Research and Book Presentation by Dr. Rangarirai Gavin Muchetu.
Overview
Comparing the Zimbabwean and Japanese agrarian experience may sound impossible. Still, the similarities in the socio-economic and political realities of their respective radical land reforms and grain policies provide scope for such an endeavor. This book examines the aftermath of Japan’s radical land reform and the development of her cooperatives. It then compares it to the nature and character of the Zimbabwe post-land reform agrarian structure. The author collected and analyzed data from three villages in Japan, and three in Zimbabwe to understand different types of cooperatives, their growths, and constraints. Three distinct types of cooperatives emerged from Japan’s 70-year experience in cooperative development. One of these three was identified as providing more relevant lessons necessary for restructuring the British-Indian type of cooperatives currently obtaining in Zimbabwe. The central argument is that the radical Fast-Track Land Reform Programme provided a rare platform (as it did in Japan) to develop robust, genuine grassroots cooperatives from below. Based on a global political economy reading of agricultural production, the book sieves the pros and cons of the Japanese agricultural cooperative system with knowledge systems from the Zimbabwe movement to advance a new agricultural cooperative development framework for Zimbabwe and other post-colonial states.
When?
This online event will take place on Tuesday, March 15th, from 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM Japan Time. Join this month’s presenter, Rangarirai Gavin Muchetu, the JSAS Secretary General. Gavin is a Political Economist who specializes in rural and agricultural development, and he is post-graduate fellow and assistant at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University.
Venue: Zoom
Meeting ID
828 3976 5664
Passcode
613442
Come One, Come All
And do you have a topic you want to talk about that is relevant to JSAS' interests? Do you have a scholar to recommend and invite for this workshop-style presentation? Contact us @
gavinmuchetu@gmail.com (Rangarirai Gavin Muchetu)
vicknnyanzi@gmail.com (Vick L. Ssali)