Kevin M. Woods, University of California Berkeley
Burma's dramatic entry onto the world stage this decade has been imagined as Asia's 'final frontier' for global finance institutions, markets and capital. Burma's agrarian landscape and society, where three-fourths of the country's population resides and works as smallholder farmers, is now being constructed as an investment opportunity for domestic and international agribusiness. But ?agro-capitalism? is not just constructed in urban finance centers, but also in agrarian places alive with specific politics, socio-cultures and histories. The paper demonstrates how the making of agro-capitalism in Burma during this current neoliberal reform period is borne through violent regional histories defined by contested and racialized territorial politics. The transition to industrial food regimes involves a shift from the use of guns and fear to dispossess smallholders of their land and farming livelihoods to that of the logic of law and markets, backed by police force. Farmers? fight for food sovereignty, much like the making of agro-capitalism, are nestled in the fractured landscapes and state-society relations informed by race and space, both uniting and challenging solidarity within and among farmers from different agro-ecological zones and political histories and territories.
Kevin Wood's research is situated on the Burma-China border where he initially investigated cross-border timber trade in the mid-2000s. His current dissertation project follows emerging post-war land governance changes in northern Burma's uplands with the arrival of Chinese agribusiness subsidized by China's opium substitution program. He is particularly interested in how this most recent Chinese cross-border exchange with northern Burma offers novel mechanisms for military-state territorialization through resource extraction concessions, counter to the hyped fear of Chinese land grabbing. These dramatic biophysical landscape changes have profound socio-economic and political implications.
This event is the first seminar in the 2014-2015 Critical Asian Political Ecologies Seminars series at the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) at York University.
The series is organized by Peter Vandergeest and Robin Roth (Department of Geography).
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