The most critical factor that shapes the character and trajectory of the sugarcane sector in China is neither land nor labour, individually, but rather the interactions of social dynamics around land and labour, and specifically migrant labour.
This is the main argument in this new article co-authored by researchers working on the Commodity & land rushes and regimes (RRUSHES-5) project.
They argue that not only the political economy of land and labour together drive agrarian transformation in the sugarcane sector, but more precisely that it is the process of how the labour regime shapes land politics, and how land politics shapes the labour regime, that is the central driving force.
Furthermore, this mutual reshaping of land and labour regimes is multi-sited, occurring simultaneously within China and Myanmar, and in the China–Myanmar corridor.
They hypothesize that the dynamics they have observed in this context have broader resonance worldwide, especially in major farmer–farmworker land/labour flows along transnational corridors.
Read the article online
'Migrant (farm)workers and farmers in China and Myanmar: a perspective from the sugarcane sector', Agriculture and Human Values. March 2025.
