This
presentation explores how the peasant labour processes are being reconfigured
in the Global South by contemporary rural and agrarian change, with particular
focus on their incorporation into informal mining: the exchange of ploughs for
picks. To address this question, it draws on recent scholarship that has
problematised the classical understandings of agrarian transition by going
beyond the question of how capitalism transforms peasant production systems to
encompass broader sources of social and economic change in rural areas.
Following this thread of argument, this paper shows that throughout the global
south, peasants on mineral-rich tracts are being driven into what are generally
portrayed as illicit and disruptive mining practices by rising commodity
prices, increasing input costs and poor returns from agriculture, authoritative
resource governance by states that favour large corporations, and poor environmental
care by these operators. The aim in exploring the political economy of
extraction by peasants is to expand the notion of extractive industries, to dig
through the contemporary sense of anxiety over such mining, and to extend the
livelihoods diversification-versus-degrarianisation debate. Such analytical
approaches to mineral-dependence would enable social scientists to shift away
from the macroeconomic theory of resource curse or the top-down 'greed and
grievance' view, and place the geophagous peasants within the body literature
on agrarian change, by linking mining history with contemporary labour theories
and those on the informal economy.