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ABSTRACT
In Ratanakiri province, home to a large share of Cambodia's indigenous minorities, land commercialization involving large-scale land transfers and in-migration has led to shrinking access to land for indigenous households. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a household survey conducted in Ratanakiri, this paper explores the links between social reproduction and agrarian production in the current phase of agrarian transition through the lens of everyday gendered experiences. It argues that while wage labour is becoming an essential component of agrarian livelihoods for land-poor indigenous households, gendered hierarchies mediate access to local wage labour opportunities due to the incompatibilities between care work and paid labour. This paper contributes to the literature by exposing locally-specific processes through which gender-differentiated impacts are produced under multiple modes of dispossession. It also illuminates the links between dispossession and social reproduction and the tensions between capitalist accumulation and care activities in agrarian trajectories following land commercialization.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Elisabeth Prügl for her comments on earlier drafts of this article, DEMETER project members for their support, translators for their patience and assistance during the fieldwork in Ratanakiri, and the respondents that provided their valuable time to be interviewed for this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I use the term ‘land commercialization’ with reference to large-scale land transfers, (voluntary or involuntary) land sales and the (legal or extra-legal) appropriation of private and communally-managed land. These processes/outcomes, together and individually, have been understood as exemplifying ‘land grabs’ or ‘land dispossession’ in the literature relating to global (see Levien, Citation2017), Cambodian (see Schoenberger, Hall, & Vandergeest, Citation2017) and local (Ratanakiri) contexts (see Park & Maffii, Citation2017). As a result, I situate this study in relation to previous works examining ‘global land grabs’ (Borras & Franco, Citation2012) and land dispossession.
2 This phrasing draws on Priti Ramamurthy's study on cottonseed farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India which frames ‘feminization of agriculture as an index for the changing relationship between labour and capital’ (Ramamurthy, Citation2010, p. 398).
3 Cambodia is divided into 24 provinces, which are further divided into districts. Each district is sub-divided into communes which consist of villages. Ratanakiri consists of a total of 51 communes. To maintain the anonymity of the respondents, I have not mentioned the names of the communes and villages studied in this article.
4 These study sites were selected jointly by researchers involved in the DEMETER project (Droits et Egalité pour une Meilleure Economie de la Terre). For further information see: https://r4d-demeter.info/
5 The quotes from respondents cited in this article are based on translations provided by interpreters (who prefer not to be named in this paper) during interviews.
6 The 2013 government census reported that 2.26 percent of the Cambodian population were ‘mother tongue speakers of ethnic minority languages’. Khmer mother tongue speakers comprised 97.05 percent of the population (National Institute of Statistics, Ministry of Planning, Citation2013, pp. 23––24). Most estimates suggest that Ratanakiri is the province with the highest proportion of indigenous minorities in the country.
7 While 58 percent of households surveyed in my study areas mentioned possessing land titles in 2016, this was not the case when ELCs were rolled out in these areas between 2007 and 2011. Most households received titles only in 2012 following the Directive 01 land titling policy.
8 The market rate per hectare for land in Ratanakiri is around USD 1000–3000 per hectare.
9 These cases do not necessarily represent ‘female-headed households’. A majority of these women mentioned living jointly with other family members— parents, siblings and/or their children's families.
10 This time-use data was collected by asking respondents to recall the time they and their spouse spent conducting the following tasks in a day. Thanks to Andres Torrico Ramirez for compiling this table.
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Saba Joshi
Saba Joshi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. Her doctoral research focuses on gender and resistance to large-scale land acquisitions in Cambodia. She is also a Research Assistant in DEMETER (Droits et Egalité pour une Meilleure Economie de la Terre), an academic research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Swiss Development Corporation examining the gendered impacts of land commercialization on food security and the right to food in Cambodia and Ghana.