The world is not on track to eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition by 2030.
(Food and Agriculture Organization 2021c)
…
One of the enduring agrarian puzzles has been the persistence of the Asian smallholder.
(JONATHAN RIGG et al. 2018: 327)
∵
In Greek mythology, the Titan Atlas shouldered the heavens as punishment mandated by Zeus. In the 21st century, hungry Asian farmers and fishers play the Titan role of propping up the capitalist world food system. Like Atlas, they receive few rewards for their contributions. Instead, their survival is threatened by the highest incidence of hunger and malnutrition in the world, land evictions, debt bondage, and a higher vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The central question of our study has been: Why are the Asian peasants who produce and export so much of the world’s food the hungriest people on Earth? The sixteen Asian fisheries produce more than three-quarters of the world’s fish and nearly half of total world food output (ADB 2013). They account for a majority of the world’s wild seafood outputs and more than two-thirds of
Worldwide, Asian fishery imports are “cheap” because fishing households, especially the women in them, provide hidden, unpaid subsidies to export commodity chains through their unpaid and low-paid labors and through their absorption of externalized ecological and community costs (see Figure 20). As Asian peasant fishers and farmers have become increasingly enmeshed in debt bondage and contract farming, women’s work roles have changed and expanded in ways that threaten household survival (see Chapter 6). Wives and daughters work longer hours than males, take on “men’s work” as needed, and often earn more cash than males. However, these females are disproportionately impacted by hunger, micronutrient shortfalls, and nutrition-related diseases while they are also carry the primary burden for feeding their children (see Chapter 5). In this chapter, we will explore five questions:
What are the projections for Asian food security?
What are the contributions of peasant farmers and fishers to Asian food security?
Does urbanization spell the end to Asian peasants?
How does debt bondage impact peasant persistence?
Are Asian peasant farmers and fishers likely to persist into the 21st century?
Despite the high regional incidence of nutritional shortfalls and hunger-related illnesses (see Table 2), none of the Asian fisheries has a systematic national food security policy. While these states have prioritized other development goals in the early 21st century (see Chapters 2, 3 and 7), they have not focused on national food security. As we saw in Chapter 7, the Asian fisheries have engaged in massive land expropriations for national development goals and infrastructure construction since 2000. While prioritizing dams, Special Economic Zones, coal-fired power plants, tourism complexes, and elite housing, these state land concessions to investors have only targeted agriculture when it has afforded expansion of nonfood exports for which there is high global demand (especially rubber, palm oil, biofuels, paper pulp). While failing to prioritize national food security in its land expropriations from citizens, the Asian states have also disproportionately displaced rice and food croplands and evicted peasant and indigenous farmers and fishers, further endangering domestic food security.
The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (2011: 11, 33) recommends that “governments should prioritize investment in the small farm sector… and should encourage business models that involve collaborating with them.” The Panel made that recommendation because national budgets of a majority of countries do not prioritize agriculture. Globally, agriculture produces nearly twice as much in terms of economic value as this sector receives in public financial support (FAO 2021b). In 2015, Southeast Asian agriculture contributed 16 percent of GDP while being allocated less than 4 percent of public budgets. South Asian agriculture received less than 7 percent of public funds even though the sector contributed nearly 16 percent of GDP value. East Asian agriculture fared somewhat better, with only a 2 percent difference between GDP value and national funding (see Table 20). In a recent report advocating transformation of public support of agriculture, the United Nations Development Program (2021: 14) contends that little of current public funding reaches peasant farmers and fishers, and little of any increases will reach them in the future, without significant policy changes worldwide. Indeed, “87% of current support to agricultural producers, approximately $540 billion per year, include measures that are often inefficient, inequitable, distort food prices, hurt people’s health, and degrade the environment.” Moreover, most of the public funding aims at specific commodities that are in high global demand, subsidies to maintain artificial trade prices for specific commodities, or subsidies to consumers. We doubt that we need to point out the obvious, but we will. Asian peasant farmers and fishers do not presently receive much in the way of public funding, yet they persist, most of them struggling in poverty.
Status of agricultural expenditures in national budgets, 2015
| Part A. South Asia | ||
| Country | Agriculture as % GDP | % national budget spent on agriculture |
| Bangladesh | 14.8 | 7.8 |
| India | 16.2 | 8.9 |
| Pakistan | 23.8 | 0.6 |
| Sri Lanka | 8.2 | 6.3 |
| Subregional Averages | 16.1 | 6.8 |
| Part B. Southeast Asia | ||
| Cambodia | 26.6 | NA |
| Indonesia | 13.5 | 3.1 |
| Malaysia | 8.3 | 3.1 |
| Myanmar | 26.7 | 6.1 |
| Philippines | 10.3 | 4.1 |
| Thailand | 8.9 | 7.7 |
| Vietnam | 17.0 | NA |
| Subregional Averages | 15.9 | 3.8 |
| Part C. East Asia | ||
| China-Mainland | 8.5 | 5.0 |
| Japan | 1.1 | NA |
| North Korea | 21.6 | NA |
| South Korea | 2.0 | 4.1 |
| Subregional Averages | 8.4 | 6.4 |
SOURCE: ANALYSIS OF COUNTRY DATA IN FAOSTAT. SUBREGIONAL DATA ARE FROM FAO (2021B: 4). NA = NATIONAL BUDGET DATA NOT AVAILABLE FOR CAMBODIA, JAPAN, NORTH KOREA, TAIWAN, VIETNAM
Two-decades of alarming to moderate global hunger indexes, 2000–2019
| Part A. No change in the index over the period | |||
| Asian fishery | 2000–2010 index | 2010–2019 index | 2017 % above or below world average of 2,884 calories per capita daily food supply |
| China-Mainland | Moderate | Moderate | 9.2% Above |
| aIndonesia | Serious | Serious | 2.4% Below |
| Malaysia | Moderate | Moderate | 1.9 % Below |
| Myanmar | Serious | Serious | 6.3% Below |
| aNorth Korea | Serious | Serious | 29.5% Below |
| aPhilippines | Serious | Serious | 7.3% Below |
| aSri Lanka | Serious | Serious | 9.4% Below |
| Thailand | Moderate | Moderate | 4.2% Below |
| Part B. Index change dependent on national and international child feeding programs | |||
| aBangladesh | Alarming | Serious | 10.0% Below |
| aCambodia | Alarming | Serious | 14.30% Below |
| aIndia | Alarming | Serious | 12.7% Below |
| aPakistan | Alarming | Serious | 19.4% Below |
| Vietnam | Serious | Moderate | 4.7% Below |
| Part C. No change in the index over the period: Low hunger indexes | |||
| Taiwan | Low | Low | 3.2% Above |
| Japan | Low | Low | 6.5% Below |
| South Korea | Low | Low | 16.8% Above |
low-income food-deficit country (FAO 2011a)
SOURCE AND NOTES: JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA, AND TAIWAN HAD LOW INDEXES IN BOTH 2000 AND 2019. THE GLOBAL FOOD INDEX IS CALCULATED USING FOUR STATISTICAL INDICATORS: PROPORTION OF THE POPULATION THAT IS UNDERNOURISHED (NOT RECEIVING ADEQUATE FOOD CALORIES), PROPORTIONS OF CHILDREN WASTED OR STUNTED, AND CHILD MORTALITY RATE (CONCERN WORLDWIDE 2010–2019). THE THIRD COLUMN IS DERIVED FROM ANALYSIS OF KCAL PER CAPITA PER DAY FROM FAO FOOD BALANCE SHEETS
The Asian Development Bank (2013: 70, 89) delineates two problems that are inherent in existing state policies. On the one hand, states only offer “immediate relief to the poor during temporary bouts of food insecurity,” coupled with childhood feeding programs that are usually funded internationally. On the other hand, “national food security strategies have often focused on agriculture and food supply, neglecting the importance of nutrition.” It is not surprising that Asian neoliberal states have failed to develop serious food security platforms because international development agencies deter such proactive national agendas by linking project funds, loans and debt repayment to food exporting and nonfood agriculture (SAPRIN 2002). Our examination of trends in the sixteen Asian fisheries points to the dangers of food and fishery exporting and importing (see Tables 3, 5, 6 and 7) because these are profit-oriented strategies of capitalists that are very weakly (if at all) regulated by national policies. Indeed, such state “interference” would be in violation of global and regional trade agreements (SAPRIN 2002).
A decade ago, the Special Rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission advocated a new kind of state responsibility for food security. On the one hand, he instructed states that they would, in future, be expected to recognize the “human right” of their citizens to “an adequate diet providing all the
1.1 The Absence of Asian State Food Security Policy
While it is hard for any of us to disagree with the philosophy of “food as a human right,” such an important goal becomes empty international rhetoric in the face of multiple contradictory layers of neoliberal mandates that have been imposed on Global South states by international development organizations and banks. With respect to food security in the 21st century, international development organizations are now imposing three antithetical mandates on states. First, the World Trade Organization, as well as the proliferation of international and regional trade pacts, require states to eliminate barriers to trade, so that governments do not “interfere” with the actions of capitalist enterprises to produce, process, distribute, export, import and maximize profits from foods. Second, “states have a duty,” according to the United Nations, “to protect the right to an adequate diet, in particular by regulating the food system, and to fulfill the right to adequate food by proactively strengthening people’s access to resources, allowing them to have adequate diets” (DeSchutter 2011: 9). Third, states need to determine how they will comply with contradictory international mandates “to eliminate regulation” and “to create regulation” of the supplies of food within their territories.
1.2 World Food System Risks Made Visible by COVID-19
Before the global pandemic, the Food and Agriculture Organization (2019c) reported that progress in reducing global hunger had stalled. Since 2014, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has been slowly rising globally, and the number of undernourished people steadily increased. By 2018, one of every 3.8 people experienced some form of food insecurity. Then the global COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated those trends. The 2021 State of
Port and airport facilities that handle 90 percent of global commodities were disrupted, resulting in long delays for shipping containers in which foods spoiled or were infested by vermin.
Restrictive food trade measures were implemented by 33 countries, hitting East, South and Southeast Asia hardest with export restrictions on rice and wheat.
Citizen quarantines led to breakdowns in the supply of workers. Food production came to a halt when local and migrant workers were prevented from traveling to farms, fisheries, processing and packaging facilities.
Imports of seeds, seed fish, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery and technology ceased or suffered long delays, preventing crop and aquaculture outputs.
These systemic breakdowns triggered price increases for foods, food packaging, and agricultural inputs by as much as 20 to 50 percent.
Domestically, the prices of fresh produce and fish declined due to oversupply in warehouses and processing centers. Restaurant closures exacerbated this problem, resulting in unsold crops and fish catches. Informal sector workers (who already experienced the highest incidence of hunger) were impacted hardest because peasant farmers and fishers are concentrated in the informal sector.4
Job losses led to sharp declines in household income, causing a 60 percent increase in extreme poverty and loss of access to food resources. East, South and Southeast Asia suffered the highest incidence of job loss and subsequent hunger in the world. What, we wonder, happened to fishers and smallholder farmers when they could not meet their debt bondage obligations?
To complicate matters, there was a 20 percent decline in remittance flows from migrant laborers, hitting South and Southeast Asia hardest.
Closures of schools, NGO and public clinics ended feeding programs for low-income children. Most Asian households could not replace those lost resources, leading to a rise in stunting and anemia among Asian children.
A high proportion of highly perishable micronutrient-rich foods and fishery outputs spoiled in local markets, limiting the food resources needed by pregnant and lactating women, children and teenagers.
Disruptions in agriculture and fishing disproportionately impacted peasant farmers and fishers, triggering sharp rises in rural poverty and rural hunger.
In addition to disruption of food flows to communities, there were even worse supply disruptions to Asian refugee camps.5
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, North Korea was probably the country hardest hit by shortfalls caused by the COVID pandemic.
The total domestic consumption of agricultural products, particularly cereals, soybeans, and potatoes, structurally exceeds the domestic production volume in North Korea. As a result, the country heavily depends on commercial imports from China to fill the gap. Unfortunately, the chances of closing this food gap through increased trade and imports were low due to a border shutdown to trade since January 2020 due to COVID19. … The domestically available crops, combined with the officially planned commercial imports, still left a food gap of approximately 860,000 tons –equivalent to roughly 2.3 months of food use.6
2 Peasant Contributions to Asian Food Security
with less than five hectares of agricultural land per farming household, account for a significant portion of global production of many crops, contributing more than 80% of global rice production, 75% of global production of groundnuts and oil palm, nearly 60% of global production of millet and cassava, and more than 40% of production of sugarcane. … Including 41 crops, accounting for more than 90% of global calorie production… smallholder farming… is responsible for 41% of total global calorie production, and 53% of the global production of food calories for human consumption. Units with less than five hectares of agricultural land per farming household contribute 70% of food calories produced. (Samberg et al. 2016: 5)
The Food and Agriculture Organization (2013, 2021d) emphasizes that Asian peasants produce diversified agricultural surpluses, that they are essential to domestic food security, and that they generate a disproportionate share of the commodities that circulate in the world food system (cf. also Quizon 2013; Samberg et al. 2016; Harrero et al. 2017; Lowder et al. 2021). In the Asian fisheries, small and very small farms produce 35 to 50 percent of global food calories and 50 to 70 percent of local food calories (Lowder et al. 2016; Samberg et al. 2016; Harrero 2017). In most of the Asian fisheries, “smallholders contribute a significant amount to the total value of agricultural output. In the case of India, for example, smallholders contribute over 50% of the country’s total farm output although they cultivate only 44% of the land. In many Asian countries, smallholders are the main producers of staples such as rice, corn,
Asian peasant farmers produce more than 75 percent of most food commodities, including a majority of vegetables, roots and tubers, pulses, fruits, fish, livestock and rice (Harrero et al. 2017). Asian subnational food security is heavily dependent on peasant farms that are smaller than two hectares. There is an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity, i.e. small farms are more productive per hectare than large farms (Quizon 2013; Samberg et al. 2016; Harrero et al. 2017; FAO 2021d; Lowder et al. 2021). More of the crop production of small peasant farms is marketed locally (our Philippine field research; Harrero et al. 2017). The food outputs of small peasant farms are more affordable locally than the outputs of farms oriented to production for global commodity chains (Samberg et al. 2016; Harrero et al. 2017; our Philippine field research). The food outputs of small peasant farms are more nutritiously diverse than those produced by local larger firms that specialize in crops for export (Samberg et al. 2016; Harrero et al. 2017; our Philippine field research). Moreover, imported foods overcome few of the nutritional shortfalls of Asian farming households (see Table 6). In local markets, peasant crop outputs are routinely traded directly for locally captured fish (our Philippine field research; Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile 1977–2019; Pomeroy et al. 2009; Siason 2001; Turgo 2015; Wang 2004). Furthermore, peasant farms serve as conservators of genetic diversity of food crops because they cultivate a wider variety of crops that, in turn, increase their resilience against pests, diseases, droughts, and other stresses (Quizon 2013: 52; Harrero et al. 2017: 36). In addition, small peasant farms and networks collect, preserve and trade seeds of foods, especially vegetables and tubers, that are part of indigenous diets (Bates et al. 2011; Bicksler et al. 2012; La Via Campesina. 2015).7 In short, the shift to capitalist monocultural agriculture has yielded more quantity but less food diversity and a reduction in the indigenous sources of nutrients in Asian diets, a point that we emphasized in Chapter 1.
Because of their production, international development organizations have shifted their policy about peasant fishers to one that values their contribution
Acknowledging that “small scale fisheries have not been given due attention,” the Food and Agriculture Organization launched in 2020 a new project to develop a global inventory of small-scale marine and inland fisheries in developing countries. Their website draws attention to contributions of peasant fishers.
Around 90% of the 35 million people recorded globally as fishers are classified as smallscale, and a further 20 million people are estimated to be involved in the smallscale postharvest sector. In addition, there are millions of other rural dwellers involved in seasonal or occasional fishing activities that are not recorded as “fishers” in official statistics. Women are heavily involved in processing and trade of fish and fish products from smallscale fisheries. When numbers of fishers and fish workers are combined with those involved in activities supplying inputs to fishing and postharvest activities and their household dependents, it is likely that more than 200 million people worldwide depend in some part on smallscale fisheries for their livelihood. These people include many millions who live in remote rural areas, especially in Asia and Africa, where there are few alternative sources of income and employment offering significant potential to contribute to livelihood strategies. (FAO 2019c: 1)
The 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress convened in 2022, and the United Nations declared 2022 the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture.
About three years into the post-2008 global land grabbing (see Chapter 7), the Oakland Institute (2011) drew attention to the pivotal role of the World Bank in causing land investments in developing countries through (a) direct financing of agribusiness firms which amounted to $3.9 billion to 125 projects in 51 countries; (b) assistance to governments to develop land laws friendly to foreign investors interested in large tracts; (c) encouraging governments to offer tax holidays and other subsidies to investors and (d) “working in multiple capacities to foment the influx of private equity into agricultural land worldwide.” OXFAM (2012) challenged the World Bank to “put its house in order” by “freezing its investments in large-scale land acquisitions.” Between 2002 and 2012, Bank investments in agriculture tripled to nearly $8 billion. From 2008 to 2012, formal complaints were lodged by 21 communities whose land rights had been violated by investors funded by the Bank. The year before the global land grabbing began, the World Bank published its economic philosophy about large land acquisitions in its World Development Report 2008 in which the plan for “a new agriculture for development” reads like a prediction of the pressures toward depeasantization that resulted from the land grabbing frenzy.
led by private entrepreneurs in extensive value chains linking producers to consumers and including many entrepreneurial smallholders. … The agriculture of staple crops and traditional export commodities finds new markets as it becomes more differentiated to meet changing consumer
demands and new uses (for example, biofuels). An emerging vision of agriculture for development redefines the roles of producers, the private sector, and the state. … The private sector drives the organization of value chains that bring the market to smallholders and commercial farms. The state… engages strategically in public-private partnerships to promote competitiveness in agribusiness. (World Bank 2007: 8)
Furthermore, smallholders are called upon to “decommodify” traditional local staple crops to make room for new “specialty” exports, specifically biofuels, oil seeds, livestock, feeds and horticulture (World Bank 2007: 142).
If fully implemented, the World Bank’s (2007) economic philosophy of “the new agriculture” would threaten the survival of Asian peasants for three reasons. First, this approach will trigger even more of the kinds of evictions and displacements, biases against ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples, and human rights violations that we analyzed in Chapter 7. Second, this kind of agricultural approach directly conflicts with the global climate change adaptation goals discussed previously, and these are goals to which the World Bank claims to be committed. Those kinds of conflicts in international development approaches often play out on the ground in developing countries, with externally-funded projects from both perspectives operating simultaneously in communities to cause socio-political disruptions and worsening ecological risks that will attract international criticism. Third, the World Bank “new agriculture” is actually most “new” because it advocates the displacement of “less market-productive” smallholders into nonfarm livelihoods and migration. Indeed, the World Bank (2007) advocates the transformation of a high proportion of the world’s peasantry and smallholders into nonfarm laborers to make room for farmers who integrate themselves into production of exports for global value chains. That degree of extreme depeasantization is unlikely for three reasons. First, there simply are not enough nonagricultural options, other than unreliable urban informal sector activities that keep people poor. Second, Asian peasant farmers are strong enough in numbers (see Table 24) to resist strenuously. Third, other international organizations have organized agendas to strengthen smallholder farming in the 21st century.
Is this historical transition to depeasantization and large Asian farms likely to occur? Asian peasant farmers are “persisting in the face of deep socio-economic transformation” (Rigg et al. 2018: 327). Especially in Asia, the World Bank (2007: 17) claims, “the reallocation of labor out of agriculture is lagging.” Even in the neoliberal age when peasant farmers and fishers have been integrated into the global commodity chains of the world food system, the “natural economic transition towards larger farms” that has been predicted by western
Farm size and land distribution in the major Asian fisheries, 2010–2015
| Country | Average farm size in hectares | % farms less than 1 hectare | % farms 1 to 3 hectares | % farms larger than 3 hectares | % land in farms less than 1 hectare | % land in farms 1 to 3 hectares | % land in farms larger than 3 hectares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bangladesh | 0.6 | 84.4 | 14.1 | 1.5 | 50.2 | 37.5 | 12.3 |
| Cambodia | 1.6 | 46.4 | 45.3 | 8.3 | 12.9 | 48.2 | 38.9 |
| China | 0.6 | NC | NC | NC | NC | NC | NC |
| India | 1.1 | 61.7 | 21.0 | 11.9 | 22.5 | 36.5 | 41.0 |
| Indonesia | 0.5 | 74.0 | 20.0 | 6.0 | NC | NC | NC |
| Japan | 2.5 | NC | NC | NC | NC | NC | NC |
| Myanmar | 2.6 | 29.4 | 50.5 | 20.1 | 7.8 | 47.9 | 44.3 |
| Pakistan | 2.6 | NC | NC | NC | 7.9 | 40.1 | 52.0 |
| Philippines | 1.3 | 56.8 | 32.0 | 11.2 | 12.0 | 35.6 | 52.4 |
| South Korea | 1.2 | 53.9 | 18.0 | 28.1 | 24.5 | 32.0 | 43.5 |
| Sri Lanka | 0.5 | 92.7 | 6.5 | 0.8 | NC | NC | NC |
| Thailand | 3.1 | 23.3 | 41.0 | 35.7 | 3.4 | 23.7 | 72.9 |
| Vietnam | 0.7 | 76.1 | 18.2 | 5.7 | 35.6 | 50.1 | 14.3 |
SOURCE: ANALYSIS OF COUNTRY DATA IN “MAIN RESULTS AND METADATA BY COUNTRY (2006–2015),” WORLD PROGRAMME FOR THE CENSUS OF AGRICULTURE 2010, HTTPS://WWW.FAO.ORG/3/CA6956EN/CA6956EN.PDF (ACCESSED 19 JAN. 2022). INDIA’S NATIONAL CENSUS IS BIASED TOWARD LAND OWNERS, IGNORING INDIGENOUS AND LANDLESS FARM OPERATORS. CONSEQUENTLY, THE AVERAGE FARM SIZE IS MOST LIKELY SMALLER THAN THE CENSUS REPORTS. JAPAN, MALAYSIA AND NORTH KOREA DID NOT CONDUCT CENSUSES. NC = DATA NOT COLLECTED BY THE NATIONAL CENSUS. NA = DATA NOT AVAILABLE
One of the enduring agrarian puzzles… has been the persistence of the Asian smallholder. … We have seen Asian countries make the transition from low income to middle income, lower-middle income to upper-middle income, and even to high income. The share of agriculture in GDP has dropped markedly…. But we have not seen the farm size transition
take hold. Rather than the number of farms declining and their average size growing, as experience of and theory from the Global North might lead us to expect, the reverse is occurring: the number of farms is often growing and their average size declining. (Rigg et al. 2018: 327)
In 2010, nearly three-quarters of the world’s farms were situated in East, South and Southeast Asia (see Figure 30), and a majority of them were operated by peasant smallholders (see Table 22).
The World Bank’s “new agriculture” policy is unrealistic because the world’s typical farm is operated on less than one hectare, with 84 percent of farms averaging less than 2 hectares. In most of the Asian fisheries, including Japan,
Status of farms, farmers, cropland and farm mechanization, 1960–2019
| Part A. South Asia | |||||
| Country | Change in farm size, 1960–2019 | % cropland decline, 1960–2011 | % increase or (decline) in No. farmers, 1990–2008 | % population employed in agriculture, 2019 | % farms that use any form of mechanized technology, 2019 |
| Bangladesh | decrease | 43.3 | 5.3 | 38.3 | 37.6 |
| India | decrease | 31.0 | 26.2 | 42.6 | 44.2 |
| Pakistan | decrease | 35.9 | 55.3 | 36.9 | 73.1 |
| Sri Lanka | decrease | 8.7 | 9.2 | 25.0 | 12.8 |
| Subregional Totals | decrease | 30.2 | 24.7 | 38.0 | 42.4 |
| Part B. Southeast Asia | |||||
| Cambodia | increase | 32.8 | 26.2 | 34.5 | 34.0 |
| Indonesia | decrease | 14.7 | 15.9 | 28.5 | NA |
| Malaysia | decrease | 32.9 | (14.6) | 10.3 | NA |
| Myanmar | increase | 9.3 | 28.3 | 48.9 | 2.2 |
| Philippines | decrease | 35.8 | 21.4 | 22.9 | NA |
| Thailand | decrease | 23.3 | (9.3) | 31.4 | 40.1 |
| Vietnam | increase | 8.5 | 31.0 | 37.2 | NA |
| Subregional Totals | decrease | 26.2 | 14.2 | 30.5 | 25.4 |
| Part C. East Asia | |||||
| China-Mainland | decrease | 26.3 | 5.5 | 24.9 | NA |
| Japan | increase | 13.7 | (64.9) | 5.1 | 75.5 |
| North Korea | decrease | 17.4 | NA | 43.8 | NA |
| South Korea | decrease | 34.2 | NA | 5.2 | 24.9 |
| Subregional Totals | decrease | 24.1 | 5.1 | 21.5 | NA |
SOURCE: ANALYSIS OF COUNTRY DATA IN FAOSTAT, FAO (2021C, 2021D) AND “MAIN RESULTS AND METADATA BY COUNTRY (2006–2015),”WORLD PROGRAMME FOR THE CENSUS OF AGRICULTURE 2010,” HTTPS://WWW.FAO.ORG/3/CA6956EN/CA6956EN.PDF (ACCESSED 19 JAN. 2022). NA = DATA NOT AVAILABLE. 2010 FAO DID NOT REPORT FARM CENSUS DATA FOR TAIWAN
Even though a majority of Asian farmers are smallholders, they control a minority of the land area. The worst land concentration has occurred in Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Even though more than 91 percent of Japanese farms are smaller than 5 hectares, they occupy little more than two-fifths of all farm land. More than 82 percent of Sri Lanka’s farms are smaller than 0.1 hectare, but that majority of farms encompass less than 10 percent of the country’s farm lands (see Table 23). While little more than one-third of Thai farms are larger than three hectares, those larger farms control nearly three-quarters of the total land. The average farm size in Bangladesh is 0.6 hectare, but farms larger than one hectare encompass nearly half the farm land. The average Philippine farm is 1.3 hectare, but farms larger than two hectares hold more than three-quarters of the total land. Even in Vietnam where the average farm size is 0.7 hectare because of government land redistribution, two-thirds of the farm land is concentrated in farms larger than one hectare.
Second, the World Bank shifted away from its “new agriculture” policy to the following pro-peasant position after the post-2008 international land grabbing described in Chapter 7.
Smallholder productivity is essential for reducing poverty and hunger, and more and better investment in agricultural technology, infrastructure, and market access for poor farmers is urgently needed. When done right, larger-scale farming systems can also have a place as one of many tools to promote sustainable agricultural and rural development, and can directly support smallholder productivity. … However, recent press and other reports about actual or proposed large farmland acquisition by big
investors have raised serious concerns about the danger of neglecting local rights and other problems. They have also raised questions about the extent to which such transactions can provide longterm benefits to local populations and contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development. (Deininger et al. 2011: XIII)
Third, international development organizations and NGO s emphasize the centrality of peasant farms to world food security. The United Nations has declared 2019 to 2028 the decade of smallholder farming, and the Food and Agriculture Organization has initiated World Agriculture Watch to develop information systems for smallholders.9 The United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization (2014a: 4) emphasize that “responsible international investments” must incorporate “smallholders, including those that are small-scale producers and processors, pastoralists, artisans, fishers, communities closely dependent on forests, indigenous peoples, and agricultural workers.” There are two problems with this lofty policy statement. On the one hand, significant international funding has not addressed the needs of the enumerated groups which form a majority of Asian peasant farmers. On the other hand, the historical reality is that most of the international funding to countries focuses on the integration of agricultural producers into cultivation and marketing of globalized commodities, and those projects have prioritized food crops for export or the transfer of traditional local foods, like cassava, into global nonfood commodity chains (see Chapters 1, 4 and 7). Furthermore, our analysis of current land grabbing in the Asian fisheries points to national policies that displace, rather than aid, the types of smallholders enumerated by the FAO.
4 Deruralization, Occupational Multiplicity and Asian Peasant Persistence
In 2020, more than 44 percent of world population resided in rural areas, and 61 percent of those people were concentrated in the sixteen Asian fisheries where more that 47 percent earn their livelihoods in agriculture and fishing. Despite those contemporary trends, the United Nations predicts that two-thirds of the world population will be urbanized by 2050. As Table 24 shows, ten of the Asian fisheries are “expected” to lose one-fifth or more of their rural populations over the next three decades. This degree of urbanization does
Changes in rural population in the major Asian fisheries, 2000–2050
| Part A. South Asia | |||||
| Asian territory | 2020 actual number | 2020 % total population | 2000 to 2020 actual % increase of (decline) | 2020 to 2050 projected increase of (decline) | 2050 projected number |
| Bangladesh | 104,960,000 | 61.8 | 4.4 | (20.0) | 84,090,000 |
| India | 900,099,000 | 65.1 | 18.2 | (13.1) | 782,365,000 |
| Pakistan | 130,925,000 | 62.8 | 41.0 | 12.1 | 146,712,000 |
| Sri Lanka | 17,139,000 | 81.3 | 10.4 | (17.0) | 14,218,000 |
| Totals | 1,153,123,000 | 63.4 | 18.4 | (10.9) | 1,027,385,000 |
| Part B. Southeast Asia | |||||
| Cambodia | 12,665,000 | 75.8 | 28.0 | 2.3 | 12,957,000 |
| Indonesia | 118,034,000 | 43.4 | (3.8) | (25.9) | 87,446,000 |
| Malaysia | 7,507,000 | 22.8 | (14.8) | (29.5) | 5,289,000 |
| Myanmar | 37,740,000 | 68.9 | 12.2 | (12.6) | 32,967,000 |
| Philippines | 57,695,000 | 52.6 | 37.3 | 0.2 | 57,828,000 |
| Thailand | 33,713,000 | 48.6 | (21.9) | (40.8) | 19,963,000 |
| Vietnam | 61,633,000 | 62.7 | 1.5 | (20.6) | 48,918,000 |
| Totals | 328,987,000 | 50.0 | 5.5 | (19.3) | 265,368,000 |
| Part C. East Asia | |||||
| China-Mainland | 549,472,000 | 38.6 | (33.2) | (50.4) | 272,509,000 |
| China-Taiwan | 5,016,000 | 20.4 | (23.8) | (43.1) | 2,853,000 |
| Japan | 10,396,000 | 0.2 | (61.8) | (44.6) | 5,756,000 |
| North Korea | 9,721,000 | 37.6 | 4.5 | (28.8) | 6,923,000 |
| South Korea | 9,573,000 | 18.6 | (0.9) | (28.5) | 6,841,000 |
| Totals | 584,178,000 | 35.2 | (25.9) | (49.5) | 294,882,000 |
SOURCE: ANALYSIS OF UN POPULATION DIVISION DATASETS
4.1 Deruralization of the Asian Fisheries?
In short, “the end of the Asian peasantry” that was predicted by Elson (1998) is not quite as certain as the United Nations urbanization projections make it seem. On the one hand, there is no magic wand (not even urbanization) to wave to “disappear” all these millions of people neatly or efficiently. Consider Pakistan, for instance. After estimating that there were 1.7 million agricultural bonded laborers in the country, the Pakistan Human Rights Commission (2010) established camps to transition 2,000 of these laborers to freedom each year. The government entity soon realized that it would take 170 years to liberate all the agricultural bonded laborers, without taking into account debt bondage in the fishery sectors (Kara 2012: 77). On the other hand, much of so-called urban growth in Asia consists of unstable shanty towns at the edges of cities and larger towns. Except in China and South Korea where there are inventories of state-built housing or corporate compounds at urban peripheries, communities at the edges of Asian cities take four illegal (but weakly regulated) forms: temporary transient camps, squatter shantytowns, pirate subdivisions of substandard rental housing, and some settlements of refugees or internally displaced persons (Davis 2006: 24–43). Essentially, squatters occupy “land that has so little worth that no one bothers to have or enforce property right to it” (Stillwagon 1998: 67). Much of this land lies in floodplains, on steep hillsides, or in fields contaminated by chemicals or garbage.
Urban planners refer to these areas as peri-urban zones (Cohen 1996: 299) “where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside” (Davis 2006: 46). These are areas in which rural and urban economic
4.2 Peri-urbanization in the Asian Fisheries
Scholars describe 21st century urbanization of Asia as a process other than the city expansion predicted by 2050. Guldin (2001: 23) argues that, in China, we are witnessing “a significant new path of uneven settlement” that is “neither rural nor urban, but a blending of the two” in which economic transactions and labor migrations tie large urban cores to their hinterlands without fully integrating rural areas. However, what happens in the peri-rural community is not driven by processes in the urban core (Aguilar and Ward 2003). South and Southeast Asia are undergoing the emergence of “a completely different urban environment” that is composed of diffuse and disorganized islands that lack a clear center, but have networks of specialized areas with varying degrees of rural/urban mix (Sieverts 2004: 3). In India and North Korea, peri-urban development is described as “a fusion of urban and regional development in which the distinction between what is urban and rural has become blurred” (Drakkis-Smith 2000: 21; van den Berg 2003). In Indonesia and the Philippines, rural/urban hybridization is referred to as city villages (McGhee 1991) that are “strange limbos where ruralized cities transition into urbanized countrysides” (Davis 2006: 16).
According to Asaf Bayat (1997: 56–57), these peri-urban settlements “seek to expand the survival space and rights of the disenfranchised.” Small and marginal peasants resist urbanization by struggling to hang onto land and waterway access, even when they earn less of their household income from agriculture or fishing (Brycesyon et al. 2000: 225). Part of their survival resources come from the remittances from footloose household members and from women’s nonagricultural earnings in the peri-urban community (Breman 2020). Asian peasant farmers and fishers are likely to persist in these peri-urban areas because of their diversity of class and ethnicity and their degree of control over land and resources. Politically, middle-class and land-owning peasants sometimes align with the interests of poorer peasants (Bryceson et al. 2000: 215–219), as is the case with the 2020–2021 Indian farmer rebellion which successfully led to repeal of new farm laws (Basu 2021; Schmall et al. 2021).).10 Furthermore, there are hundreds of political and activist organizations that offer frameworks for resistance.11
Worldwide, there are more bonded and forced laborers in agriculture, fishing and aquaculture than in any other industries (Walk Free Foundation 2018: 21). Moreover, the historical shift to globalized food and fishery exporting has been a major driver toward expanded numbers of these coerced laborers (US State Dept. 2016). Shrimp, rice, palm oil, tea and Indian cigarettes are the commodities that employ the greatest numbers of bonded and forced laborers, including children (U. S. State Dept. 2016, Basu and Chau 2004). However, shrimp and rice are the two commodities in the world food system that are most likely to keep export prices cheap through reliance on bonded labor (Barclay 2013). Driven by several ecological disasters and the global economic crisis, the incidence of Asian debt bondage grew nearly two percent between 2007 and 2011. According to Siddharth Kara (2012: 237–38), “the 2007 commodity bubble doubled the prices of basic food and fuel inputs for billions of the poorest people in the world. … The subsequent global economic meltdown… evaporated markets for many goods and services provided by the poor, caused cuts to social safety nets and poverty alleviation schemes, and increased migration levels.” The international land grabbing that followed the 2008 recession further exacerbated debt bondage and labor trafficking (see Chapter 7).12 In Southeast Asia, for instance, investors displaced local smallholders, then recruited contract and tenant farmers and waged laborers from adjacent countries (Beban and Gorman 2017; Bissonnette and Konick 2017; Marks et al. 2015). These trafficked contract farmers netted the new land owners an estimated 56 percent profit margin annually. At the end of the recession, annual worldwide profits from debt bondage were $96.5 billion (Kara 2012: 237–242),
In 2011, an upper caste South Asian landowner could acquire a bonded laborer for an average initial outlay of $200. Annually, the owner could expect to net a profit of $2,585 from the exploitation of that peasant. As a result of such arrangements in 2011, the total bonded debt in South Asia was $4.5 million, each peasant owing an average $282 (Kara 2012: 216, 237). Bonded labor takes two systemic patterns: (a) domestic farmers and fishers indebted to landowners or traders and (b) laborers recruited and trafficked by legal and illegal agents for transnational employers (Kara 2012; Walk Free Foundation 2018; US State Dept. 2016). As Table 25 shows, there are currently
Estimated bonded/forced laborers employed in agriculture, fishing and aquaculture, 2018
| Part A. South Asia | ||
| Fishery territory | Number | Incidence per 1,000 rural laborers |
| S aBangladesh | 370,592 | 2.3 |
| S aIndia | 5,232,795 | 5.8 |
| S aPakistan | 2,010,366 | 14.7 |
| S aSri Lanka | 35,816 | 2.0 |
| Total | 7,649,569 | 9.0 |
| Part B. Southeast Asia | ||
| S aCambodia | 198,621 | 15.8 |
| S aIndonesia | 536,800 | 4.5 |
| M Malaysia | 49,608 | 6.6 |
| S Myanmar | 397,325 | 16.6 |
| S aPhilippines | 413,952 | 7.3 |
| M Thailand | 300,730 | 9.8 |
| S Vietnam | 266,914 | 4.4 |
| Total | 2,163,950 | 9.3 |
| Part C. East Asia | ||
| M China-Mainland | 1,418,088 | 2.8 |
| L China-Taiwan | 2,580 | 2.0 |
| L Japan | 3,071 | 1.4 |
| S aNorth Korea | 1,000,560 | 107.8 |
| L South Korea | 18,228 | 1.9 |
| Total | 2,442,527 | 14.4 |
2010 low-income food-deficient country (FAO 2011a).
SOURCE AND NOTES: THE FIRST COLUMN WAS ESTIMATED BY MULTIPLYING THE PERCENTAGE OF RURAL POPULATION (SEE TABLE 21) BY THE TOTAL NUMBER OF BONDED/FORCED LABORERS (WALK FREE FOUNDATION 2018). THE LETTERS BEFORE NAMES REFER TO THEIR 2019 GLOBAL HUNGER INDEXES (CONCERN WORLDWIDE 2019). S = SERIOUS, M = MODERATE, L = LOW
5.1 Agricultural Debt Bondage
Debt bondage has been widespread for decades throughout Asian peasant agriculture. Throughout South and Southeast Asia, peasant smallholders are involved in lease/sharecropping arrangements in which they assume liability for housing, household advances, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and irrigation systems, all of which are over-priced in owner accounting. One third-to two-fifths of tea plantations in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have relied on bonded labor for multiple generations. After 150 years, tea laborers “remain an isolated and harshly exploited subpopulation,” many of them trapped on the same plantations to which their grandfathers were trafficked decades ago (Kara 2012: 130). Typical interest rates in agriculture range from 50 to 60 percent, and the term of indebtedness averages 5.7 to 6.8 years. Most of these indebted peasants are illiterate, and some have been indebted over generations. Among agricultural bonded laborers, extreme working schedules, physical violence, sexual exploitation, high child mortality and severe levels of hunger and malnutrition are common (Kara 2012: 8, 72, 76).
Since 2010, recruitment of migrant laborers has been intense for large palm oil plantations in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. For their year-round harvesting, production, and export operations, these plantations are heavily dependent on bonded migratory laborers trafficked from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand. Criminal gangs transport Vietnamese laborers through Cambodia to be exploited on palm oil plantations in Thailand and Malaysia. Most of the transnational laborers employed in palm oil agriculture migrate through irregular channels without identity documents. Legal and illegal brokers move them over public roads or smuggling routes and act as intermediaries with employers. Workers are indebted to these brokers for recruitment and transport fees, bribes to corrupt officials, and initial employer charges. To reduce worker escapes, brokers and employers confiscate identity documents (US State Department 2016).
Throughout Asia, fishers are the very poorest households largely because so many of them are indebted to the mid-level traders to whom they sell their fish. Chapters 4 and 5 provide details about how these arrangements are structured in the Philippines. Nearly three-quarters of frozen shrimp exported from the Asian fisheries are tainted by bonded or forced labor (Walk Free Foundation 2018). Shrimp farming in Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam relies heavily on bonded peasant leaseholders (see Table 26). In those countries, rapid transformation of farmlands into shrimp ponds displaced millions and led to an industry heavily reliant on bonded labor. Operating under bonded labor agreements, peasant shrimp farmers either take loans to lease land or accept capital investment to develop a pond on their own land. Their debits include initial shrimp fry, technology, feeds, chemicals, fertilizers, and antibiotics, and repairs due to ecological disasters are externalized to them (Kara 2012).13 In Bangladesh, there is a disproportionate level of bonded laborers in shrimp and fish farming who take out very high loans to lease land, construct fishponds, and cover the cost of fishpond inputs. “The lease rates are just slightly higher than the average gross profit from shrimp farming. … Any sort of systemic infection or natural disaster that obliterates a single season of shrimp places them in a debt hole from which it would be virtually impossible to escape. … The economics of the system are clearly designed to ensure the persistence of debt bondage for many of the 800,00 to one million shrimp farmers in Bangladesh” (Kara 2012: 116). Most peasant shrimp farmers become trapped in such long-term indebtedness (Shiva 2000), and the lands where they farm shrimp are permanently transformed into salinized soils unfit for future agriculture (Primavera 1997).
Economic sectors and migration patterns of bonded and forced laborers, 2010–2020
| Asian territory | Domestic bonded laborers are concentrated in these domestic sectors: | Bonded migratory laborers are exported to: |
|---|---|---|
| Bangladesh | Domestic Laborers: agriculture, peasant fishing, aquaculture Migrant Laborers: ethnic Indians in tea plantations, aquaculture |
Malaysia: palm oil, commercial fishing vessels Japan: commercial fishing vessels |
| Cambodia | Domestic Laborers: agriculture, peasant fishing | Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, China, Indonesia: commercial fishing vessels Vietnam: Aquaculture (shrimp farming & processing) |
| China–Mainland | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing & agriculture, aquaculture, commercial fishing vessels Migrant Laborers: North Korean women in agriculture; Cambodian, Philippine laborers in commercial fishing vessels Ethnic Minorities: re-education & camp imprisonment of Uighurs for farm laborers |
South Korea, Japan: commercial fishing vessels |
| China–Taiwan | Migrant Laborers from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia: commercial fishing vessels | |
| India | Domestic Laborers: peasant agriculture & fishing, Aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming) | Malaysia: palm oil, commercial fishing vessels Ethnic Minorities: Indian Tamils trafficked to Bangladesh tea plantations |
| Indonesia | Domestic & Migrant Laborers: peasant fishing, palm oil, commercial fishing vessels | Malaysia: 1.9 million Indonesians in palm oil, commercial fishing vessels Taiwan, South Korea: commercial fishing vessels |
| Japan | Migrant Laborers from Philippines, Cambodia, China Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea: commercial fishing vessels | |
| Malaysia | Migrant Laborers from Indonesia, India, Bangladesh: palm oil, commercial fishing vessels 1.9 million Indonesians in palm oil & commercial fishing | |
| Myanmar | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing & agriculture | Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Thailand: commercial fishing vessels, palm oil |
| North Korea | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture in forced labor camps | Japan: commercial fishing vessels China: government contracts for agriculture |
| Pakistan | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming), agriculture | Japan: commercial fishing vessels |
| Philippines | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture Ethnic Minorities: Muslims in peasant fishing & agriculture, aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming) |
Japan, Malaysia: commercial fishing vessels |
| South Korea | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture, aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming) Migrant Laborers from Vietnam, Indonesia, China: commercial fishing vessels |
|
| Sri Lanka | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture (esp. tea) Ethnic Minorities: Tamils on tea plantations |
Taiwan: commercial fishing vessels India: Tamils to tea plantations |
| Thailand | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture (esp. palm oil), aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming) Migrant Laborers from Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China: commercial fishing vessels |
Malaysia: migrant palm oil camps of Thais on the Malaysian border Malaysia, Taiwan: commercial fishing vessels |
| Vietnam | Domestic Laborers: peasant fishing, agriculture Migrant Laborers from Cambodia: aquaculture (esp. shrimp farming) |
South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand: commercial fishing vessels |
SOURCES: WALK FREE FOUNDATION (2018), U. S. STATE DEPT. (2016), KARA (2012); URBINA 2015; MARSCHKEA & VANDERGEEST 2016; INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE MISSION 2017; HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2018; ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FOUNDATION 2018
Legal and illegal agents recruit aggressively for laborers to supply the commercial fishing fleets of Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia (see Table 26). Since 2014, the U. S. Congress, NGO s, scholars and international media have drawn attention to the heavy reliance of Asian fishing fleets on bonded/forced labor, and the situation in Thailand is viewed as especially exploitative (Urbina 2015; Marschkea and Vandergeest 2016; US State Dept. 2016; International Justice Mission 2017; Human Rights Watch 2018; Environmental Justice Foundation 2018). Corrupt officials in source countries cooperate with labor brokers in destination countries to facilitate the trafficking and debt bondage of laborers between countries, and they often conceal the activities of illegal recruiters who have ties to government
Such labor trafficking is now investigated and condemned internationally by the United States, but its latest report (US State Department 2016) does not acknowledge that the cheap seafood prices enjoyed by Americans are the driving force for the development and maintenance of such labor exploitation methods. All of the Asian seafood industries must systematically reduce their labor costs to an extreme degree in order to remain price competitive for markets in the USA, European Union, China and the Middle East.
In the Thai seafood sector, efforts to remain competitive have been associated with importing its seafood labor force from the poorer, and more firmly peripheral states [on which] it borders. This reliance on severe exploitation points to the geo-political significance of semiperiphery nations in global value chains, particularly in the buyer-driven global food system. Expansive and extra-legal fishing measures are required in order to maintain some degree of economic viability in a highly competitive labor value chain where Global North retailers and distributors can control the price of commodities. (Clark and Longo 2021: 18–19)
In similar fashion, the Taiwanese seafood industry keeps prices low by recruiting labor for its fishing vessels from the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. To keep labor costs low, the ship operators charge exorbitantly high recruitment fees, resulting in substantial debts that brokers or employers use to coerce laborers into long-term contracts on fishing trawlers. After broker fees and employer charges are garnished from their wages, most workers earn significantly less than the legal minimum wage in the Asian countries where they are employed (US State Department 2016: 361).
5.3 Asian Climate Change and Debt Bondage
sought to use the destruction of the floods to escape the debt bondage that tied them to landlords. In the period of confusion and reorganisation that accompanied the floods, individuals and families began to uproot to… urban centres. Indeed, the prospect of migration chipping away at the subordinate sharecropping labour force was not lost on the landlord
class, who used their considerable political leverage to have the camps for those displaced by floods shut down to prevent them serving as a launch pad for urban migration. (Taylor 2014: 136)
Since five percent of agricultural households own nearly two-thirds of Pakistani farmland, peasant farmers plunged deeper into debt, landlessness increased, and transnational migration escalated dramatically (Tariq 2018). Food prices skyrocketed. Some trafficked children and sold kidneys to repay debts (Kara 2012: 70–73).
Following Hurricane Aila in West Bengal, numerous villages were destroyed. Landowners offered to rebuild homes in exchange for labor to roll bidis, Indian cigarettes that are marketed throughout South Asia.
A total of 2,900 villagers were caught in bonded labor for bidi rolling. In exchange for rebuilding the homes and allowing the villagers to live in them, the landowners required the villagers to work six days a week rolling bidis. They were not allowed to leave the village area nor take on any other work. If they broke these rules or did not roll enough bidis, they would be evicted. … They roll the bidis all year round, and at some point during the year just about every family needs an advance. … The jamadar offers the advance, and the family is that much more pressured to roll more bidis. … In addition to severely cramped fingers and neck and back ailments, many villagers suffer from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. (Kara 2012: 97–98)
Since the 2010 hurricane and flooding, nearly 98 percent of the one trillion bidis produced in India every year are hand rolled by more than four million laborers, half of whom are in long-term debt bondage. At least $2 billion of the bidi trade can be attributed to bonded laborers, each of whom provides a net profit of $500 yearly to the creditor (Kara 2012: 100).
Sometimes, an historical comparison provides the best sense of the severity of labor exploitation. The labor practices used to hand roll India’s 21st century cigarettes are more archaic and more labor intensive than those that characterized the workplace of slave laborers in 19th century American tobacco factories. Those slave laborers worked in systematized factories in which workers were rationalized to different tasks, they had access to some machinery, and they worked fewer hours each week than today’s bidi rollers. Children and women worked in both contexts, physical abuse of American slaves was probably more frequent and severe, but the American slaves were not likely to be evicted from housing as punishment. Today’s Indian debt bonded peasants and
6 Will Asian Peasants Persist in the 21st Century?
Food extractive enclaves, like the sixteen Asian fisheries, are populated by concentrations of the hungriest, most malnourished people worldwide. Despite the threats to their survival, Samir Amin (2010: 14, 89, 134) argues that economic growth will not lead to the disappearance of peasants. Even a 7 percent rate of growth for fifty years across the entire Global South, he contends, would not lead to the proletarianization of the world’s vast peasant population. Thus we have seen that the sixteen Asian fisheries have not been “depeasantized.” Between 2000 and 2020 when national and local governments have prioritized export agendas that dispossessed peasants from lands and waterways, the rural populations increased in twelve of the Asian fisheries.15 Neither government policies that privilege large export producers nor lack of equitable credit has caused Asian peasant food producers to disappear (McMichael 2006; van der Ploeg 2010). In a nutshell, Asian peasants have persisted for two reasons. First, peasant farmers and fishers are economically valuable to capitalists who have historically exploited them but never fully destroyed them. Willingly and unwillingly, peasants are integrated as nonwaged producers and suppliers into the global commodity chains that produce and move the goods of the world food system across multiple national boundaries.16 For example, 21st century
In Southeast Asia, local and foreign contract farmers were integrated into the operations of palm oil, rubber and biofuel plantations (Beban and Gorman 2017; Bissonnette and Konick 2017; Marks et al. 2015). As we describe in Chapters 4 and 5, peasant provision of low-paid nonwaged labors, unpaid labors, and their debt bondage support the degrees of monopoly of capitalists who control global commodity chains, allowing them to collect profits while providing cheap prices to distant consumers (Clelland 2014). Second, peasant farmers and fishers resist complete destruction or transformation of their livelihoods and cultures through community and national political activism and transnational alliances. “To label oneself a smallholder or to be labeled as such by national or transnational actors is to assert a certain politics of meaning” (Peluso and Lund 2017: 839).
6.1 Why Peasant Farmers are Essential to Capitalism
Mao Tse-Tung (1926) was the first to employ the term semiproletarian to describe peasant households that survived hard times in the early 20th century by merging agriculture with nonagricultural income. In the 21st century, Asian peasant households are semiproletarianized, i.e., they merge waged and nonwaged nonfarm labor, informal sector activities, household production, and migrant remittances with earnings from agriculture (see Chapter 6). Thus, Asian peasant households overcome agricultural crises by merging multiple livelihoods, members often engaging in circular migration to combine farm and nonfarm incomes during different seasons of the year. The analyses of the state of the peoples on the lands grabbed by investors (Land Matrix 2016), as well as the diverse array of farmers involved in 2020–2021 resistance against India’s new land laws, make clear that Asian peasants are integrated into– and often battling against– capitalist markets.17 In reality, peasants provide functional and profitable labor to capitalists because they undertake a number
However, wage earning is not the predominant mechanism through which these households are integrated into the modern world-system. According to Samir Amin (1975: 44), full proletarianization of peasants is a rare exception to the normal operations of agrarian capitalism. Since capitalist agriculture and fishing do not “require the emergence of a rural proletariat” (Brass 1999: 2), peasant farmers and fishers have a “strong degree of autonomy from waged labour” (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010: 273). In reality, most contemporary peasants must prioritize production of market commodities that are contractually committed to landlords, traders, or capitalist enterprises. Furthermore, Asian peasants are not “independent” household producers. Instead, their relations of production with capitalist exporters involve debt bondage, sharecropping and contract farming. For Asian peasants, debt bondage, informal sector activities, contract farming, and sharecropping have not been temporary nonwaged forms on an inevitable path toward proletarianization. A majority of the world’s peasants still earn their livelihoods through nonwaged labor in economic activities that are not transitional to wage earning (ILO 2007). Moreover, the rural informal sector still thrives as a significant source of peasant income (Bryceson et al. 2000). The informal sector accounts for 78 percent of Asian workers (ILO 2007), including most peasant farmers and fishers (see Chapter 5).
Since they are profitable and efficient for capitalism, peasants are not likely to disappear, even though public policies marginalize them, and capitalist commodity chains impoverish them. For these reasons, modern capitalism is not likely to eliminate peasants or to push toward their full proletarianization because the mix of nonwaged and waged labor enables capitalists to maintain high profits (see Chapter 5). Indeed, there are functional advantages for leaving capitalist agriculture in peasant hands. “Without the peasants’ supply of cheap seasonal labour,” contends Julio Boltvinik (2016: 46), “capitalist agriculture would be impossible” unless “the social cost of seasonality is absorbed
6.2 The Persistence of Asian Peasant Fishers
To get a sense of how difficult it would be to eliminate peasant fishers (also referred to as small scale or artisanal), let’s begin by reviewing the numerical proportions. The conservative worldwide estimate is that there are nearly 55 million registered small scale fishers, 82 percent of them located in the sixteen Asian fisheries, totaling more than 45.1 million. Between 1995 and 2018, the number of Asian small scale fishers increased 64 percent. Most of those who fish inland Asian fresh waters are small scale operations, and a majority of them live in small fishing communities. While the term “Asian fishing fleet” sounds like large industrial vessels, 86 percent are small boats that primarily employ nonaggressive gears and nets (FAO 2018; Smith and Basurto 2019).
In the face of marginalization, rising debt and dwindling catches, why do Asian peasant fishers persist? First, there is a dialectical relationship between export fishery sectors and peasant fishers. In reality, neoliberal export strategies are not leading to the death of the peasantry. Instead, these fishing households are profitable elements of global commodity chains to which costs are externalized and from which surpluses are extracted through low paid and unpaid labors and inputs. In short, consumer prices are kept low because these peasants subsidize the production and marketing processes (see Chapters 5 and 6). In short, nonwaged peasants are crucial to capitalists because they produce valuable commodities at lower costs than can be achieved through other approaches (see Chapter 5).
Second, debt bondage operates to keep peasant fishers from leaving their occupation, as fishing is their only means to meet debt obligations and to obtain part of their household survival needs. In fact, traders and middle sector traders utilize debt bondage as a strategy to keep these workers committed to long-term exploitative putting out arrangements in order to attain a degree of market monopoly (see Figures 16 and 17). In addition, bonded peasants are
Third, there are no other occupations to absorb more than 39 million peasant fishers who are better aware than policymakers that they can generate more survival resources through fishing than through alternative livelihoods. Fundamentally, these fishers are accurate when they argue that there are no other jobs that will insure them the survival needs they secure from fishing. In fact, more than one-third of Asian fishers shifted into fishing after their waged jobs in agriculture and industry disappeared. Asian fishers are creative at finding methods to continue in fishing. Some overcome declining catches in their home communities by migrating to follow the seasonal flows of fish and shellfish (Siar and Kusakabe 2020). Male fishers are subsidized by the earnings of wives from non-fishing sources (see Chapter 6) and from household members who move in circular fashion between rural and urban livelihoods, treating the fishing household as home. Fishing households, “are not stagnant entities but adaptive units with agency who often diversify livelihoods to meet household needs” (Siar and Kusakabe 2020: 15). Furthermore, “alternative occupation projects for fishers are likely to fail if they cannot provide the noneconomic aspects of job satisfaction that fishing does” (Cinner et al. 2008: 130).
Fourth, Asian peasant fishers are likely to persist in the 21st century because of their resistance movements and their political activism (McMichael 2008; Hall and Fenelon 2009; van der Ploeg 2010). They are represented by national and local resistance organizations that keep their plight before the media, politicians, NGO s and researchers (Pinkerton 2017).18 For that political reason, it is not likely that depeasantization will totally sever small fishers from the ecological resources they employ to produce part of their livelihoods and household needs. Numerous fisherfolk organizations keep their agendas within the purview of national and local politicians (Desmaris 2007), and they are aligned with global activist organizations, like La Via Campesina, the international food sovereignty movement, Focus on the Global South and FAIN
Fifth, and perhaps most important, most fishers do not desire to leave their traditional work, even in the face of public depeasantization policies and narrowed access to ecological resources (Shiva 2000; Klein et al. 2003). Between 1995 and 2018, the number of Asian fishers increased dramatically. In the Philippines alone, at least one million people are employed in artisanal and commercial fishing, and another six million depend on fishing for their livelihoods (Jacinto 2004). Based on ethnographic studies of Asian fishing communities, Siar and Kusakabe (2020: 37) contend that “fishers have a strong identity as fishers and the old fishers are determined to continue their occupation.” Despite declining catches and limited access to resources, Asian peasant fishers still have access to some of their traditional means of production. As one Philippine fisherwife put it, “there will always be some food to eat, if we are industrious enough.” Moreover, they verbalized in interviews that they cannot replicate their living conditions if they migrate to urban areas. One fisher explained that his family could not secure an equivalent amount of food by migrating to a city where they would have to depend on waged jobs that “do not last long.” Peasants also told us that most of their adult children in urban areas were impoverished, erratically employed in waged jobs and dependent on informal sector earnings.
These fishers expressed views that are advocated by several contemporary scholars who study the global food crisis. For example, Shiva (2016) and McMichael (2006) describe the need for Global South countries to reconstitute “peasant spaces” that challenge the globalized corporate food regime. According to Eric Vanhaute (2008: 57), the “peasant way” combines “local forms of social reproduction with local strategies of income and food security and local forms of knowledge. Most important is the peasant knowledge of internalizing costs of production and reproduction, contrary to the dominant and ultimately dead-end tendency within historical capitalism to externalize social and ecological costs.” We should not under-estimate the great pride that peasants have in their work and in their family fishing heritage. They are quite rational when they vocalize greater certainty about fishing than about unreliable forms of employment that have emerged and declined over their lifespans. One fisher probably captured the sentiments of the majority of Asian peasants when he
7 Conclusion: Seeing Hunger through the Fisherwoman’s Lens
The world food system is “a stratified global division of consumption in which the increasingly extensive commodification of the human and nonhuman world has driven forward an expansive industrial metabolism geared towards the relentless accumulation of capital, yet hinged to the parallel production of climate at a global scale” (Taylor 2014: 191). Rather than ending hunger and malnutrition, food exporting and importing are displacing traditional healthy food/fishery production and consumption patterns (see Tables 6 and 7). Because of their debt bondage and/or contract farming arrangements, peasant farmers and fishers are caught in the trap of contributing to their own nutritional shortfalls by participating in the export of foods. Briefly, let’s examine the world food system from the vantage point of the daily hunger dilemma that faces a Philippine fisherwife. She exchanges her iron-rich, higher-value mollusks (e.g., oysters, clams) and her husband’s most nutritious shellfish (e.g., crabs, shrimp) or finfish (e.g., tilapia) for polished high-carbohydrate white rice. You must run fast and work hard to catch the rice is a cultural expression that we heard frequently during our Philippine ethnographic research. Daily, she makes food decisions for her family, and those choices are severely constrained. She and her husband are aware that peasant fish catches have steadily declined in the face of commercial trawlers and aquaculture, but they operate within the constraints of a debt bondage arrangement with their trader. Consequently, her food budgeting is grounded in the view that rice is more rational because it “numbs” the hunger and will feed more people in her household.
In our ethnographic interviews, wives indicated that they kept the “worst” of the daily catch and sold the “best” because that is what the traders require. Indeed, her daily food trading decisions are grounded in global and national development policies that prioritize the export of her household’s most nutritious fishery outputs. However, the fisherwife may not see beyond these difficult daily complexities. In our interviews we did not encounter any fisherwife who connected her anemia, her problem pregnancies or the stunting of her child to her nutritional unequal exchanges with the local trader, even though some of them realized that part of their traded fish would eventually arrive in one of the least hungry zones of the world (see Table 5). When we told a
Herein sets the daily weight of the world food system on the shoulders of an Asian fisherwoman. She allocates her household’s high-value, most nutritious outputs to a trading network that will ship them to profit-motivated agribusinesses that will export them into the world food system. Globally, those who are rich enough are overfed with the exotic Asian species supplied by households like hers, but those faraway consumers will need to work far fewer hours to buy the fish or oysters than the Philippine household utilized to capture them. While supplying luxury foods to those who can be healthy without them, the fisherwife puts her household members at risk of nutritional shortfalls through her marketing decisions that repay debts to the trader. Systemically, their household debt bondage and nutritional unequal exchanges are dark value drains that derive from Asian development policies that endanger ecological resources and threaten peasant farmers and fishers in order to export their most nutritious foods to repay international debts.
Calories per capita have remained static or risen slightly in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Analysis of country data in FAOSTAT. Per capita consumption declined in Japan.
In its first report on world nutrition after more than a year of globalized COVID-19, the FAO (2021c: 78) pushed aside any consideration of these systemic weaknesses. “While broader agri-food system transformation is of utmost importance, it is beyond the scope of this report.” If such a discussion does not belong in these annual FAO reports about recommended policy changes about world food access and nutrition shortfalls, where does it belong?
These trends were aggregated from ADB (2020); Breman (2020); FAO (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021c); ILO (2020); IMF (2020); Islam (2020); Janssen (2020); World Bank (2020a, 2020b).
These trends were aggregated from ADB (2020); Bremen (2020); FAO (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021c); ILO (2020); IMF (2020); Islam (2020); Janssen (2020); World Bank (2020a, 2020b).
https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessingfall2021agriculturalconditionsnorthkorea (accessed 19 Jan. 2022).
Farm-saved seeds and informal exchanges contribute as much as 70 to 90 percent of the total seed supply of small Asian peasant farms (Shiva 2000, 2016). Asian activist groups battle corporate biopiracy in which multinational agribusinesses seek to prevent indigenous seed collection and community seed banks. See La Via Campesina (2015), the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (https://asianfarmers.org/afa/, accessed 26 Jan. 2022), Vrihi, a folk rice seed bank for farmers (http://cintdis.org/vrihi/, accessed 26 Jan. 2022) and Vandana Shiva’s organization (https://www.navdanya.org/site/livingseed/navdanyaseedbankshttps://www.navdanya.org/site/ (accessed 26 Jan. 2022).
Throughout this chapter, monetary values are expressed as $US.
https://www.fao.org/publications/card/en/c/CA4672EN/ and https://www.fao.org/world-agriculture-watch (accessed 21 Jan. 2022). To date, there are information system projects in Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Similarly, Japanese peasants garnered political support for specialized organic farming for which they now have a domestic demand of $14 million (Moen 1997).
See, for example, the discussion of agrarian unions in Ness (2021: 131–43).
In Southeast Asia, investors displaced local smallholders and recruited contract and tenant farmers from adjacent countries, and they preferred to hire foreign waged laborers (Beban and Gorman 2017; Bissonnette and DeKronick 2017; Marks et al. 2015).
We found such arrangements in our Philippine field research; see Chapters 4 and 5.
Regarding American slaves see Dunaway (2003: 109–113). The 1850 price for U. S. cigarettes is standardized to 2020 values. The contemporary price of an American pack of cigarettes is nearly $4.00, but it is probably more cancerous (according to the Center for Disease Control) than the Indian bidis.
Analysis of UN Population Division database.
According to the World Bank (2020c: 30–31, 105), the vast majority of international trade is managed through these chains which effect downward pressures on labor through heightened competition, driving down the share of the sales prices and/or profits that accrue to the producing laborers.
The notion that a peasant is strictly a poor subsistence producer who operates outside all market ties (e.g., Robinson 1979: 47; Zhang and Donaldson 2010) is romantic and outdated. This essentialist view presumes that peasants want to (or will be allowed to) stay outside markets and outside global commodity chains. First, so many peasants are trapped in debt to traders who export. If they never sell anything, how would they meet contractual obligations to land owners, pay taxes, school expenses, medical expenses or pay off their indebtedness? Second, part of their production still ends up in a global commodity chain, even when they only trade or barter locally, (as we describe in our ethnographic study of Philippine small-scale fishers).
For example, fisher resistance to the Japan-Philippine trade agreement JPEPA made national and international news, and these organizations played a part in generating the 2009 call for a panel to reassess JPEPA (Philippine Star, 25 January 2011).