Global agriculture enclaves and labor migrations: global convergences and transnational regulations

Abstract

In recent decades in the context of food globalization have emerged new enclaves of intensive agriculture. These enclaves of agricultural production have generated new patterns of mobility of transnational capital and of agricultural work. Its orientation towards external markets, its high technology and production modernization and its extensive use of labor have turned it into a sector that dynamizes the territories in which it sits. This article shows that, despite the heterogeneity of production sites scattered throughout Latin America and Southern Europe, there is a general trend in the production and working conditions toward precariousness. Given these conditions and their social effects, this article explores the social regulatory initiatives that have been deploying in these enclaves. First, this article social and analytically contextualizes the proliferation of new enclaves of intensive agriculture. Second, it then describes the new patterns of mobility and settlement of work that have contributed to the appearance of new enclaves of agricultural production in a context of increased local and global migration flows. New patterns of mobility and settlement are presented as indicators of the effects on social cohesion that are generating these productive territories. Third, we describe the new social composition of the labor market, showing their sexual and ethnic segmentation and precarious working conditions. Fourth, the paper indicates some of the many efforts of social regulation of these new production areas. To conclude, the findings concentrate on thinking about the complicated relationship between global productive convergences and transnational regulations.