Introduction to the Special Issue: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Essays in Appreciation of Henry Bernstein

This special issue presents five essays and an interview in appreciation of Henry Bernstein. The essays – by major scholars in the field of agrarian political economy – engage with different aspects of Bernstein’s oeuvre: from direct critical reflections on his approach to the peasantry and the agrarian question through to arguments developed in connection to his work on commercial capitalism, landed-property and the relationship between petty production and accumulation. This introduction briefly sets out some of the major aspects of Bernstein’s distinctive editorial, pedagogical and theoretical contributions. It suggests that his most crucial and lasting contribution is in his absorption and ability to apply Marx’s theory and method as a living theoretical and analytical approach to the study of agrarian political economy

Working beyond the border? : a new research agenda for the Evaluation of Labour Standards in EU trade agreements

The European Union (EU) has approximately fifty bilateral trade agreements in place with partners across the world, and more than twenty more that are at various stages of the negotiating process. At the same time as they increase in number, these agreements also increase in scope. EU trade agreements now cover a wide range of regulatory measures, including ‘Trade and Sustainable Development’ chapters, which, among other things, contain obligations in relation to labour standards. These labour standards provisions follow a common model (with limited variations) and adopt an approach which has been described as ‘promotional’ rather than ‘conditional’. In the context of the broader debate about the purpose and efficacy of the labour and trade linkage, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of the EU's new provisions on labour standards. It draws attention to the limited research on the impact of existing provisions ‘on the ground’ with respect to different types of agreements, and why this is problematic. It then concludes with proposals for a research agenda that can fill this gap, involving a set of methodologies requiring greater concern for firm and country-level assessment of changes arising from the implementation of this new breed of EU bilateralism and directed to the question of whether EU labour standards can really work ‘beyond the border’

Industrial Fisheries and Ocean Accumulation

Three-fourths of the world’s marine capture fisheries are at or beyond ‘full exploitation’, indicating the likelihood that many fish populations, and the ecosystem of which they are a part, will decline (if they are not already) with current and expanded levels of competitive extraction, though the geographies of fisheries decline and recovery are uneven. Fish, whether saltwater or freshwater, farmed or captured, are an important source of animal protein, micronutrients and fatty acids crucial to alleviating malnutrition, hundreds of millions of people are employed as fish workers and in fisheries-related activities, and fish exports from developing countries generate a higher export value than coffee, bananas, cocoa, tea, sugar and tobacco combined (Campling et al. 2012). State and market pressures from outside fishing industries also shape the ecological resources that fisheries depend upon. For example, the ‘deadly trio’ of oceanic warming, acidification and deoxygenation – all driven by terrestrial capitalism – threatens in particular larger-bodied animals living at the top of trophic levels in the oceans’ ecosystems (Payne et al. 2016). These changes and declines are a likely oceanic outcome of ‘business as usual’ for global capitalism. Mainstream social science fisheries research has largely been under-attentive to fisheries systems in general and particularly in relation to questions of how they are shaped through capitalism. Historically, the prevailing treatment of fisheries in the social sciences has been biologically and economically reductionist, and policy thinking is ‘subsumed under the goals of economic growth and wealth creation’ (Symes and Phillipson 2009, 1). Fisheries have been treated as ‘a technicality, an exercise of narrow, instrumental rationality ruled by universal theory’ (Jentoft 2007, 435), and ‘the individual producer [is theorized] as an autonomous isolate engaged in the technical act of catching fish’ (Pálsson 1991, 21). However, over the last ten years, this has begun to change rapidly (for a recent review, see Bavnick et al. 2018). With Penny McCall Howard, in 2012 we edited a special double issue of Journal of Agrarian Change that sought to examine the political economy and ecology of capture fisheries, drawing explicitly from the analytical tools available to critical agrarian studies, and enriching these tools with cases from the water. In our introduction to that special issue (Campling et al. 2012), we charted three themes that we saw then as pertinent to critical agrarian studies and the political economy of capture fisheries: market dynamics and competition in fisheries production-consumption systems; labour, forms of exploitation and resistance; and resource access and the state. In the years since, there has been a flourishing of attention to fisheries specifically, and of extractive relations in aquatic spaces more broadly. Here we advance two main objectives: 1) to introduce study of industrial fisheries to a critical agrarian studies audience and indicate relevant intersections between the two, and 2) to highlight new advances, emergent research themes and exciting scholars working in the field of ‘oceanic accumulation’ (Sibilia 2019). Given space limitations, we focus on industrial marine capture fisheries and to raise questions about ocean accumulation more generally. We recognise the profound socio-economic and ecological importance of artisanal and small-scale coastal fisheries, and inland or riverine fisheries, as well as booming aquaculture and mariculture industries. These are essential areas for critical agrarian studies and each presents important analytical similarities and differences and we encourage scholars working in the critical agrarian studies tradition to research these and their articulations; our hope is that the discussion here offers foundations for ongoing and expanding attention to critical agrarian studies beyond the terrestrial

Labor regimes, global production networks, and European Union trade policy: labor standards and export production in the Moldovan clothing industry

This article examines the relations between workplace and local labor regimes, global production networks (GPNs), and the state-led creation of expanded markets as spaces of capitalist regulation through trade policy. Through an examination of the ways in which labor regimes are constituted as a result of the articulation of local social relations and lead-firm pressure in GPNs, the article examines the limits of labor provisions in European Union trade policy seeking to ameliorate the worst consequences of trade liberalization and economic integration on working conditions. The article takes as its empirical focus the Moldovan clothing industry, the leading export-oriented manufacturing sector in the country. Trade liberalization has opened up a market space for EU lead firms to contract with Moldovan-based suppliers, but in seeking to regulate labor conditions in the process of trade liberalization, the mechanisms in place are not sufficient to deal with the consequences for workers’ rights and working conditions. Indeed, when articulated with national state policy formulations seeking to liberalize labor markets and deregulate labor standards, the limits of what can be achieved via labor provisions are reached. The EU’s trade policy formulation does not sufficiently take account of the structural causes of poor working conditions. Consequently, there is a mismatch between what the EU is trying to achieve and the core labor issues that structure social relations in, and labor regimes of, low-wage labor-intensive clothing export production for EU markets

The trade-labour nexus: global value chains and labour provisions in European Union free trade agreements

Labour standards provisions contained within the European Union’s (EU) free trade agreements (FTAs) are a major iteration of attempts to regulate working conditions in the global economy. This article develops an analysis of how the legal and institutional mechanisms established by these FTAs intersect with global value chain governance dynamics in countries with contrasting political economies. The article formulates an original analytical framework to explore how governance arrangements and power relations between lead firms in core markets and suppliers in FTA signatory countries shape and constrain the effectiveness of labour provisions in FTAs. This analysis demonstrates how the common framework of labour provisions in EU trade agreements, when applied in a uniform manner across differentiated political-economic contexts, face serious difficulties in creating meaningful change for workers in global value chains

Governing labour standards through free trade agreements: limits of the European Union's trade and sustainable development chapters

The EU has established a new architecture of international labour standards governance within the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). To examine the operationalization of this framework, we draw upon 121 interviews undertaken with key informants in three FTAs signed with the Caribbean, South Korea and Moldova. We engage with wider debates over external governance and the projection of EU power by showing how operational failings, including a lack of legal and political prioritization of TSD chapters and shortcomings in the implementation of key provisions, have hindered the impact of the FTAs upon labour standards. We also identify significant limitations to the EU's ‘common formulation’ approach when applied to different trading partner contexts, alongside ambiguities about the underlying purpose of the trade–labour linkage. Reflection about the function and purpose of labour standards provisions in EU trade policy is therefore required

Workers’ rights are now a basic element of trade deals. What stance will Britain take?

Labour rights are now a basic component of many of the kinds of trade agreements the UK wants to sign post-Brexit, but there has been little discussion of what sort of provisions the UK wants to see in them. James Harrison and colleagues have found that commitments to workers’ rights on paper are not always enforced. They suggest what a labour rights agenda might look like as the UK prepares to leave the EU’s trade deals

Governing labour standards through free trade agreements: limits of the European Union's trade and sustainable development chapters

The EU has established a new architecture of international labour standards governance within the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). To examine the operationalization of this framework, we draw upon 121 interviews undertaken with key informants in three FTAs signed with the Caribbean, South Korea and Moldova. We engage with wider debates over external governance and the projection of EU power by showing how operational failings, including a lack of legal and political prioritization of TSD chapters and shortcomings in the implementation of key provisions, have hindered the impact of the FTAs upon labour standards. We also identify significant limitations to the EU's ‘common formulation’ approach when applied to different trading partner contexts, alongside ambiguities about the underlying purpose of the trade–labour linkage. Reflection about the function and purpose of labour standards provisions in EU trade policy is therefore required