‘T
he impacts of climate change have never been inevitable’ begins the final paragraph of Paprocki’s (2021, 196) compelling portrait of the politics of and resistance to climate change adaptation in rural Bangladesh. This statement encapsulates what this thoughtful book ultimately argues for: a renewed understanding of the politics of rural possibility inherent in adaptation to climate change that are embodied by agrarian justice movements around the world, but largely ignored by mainstream adaptation policy.
The book develops this argument in a novel way. Through a careful historical and political dissection of both rural transition in coastal Bangladesh, and the envisaging and implementation of first colonial, then development, then adaptation rural policy in the region, the book builds towards an understanding of how a dystopic vision of rural, coastal life in Bangladesh vis-à-vis denaturalized climate impacts came to be dominant. Bangladesh, as Paprocki reminds us, is so often depicted as ground zero for climate impacts, a place of apparent desolate rural poverty. In fact, this dates back to colonial accounts of livelihoods in the Sundarbans region, the area Paprocki focuses on, which is characterised by endless mangrove forests dominating vast and winding coastlines and small islands as part of the complex deltaic system where the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra rivers, originating in the upland Himalayas, open out into the Bay of Bengal. The region was immortalised in Amitav Ghosh’s award-winning 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. A deceased character in the book who is a lifelong inhabitant of the region describes it through a diary entry (Ghosh 2004, 7):
‘There are no borders here to divide the fresh water from salt, river from sea. The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater only to re-emerge hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily… When the tides create new land, overnight mangroves begin to gestate, and if conditions are right they can spread so fast as to cover a new island within a few short years…’
Allowing for some poetic license in Ghosh’s captivating imagery, he captures the essence here of the region’s elusive nature vis-à-vis colonial and later development administrators. As Baglioni and Campling (2017, 2446–47) write, ‘the history of capitalist agriculture can be read as a permanent struggle to standardise, control and simplify nature and the uncertainties of natural environments’. Read through this prism, the Sundarbans represents an almost-insurmountable challenge, one which has led colonial planners through to development practitioners to view the region as a lost cause for capital penetration. Nonetheless, they have also continued to try and accumulate through this unique landscape with almost two centuries of ‘experiments’ accounted for in Paprocki’s book.
What is novel in Paprocki’s account of this dystopian vision-building in the current era is her effortless melding of materialist and discursive analysis, and of critical agrarian studies with climate adaptation analysis, through the framing of a “climate adaptation regime”, constituted by: imagination, experimentation and dispossession, to argue that the construction of the Sundarbans as a dystopia has foreclosed particular futures whilst rendering others, however destructive, as common-sense. Most notable here is the introduction and expansion of shrimp aquaculture into the region from the 1980s onwards as part of a broader neoliberal shift towards non-farm economies and export-oriented growth across the country. The violence of converting the shifting and dynamic mangrove forests or even areas of settled agriculture made up of garden plots, ponds and small forests into shrimp ghers and the fatal effects of saline water intrusion upon flora and fauna are captured clearly in Paprocki’s text. Furthermore, and most alarmingly, detrimental impacts that result directly from shrimp aquaculture are shown to be attributed to climate change by the development sector. Paprocki traces how villagers’ accounts lucidly locate the demise of the local agrarian economy in relation to the specific impacts of shrimp ghers, where for development experts, the former is due to climate change and the latter represents a form of adaptation.
This disjuncture is embodied most vividly in the competing visions of climate adaptation. To development planners, Paprocki writes, promoting rural—urban migration offers a positive and managed approach to climate adaptation, ensuring livelihood possibilities for the formerly-rural dispossessed and also preventing international migration in line with global North bordering regimes which are increasingly the concern of North-South development policy (see Goodfellow 2022). Yet for those compelled to leave rural coastal Bangladesh, often for precarious, seasonal work in the Indian city of Kolkata, imagined futures remain agrarian. This is echoed in accounts of Cambodia (see Natarajan, Parsons, and Brickell 2019), where the precarious, and often dangerous and insecure nature of non-farm work available to the most precarious among the rural dispossessed rarely reflects the secure livelihood transition envisaged by development planners. In this way, Paprocki draws attention to the juxtaposition of imaginaries, between development planners’ notions of agrarian transition, largely rooted in modernist development thinking (Escobar 1995), and the reality of work in the global South where insecure precarious jobs constitute the norm, not the exception (Breman and van der Linden 2014).
More than this though, Paprocki’s account offers a much-needed drawing together of critical agrarian scholarship, taking seriously as it does agrarian change, rural livelihoods and rural development, together with climate adaptation policy, environmental change, and environmental justice movements. Too often, accounts of agrarian change are limited to a more traditional set of questions about capitalism and the countryside, rooted in Marxist scholarship which seeks to understand how accumulation in agrarian capitalism is proceeding, who it is benefitting, and who is left out. These are certainly important questions, and ones that Paprocki delves into in her exploration of Kolanihat in particular, a village where shrimp aquaculture characterised by land concentration and saltwater intrusion has driven major agrarian dispossession. Yet her account effortlessly melds such analysis with preceding exploration of the policy imaginary that led to dispossession in the village and links this to global circuits of knowledge and capital in climate adaptation policy practice. These are shown to have a profound effect in (re)shaping processes of material dispossession. In drawing out these links, Paprocki fundamentally enlarges our toolkit as scholars of agrarian change, particularly in an era of climate crisis. We are reminded that agrarian justice is climate justice, that policy made in seemingly progressive spaces of NGO offices and conferences which uses apparently common-sense thinking to promote visions of climate adaptation, itself fought for by climate justice activists over decades, can result in material dispossession among the rural poor. We are also reminded that capitalism in the countryside is no longer a local affair, it is forged through imaginaries located across multiple scales, and power relations that operate beyond agricultural policy alone. These are crucial conceptual ideas that this book has given us, and should enable us to better link agrarian change and climate adaptation in future accounts.
It is also in relation to this linking of agrarian change and climate adaptation however that Paprocki’s account throws up a set of further questions which warrant further exploration. In fleshing out the agrarian imaginary of rural people in Kolanihat, and then contrasting this with Tilokpur and Polder 22, two areas engaged in ongoing and in many senses successful struggles to transition away from shrimp back to semi-subsistence rice and vegetable agriculture, we are left wondering about how Paprocki envisages the viability of these processes of resistance vis-à-vis the wider neoliberal development context in the region, and vis-à-vis different socio-economic and generational groups in the village. I explore three specific questions here.
Firstly, wider accounts of agrarian change in Bangladesh and across South Asia chart the impact of globalisation and neoliberalism which have compelled farmers into more commercial production, resulting in: monocropping, reliance on capital for chemical inputs and seeds, increased use of commercial credit, increased irrigation, reliance on more geographically-expanded value chains and lower labour usage (Bernstein 2006; Borras 2009; Moore 2015). The impacts of this on rural livelihoods have been profound, with so-called ‘land grabs’ and the ongoing enclosure of common lands leading to reduced subsistence cultivation (Zoomers 2010; Levien 2012; Beban and Gorman 2017), lowered rural labour requirements driving rural-urban migration (Breman 2007; Guérin 2013; Pattenden 2016), and tightening agrarian incomes driving households’ diversification into non-farm work and enterprises in rural and peri-urban areas (Pritchard, Vicol, and Jones 2017; Rigg et al. 2018). Increased reliance on commercial credit and a rolling back of state support for agriculture and social protection further deepen the precarity of many agrarian households (Mader 2014; Natarajan, Brickell, and Parsons 2019).
Here, the contrast that Paprocki sets up between the predatory nature of shrimp aquaculture versus the benefits of semi-subsistence rice and vegetable cultivation warrants further interrogation. Certainly Paprocki is not promoting a vision of the latter based on tenets of neoliberal agriculture. Rather, her vision is one rooted in principles of a global agrarian justice movement which centres farmers’ autonomy over their own inputs, land and markets (see Borras Jr. 2008 for full elaboration of this movement), as embodied through the Nijera Kori movement. Furthermore, as she herself has written elsewhere, ‘the right to remain agriculturalists does not, necessarily, imply egalitarian rural politics’ (Paprocki and Cons 2014, 1111–12). But the reality of agriculture in Bangladesh and beyond remains one that is tending towards commercial cultivation, and the structural issues that come with this. Accounts of other villages in the region that have moved away from saltwater shrimp highlight a shift to commercial farming, based on Green Revolution style-agricultural packages that promote their own slew of ecological and social issues (see Dewan 2022). The question that emerges is thus as follows: to what extent under the aegis of neoliberal development in Bangladesh is an agrarian future a viable livelihood strategy for social justice in coastal Bangladesh?
Furthermore, and secondly, is the question of land as survival or a means of autonomy, particularly for the poorest. Whilst many accounts of rural precarity have highlighted the centrality of access to land and subsistence cultivation as a strategy of empowering otherwise footloose labour in providing the basics of subsistence in periods of crisis (Ossome and Naidu 2021) and also in affording rural households with a safety net that prevents them taking the most exploitative work (Brown 2019; Hall 2020), this form of reproduction remains a frugal means of living for the most precarious (Bernstein 2006). That is, the reality of semi-subsistence petty production in a context of agrarian capitalisation as is the case across South Asia constitutes a squeezed livelihood for the poorest, and one that requires multiple forms of income, usually in the form of non-farm waged work, to allow such basic production to continue. Certainly, a feminist lens allows us to see the everyday work of reproducing the household (through subsistence cultivation that is largely feminised in the case of Paprocki’s account) as constitutive of broader projects of agrarian autonomy (Natarajan and Brickell 2022). Yet for movements such as Nijera Kori which centre rural autonomy as a marker of justice, retaining land remains a central concern. The question thus arises, to what extent does this concern remain relevant in the shifting political economy of cultivation faced by smallholders in coastal Bangladesh? As Paprocki and Cons find, whilst the project of food sovereignty established on Polder 22 (an island wrenched back from shrimp aquaculture and industrial agriculture) is truly remarkable, it does not necessarily allow for the poorest to escape poverty or the need for labour migration. Paprocki and Cons advocate the types of collective land access promoted by Nijera Kori, but without adequate access to capital and high levels of state credit among the poorest, will this necessarily enable justice for all? Put another way, in a context where capital relentlessly seeks to compel people towards market dependence through the erosion of subsistence cultivation, what are the prospects for the latter as a meaningful basis for reproduction?
A third and final area which raises further questions is the extent to which the vision of agrarian justice that Paprocki sets out in her book and elsewhere is shared across different generations. As argued above, the poverty of non-farm work available to many migrants in Paprocki’s case and in accounts across the South today is endemic to the kind of agrarian transition that global South countries face, and certainly leads many in urban and peri-urban work to aspire to life back on the land, and the autonomy this could provide. Yet numerous accounts also highlight a cultural shift among the rural youth in South Asia towards aspirations of non-farm life, specifically towards salaried waged work. In Bangladesh, panel survey data indicates that the overall trend towards non-farm work among rural households is driven by younger generations (Sen, Dorosh, and Ahmed 2021), reflecting a wider geriatrification of the village across Asia (Rigg et al. 2020). To what extent then is the purely agrarian future envisaged by migrant workers in Kolkata a product of the poverty of type of work they encounter, as opposed to an active embracing of rural life? Could an imaginary of agrarian justice include a focus on urban and peri-urban work and working conditions, particularly for younger generations?
These three areas of enquiry very much speak to the richness of Paprocki’s research, raising as it does some of the key questions and debates within critical agrarian scholarship today. To that end then, Paprocki’s text is essential reading for scholars of agrarian change, climate adaptation, and climate justice, particularly those in the former group wishing to better incorporate the latter. In taking seriously the voices and movements of rural communities at the heart of processes of rural change, we are given a new perspective on the violence of climate adaptation, one that must be essential to all scholars of rural life in the South today.
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Dr Nithya Natarajan’s research is rooted in political economy and explores agrarian change, climate adaptation, microfinance and gender in Cambodia, South India and global policy. Her work is published across top-tier geography and development journals including World Development, Antipode and Development and Change, and has received funding from the ESRC and GCRF.
