Abstract
If your understanding of land reform does not call to mind the World Bank's neoliberal policies associated with structural adjustment, you would not be alone. And yet, as Mihai Varga shows us in Poverty as Subsistence: The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia, in many parts of Eurasia the transition from socialism to neoliberalism centrally involved “individualizing” land ownership in order to reduce poverty and spur commercialization. As with many World Bank policies, these policies had unanticipated effects, creating millions of smallholder farms that appear to operate outside markets. In the case of Ukraine, Romania, and other countries in the region, land reforms have been deemed a failure because they promoted, in the eyes of policymakers, “subsistence” agriculture, equated with poverty. Varga's meticulously researched book argues that this set of conclusions deserves closer scrutiny. Upending widespread assumptions about “traditional” farmers who were unable to transition away from collective farming arrangements, Varga critiques World Bank assumptions and brings us untold stories of highly adaptable, resourceful semi‐urban poor communities who resist simply by ignoring the mandates of those on high.
World Bank policy presumed, based on the example of post‐reform China, that the path to the widespread commercialization of agriculture would proceed in two sequential steps: propertizing and commercialization. First, states would grant individual land deeds, or “propertize” rural and semi‐rural individuals. This process could involve different processes in different locations, ranging from registration drives to the dissolution of large collective farms to the conversion of large collective farms into corporations. The motivation behind this step came from social justice‐oriented policymakers at the World Bank, drawing from postcolonial land reform efforts in many parts of the world. In south India, for example, Green Revolution technologies were accompanied by the redistribution of land to rural households, a process that was intended both to counter historical patterns of inequity and to spur productivity. Surprisingly, those same logics survived within the World Bank under the reform‐oriented leadership of Robert McNamara in the 1970s to make its way into the policy recommendations of the early 1990s in post‐communist Eurasia. Varga shows us that this step actually proceeded quite successfully in many locales in the region, even though it occurred within highly variable historical and policy contexts.
It was the second step, commercialization, that ran into issues. This is because the only kind of commercialization that the World Bank would recognize as successful was formal commercialization. This impulse, Varga points out, came from the contingent of World Bank policymakers that were centrally concerned with the integration of agricultural markets in Eurasia with the rest of the global economy, the founding logic of neoliberal policy. The two‐step policy prescription, although drawing directly from the China experience, interpreted that experience through an institutional lens that combined social justice policies with free market policies. These dynamics produced a mix of results that neither set of policymakers could have predicted. The reality, Varga's long‐term fieldwork in Ukraine and Romania shows us, was that new smallholders, many with direct connections with the collective kolkhoz systems, used engagement with varying informal markets to strengthen the food security of their families and adapt to the new market‐based landscape.
The opening chapters of Poverty as Subsistence set up the global and local policy context. The subsequent chapters about small, medium, and large‐scale farmers, however, truly constitute the heart of the book. Focusing respectively on “Resilience” and “Resistance,” Varga reframes the ingenious strategies through which peri‐urban workers demonetize their food production when possible, rely on remittances from mostly women laboring as domestic workers abroad, and engage in local markets to sustain their families.
While “subsistence” suggests poverty, Varga highlights the notion of “self-provisioning” as a viable strategy of resilience that became available to entrepreneurial farmers and some smallholders. The World Bank would have pushed further monetization of agricultural land, but newly propertized communities did the opposite: they demonetized their agricultural plots as much as they could afford to. Family members worked the land themselves without pay instead of hiring increasingly scarce seasonal farm workers. Landowners would keep some of the produce themselves and sell some portion of it at a local market to ensure a better return than they would if they were to sell a small amount of produce to a middleman.
To fulfill their monetary and long‐term needs, these same farmers might sell cheap commercial imports as Varga's interlocutor, Misha, does in the book's opening, or rely on income from abroad. The poorest endeavored to combine agricultural work with a local factory or state job in order to ensure a stazh, or long‐term contribution to their pension. Surprisingly, only those who had no other source of monetary income sold all they grew. These were the most precarious smallholders who were constantly in search of a way to increase their income. World Bank understandings of commercialization missed these resourceful strategies when declaring land reform a failure. Instead of looking closely at how smallholders were protecting themselves from poverty, policymakers resorted to tropes about the “traditional” and backward peasantry, resistant to markets. Ironically, this pattern of thinking on the part of neoliberal policymakers and scholars echoed the negative understandings of peasants that defined Marx's thinking.
Varga’s work thus brings to light “self-provisioning” as an important lens through which to understand social reproduction under neoliberalism. He shows convincingly that we need to closely examine the immediate environments in which communities labor to understand local mutual aid networks and continuities between earlier organizational forms and current ones. Existing understandings of “subsistence” no longer capture the diversity of ways that newly propertized individuals navigate their livelihoods.
Analyses of neoliberalism often overlook the specific form the transformations of the 1990s and early 2000s have taken in specific post-Soviet contexts. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has belatedly drawn the attention of American scholars and the public to the region. Although this is not the first book to show us where and how World Bank policy outright failed in some ways and produced unintended consequences in others, it is unique in its focus on how contrasting understandings of poverty alleviation, subsistence, and free markets at the World Bank created an uneven landscape for markets and livelihoods in Eurasia. This book is a major scholarly work that will be of interest to graduate students and scholars interested in expanding and bringing down to earth our taken‐for‐granted understandings of neoliberalism.