Agricultural Transformation and Rural Development

ক্ষমতার ধারণা কোনো নির্দিষ্ট বৈশিষ্ট্য দিয়ে বোঝা সমস্যাজনক। কেননা ‘শক্তি প্রয়োগ’, ‘প্রভাব’, ‘মর্যাদা’, ‘শ্রেণী’, ‘কর্তৃত্ব’ প্রভৃতির মাধ্যমে ক্ষমতাকে বিভিন্নজন ব্যাখ্যা করেছেন। একটা দীর্ঘ সময় বাংলাদেশের গ্রামীণ ক্ষমতা কাঠামোর ভিত্তি হিসাবে ভূমি, শ্রেণী, সামাজিক মর্যাদা, গোষ্ঠী বা বংশ প্রভৃতিকে বিবেচনা করা হত । কিন্তু বর্তমানে ক্ষমতার ভিত্তি এবং গ্রামীণ জনগণের মাঝে ক্ষমতা সম্পর্কিত বোঝাপড়া উভয়ক্ষেত্রেই পরিবর্তন এসেছে। এই প্রবন্ধের মাধ্যমে বাংলাদেশের গ্রামীণ ক্ষমতা কাঠামোর সাম্প্রতিক প্রবনতাসমূহ বিশ্লেষন করা হয়েছে। এই বিশ্লেষনের মধ্য দিয়ে মার্ক্সীয় ও ওয়েবারীয় দৃষ্টিভঙ্গীর সীমাবদ্ধতা প্রস্ফুট হয়েছে। আমি দেখাতে চেষ্টা করেছি কিভাবে পরিবর্তিত সামাজিক, রাজনৈতিক, অর্থনৈতিক এবং সাংস্কৃতিক প্রেক্ষাপটে বাংলাদেশের গ্রামীণ ক্ষমতার পরিবর্তন হয়েছে। ক্ষমতার মার্কসীয় ও ওয়েবারীয় বিশ্লেষনের বিপরীতে ফুকোলডিয়ান মডেল ব্যবহারের মধ্য দিয়ে ক্ষমতা অনুশীলনের পরিবর্তিত রূপ এ প্রবন্ধে তুলে ধরা হয়েছে।

This study examined the impact of migration on multidimensional poverty in the Gurage zone of Southern National Regional State in Ethiopia. The key objectives of the study were to analyze the prevalence of multidimensional poverty, identifying the determinants of MPI, and estimating the impact of migration on multidimensional poverty of rural households in the study area. Data were collected from a total of randomly selected 384 sample households. The data were analyzed using a multidimensional poverty index, probit regression model and propensity score matching. From multidimensional poverty index, the adjusted headcount ratio in non-migrant households, migrant sending households, and overall population was 19.8%, 10.5%, and 15.7%, respectively. The incidence of poverty in non-migrant and migrant sending households was 43.5% and 25.6%, in that order. The average deprivation share of poor people in migrant sending and non-migrant households in the weighted indicators was 41% and 43.5%, correspondingly. The contribution of non-migrant and migrant sending households to the adjusted headcount ratio was 70.5% and 29.5%, respectively. The result of an econometric model indicated that; household size, number of migrants, education of household head, and livestock holding have a significant effect on rural household multidimensional poverty in the study area. The average effect of migration on multidimensional poverty reduction was 4.3% and 1.6% in migrant sending households and the entire population, respectively. This study showed that the scale and the prevalence of multidimensional poverty is well controlled by migration. Therefore, this study recommended for development planners to mainstream migration and all stakeholders are requested to participate in awareness creation on top of effective migration management and efficient use of its remunerations.

Strategic communication is a communication plan that requires communication and dissemination of development initiatives. It is a development communication plan which advocates quantitative information impact assessment. This paper therefore looks at the potentials of strategic communication and how it could be used effectively for agricultural extensions to transform agriculture in Nigeria.

Over many decades, conventional farming has increased agricultural production, but in ways that have increased energy usage and environmental pollution as well. An alternative approach is to convert to organic systems, which can be more efficient in both natural resource use and energy consumption. However, this conversion will change the pattern of economic and social activity on farmed landscapes. This research examines this transformation as a complex system in a Multi-agent Model (or Agent-based Model (ABM)). The complexity of the system is due to the interactions between human and natural elements over time and space. We designed an ABM, coupled with a Geographical Information System (GIS), to create a powerful model in which agents are able to evaluate and make decisions about conversion over a period of 32 years. The focus was on economic factors, farmer characteristics, and community relationships, to increase not only economic and social sustainability, but also to reduce environmental pollution. An Ontario sub-watershed with predominantly agricultural land use was selected for this research. The GIS_ABM was applied to scenarios looking at governmental support, social communications, economic factors, and GHG emissions over space and time. Agents (small farm enterprises) are activated and adapt themselves by interacting with other agents. They process input data using knowledge-based rules, including whether to convert from conventional to organic farming or vice versa. Some of the scenarios to optimize economic/social subsidies and their simulation results are discussed in this paper.

In post-independence Kyrgyzstan, the role of the informal institutions of aksakals and imams remains strong even during an era of transformation and development of the region with international support. This research notes the importance of informal local institutions in international aid and argues for a complementary interplay between formal and informal institutions in weak democracies. In contrast to existing studies, this research states that the role of informal institutions in young democracies should not be treated only as detrimental. A gap that this work aims to fill in the existing literature is a contribution to the understudied topic of how and why formal institutions exploit/use informal institutions for own purposes. The contribution discusses how the Local Crime Prevention Center (LCPC)—a formal institution—engages with informal institutions, such as imams and aksakals, for its everyday duties and tasks, starting from information dissemination activities and informat...

Anthropological participant observation, in-depth, open-ended interviewing and oral history reveal aspects of social change and modernisation that have taken place in Aliabad, Iran, over more than half a century. These developments have transpired in interplay with economic, political and cultural processes. As a result of economic transformation from sharecropping and trading to urban-style jobs, and due to outside influences as a consequence of advances in transportation , communication, education and travel, villagers have been able to make other choices. Through bottom-up social and political change, relationships in all areas of life have become less authoritarian and hierarchical and more egalitarian and subject to negotiation and individuation.

This paper examines postcolonial agricultural
mechanisation in Zimbabwe in the context of recent land
reforms. It pays particular attention to the central role
played by state-capital relations – with notable links to
international finance – in shaping a resurgence in tractor
usage following Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform
Programme (FTLRP). Moreover, the economy-wide
crisis triggered by land reform shaped the emerging
agricultural mechanisation. This study examines the
decline in tractor supply by the government, and the
growth and dominance of large-scale commercial farms
as a source of second-hand tractors for smallholder
and medium-scale farmers.
This paper relies on archival sources as well as empirical
data collected in Mvurwi through surveys, focus group
discussions, tracker studies and in-depth interviews.
While the tractors imported by the government from
Brazil on concessional terms have become a major
source of tractor services for the resettled farmers in
Mvurwi, resettled farmers are also reinvesting proceeds
from the sale of agricultural commodities predominantly
in agricultural mechanisation, creating a new source
for tractor hiring services and agrarian transformation.
Although patronage politics has shaped the distribution
of tractors and the establishment of tractor service
cooperatives, there is no evidence of concrete political
gains resulting from these investments.

This article aims to understand how villagers whose ancestors had to migrate to Turkey from Greece in 1924 as a result of the Greek‐Turkish population exchange remember their past. Within a theoretical framework built around the concept of habitus from Bourdieu’s oeuvre, social memory, and identity, I argue that social memory finds a practical place in the habitus of the villagers and promotes the villagers’ identity through practices. By emphasising the time dimension in the working of habitus, I also discuss how habitus attunes to changing conditions. Based on semi‐ethnographic fieldwork, this article claims that the relationship among habitus, social memory, and identity was established within the framework of everyday lives that revolved around tobacco production and later changed with the transformation of the tobacco market in Turkey after the 1980s.