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For the purposes of developing a rigorous comparative
framework, we will focus on: Brazil, India, China, Hungary, South
Africa, the United States, and France. The logic for choosing these
countries rests on three different factors: i) all seven countries
have historically strong agricultural sectors and are important
contemporary actors in regional or international agricultural trade;
ii) they are representative of the most important internal transformations
in property regimes and rights, including post-apartheid distribution
(South Africa), post-communist de-collectivization (Hungary and
China), post-authoritarian grassroots-led distribution (Brazil),
gendered struggles over access to land and natural resources (India),
and neo-liberal transformations in state-property relations (the
United States and France); and iii) they all have vocal groups advocating
for their rights regarding access to land. With all of these similarities,
the countries provide important differences for comparative analyses.
Across the countries and regions, we will
work through spatial and historical comparisons, asking questions
such as: what relationships exist between the property enclosures
of 18th century England and the mass de-collectivization of state
property in Eastern Europe over the past twenty years? Why have
populist calls for a return to the land been present in every century
and every region of this modern industrial age? What threads run
through Progressive Era concerns over Pure Food in the United States
and heated calls for organic, sustainable, and slow food production
and consumption today? How do gender, class, and customary laws
interact with the social and economic forces of globalization to
create new geographies of power and exclusion?
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