Jeff Neilson – författare

Adopting a 'global value chain' approach, Value Chain Struggles investigates the impact of new trading arrangements in the coffee and tea sectors on the lives and in the communities of growers in South India. Offers a timely analysis of the social hardships of tea and coffee producersTakes the reader into the lives of growers in Southern India who are struggling with issues of value chain restructuringReveals the ways that the restructuring triggers a series of political and economic struggles across a range of economic, social, and environmental arenasPuts into perspective claims about the impacts of recent changes to global trading relations on rural producers in developing countries

Adopting a 'global value chain' approach, Value Chain Struggles investigates the impact of new trading arrangements in the coffee and tea sectors on the lives and in the communities of growers in South India. Offers a timely analysis of the social hardships of tea and coffee producersTakes the reader into the lives of growers in Southern India who are struggling with issues of value chain restructuringReveals the ways that the restructuring triggers a series of political and economic struggles across a range of economic, social, and environmental arenasPuts into perspective claims about the impacts of recent changes to global trading relations on rural producers in developing countries

Fortress Farming identifies in Indonesia's rural coffee-growing regions an alternative livelihood strategy that is reshaping relationships with land and informing Indonesia's agrarian transition. Jeff Neilson presents "fortress farming" households as ones that are reluctant to embrace productivity-maximizing agriculture, even as they interact with commodity markets and powerful downstream companies. Rather, these households tenaciously maintain access to land as a last defense against insecurity in a precarious global economy, all the while actively tapping into off-farm income sources. Fortress farming confounds assumptions that the development process entails an inevitable transition away from the land and into city-based manufacturing. Shifting away from production to take a fuller view of rural Indonesian coffee-growing communities, Fortress Farming explores how and why defensive farming strategies have emerged, and what these tendencies mean for our understanding of agrarian transition in late-industrializing countries in the early twenty-first century. Neilson posits that late-industrializing countries may never undergo a full agrarian transition: In the alternative livelihood practice of fortress farming, we see a way that local social institutions can resist, or at least modify, the productive forces of capitalist agriculture.