Agricultural Extractivism in the Mediterranean Region

This book addresses the connections between food provisioning, natural resource extraction and the exploitation of human labor. Through a series of case studies, it tackles agricultural extractivist regimes in the Mediterranean, focusing on the socio-ecological and ideological practices that constrain or contribute to conflicting processes of social reproduction.
The book is divided into two parts investigating the two faces of agricultural production and opening the field of their inter-connections: (1) labor, nature and capital in food production, and (2) agricultural projects for a sustainable future. The contributed chapters provide insights into how valuation processes of human and non-human resources are entangled with economic valorization and capital accumulation. Bringing together studies based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Agricultural Extractivism in the Mediterranean Region bridges macro-level analyses and micro-level perspectives by tracing how structural constraints express themselves in concrete social relations. The reliance on detailed case studies facilitates the introduction of advanced topics in an accessible and engaging format. This book will be of interest to scholars in economic and environmental anthropology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of work, as well as sociologists and human geographers working in related areas.

1. Beyond Depletion: On Value Extraction in Mediterranean Agriculture. - Part I Labor, Nature and Capital in Food Production: Practices of Extraction and Exploitation. - 2. Thirsty Landscapes: Morocco s Green Agricultural Policies and the Struggle for Water at its Margins. - 3. Water, Crisis Governance, and Everyday Experiences of Uneven Stateness in Rural Tunisia. - 4. Monocultures in Southern Tunisia: Promising Employment, Promoting Desertification and Displacement. - 5. Extractivism as Predatory Accumulation. On Water, Labor, and Accumulation in Strawberry Production in Southern Spain. - 6. Non-Profit Intermediation? Housing Access for Migrant Farmworkers in Italy Amidst the Criminalisation of
Caporalato
. - 7. Appropriated, Segregated, Hierarchised: The Spaces of Migrantised Agroindustry in Mediterranean Europe. - Part II Agricultural Projects for a Sustainable Future: Visions and Contradictions. - 8. Nature, Capital and Control in the Organization and Digitalization of Pig Production. - 9. Digitalisation for Green Agrarian Extractivism in Mediterranean Europe: Dynamics of Change in the Agrifood Enclave of Foggia, in Apulia (Italy). - 10. Agricultural Crisis and Food Insecurity in Greece. Challenges in Strengthening Local Agri-food Systems. - 11. Navigating Opposition and Recognition: Changing Relationships and Imaginaries Between Agroecology and the State. - 12. Cultivating Alternative Supply Chains: Hemp Gardens in a (Post)Industrial Valley. - 13. Who is Served by Agricultural Cooperatives? Power Relations in the Lleida Fruit Cluster (Catalonia, Spain). - 14. The Baskets of the Crisis in Marseille (France).