Land acquisitions, labour and the export of farm models: the frictions emerging from Western involvement in Russian agriculture

This paper studies the export of Western farm models following foreign land acquisitions, and the frictions that emerge when diverging farm models meet (or clash). It studies what land acquisitions produce in terms of new social relations and labour arrangements, applying the socio-technical systems approach. The general image that global land grabbing equals the sudden imposition of large-scale modern farming models in rural societies devoid of it, does not match with the reality in rural Russia. The country has a long history of exceedingly large farming, and like in some other BRICS, domestic investors promote their own model of large-scale farming. Dutch investors, managers and consultants involved in Russian large-scale agriculture, who implicitly promote the smaller-scale family farm model, encounter farm models which are fundamentally different from theirs. In the global land grab debate, conflicts about the future model of farming related to land deals are often depicted as a battle between on the one hand investors, together with state officials, pursuing large-scale farming, and the local population in discontent or opposition. The case of the World’s largest countryside shows that this conceptualisation does not always match reality, as many of Russia’s rural dwellers  appreciate aspects of large-scale farming.  However, this does not mean that the new forms of large-scale farming are therefore unproblematic.  

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Roy Huijsmans