This session will be held in a hybrid format, on Teams virtual platform and in the Doucy room
Speaker : Joseph Martinez (LAMC-ULB/University of Cambridge)
Title : "Credit Takes Over" : How Credit in Agrarian Capitalism Reshapes Social Reproduction
Abstract :
Production of palm oil in Colombia has been a matter of extended contestation over the last decades. Workers’ rights violations and land dispossession are usually associated with the crop, and its material presence have deeply transformed local landscapes. While palm oil constitutes a transforming force for communities across the country, I focus on the role of debt in those transformations, particularly in the contract-farming schemes that have been implemented to expand the palm oil cultivated area in the Colombian Caribbean. Based on the experience of small peasant palm oil producers in the Montes de Maria region, I explore how debt in its credit form, beyond constituting a source of capital to secure production, serve as an infrastructure that mediate global relations of capital valorisation and allow them to reorganise local processes of social reproduction. Particularly in cases in which national production is uncompetitive, debt infrastructures (here in the form of producers’ associations and contract arrangements) are able to secure specific forms of exploitation and value extraction by harnessing local regimes of property and existing forms of territorial life-making.
Bio:
PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge and current FWA Doctoral Fellow at LAMC.
- When ?
Friday 11 February 2022 from 2:00 pm until 4:00 pm
- Where ?
ULB - Campus du Solbosch
Institut de Sociologie (building S)
Room Doucy - 12th floor - Room 123
44 avenue Jeanne - 1050 Bruxelles
Conference also accessible via the Teams virtual platform - Registration: lamc@ulb.be