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Accepted Paper:
Sustainable Agrarian Futures under Threat: Climate Change, Capitalist Exploitation, and New Frontiers of Peasants' Revolt in Ghana's Agrarian Economies
Surulola Eke
(Queen's University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the intersection of climate change processes with micro-forms of capitalist exploitation is threatening the future sustainability of agrarian economies in Ghana, West Africa.
Paper long abstract:
In the examination of the interplay between capitalism and climate change and its effect on agrarian struggles, the idea of the intrusion of corporate and state-guided capitalism into the agrarian world has been preeminent. This focus on hard capital obscures indirect linkages, such as how soft capital, although disoriented towards the raping of nature, unlike the former, exacerbates climate change effects in ways that accelerate the destabilization of agrarian economies. This indirect connection is evident in agrarian settings in the Northern Region of Ghana, where the resultant peasants' revolt is directed neither at capital nor the state but at local landed-elites, who transfer the burden of the twin pressures of climate change and soft capital to their labourers. Using the Marxian concept of social relations of production as a theoretical lens, this paper unpacks how this interface plays out in Gushiegu, Northern Ghana. It concludes that because the relations of production in a society shapes the peasants' revolt undertaken in response to threats to their livelihoods, agrarian scholars should become more attentive to their diversity in order to recognize the different ways peasants are responding to the twin threats of climate change and capitalism.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality. Log in
Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
Paper long abstract:
In the examination of the interplay between capitalism and climate change and its effect on agrarian struggles, the idea of the intrusion of corporate and state-guided capitalism into the agrarian world has been preeminent. This focus on hard capital obscures indirect linkages, such as how soft capital, although disoriented towards the raping of nature, unlike the former, exacerbates climate change effects in ways that accelerate the destabilization of agrarian economies. This indirect connection is evident in agrarian settings in the Northern Region of Ghana, where the resultant peasants' revolt is directed neither at capital nor the state but at local landed-elites, who transfer the burden of the twin pressures of climate change and soft capital to their labourers. Using the Marxian concept of social relations of production as a theoretical lens, this paper unpacks how this interface plays out in Gushiegu, Northern Ghana. It concludes that because the relations of production in a society shapes the peasants' revolt undertaken in response to threats to their livelihoods, agrarian scholars should become more attentive to their diversity in order to recognize the different ways peasants are responding to the twin threats of climate change and capitalism.
Transforming the global countryside: Rural persistance and change in the ‘urban century’
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -