"When they return home they do nothing for half a year”: opposing remittances and articulations of Romanian migrant labour in agriculture

Abstract

Food security is becoming increasingly problematised, as demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown, or by the crisis in the global grain markets induced by the war in Ukraine. How out-migration and return change agriculture in different countries of origin, including Eastern Europe, is less understood in connection to such crises. In this paper we look at the ways in which agriculture and its labour regime change under the impact of international migration in two geographical areas in Romania, the Transylvanian Highlands and Banat. We analyse how two types of actors return to Romanian agriculture and how they occupy different labour positions: small-scale entrepreneurs and seasonal workers. Unlike much research on migration and development depicting migrants as agents of positive change, we consider social remittances as contested. We advance the notion of “opposing remittances” to account for how migrants differently reflect on their migration experiences and how class-based relations, marginalisation and racial inequalities affect social remittances related to labour. Ultimately, this paper reveals how inequalities are entangled in return migration in agriculture, and how contingent migration experiences contribute to the variegation of social remittances.