base would limit the numbers of people who can live on the planet. Harvey in his critique of neo-Malthusianism explicitly argues what is ‘natural’ and ‘nature’. The term nature, as discussed above, means (i) the non-human world, (ii) the essence of something, and (iii) an inherent force ordering the human and non-human worlds. All three definitions are in play in neo-Malthusian reasoning. First, the non-human world of natural resources is cited as a key factor limiting population growth. Second, these resources are seen as both quantitatively and qualitatively finite: it is in their nature (their essential character) to be non-ubiquitous. Third, neo-Malthusianism sees the propensity of people to breed beyond the natural-resource base as a ‘natural law’ that can only be tempered but never fully eliminated. Here nature is seen as creating a dynamic balance between population numbers and resource availability over time and space.
Harvey took issue with the assumptions about nature that underpinned the whole overpopulation argument. First, he questioned the idea that the amount of natural resources people need to subsist is determined by their biological needs. Subsistence levels are, he insisted, defined relative to a person’s ‘historical and cultural circumstances’ (1974: 235). Thus the bundle of resources deemed necessary to subsist in one society at one moment in time will be very different to others in the present and future. Second, Harvey argued that ‘natural resources’ are socially, culturally and economically defined. Certain things only become resources when a particular society has the means and the desire to utilise them; until then a naturally occurring phenomena is not a resource for that society. Finally, Harvey argued that resource scarcity is not given in nature but, rather, is the outcome of societal processes. This created scarcity arises, Harvey (1974) argued, because of power relations internal to society wherein some social groups command far more wealth than other groups. More specifically, Harvey suggested from a Marxist analytical viewpoint that in capitalist societies both the lower cadres of the working class and the unemployed are denied the monetary wealth to purchase their means of subsistence. Thus, what neo- Malthusians called ‘overpopulation’ was, for Harvey, a ‘relative surplus population’ produced by capitalism’s tendency to create poverty for the many and wealth for the few. In effect, Harvey argued that unproblematised assumptions about nature were used as a smokescreen to justify the West’s unwillingness to redistribute wealth to the developing world. Harvey’s critique of neo-Malthusianism was among the first in Geography to show that ideas about nature are not innocent in relation to the world they purport to describe, explain and evaluate.
The Production of Nature
Work on the production of nature originates with, and is indeed largely synonymous with, the writings of Henry Lefebvre (1991), David Harvey (1996, 2001) and Neil Smith (1990) who explicitly based their writings on Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Nature as separate from society had no meaning for Marx; nature was always related to societal activity. He meant this materially as well as ideally; the entire earth bearing on its face the stamp of human activity. In his initial, abstract introduction to the theme in Capital, Marx depicts production as a process by which the form of nature is altered. The producer “can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of matter”. Unlike other approaches to nature, space and geography, Lefebvre, Harvey and Smith consider space to be neither static nor ahistorical, nor a passive locus of social relations. Rather, space and nature are considered constitutive elements of capitalist social practices. In this sense they argue that Marx’s account of the annihilation of space through time does not refer to the destruction of or dissolution of space. Instead, Marx stresses the increasing reliance of capitalism on the production of space rather than the production process in space. Marx observed that “annihilation of space through time” is a historical requirement of capital and regarded time and space configuration as important aspects of capitalism. Further he observes ‘circulation of capital realizes value while living labour creates value’ (Marx 1973: 543). Circulation has two aspects; the actual physical movement of commodities from point of production to point of consumption and the actual and implicit costs that attach to the time taken up and to the social mediations (the chain of wholesalers, retailers, banking operations etc.) which are necessary in order for the produced commodity to find its ultimate user. The transportation and communication industry which ‘sells change in location’ (Marx 1967) is directly productive of value because ‘economically considered the spatial condition, the bringing of product to market, belongs to the production process itself. The product is really finished only when it is on the market’ (Marx 1973). For this capitalism depends on the organization of space through an ever expanding transportation and communication network in order to accelerate the turnover of capital, that is, the time it takes for labour and nature to transform into commodities, and commodities into money.
For the same reason Lefebvre (1991) argues that capitalism relies on the produced space of nature/produced nature. The notion of produced nature refers to new spaces as the product of the labour process and labour itself that capitalism relies on for the circulation and reproduction of capital. This notion of produced nature not only points to capitalism’s need for new spaces but also shows how social relations of production are reproduced and fetishized as ‘new landscapes’. In other words, landscape changes are seen as ‘natural’, ‘neutral’ and ‘apolitical’, concealing exploitation of labour, the political struggles and the displaced livelihoods behind their production.
Harvey’s (1974) essay also questioned the relative causal importance of the environment in understanding human–environment relationships. In other words, once one had penetrated behind the veils of ideology, Harvey argued that the environment is not as important a factor as is often supposed in the environment–society relationship. Specifically, his critique of neo-Malthusianism implied that what appear to be naturally caused problems (like starvation) are,in fact, socially caused. This attempt to deemphasize the physical environment was central to political ecology.
The Politicization of Nature and Environmental Change – The Political Ecology Approach
Departing from the premise that socio-ecological change has political underpinnings, which occur at different spatial and temporal scales, this section draws on recent theorizations of nature-society relations, as well as perspectives that critique environmental science and place greater attention on the agency of biophysical processes, to explore the relationship between social power and control over resources. Political ecology departs by recognizing that conventional technical approaches to natural resources (environmental science, agricultural science, engineering, economics, resource management) are inadequate for explaining the complexity of environmental change (Forsyth 2003). Such approaches are limited by their consideration of the environment as an assemblage of physical components that are subject to human manipulation. This forms the basis of ‘human-environment impact’ analyses, which focus on how human actions modify the natural environment. These conventional approaches are problematic in two key ways. First, they give little consideration to the complexity and interrelatedness of the social dimensions of environmental change, and instead tend to identify immediate spatial and temporal causes, with less attention to wider and/or multiple factors. Second, their primary explanations are often based on simple cause-effect relationships between human activity and environmental change, which are frequently regarded as self-evident, rather than the result of careful assessment. Failing to look beyond the ‘observable’ boundaries of environmental problems results in a depoliticized and dehistoricized analysis that fails to fully capture the complex nature of society-environment dynamics, and typically orients remedial measures towards these ‘symptoms’ rather than their ‘causes’ (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Castree and Braun 2001; O’Riordan 1999; Paulson 2003).
Political ecology enquiry has responded by seeking to understand the ‘complex metabolism between nature and society’ (Johnston et al. 2000: 590). In particular, it has more closely examined the roles of different social groups and institutions in society-nature relations, their vested interests and the power relations between them, and how these shape often uneven social and ecological outcomes, across wider spatial and temporal scales (Blaikie 1985; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Castree and Braun 2001; Paulson and Gezon 2005; Robbins 2004; Zimmerer and Bassett 2003). Power relations, which are by definition unequal, play a role in determining how nature is transformed: who exploits resources, under which regimes and with what outcomes for both social fabrics and physical landscapes (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Swyngedouw 1997b). Given the often competing interests among different social actors vis-à-vis environmental management, power relations must be exercised to be effective. This is achieved by ‘socially constructing’ nature, whereby nature is perceived in distinct ways by different actors, within particular moments and contexts, and consequently represented according to these positionalities (Barry 2005). The various constructions are then mobilized through associated discourses, through which social actors frame issues (definitions, problems, solutions) and promote them in ways that coincide with their particular interests and visions of how nature should be managed (Blaikie 1995, 2001; Braun and Wainwright 2001; Castree 2001b; Demeritt 2001). Political ecologists have thus sought to question conventional understandings and deconstruct situated constructions of nature, in order to uncover the power structures underlying them (Castree 2001a, 2001b).
The view of environmental issues as politicized, constructed and discursive is simultaneously challenged and complemented, by two theoretical developments: hybrid or social nature and critical approaches to environmental science.
Social nature
The a priori separation of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ into two distinct domains – the foundation of environmental studies, sciences and management – has been identified as both artificial and problematic (Castree 2001b; Escobar 1999; Haraway 1991; Harvey 1996; Latour 1993). As a result, attempts have been made to reconceptualize nature and society as a ‘hybrid’ (Swyngedouw 2004; Whatmore 2002), ‘social nature’ (Blaikie 2001; Castree 2001a, 2001b) or ‘socio-nature’ (Swyngedouw 1997b).
This resonates with Harvey’s (1996) dialectical approach, which transcends the materiality of nature by instead considering it to be constituted, and reconstituted, by the processes that continually transform it:
Dialectical thinking emphasizes the understanding of processes, flows, fluxes and relations over the analysis of elements, things, structures, and organized systems … [these] do not exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows and relations that create, sustain or undermine them (Harvey 1996:49).
A dialectical understanding of nature emphasizes the two-directional dynamics of social and natural processes in socio-ecological change. This allows nature itself to be reconceptualised as inescapably politicized, rather than merely the object of political processes, thus overcoming the dualistic perspective of nature as external to social power. In this way, a hybrid perspective enables the political processes and power relations that underlie fused ‘socio-ecological’ change to be elucidated, as power and socio-ecological change can be understood as mutually and dialectically constitutive (Castree 2001b; Harvey 1996; Paulson et al. 2003). This rejects the view of nature as a purely material domain over which policies are made and social struggles occur, to an integrated ‘social nature’ in which the agency of non-human natures also shapes social power (Braun and Wainwright 2001; Castree 2001b; Whatmore 2002).
The Landscape
In Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984), Denis Cosgrove argued that landscapes are not simply physical environments existing ‘out there’ for people to see, study, use or enjoy. Instead, he argued that landscape is a specific ‘way of seeing’ coincident with the emergence of capitalism in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. When we think of the word ‘landscape’ we often think of fields, water courses, trees, sky, fields and livestock arrayed before us. Cosgrove argued that we have, historically, learnt to see the apparently objective facts of landscapes in a certain way. From the period of the European Renaissance, capitalism began to supplant previous modes of production, while the invention of three-dimensional perspective and new cartographic and surveying techniques permitted a new way of representing urban and rural spaces that fast became ‘common sense’. Cosgrove (1984) showed how newly wealthy urban merchants and industrialists purchased estates in the countryside and began to commission paintings of their properties. These paintings typically contained little or no human presence, gave the viewer a detached all-seeing perspective on a ‘natural’ panorama, and appeared to be highly realistic. Cosgrove’s point was that the view of landscape here was both constructed and highly particular. For him, it not only reflected the landowner’s desire to match his physical ownership with visual ownership. It also deliberately made invisible the work of peasants and rural labourers who were often dispossessed so that urban elites could enjoy their picturesque views of a seemingly harmonious, well-ordered rural environment. By ‘naturalising’ the view, landscape painting thus, for Cosgrove, both arose from and reproduced the social relationships of a nascent, class-divided capitalist society. In his estimation, landscape was a class-specific way of seeing akin to ‘ideology’ in the Marxist sense of the term. Along with Stephen Daniels, Cosgrove (1988) went on to pioneer the geographical study of ‘symbolic’ and ‘iconographic’ urban and rural landscapes. This research opened the door for perceiving the ‘culture of nature’.
Drawing on these related traditions, landscape has been reconceptualised from purely material/physical ‘space’ that is tangible and observable, and which can be quantified, harnessed and manipulated, to a socio-natural one to a “hybrid” thing that captures and embodies processes that are simultaneously material, discursive and symbolic (Swyngedouw 2004). In this study the landscape is treated as a stretch of humanly transformed nature, but nature transformed to serve a particular end: the needs and desires of the culture that made it. Working backwards from the fact of the cultural landscape, then, the geographer could see how nature was transformed and thus learn something about the culture that lived in and created the landscape: what that culture thought, what it wanted, how it lived. The landscape could be ‘read’ for clues about culture and cultural change. A clearer analysis of the practices that make the landscape, and the varying meanings that are attached to it, can be had by understanding that the landscape (as form, meaning and representation) actively incorporates the social relations that go into its making. The landscape (in all its senses) is both an outcome and the medium of social relations, both the result of and an input to specific relations of production and reproduction.
The next section examines the production of landscape in Muthalamada, by examining the ways in which land use changes and problems are framed by different social actors and how such discourses are mobilized to position favored agro-forestry solutions and new landscapes.
Section II
Resource conflicts in Muthalamada
The Muthalamada Grama Panchayat lies in the South-East of Palakkad district of Kerala state in between 100 33’ and 100 36’ North latitudes and 760 44’ and 760 50’ East longitudes. The region covers a total area of 374 km2, out of which 301 km2 are the reserve forests under the Parambikulam Wild Life Sanctuary. According to the 2001 Census, the total population was 33,935 persons with 668 persons per square kilometre as the average density. The area has highly fertile soil and is rich in natural vegetation. A large variety of food crops were locally cultivated. Rice was the traditional crop in northern part and groundnut and ragi in southern part (Brahmaputran 2004).
The population of the region is mainly constituted by agricultural labourers and marginal farmersiii. The Muthalamada Panchayat is now better known as the “mango village” of Kerala (Development Report, Muthalamada Grama Panchayat 2005). The ‘mango boom’ accordingly took place against the backdrop of a clear downward trend in the market for traditional crops and the degradation of several key environmental resources. The cropping pattern of the study area was predominantly that of seasonal food crops prior to ‘mango boom’, rice, groundnut, grams, millets, pulses and other cereals were cultivated. Most of the cropping was for subsistence only. Pulses, grams, millets and vegetables were cultivated following the main cropping season. Most of the households grew pumpkins, bottle gourds, spinach, bitter gourds, chillies, and tomatoes for household use. The major crops such as rice or ground nut were sowed in the prime cropping season which is from May-June to August-September. The next season will be followed with other food crops like pulses, millets, and vegetables. The gendered division of labour was based on individual agricultural tasks and crops, which distributed more evenly the responsibilities for food provisioning and the opportunities for commodity production and exchange among men and women. During the 1960s, the Land Reforms Act was implemented in Kerala (The Kerala Land Reforms Act 1963). Nearly 450 hectares of land were acquired by the Kerala Government in the 1970s and redistributed to around 1,000 households till date in Muthalamada. A substantial number among these households belong to other backwards classes, scheduled castes/tribes. These people used their lands for the production of subsistence food crops like fox tail millet, ragi, bajra, little millet and jowar and grazed their animals in the common/fallow lands which were abundant (Survey Data 2007-8). Both men and women engaged as agricultural labourers in the cropping seasons. The men and women were associated with groundnut, rice and sugarcane in upland and lowland fields in the main cropping season and in the following season women had the major role in the production and post production of millets, pulses and vegetables.
However, most of the domestic work was done by female members alone. The control of the homestead land and backyard gardens was done by female heads of the family (Field Reports 2007-8). Except wheat (which was supplied through PDS in the fair price system) most of the food items including milk and other items such as fire wood, fodder were located from their own land and from the nearby common landsiv. Abundant supply of fodder for animals and fuel wood for cooking from the common lands reduced the household burden of women to a great extent (Agarwal 1994). Almost all of the crops were rain-fed and ground water exploitation was minimal. This also reduced the drudgery of water collection which was lone responsibility of the women members of the household (Agarwal 1994). Women’s access to rural productive resources and the food availability from subsistence farming relatively ensured household food security and reduced women’s daily life burdens. Commercialisation of Third World agriculture is an international policy since the 1960s. The International research agencies like International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) argues that the process of commercialization, by raising incomes, actually improves a nutritional situation that might have been worse otherwise. Specialization, the development of markets, and trade, which characterise commercialization are fundamental to economic growth (Bouis and Haddad, 1990). From the mid-1980s and the 1990s the neoliberal agricultural policiesv devised by multilateral funding agencies like World Bank, proposed ‘diversification and market integration of smallholder farming’ as a development strategy for developing countries (Joshi et.al 2007). Such policies adopted by the National Government, on a macro scale, promoted high-value export oriented cash crops such as fruits and vegetables through national missionsvi funded by multilateral funding agencies. This triggered a process of economic, social and spatial restructuring of rural landscapes exaggerating local and regional differences in development. They act in contradictory ways by unevenly drawing agriculture into wider circuits of capital on a locally differentiated and changing rural social backdrop. On the one hand, capital accumulation in the commercial form of agriculture leads to distinctive industrial/agricultural spaces in the rural landscape integrated into globally networked, urban-centered agro-food complexes. On the other hand, farming businesses marginalized by this process suffer falling incomes and become dependent on local markets and spaces. This leads to farm business diversification and an ever-widening range of income sources for members of the farming household. Running alongside these differential shifts in the organization of farm production is the growing consumption of rural space by middle-class capitalist growers who alter the cultural politics of rural identity and reinforce commodification of the rural landscapes (Mormont 1990; Lowe et al. 1993; Murdoch and Marsden 1994). Under the neoliberal agricultural policies implemented since 1990s in India, commercial export agriculture became a priority for national development, and has led to the expansion and conversion of land to non-traditional export crops. In Muthalamada from early 1990s, as a response to the neoliberal agricultural policies and with the repeated market failures of traditional agricultural products including rice and coconut, a slow and steady change of cropping pattern and tenure relations have taken place. Since the early 1990s, Muthalamada has undergone a shift from annual crops for the domestic market (rice, groundnut, millets, beans and vegetables) to permanent mango orchards for export. Due to the optimal climate for mango production, high export demand and excellent returns, and the relatively easy and cheap management of mango trees, large farmers increasingly converted land to mango orchards. Many large farmers, as well as new large capitalist growers from other parts of the state, bought up extensive areas in Muthalamada for new plantations. Marginal farmers have been slower to follow, but have increasingly converted some or all of their land to permanent orchards, some even assisted by state credit and subsidies.
A local market was formed to send fruit mango to terminal markets of Mumbai and Delhi for further shipping to International markets such as Middle East countries, United States, Europe and Oceania. Mumbai tradersvii engaged local people as their agents to procure mangoes in the season. It ensured a steady and high demand for mangoes throughout the ripening season. The income of farmers increased and more and more agricultural households shifted to orchard farming. Thus a network was established in Muthalamada with national and international markets. In 1988, the State Forest Department started to acquire and enclose the slopes of the hills (The Kerala Private Forest (vesting and assignment) Act 1971) for social forestryviii – a World Bank funded project – that resulted in the unofficial eviction of hundreds of peasant farmers, without any compensation. The forest officials restricted the public even from the collection of fire wood or fodder from the ‘protected forests’. Some of the local marginal and affluent farmers started to sell their lands in the late 1980s and the early 1990s at relatively fair prices to new affluent immigrant growers. Within a decade, almost 70 per cent of the cultivable land in Muthalamada was bought by immigrant capitalist growers from the local people (Field Survey 2007-8). Those who sold their small holdings, below 1 hectare, for a comparatively ‘good price’ became landless labourers within one or two years. The remaining local farmers were forced to shift from traditional crops to cash crops, mainly to mango due to mixed reasonsix. The entire local economy became more cash focused and male-oriented (men as the sole controllers of cash earnings in the traditional patriarchical family system) due to women’s loss of income and access to productive resources. The spatial relations were drastically altered and ‘colonies’ were formed in a State scheme for lower caste landless labourers. In the case of gendered division of labour, mango orchards rely heavily on male labourers for production and post production processes. Thus, agricultural production in general became increasingly polarized, both spatially and in terms of gendered labour organization. Women in the households frequently lost control of their lands due to severe technical interventions needed for planting orchards and production. Mango orchards are solely controlled by male land owners (often capitalist growers and local traders). Most of the male members of the small holder families migrated, in search of better jobs, to industrial towns of the neighbouring states (Field Interview data 2007-8). The capitalist growers, who brought with them new ‘consumption’ of landscapes, enclosed their land and restricted entry to local population. Gradually, the local population were marginalised and displaced from all their livelihood sources like land, water and commons. The indiscriminate digging of tube wells by the rich orchard owners altered the surface water table, permanently fallen low in several places, which was already lowered due to excessive sand mining in the lower courses of the Gayatri River. The capitalist growers invested more money for deeper and deeper wells at the livelihood costs of marginal farmers and landless labourers. The unrestricted and unscientific use of pesticides in the orchards polluted most of the surface water sources. The importance of climate, seasonality and physiography in the livelihood strategies of the local population has been significantly reduced. The net result of all these changes was the production of a highly homogeneous landscape with striking gender imbalances in Muthalamada.
Data collection for the study
The field work for the study was conducted during 2007-2008. Mixed methodologies were employed for the study. A total of 250 households were surveyed for collecting quantitative data. In-depth interviews along with an ethnographic case study were conducted for the collection of qualitative data. Separate questions were employed for addressing men and women in each questionnaire for the purpose of gender analysis. As a whole, more than 75 per cent participants/respondents were women in the research process which was assured through stratified purposive sampling. Key respondents including politicians, officials and academicians were interviewed.
Size of holdings and the agrarian class
We have a substantial amount of landless labourers (below 10 cents of land), who constitute 165 of the total 250 respondents. Subsistence farmers or marginal farmers with a land holding below 2 hectares are 51 out of 250. The large owners met for the survey were 34. These reflect the current pattern of land holdings. The data collected shows that among the 165 landless respondents, 86 had lost their lands after 1980, either through selling or through government appropriation. There were at least 25 capitalist growers, with a holding of more than 25 hectares identified in the region but unfortunately only a few of them were available in the farm or were ready to respond to the questionnaire.
Results and discussion
The following are a summary of the inferences of the research on the twenty five years’ experience of agricultural commercialization in Muthalamada.
There is a clear class difference in the perception on land use changes in Muthalamada; that is, from subsistence food crops to high value commercial crops, with almost all large holders favouring the change at the expense of the agricultural labourer class and marginal farmers’ class. The research results show that the large owners’ class is the net gainer of the espousal of cash cropping and the marginal farmers and landless labourer classes are the net losers.
The widespread introduction of a high-value cash crop, mango, in Muthalamada has resulted in an imbalanced land tenure system, in which land resources have reached the hands of a few elite landholders, a reverse process to land reforms. This process has denied access to village commons on which the village community survived for decades. The process of land use change of agricultural commercialisation has escalated inequalities in the access to natural resources like water. Mono-cropping system has changed the agro-bio-diversity of the region, traditional fallow cycles have been abandoned, altering energy flow and nutrient cycles, and replacing the entire agro-ecology of subsistence farming.
An important characteristic of this high-value export oriented crop is its low labour intensity and increased reliability on male labour. More than 80 per cent of agricultural activities are purely of the skilled male domain. As a result, women of agricultural labourer households have increasingly been marginalised and thereby denied many of the livelihood securities, especially food security. The shift from the subsistence agricultural system has resulted in a partial loss of sources of food, water, firewood, and fodder. The loss of subsistence food systems has now increased the dependence on market for food. The fluctuations of food prices and loss of steady income from subsistence system has resulted in a food insecure situation to the poorer population, especially women.
The severe fall in the cattle population of the region over the years also has had a major impact on women of the marginal households. In the initial years of land use change, women depended on sale of animal products like milk to compensate their loss of income from agricultural labour and subsistence farming. After the widespread adoption of mango orchards and the State’s appropriation of slopes, the consequent lack of grazing grounds and fodder has pushed them to reduce the number of cattle. On the environment side, cattle have been one of the input sources of organic matter in the energy and nutrient cycles of subsistence agro-ecosystem. In cash cropping, this has been replaced with chemical fertilizers.
The loss of food crops like rice, millets, pulses and vegetables has resulted in decreased access and availability of food at the household level. It has soared the burden of women, who bore the traditional responsibility of household food supply, in finding out appropriate food for the household. Many times, they themselves have been deprived of food, especially in the recent times, due to escalating prices of food items. This also has strong negative implications for women’s nutritional security in the poor households.
Section III
Integrated Understanding Informed by Political Ecology
Commercialization of agriculture first gained a foothold in India in the 1960s, with the advent of Green Revolution in Punjab, when the World Bank, along with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has promoted agricultural productivity through import of fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and farm machinery. The Bank has provided the credit necessary to replace the low-cost, low input agriculture in existence with an agricultural system that was both capital- and chemical-intensive. In the southern side of India, the ‘grow more food campaign’x developed a rice-centric approach to agricultural development. Many of the drought resistant varieties of rice and millets have been replaced with High Yielding Varieties, demanding more direct chemical input to the agro-ecological system, and partially paralyzed the natural cycle of nutrition and energy. This has been the first addition to the rural landscape of Muthalamada. Local populations tried to cope up with the situation, with the help of annual agricultural cycles, that could evolve out of the unique agro-ecological setting. As these developments have taken place, a second set of initiatives ‘market integration of small holders’xi have taken shape in the policies for the Third World in the development capitals of the United Sates and Europe by multilateral donor agencies. Due to the growing concern for global environmental problems, the policies of the 1970s and 1980s have aimed at ‘greening’ the Third World agriculture through a series of interventions. Agro-forestry interventionsxii, one of such interventions formulated by the multilateral agencies, have been widely touted for their prodigious capacities. In the context of global ecological politics of the 1980s agro-forestry approaches have accomplished dual purposes. They have simultaneously boosted commodity production and contributed towards efforts at stabilizing the underlying resource base. On both these grounds, agro-forestry approaches have been constructed as an unambiguous and unalloyed “good” (Rocheleau and Ross, 1995). Institutional actors in forestry and environmental agencies and the major multilateral donor agencies such as the World Bank have accordingly joined forces to promote and preserve agro-forestry in many parts of the world including India. Mango orchards were the second initiative of the 1980s to the rural landscapes of Muthalamada. Like rice in the green revolution, orchard growers have benefited from a favourable shift in the development policies and practices, as the government agencies that had once supported the rice, adopted a new objective centered on the task of producing a high-value crop landscape and rejecting the conditions necessary for the sustained food security. The mango orchards have represented a substantial diversification of the subsistence agrarian economy and have given the rural landscape a “much needed exposure to national and international markets”. In this regard, Muthalamada have achieved the ultimate goal of donor agencies and policy makers who sought to “integrate” environment, development and market through productive endeavours (Biodiversity Support Program, 1993; USIAD, 1993; World Bank, 1996).
Political ecology understands land use conflicts as a consequence of certain forms of production and stresses that human-nature relationships have to be understood in the light of relations of production within the society. The history of agricultural commercialization in Muthalamada has provided a background of powerful landed interest of elites, market forces and policy settings in which the orchard economy evolved. The penetration of capital, technology and market has led to the displacement of local population in Muthalamada. The most important observation from a political ecology frame is the ‘eco-system’ people argument, where the effect of resource depletion like water and the process of ‘enclosure of commons’ become doubly serious when people are directly dependent upon land based resources for their livelihoods. Political ecologists would argue that farmers are forced into enhancing their production to cater to the needs of being in a competitive market, where they are forced to pursue eco-degrading practices for subsistence due to market integration (Blaikie, 1985; Jansen, 1998).
Multiple Perceptions
A major concern of political ecology is the identification and recognition of plurality of perceptions and meanings. The quantitative data analysis has given a micro analysis of class perceptions on land use changes. The perceptions based on material benefits, world views, and political/personal positions have been seen to generate the fragmented visions in the local and macro contexts. Conflicting views of landless labourers, marginal farmers, and large owners and diverse views of men and women within the classes on agricultural commercialization have brought out the different perceptions on land use decisions, depending on the actor’s position in the social structure with differing endowments, available information and priorities. It is explicit that from the story of Muthalamada, how powerful actors in the structurexiii, such as state, multilateral agencies, large land holders, thus exercise their agency to use the source of power at their command to initiate environmental changes in Muthalamada. A typical official perception to land use change in Muthalamada is that, the State agencies for agricultural development are planning for a major expansion programme for the mango orchards under the National Horticultural Mission, a national level mission to promote high-value export oriented crops. The State agencies have identified Muthalamada’s unique geographical and climatic settings, which are highly favourable to the growth of mango farming, and its capacity to supply mango in the ‘gap’ seasonxiv at the national market. The State agencies also promote contract farming of traders, that is, land owners as merely tree owners, which are an ideal condition to those who simply want to invest money in Muthalamada with well assured returns. The academic engagement in Muthalamada’s land use changes has been a study on the impacts of pesticide usage in the mango orchards by the Kerala Agricultural University. The report has concluded that “the pesticide use is justifiable in commercial mango farms, though the levels of investment in the present cost-price regime and technology are high” (Devi, 2008 (unpublished)).The official and academic perceptions of environmental change in Muthalamada is proof that conventional technical approaches to natural resources (engineering, economics, law, resource management, science) are inadequate for explaining the complexity of environmental change. Such approaches are limited by their consideration of the environment as an assemblage of physical components that are subject to human manipulation. This forms the basis of ‘human environment impact’ analyses, which focus on how human actions modify the natural environment. Gender Politics in Muthalamada: Towards a Feminist Political Ecology Understanding
According to Rocheleau et. al. (1996), feminist political ecology:
……..begins with the concern of political ecologists who emphasize decision-making processes and the social, political, and economic context that shape environmental policies and practices. Political ecologists have focused largely on the uneven distribution of access to and control over resources on the basis of class and ethnicity. Feminist political ecology treats gender as a crucial variable in shaping resource access and control, interacting with class, caste, race, culture and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change, the struggle of men and women to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods and the prospects of any community for “sustainable development”.
Women’s materially dependent status is ideologically reinforced through socially legitimised forms of submission to men. Expressed through seclusion ideologies and operationalised by what Sharma (1980: 198) has called an “etiquette of public invisibility”, these shape the content and value of women’s work and interactions with different members of the village community at different stages of their life cycles. Seclusion ideologies also define the unique relationship women have to the geographical spaces in which their lives and work are embedded. Like women in many subsistence agro-ecological systems, women of Muthalamada in their subsistence agro-ecosystem, needs to be extremely mobile and visible in public areas: most of their daily work is performed outdoors, often in common lands, slopes of the hills or in the fields located at considerable distances from their homesteads.
If “command over space is a fundamental source of power” (Enslin, 1990), then it follows the lack of, or limited access to, certain spaces that can play an important part in disempowering certain individuals or groups of people relative to others. This is true throughout rural India, where space as a geographical reality has had different meanings for women as a result of their differential access to and uses of it. In this sense, women’s access to, and exclusion from certain spaces also make an important statement about the differential exercise of social power between the sexes.
Gender and Production of Landscape in Muthalamada
For the past few decades, the rural landscape of Muthalamada has witnessed a large scale reorganisation of spaces and the spatial organisation of gender relations. Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of spatial construction of social was employed by Massey (1992:70) to explain that ‘…society is necessarily constructed spatially, and that fact – the spatial organisation of society – makes a difference to how it works’. The ecological changes in Muthalamada have affected women and men in different ways, reflecting their different positions within the society, their work obligations and responsibilities, and their access to newly emerged spaces within the market economy.
From a subsistence agro-ecosystem to a market oriented orchard farming system, changes of cropping patterns from annual food crops to perennial tree crops, enclosure of commons, loss of livelihood systems all affected women and men in different ways. The “gendering” of geographical spaces has had much more tangible, and negative, impact on women’s lives. The loss of subsistence food crops drastically reduced women’s direct access to and availability of food. But still the household food security heavily relies on them. Enclosure of fields, common lands, streams and slopes of the hills narrowed women’s access to fodder leaves, grasses, and firewood, and compelled some to walk considerably longer distances in order to meet their household’s daily needs. The enclosed common lands and streams have also eroded the small measure of control and freedom of movement that women once exercised in defining their work agendas independent of men. The growing importance of both local and non-local markets in the household consumption and production strategies, and the absence of subsistence agriculture, has contributed to decline in the perceived importance of spaces – fields, commons, hill slopes – in which much of the women’s work is conducted.
The perceptions of nature produced by orchards - dark, vast and lost – are entirely different form the nature where in the subsistence system in which women dominated the geography in time and space. Alienated feel from the once intimate and live spaces are much more tangible impact in their everyday life negotiations. Today, one of the biggest challenges women in Muthalamada face is having to operate in a social environment in which they have unequal access to the very geographical spaces that are vital to the accomplishment of many of their daily tasks. In short, while comparatively men’s spaces are expanding (through being employed as skilled orchard labourers or through outmigration in search of work), women’s spaces are shrinking without enabling them to access the new arenas of livelihood. What is significant in the case of women, however, is that the access to money is structurally limited in the new landscapes, through a combination of gender hierarchies, the gender division of labour, and differential access to crucial resources. Today a major impediment to women’s ability to accumulate cash is the absence of local opportunity to earn money. This gender based disadvantage can be found in Muthalamada cutting across the classes. Men’s control over money concretizes gender ideologies which claim that “nothing can be done here without men” (Field Interview Data 2008). Gender-differentiated control over money diminishes women and reinforces the view that men are the “natural” heads of the households and, hence, the real managers of all matters pertaining to family sustenance. This perception, in combination with men’s considerably easier mobility and access to new spaces, lends increasing support to the widespread belief that women are simply “housewifes” (Field Interview Data 2008).
From Landscape to Socio-Nature – An Epilogue
Through the case study of Muthalamada, this paper sought to analyse the material, sociopolitical and discursive elements of resource conflict, based on the reconceputalisation of landscape from a ‘nature’ to a ‘socio-nature’. In turn this highlighted several important and nuanced dimensions. The paper explored how landscape is deeply politicized and produced by different actors in Muthalamada, as different categories of people struggled to secure a livelihood, and vied to produce a landscape from their own vantage point. However, rather than considering landscape as merely a static object over which power is exerted, the dialectical relationship between social power and landscape change also illustrated how the materiality of nature – space – its biophysical properties and agency – configured the social relations of control over it. In particular the unique biophysical settings of Muthalamada, which the large farmers and capitalist growers enjoyed, at the expense of marginal farmers and landless labours. The landscape ‘naturalises’ social relations and makes them seem inevitable. In this regard the landscape functions not only as a stage upon which life is lived, upon which the reproduction of capital and society occurs. It also functions as natural, as that which is (and hence, to some large degree, that which can be). That is to say, one function of the landscape is to display the normative order of the world.
“….the blue mangoes we eat tell us nothing,
and the green landscapes therein yield fewer clues….”
tssaju@gmail.com
Notes
iGentrification has been extensively researched and debated within urban contexts but has received much less attention with respect to rural areas. Urban gentrification involves the inflow of capital investment into real estate of an already existing place in the metropolitan region whose values are depressed (Gottdiener and Budd 2005). Gentrification, which is a kind of urban renewal, is related to the decay of place. Both are cycles of capital investment in urban real estate. Urban gentrification also referring to the socio-cultural displacement that results when wealthier people acquire property in low income and working class communities. (see Smith 1982). In the context of this study rural gentrification refers to the displacement of local population in rural agricultural landscapes due to immigration of wealthier elite population in search of better capital investments. ii An agro-ecosystem can be viewed as a subset of a conventional ecosystem and can be defined as a spatially and functionally coherent unit of agricultural activity, and includes the living and nonliving components involved in that unit as well as their interactions. (see Gliessman 1990). iii Notwithstanding inaccuracy, for the purpose of this paper the term ‘marginal farmer’ is used to refer to the beneficiaries of land reforms with small holdings, while ‘large farmers’ are land holders of over 5 hectares who are engaged in commercial scale production, and the capitalist growers are either elite immigrants or traders who own large plots of orchards usually more than 25 hectares. iv The common lands (in this study) are either State or private owned lands and with or without title deeds. In a subsistence farming system, ‘the pressure of productivity’ is very low so abundant vacant lands are available for grazing, food and fuel gathering as it is a traditional collective right of villagers. v Neoliberalism in agriculture tries to diminish state protection and to further the liberalization of the international agricultural market. Neoliberal policy includes restructuring through commercialisation of the agricultural sector and enhancing its economic efficiency through market interventions. vi National Horticulture Mission is a multimillion World Bank funded centrally sponsored scheme in which Government of India to develop horticulture to the maximum potential available in the State and to augment production of all horticultural products (Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers, Plantation crops, Spices, Medicinal Aromatic plants) in the states. vii A dynamic mango market is functioning in Muthalamada. Contract farming or leasing of orchards for one or two years to local traders is the normal practice of marketing in Muthalamada. Regional and inter-state mango trading from Muthalamada started decades ago. Today several wholesalers have established contacts with large commission agents in terminal markets in North India especially in Mumbai. In addition, some 500 small country buyers and commission agents are involved in mango marketing in Muthalamada. During the flowering season in December, traders inspect the trees with the farmers, and then settle on a price for a number of trees or even whole plots. The full or portion of lease amount is paid in advance to the tree owner. From then until the start of the monsoon season that is, from December to late May-the trader is fully responsible for the cultivation of the trees, weeding, spraying with pesticides, applying fertilizers, and ultimately harvesting. Most of the present large growers are residents of middle or north Kerala, so they usually visit the orchards not more than once in a year, that is, for annual or biannual sale of orchards. But the role of mango traders is not restricted to marketing. They also supply seedlings, recommend cultivation techniques, and lease most of the mango trees in the region from local farmers. The main motive of traders for leasing mango trees is to ensure that they will have enough fruit to sell and can compete with other local traders. Most farmers in this region prefer to lease their mango trees rather than to cultivate and harvest them on their own. They have a guaranteed income and all risks are borne by the trader; moreover, their cultivation costs are lower and they have fewer labour problems. In effect, the role of farmers is limited to decision-making-whether to plant mango trees at all-and caring for the young trees during the first three to five years. After that these farmers become mere tree owners. Over the years, the traders have gathered considerable knowledge regarding both cultivation practices and the mango varieties best suited to local conditions. Through business contacts, the experienced wholesalers are also well-informed about mango cultivation techniques developed elsewhere. Traders know about both the most marketable and the most suitable mango varieties. They usually recommend planting early-yielding varieties that fetch comparatively high prices. They advise farmers to grow four or five different varieties, in order to reduce the risks represented by weather conditions, pests and disease, and to lower dependence on individual terminal markets, which often have particular preferences regarding fruit varieties. Farmers who do not lease their trees often rely on the seedlings provided by the governmental projects. However, those projects distribute only two varieties, neither of which is popular in the market. viii Social forestry is any practice, method, technique/technology or natural resource management system that enhances forest resource governance and makes forestry economically viable, and ecologically sound (GOI 1976). This definition is mostly a state view of what social forestry should be, and does not emphasise the involvement of local people. It advocates that forest plantations should be controlled by the state within fences, thus excluding local people and livestock from entering it. Projects designed with such an approach, for example the National Social Forestry Project (NSFP), aided by the World Bank in India (In 1984, the World Bank approved the India National Social Forestry project for $165 million), are typical examples dominated by the orthodox views of deforestation. ix A variety of reasons are cited such as frequent market failure of traditional food crops, unavailability of agricultural labourers, assured profit from mango cultivation, less labour intensity for mango cultivation, climate changes, increased human-animal conflicts due to afforestation and orchards and the difficulty to maintain small patches of food crop plots in the midst of large plantations. x The ‘grow more food’ campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s in India encouraged extension of cultivation to ‘wastelands’ like forests and low lying marshes, which was considered as a sign of progress – of ‘conquering nature’. Later, in the 1960s, the Green Revolution strategies and the building of engineering structures like dams (the Nehruvian Model of Development) to boost rice cultivation in Muthalamada region (two irrigation dams built in the region during 1960s) were major interventions in the natural systems of Muthalamada. xi Diversification and market integration were suggested as a development strategy to improve Third World small holder farming by International Agencies like World Bank and Asian Development Bank during 1980s. ( see web.worldbank.org › Projects) xii Culminating the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, this multifaceted programme dominated development efforts in the Asian-African region from late 1980s on. According to World Agroforestry website, the programme aims to improve the land health (the capacity of land to sustain delivery of essential ecosystem services) and Land degradation was seen as a global threat to habitat, economy and society, and is the overarching environmental issue of concern in Africa, Asia and Latin America threatening food security, ecosystems and livelihoods. xiii Structure – Agency debate, see Giddens 1976 xiv Mid-April to June is the harvesting season for mango in India. But the unique bio-physical setting of Muthalamada enable the region for an early harvesting season from March, thus to supply fruits to terminal markets before than any other place in India (Interview with Traders and Agricultural Officer, Muthalamada Krishi Bhavan 2008) References
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