ABSTRACT The agroecological practices of ethnic minority farmers in Vietnam's northern uplands are being reshaped by intersecting pressures of land‐use reform, market integration, and state‐backed crop promotion. Among Hmong communities in the south of Lào Cai Province (former Yên Bái Province) cinnamon was once valued primarily for its medicinal, culinary, and ritual uses. Today, it has become a celebrated commodity crop promoted by the state through reforestation and development programmes. Working with a conceptual framework that combines a foodways perspective with livelihood pathways scholarship, and drawing on over 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork across three Hmong villages, we examine how cinnamon cultivation intersects with the continuity and erosion of customary foodways. While all three communities have adopted the cash cropping of cinnamon to varying degrees, only one, which we call Riverside Village, has seen a notable decline in food crop diversity and intergenerational transmission of food knowledge. In contrast, households in Mountain Mist Village and Resettled Village have selectively integrated cinnamon into broader semisubsistence systems. They have maintained diverse cropping practices and culturally rooted foodways alongside market engagement, albeit in different ways and to different degrees. By analysing and comparing these entangled foodways we highlight that crop commodification does not necessarily lead to the disappearance of customary agricultural practices and food choices. We argue that village‐level ethnographies are essential for revealing the uneven transformations of upland agrarian life and the continued salience of customary foodways in the context of commodity expansion, and we conclude with policy suggestions informed by these findings.

ABSTRACT The rapid increase in the state‐led construction of small‐scale farmland irrigation infrastructures is a salient trend in China's agricultural modernization strategy. This marks an extension of state power into rural societies that have been de‐centralizing and de‐collectivizing since the reform and opening‐up policy in 1978. These newly built irrigation infrastructures are more than a simple technological upgrade, but embody a complex amalgamation of political, social and environmental changes that have reconfigured hydrosocial relations. This paper investigates how local agricultural water governance, rural social relations and power dynamics are reconfigured by a nationwide Well‐Facilitated Farmland Construction Project in T County, Shandong Province. It reveals that although this centrally‐directed and engineering‐based initiative has improved grain productivity and peasant livelihoods, it has also resulted in the recentralized government intervention in grassroots irrigation governance, socially and geographically uneven water access among irrigators and invisible groundwater grabbing and ecological concerns obscured by the discourses of agricultural productivity. By examining the hydrosocial reconfigurations of ordinary irrigation infrastructure in everyday practices, we call for a nuanced understanding of the processes, dynamics and multiplicity of China's state‐led agricultural modernization and rural development.

ABSTRACT A striking feature of rural markets in underdeveloped agrarian economies is interlinked transactions, where two or more interdependent exchanges are simultaneously agreed upon across different markets. In contemporary India, even as the capitalist relations of production are dominant, there are still regions where interlinkages play a major role in defining the class relations, which in turn influence their agricultural development. This paper analyses the nature of interlinked transactions in Eastern and Bundelkhand regions of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and agriculture‐dependent state. Using a Marxist framework, I argue that such linkages are essentially exploitative, hindering the progressive development of agriculture in these regions. The dominant parties in the interlinked transactions continue to use them as important sources of labour mobilisation and surplus extraction. It further studies the possible influence of the interlinkages associated with tenancy and credit transactions in lowering crop productivity and profitability and finally their impact on the livelihood strategies adopted by the agricultural households.

ABSTRACTHow are we to understand the continuing importance of small‐scale village farming in a country like Turkey, which is undergoing an expanding process of industrialization and commodification in agriculture? There are two sides to this question: One concerns land use reconfiguration for commercial purposes, contraction of small‐scale farmland and village resources and depeasantization and deagrarianization tendencies; the other relates to the absence of significant grassroots‐based agroecological movements for reorganizing agriculture. Using official documents, statistics, ethnographic data and in‐depth interviews, the paper examines this question through the empirical illustration of the small town of Güdül (Ankara, Turkey). It shows that farmers uphold their presence and create an enrichment value for their labour and food collaboratively with consumers within fluid, trust‐based everyday social networks. Invocated by farmers' farming imaginaries, enrichment value creation comprises their assessments and evaluative judgements of capitalist expansion into local village farming within the state‐led developmentalist fold.

ABSTRACT Strengthening women's property rights is on the policy agenda. Rich detailed analyses abound, discussing how agrarian change, including commercialization of land or land titling programmes, affect women's property rights within a particular context. In this comparative paper, we examine national‐level institutional factors across 45 low‐ and middle‐income countries. We combine individual‐level land ownership data with indicators about the structure of the economy, land markets, work and education, gender equality, property rights, social norms, marital property rights and inheritance and political voice. We find no evidence that economic growth is associated with lower gender land gaps. However, the indicators that proxy for greater gender equality in the labour force, educational attainment and legal and social norms are all associated with a lower gender gap in landownership, suggesting that national‐level institutions can play an important role in supporting women's land rights.

ABSTRACTThe year 2025 marks volume 25 of the Journal of Agrarian Change, meaning that the journal has been advancing the field of agrarian political economy for a full quarter century. To pay testament to this heritage, the journal editors have created a series of forums that capture current thinking on a range of contemporary issues in our field. This introductory statement sets out the first three forums, on climate change, agroecology and value analysis, respectively. The forums present one of the many ways that the Journal of Agrarian Change will continue to advance agrarian political economy over the coming years.

ABSTRACTThe global pesticide industry transformed from one dominated by patented products and legacy multinationals with strong manufacturing bases in the United States and EU to one dominated by generic products produced in India and China. We use proprietary market research data, data from regulatory filings, industry press and bilateral trade data to map how the ‘generics revolution’ transformed production and trade in pesticides. Tracing significant changes in sourcing over two decades, we show the emergence of major agribusiness multinationals focused on the generics market as producers, exporters or both. Industrial policy and firm strategy among Chinese firms, which now dominate the generics market, have had a global impact on the industry. Legacy R&D companies maintain dominance through strong positions in the production and marketing of generics as well, blurring the traditional distinctions between these two sectors. Overall, our analysis raises serious questions for regulation and efforts to reduce pesticide dependence.

ABSTRACTIndonesia is the world's largest producer of carrageenan seaweed, the cultivation of which is dominated by household operators and is transforming livelihoods in many coastal communities. Growing demand from the global food processing sector has rapidly transformed Indonesian coastal sea space into a commoditized livelihood resource, where access is governed by emergent, and highly fluid, institutions. Through an extensive ethnographic study in two coastal villages in South Sulawesi, we show how a new property rights regime is being created through evolving institutions of access (both formal and informal) in continual feedback with the livelihood strategies pursued by individual households. The ability to benefit from access to sea space, during a price boom, emerges from within multiple strands of intersecting power relations, producing a range of livelihood outcomes. This study contributes to debates on how rural livelihood opportunities are infused by the politics of access to natural resources, thus reshaping processes of agrarian change in coastal regions.