Reconsidering the links between poverty, international labour migration, and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

Abstract

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural people's engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.

Keywords:

• agrarian change
• dispossession
• labour migration
• land
• Nepal
• rural poverty
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and recommendations, which have strengthened this paper considerably. We are grateful to Dr Jagannath Adhikari, Associate Professor Colin Filer, Dr Megan Poore and Jyotsna Tamang for their valuable inputs for this paper, and all other colleagues who provided comments and feedback on earlier versions. We would also like to express our gratitude to a rural community of Sunsari district, Nepal for cooperation and logistical support. The research benefited from a field grant provided by the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ramesh K. Sunam

Ramesh Sunam is a PhD candidate at the Crawford School of Public Policy of The Australian National University. His doctoral research focuses on changing poverty dynamics in the Nepalese context of rapid agrarian change and rising international labour migration. His research interests include rural poverty, food security, labour migration and forest governance. He worked as a policy researcher at Forest Action Nepal and as a Forest and Livelihoods Officer at NSCFP/Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Nepal. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

John F. McCarthy

John McCarthy works on questions of governance, institutions and rural development with a focus on forestry, agriculture, food security and land use. At present he has an Australian Research Council funded project regarding social protection and food security in rural Indonesia. He has carried out various assignments with agencies including AusAID (now DFAT), the World Bank, and the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). John is Associate Professor at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, and coordinator of the Masters of Environment and Development. Email: [email protected]