Critical Agrarian Studies in the 21st Century International Conference, Beijing, Çin, 10 Ekim 2023
Climate crisis and environmental disasters are transforming the global rural landscapes in an unprecedented fashion and while there is a growing interest in adapting agriculture for a climate-changed future, migrant agricultural labour is often sidelined. The explicit consequences of climate crisis and disasters manifest themselves on the changing patterns of agricultural production, threats on the survival of peasantry, and the efforts to mend the urban-rural divide. Seasonal agricultural migrant workers appear as the essential social group enabling the sustenance of agricultural production while bearing the burden of climate impacts firsthand. As COVID-19 pandemic also shown us, these communities are the essential workers who feed the world while being subject to exceptional measures. However, the literature on climate and environmental vulnerabilities has by and far focused on the farmers and production patterns at the expense of vulnerabilities of seasonal agricultural migrant workers. Our aim with this paper is to fill this gap in the literature by examining the temporalities and materialities of climate change and environmental disasters on migrant seasonal agricultural workers.