The rise of BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as new hubs of global capital and their extension into their respective regions and the world as a whole have presented an interesting/intertwining picture of agrarian transformations both within the BRICS countries and outside. Their development trajectories, though with great divergences in land tenure system, agrarian labor regimes, and modes of agricultural production at the beginning, have been following a model that we call “agro- extractivism”. It refers to extract as much as possible of high-demand resources (be it land, water, minerals, forests, agricultural products, oil reserves, cheap and disciplined labor or others) at lowest cost within shortest period of time. The center of extractivism is to control flows of commodities through global networks. It abandons one region when the resources have been exhausted (e.g. cheap labor no longer being cheap), and expands into virgin areas through takeovers to ensure direct or indirect access to new resources. Under the umbrella of this model, BRICS countries are extracting themselves, being extracted, and are extracting other countries and regions.

However, agro-extractivism has to face endogenous crises and problems, which results in an inevitable slowing-down in some BRICS countries. Clear countertendencies can be observed regionally, nationally, and inter-regionally against this model. Food sovereignty movement, MST, and many Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives are fighting separately and/or together to gain back the control over resource reservoir, and build a life of esteem and dignity. Different efforts (organized or unorganized, overt or covert) are made to stop or suspend unwanted land deals, which may even lead to an overthrow of the (local) government. Contradictory policies have been stipulated in BRICS countries as a result of struggles, with promoting agricultural modernization and mechanization on one hand, while pressing the brakes on the scale and the speed of land concentration on the other. Whereas forbidding foreign capital flying like vultures in their own sky, some BRICS countries are encouraging the outsourcing of over-accumulated capital overseas. All these agrarian transformations and processes have invoked a number of researchers and practitioners, activists and policy makers alike to explain, and more importantly, to respond.

Against this backdrop, the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) is collaborating with several initiatives and institutions to hold an international conference with emphasis on agrarian change inside and outside BRICS countries in the context of global flows of capital, labor and agro-commodities. The hosting organizers are China Agricultural University (Beijing), in partnership with Northwest A&F University (Yangling).