The Sam Moyo Memorial Conference on “Land and Labour Questions in the Global South” brought together scholars, researchers, activists and practitioners from across the Global South to critically engage with contemporary agrarian and labour questions and to reflect on the intellectual legacy of the late Prof Sam Moyo, one of the leading scholars of agrarian political economy and land reform in Africa.
Organised jointly by the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies (CISLS), Jawaharlal Nehru University; Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies; Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South (CARES); ActionAid India; and the Agrarian South Network, the three-day conference provided a major forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on land, labour, agrarian transformation and the political economy of development in the Global South.
The conference opened with an inaugural lecture by Utsa Patnaik, followed by a round table on “Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo”, featuring scholars including William Martin, Dzodzi Tsikata, Paris Yeros, Praveen Jha and Issa Shivji. A second round table explored agrarian and labour questions from “longue durée” perspectives, bringing together historical and contemporary approaches to understanding structural transformations in the Global South.
The conference addressed a wide range of interconnected themes, including agricultural wages and rural employment, land reform and agrarian relations, land dispossession and land grabs, labour laws and workers’ bargaining power, agricultural mechanisation, rural non-farm employment, migration, tenancy and land leasing, agrarian credit, commodity markets, mining and indigenous resistance, gender and reproductive labour, social mobilisation, structural transformation, and the changing relationship between capital, land and labour.
The geographical scope of the discussions extended across India, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the Global South, reflecting Sam Moyo’s emphasis on comparative and historically grounded approaches to agrarian change. Contributions examined, among other contexts, India, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, South Africa, Brazil, Peru and Southern Africa, highlighting both the specificities of regional experiences and the wider structures connecting agrarian and labour transformations across the South.
The conference also brought together leading scholars and researchers includingPrabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, C. P. Chandrashekhar, K. P. Kannan, Ravi Srivastava, Paris Yeros and many others.
A central concern running through the conference was the continuing relevance of the agrarian question and its relationship to the labour question under contemporary capitalism. Discussions examined how processes of accumulation, dispossession, market integration, mechanisation, migration and structural transformation are reshaping rural societies and forms of work, while also generating new forms of resistance, mobilisation and collective action.
The conference concluded with a valedictory session chaired by Paris Yeros, with a concluding address by Prabhat Patnaik.
