The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology 1

A substantial proportion of the world’s population remains rural, despite decades of urbanisation. Further, most of this rural population lies south of the equator. Therefore, it is incumbent on the emerging fields of rural criminology and global southern criminology to mutually reinforce each other’s scholarly development. To this end, this article engages three selected issues associated with agriculture and food – agricultural victimisation, food security, and farmworker abuse and trafficking – and discusses them in terms of the advancement of a global southern criminology. The article concludes with acknowledgement of many more rural crime issues that have particular salience to the global South and warns of new dangers in the development of hegemonic binaries (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016) and homogenous categories of knowledge (Connell 2007) if they fail to inform each other.


Introduction
It is estimated that the world's rural population is nearly 3.4 billion individuals and increasing (The World Bank 2016a), even though, as a percentage, the rural population continues to decline (The World Bank 2016b). In fact, for the first time in human history and beginning sometime during 2007, the rural population fell from a majority status, statistically speaking, to its present minority status of about 47 per cent (UN Population Fund 2007). Yet, despite this trend, as Weisheit (2016: 5) emphasised, 'while most people live in urban areas, most places are rural'.
As the world's economies are interlocked more than ever before (something we now call 'globalisation' (Bhambra and de Sousa Santos 2017;James and Steger 2014;Ritzer 2004)), as cultures are increasingly interconnected to the same degree through the exchange of labour across national borders, and as the speed with which ideas can spread without regard to border checks through electronic forms of communication and mass marketing, (something we now call 'McDonaldization' (Ritzer 1993)), the traditional rural-urban dichotomy becomes an increasingly embarrassing anachronism. This is particularly the case in criminology because the distinction was long ago a theoretically obsolete dualism and a hackneyed trope for propping up the urban, western bias of criminological scholarship . There was and continues to be a very great lag -almost in the style of Ogburn's (1957) use of the phrase 'cultural lag' over half a century ago -between the theories, concepts and empirical research of mainstream criminology and events happening around the world that illustrate the manifold and significant issues related to crime, justice and punishment (Blagg 2016;Cain 2000;Connell 2007;de Sousa Santos 2014;Friedrichs 2007). Hence, the realities of crime and criminal justice in the smaller, less densely populated places of the world are not reflected in the theories and research concerns of most criminologists (de Sousa Santos 2014), no matter where they live, work and focus of their scholarship.
Some scholars within the criminological community have responded with fresh theoretical perspectives that incorporate considerations, first, of global or transnational crime (Findlay 1999;Friedrichs 2007;Mackenzie 2006) and, second, of the specific development of a criminology more capable of considering, both theoretically and empirically, crime and justice in the 'global South' (Blagg 2016;Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016;Connell 2007). Part of this consideration -and one with important implications for the rural criminological dimensions of a global southern criminology -is the role of colonialisation (Blagg 2016). Colonialism's impact on indigenous populations in various 'settler' societies and associated issues of crime and criminal justice -such as in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States -is already welldocumented and debated (Cunneen 2016;Cunneen and Tauri 2016). As well, the role of colonialisation on the formation of nation-states and their effects on governance in general and policing more specifically is already a rich form of scholarship (Blagg and Anthony 2016;Jones, Lithopoulos and Ruddell 2016). However, a third dimension of colonialisation, crime and justice is more muddled and less developed. It is an explication of the rural dimensions associated with the policing and criminal justice outcomes of colonialism from the past and of new styles of colonialism in the form of contemporary forms of economic, social, political and cultural exploitation, whereby rural peoples and communities are disadvantaged. These new types of rural dependency and the ways they affect crime and criminal justice is where a global southern criminology and rural criminology can have much in common.
Rural criminology itself is developing rapidly into an identifiable sub-field or specialisation within criminology, and a significant reason for this is the interlocking (or, shall we say, 'intersectionality') of green criminology previously and a criminology of the global South more recently, both of which bolster the significance of rural crime for scholars around the world (Donnermeyer 2016b). However, there are dangers in the conceptual and empirical unfolding of a global criminology whose emphasis is on regions of the world south of the equator and other parts of the world that fit a southern description in a more symbolic manner. Will it create new IJCJ&SD 120 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) lop-sided dichotomies by neglecting issues of crime and criminal justice in the rural regions of the global South in favor of a focus mostly on cities in the global South? In other words, will the old urban biases of a mainstream, westernised version of criminology seep and creep into the theorising and research of those concerned with the development of a southern global criminology?
In response, this article discusses selected issues related to the continued development of a global southern criminology that has significant rural dimensions. The three issues are interrelated in that they pertain to the production of food. In addition, it incorporates literature regardless of place because it seeks to avoid 'familiar binaries', even though the focus is on the global South (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016). It recognises that the vast variety of rural places -from those within the shadows of big city skyscrapers (figuratively speaking) to those that take many days of travel by motor vehicle to reach -share common traits, even as the diversity of place is one important linchpin for creating a cohesive rural criminology of the global south Donnermeyer, Scott and Barclay 2013). This article also reminds readers, however, that rural places anywhere in the world are part of the metaphoric south, long-ignored and homogenised into a bland landscape with little of significance for the historical development of criminology and great deal of current criminological scholarship as well (Connell 2007;Donnermeyer 2016a)

Rurality and southern global criminology
The basic trait that unifies all in the world that is rural seems quite simplistic, but contains many implications; rural places, regardless of region, have small populations and/or low population density. The key questions that follow are less easily answered: what exactly is meant by small and is there a cut-off point to distinguish what is small and therefore rural from what is larger and therefore urban? Hence, it should be quite apparent that it is easy to fall back on those oversimplistic binaries (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016). One way around this definitional issue is to rely on an administrative solution, which is to simply assume that 'rural' and by extension 'urban' is how the government of a country defines both for the purposes of demographic bookkeeping. That is what the United Nations Population Fund (2007) and the World Bank (2016a, 2016b) statistics cited in the opening paragraph rely upon. As enticing as that solution is, it is also conceptually lazy, and resembles too much of western criminology's penchant for defining significant problems for research by the availability of data that is isomorphic to the arithmetic process (Young 2011). Nonetheless, sometimes there is no choice but to use governmental definitions of what constitutes a rural place, even though both arbitrary and highly variable in definition from one country to the next, because no other data are available.
Fortunately, this issue is side-stepped when the focus is more exclusively on rural places as case studies, or when sampling study sites based on theoretical considerations rather than seeking a large sample size or data from as many governmental subdivisions as possible, the latter of which is more in the style of westernised criminological studies that Jock Young (2011: 55) so famously criticises in his already classic book, The Criminological Imagination, '… but numbers are signs to be interpreted within specific cultural contexts, figures in themselves do not have any magical objectivity'.
Eschewing for the moment a consideration of numbers and what they might mean, there is another implication of small size and/or population density that has a firmer sociological base, even if a precise numerical value cannot be assigned to it. It is this: by virtue of small population size and/or density, it is likely that rural places anywhere in the world -regardless of their economic dimensions, relative proximity to larger population centres, and electronic links to world-wide social networks -display a larger share of primary or face-to-face relationships amongst its residents . With fewer people around, day-today interactions are more likely with individuals one knows to a certain extent, especially if the IJCJ&SD 121 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) place is geographically isolated. This represents a general distinction between rural and urban community lifestyles that extends to either side of the equator.
However, this generalisation makes criminological sense only when connected to two important reminders. First, we should take seriously Weisheit's (2016) straightforward observation that there are many more rural localities than urban settings. Hence, there is great diversity both within and between rural communities, everywhere in the world, despite this commonality. Further, it could be argued that there is greater rural heterogeneity than urban diversity when considering the range of variation of rural when compared to urban places. Hence, Weisheit's (2016) sagacity leaves us open to considering dimensions of rural communities without restricting (Connell 2007) definitions of what rural means, especially as the generally subordinate side of a western based and biased polar type, with the other end occupied by the word 'urban'. It does not deny external influences (especially those associated with globalisation) on any specific rural place and its inhabitants, but it does assume that local context modifies those influences to at least some extent. Therefore, the homogeneity of knowledge categories that Connell (2007) criticises and that has helped spur the development of a southern criminology is avoided. To quote Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo (2016: 1), any attempt to consider rural crime and justice issues should: 'outline the case for the development of a more transnational criminology that is inclusive of the experiences and perspectives of the Global South, that adopts methods and concepts that bridge global divides and that embraces the democratisation of knowledge …'.
Second, a greater share of primary groups relationships does not in any way imply that crime is lower in rural settings , as the vast majority of criminologists who naively adopt social disorganisation theory would assume (Donnermeyer 2016b). Indeed, there is a relationship between crime and cohesion as expressed through primary relationships, but it may well be that greater cohesion enables some kinds of crime while simultaneously constraining other types of crime (Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). We know this from studies of violence against women in rural communities of the US, especially in the Appalachian region (DeKeseredy, Hall-Sanchez, Dragiewicz and Rennison 2016). Furthermore, a strong argument can be made that Appalachia America fits Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo's (2016: 6) observations that 'there are enclaves of the South within the North'. This nonlinear assumption effectively nominalises the relationship of cohesion and crime and, along with a recognition of great rural diversity, avoids old and anachronistic rural-urban and disorganisation-organisation binaries (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016) associated with Tönnies (1955), Wirth (1938), the Chicago School of Sociology (Sampson 2012) more specifically, and western criminology more generally (Connell 2007).
With these considerations in mind, let us now turn to a discussion of selected issues associated with the development of southern criminology that have significant rural dimensions. The focus will be on rural issues associated with agriculture and food, even though there are many other important issues, but simply not enough space to cover them all in a single article or even a single book.
About one-third of the world's population consists of farmers and ranchers who grow crops and various fruits, and who raise livestock (World Bank 2015). Some are gigantic, industrialised farms, but most are small-sized family-based operations with modest and even subsistence budgets. A greater share of small, subsistence food producers are located south of the equator and in areas north of the equator that fit the symbolic definition of the global South.
In generally, nearly 38 per cent of the world's landmass is devoted to producing food, with about 3 per cent given over to cities and other forms of urban development (The Earth Institute 2005). This ties criminological issues linked to farming with various issues of central focus to green criminology. The image of farming, farm regions and farm communities ranges from spaces of great isolation that may develop unique and even highly deviant subcultures (DeKeseredy, IJCJ&SD 122 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer 2014) to places of strong community ties and relatively little crime. In the US, a mythology that farm communities are crime free is part of a long-running 'agrarian ideology' (Donnermeyer 2015) that has mythologised rural localities in general as being less important for study in criminology and suggests crime is both more frequent on a per capita basis and more serious in urban places -hence, the 'Chicago' bias (Donnermeyer 2015). This agrarian ideology is a variation on the 'rural idyll' that rural social scientists have long described as a benign but false view of rural places as largely possessing similar (Connell 2007) characteristics (Halfracree 2007), rather than as 'contested environments' where societal-wide inequalities of an economic and political nature are played out at the local level (Liepins 2000).

Agricultural victimisation
Regardless of farm size or where in the world agricultural operations exist, the victimisation of farms has increased greatly (Barclay 2016). In part, this is due to the increased costs of various farm inputs (machinery, equipment, chemicals and other supply costs), a trend associated with the industrialisation of food production in most parts of the world (Barclay 2016). However, to heed the warning of Connell (2007), this generalisation is not intended as a knowledge claim with homogeneous characteristics. There are other factors to be taken into account and, when viewed from the perspective of farm crime research beyond the countries of Australia, North America and Europe, this generalisation takes on a unique contextualisation that is significant in its own right and adds a valuable comparison to the large body of non-southern scholarship about farm crime.
To engage in this consideration, one must access scholarship on farm crime somewhere in the global South and, fortunately, there are criminologists in several African countries who have examined crime and its impact on food producers. To begin, African studies of farm crime have focused almost exclusively on small, subsistence level farmers. To their credit, they do not invoke the word 'peasant', a throwback to feudalism and pre-industrial times that was used in the title of a book that became quite influential for the early theoretical development of the Chicago School of Sociology and that contributed to the rural-urban and gemeinschaft-gesellschaft binaries that continue to bedevil both rural criminology and the effort to develop a criminology of the global South (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918). Nor do the African scholars describe food producers as 'yeoman', a word associated with the rural idyll that evokes romanticised images of farmers as committed caretakers of the land. In fact, the strength of these studies is that they describe African farmers in a more straightforward manner; as small-scale business people who are caught up in larger structural trends related to the economy, country/city movements of people and labour, and a host of other factors associated with the context of food production in the twenty-first century of the global South (Bunei, Auya and Rono 2016).
Agricultural operations always were attractive targets for theft (and vandalism). As costs have risen for machinery, equipment, supplies (seeds, chemicals, and so on), fencing and a host of other inputs, so too has the volume of agriculturally-related property crime. The situation as depicted by the African studies shows, however, why local context is essential for a proper understanding of this broad, world-wide trend in order to avoid homogenised knowledge (Connell 2007). For example, for generations, agriculturalists in many regions of Africa have expected some level of theft, and even tolerated it. They understood that some members of their village would steal to feed themselves and their families, or members of their extended family would take a certain amount of a foodstuff, like cassava (Bunei, Auya and Rono 2016;Chiwona-Karltun et al. 2009). The dynamics behind farm theft has changed, however, with the migration of temporary workers from villages to the cities in many parts of Africa. Today, some of those workers, often living in deep poverty or on its edge because their jobs in the city are seasonal or subject to frequent layoffs, look for ways to convert property to cash for the purpose of buying everything from cell phones to clothes to more basic needs. They return to their villages and steal mostly crops and IJCJ&SD 123 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) fruits (and sometimes livestock). Through farm markets in cities, legitimate slaughterhouses will accept animals without concern for records, and cash can be obtained from the 'black market' processing of animals for meat for the family table or for restaurants that often cater to a tourist clientele. They may be connected to organised crime groups in the city that use the marketplace to sell food fraudulently or with misleading labels.
As a result, many farm operators are less tolerant of theft, even by extended family members who too may be motivated by the theft of farm property for cash rather than for food, as in previous times. Perhaps of greater significance is how thievery has changed the farming practices of African agriculturalists today. Increased insecurity associated with crop theft may change the selection of crops they grow. Traditional cereal crops and crop rotations have been modified. For example, some farmers have stopped growing legume beans (no longer part of the crop rotation) that were valuable for nitrogen fixation, and have switched to commercial fertilizers, that in turn has environmental and health related impacts of interest to Green Criminologists (Chiwona-Karltun et al. in press, 2017). Storage of harvested crops is brought closer to the house to reduce losses from theft. Other farmers may switch crop varieties, such as curtailing growth of cassava for soya beans because the latter is more difficult to take directly from the field to use in the kitchen in order to put food on a family's table. The fact to remember is that the 'family table' is now located in the city, where the stolen crop is sold after being transported from the farm field, but now sold in markets through a distribution system with clandestine dimensions. Hence, as with theft in general, purloined property is attractive because of its convertibility to cash in the marketplace (Bunei, Auya and Rono 2016). In essence, an illegal commodity chain develops as people travel out of cities to prey upon small landholders, and target rural areas where they grew up and from which they recently relocated to urban centres for the hope of work. Furthermore, as Clack (2013) notes from his research on the extent of stock theft in South Africa, even if the economic value of stolen farm property is small, the psychological impacts are much larger, especially on smaller, subsistence-level agriculturalists. Hence, farmers are aware that the nature of farm theft has changed and, in turn, they have reacted by modifying their farming practices.
Farm crime is global (Barclay 2016) but the context of farm crime is not (Bunei, Auya and Rono 2016). That is the prime lesson from the African studies: context (Donnermeyer 2016c). In turn, the highly situational nature of farm crime in the global South can help produce new 'middle range' theories (Merton 1957) about how the physical, social and cultural characteristics of place create conditions that either enable or constrain crime and how change on a global scale creates change at specific localities, and it is there that the realities of crime take on a human face (Donnermeyer 2016d).

Food security
With regard to the previous topic, we have seen that one way to advance a criminology of the global South is to consider localised context within which agriculturalists are the victims by crime, using studies from Africa to discuss the topic. In this section, I show how studies from the North can be valuable for re-framing similar issues in the global South related to food security. Food security itself is a very diverse area for scholarship, ranging from food scientists who examine the perishability and safety of food for human consumption to economists and public policy specialists who consider the ability of countries to provide sufficient food to their populations through both domestic production and imports of food. Social scientists look at issues of social justice and inequality, such as 'food desserts'; that is, places in the world where access to food for a healthy diet is difficult (Carolan 2012). Closer still to criminology, especially critical criminology, are those social scientists who examine 'food regimes', which can be defined as the structure of state policies related to imports and exports, food production and distribution systems from the field to the supermarket, and other dimensions of food within the political and economic contexts of capitalism and globalisation (Carolan 2012). As Atkins and Bowler (2001) observed, the concept of food regimes links food production and consumption systems on an international or IJCJ&SD 124 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) globalised scale, including relations of dependency between food producers in less developed regions (that is, the periphery) with the advanced capitalist societies in North America and Europe, plus Japan, China and elsewhere. In this sense, the concept of food regimes is helpful for framing issues related to inequities in the food production and distribution system but, as well, it can be applied to systems that violate the regulatory agencies who oversee food quality: hence, food security.
Yet, curiously, criminologists have rarely addressed the complexity of the food system, either north or south of the equator, for its criminological dimensions. One exception is Spencer's (2014) articulation of the relationship of complex food production networks and opportunities for the adulteration of food. Specifically, the concept of guardianship from routine activities theory was used by Spencer (2014) to frame the potential of food fraud. Routine activities theory is a decidedly mainstream and western-derived theory of crime and victimisation based on the tripartite concepts of attractive target, motivated offender and guardianship (Felson 1998). Specifically, lack of guardianship -that is, of an ability for illegal actions to be policed -was used to help understand places in the food production system where corruption of the food system can occur.
Rather than thinking about food security exclusively at a systems level, however, in part because it invites the development of new forms of homogeneous categories of knowledge (Connell 2007), an alternative approach for development of a global criminology of the South based on considerations of food security is to start at the local level and examine the integration of agriculturalists in the global South to complex commodity chains that extend to all parts of the world. Within these, depending on the commodity and the nature of the distribution systems, criminological issues of food fraud, theft and food security more generally can be considered based on variations in food production regions in the global South. Gerard McElwee, Rob Smith and associates (Smith 2013;Smith, Laing and McElwee 2013;Smith and McElwee 2016) pioneered this approach by taking a business management viewpoint to the subject matter, applying the concept of 'pluriactivities'; that is, the idea that a farm operation (and other rural enterprises) of any size and type is an on-going business that seeks to make a profit, and may do so by diversifying beyond traditional or exclusively food-producing activities, some of which may be used simultaneously for both legal and illegal activities. This straightforward and eminently common sense assumption dispels the ideal that farmers are always 'yeoman'-like caretakers of the land (Cheshire, Meurk and Woods 2013;Stenholm and Kytti 2014). To quote Smith and McElwee (in press, 2017): 'The entrepreneurial farmer need not only operate in a legal domain and may engage in a criminal act as a form of illegal diversification…'. Further, all farmers as entrepreneurs who commit crime are presumed to 'meet or coalesce and network in a central market place … they do this either formally or informally and either virtually or physically' (McElwee, Smith and Somerville 2011: 53).
McElwee, Smith and Somerville (2011: 54) developed four types of rural and farm enterprises, all of which involve offending to some degree and which impact on issues of food security. The first type is the 'legal enterprise' which occasionally engages in 'semi-legal' activities. These may include 'off book' economic production activities to avoid taxation; or engaging in cash transactions for the same reason; or not conforming to laws and regulations with which the food producer disagrees or perceives as too onerous to do. For example, Enticott (2011) applied techniques of neutralisation to examine how farmers justify their violations of wildlife lawsspecifically, the culling of badgers in rural England and Wales -referring to farmer justifications as a type of 'drift into deviance' (Enticott 2011: 206), underpinning their 'suspicion of authority' and perceived necessity to do what has to be done for economic survival of the operation.
Although not explicitly mentioned, the implication of McElwee, Smith and Somerville's (2011) framework is that this is the most frequent expression of pluriactivity for rural and farm enterprises. Their observation is applicable, as well, to the consideration of farmers as offenders IJCJ&SD 125 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) in the global South, as long as differences in farming systems and other regional and cultural differences are fully acknowledged.
The second type is the use of an agricultural operation as a 'front' (McElwee, Smith and Somerville 2011: 55) for hiding illegal activities, such as drug production and trafficking. The farmer as owner is not the direct instigator of the illegal behaviors, but is most likely aware of the activities, acquiescing or allowing those who rent or use the property to successfully conduct their nefarious affairs.
The third type is similar but, in this case, the property is acquired (rented or sold) specifically for the establishment of drug production, smuggling, operating an organised theft ring, or other kinds of illegal behaviors. This third type is called by McElwee, Smith and Somerville (2011) 'the illegal enterprise' or 'rural retreat' to distinguish it from the second type, which is a 'front' operation. Hence, the owner (when rented) or previous owner (when sold) may or may not be aware of the use to which the farm property is used, but its utility is now dedicated mostly or solely to the illegal activity. The authors also mention that some of the individuals involved may be local, noting that: 'In a rural context the relationship between the rural entrepreneur and in particular the farming community will be tenuous and symbiotic' (McElwee, Smith and Somerville 2011: 55).
The fourth and final type is labeled the 'opportunistic illegal enterprise'. It is similar to the first type because these unlawful actions are committed mostly by farmers or those with farm backgrounds and experience; that is, individuals who know and understand the everyday management and work-related tasks associated with running an agricultural operation. However, it is different because the farm operator is engaged in directly victimising others, such as by stealing from a neighbor or mislabeling their crops, vegetables or livestock for economic advantage. McElwee, Smith and Somerville (2011) also refer to this as the 'rogue farmer'. In fact, rogue farmers out of Great Britain were directly involved in networks associated with the 'horse meat scandal' in Europe, and in other mislabeling of meat.
Even though their (McElwee, Smith and Somerville 2011) typology is useful for any scholar conducting research on farmers as offenders, the African studies show how generalisability beyond a westernised context has limits. Economic survival and opportunistic crimes associated with the rogue farmer, for example, is important but not sufficient for offending in the African context. Take, for example, Bunei and Barasa (in press, 2017), who describe how patriarchal farm operators in Kenya take advantage of their own family members, rationalising that providing sufficient funds for their dependent's sustenance is sufficient, and that they can use the rest for drink and other luxuries. As well, they may take advantage of their non-family farm workers, delaying payments until they have sufficient funds, with the costs of their own lifestyle placed ahead of timely wages for workers. Hence, the mix of motives is illustrative of variation in context and, in this case, that variation is based on regionalised differences in production systems and associated cultural patterns.
In summary, McElwee, Smith and Somerville (2011) do provide a launching point for considering farmers as offenders both north and south of the equator. No studies of the type conducted by McElwee, Smith and Somerville (2011) have yet been completed in the global South, yet the potential for farmers to fit these varied profiles for illegal activities is significant because commodity chains that take food products from the field to retail outlets reach into the various countries of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Countries with well-developed regulatory governance are hard-pressed to provide sufficient guardianship over food production, much less many of the governments in the global South where few regulations and their enforcement can occur effectively (Smith 2015).

Farmworker abuse and trafficking
Whilst the first issue -farm victimisation -teaches us to consider local context if a proper global criminology of the South is to be developed, and whilst the second issue -food security -shows us how studies from the 'global North' can shed light on rural criminological issues of the south without engaging in hegemonic forms of knowledge (Connell 2007), farmworker abuse and trafficking demonstrates how some problems are global not only by their persistent and longterm presence in the agricultural regions of most countries around the world, but also for how farm labour itself ignores national boundaries. Eschewing the phrase forced labour for 'modern slavery', Bryne and Smith (2016) observe: It can be truly said that many slaves are literally hidden in plain sight. Slaves no longer enter Europe in the holds of ships or hidden in trucks. Many arrive on aircraft or by train with the promise of legitimate employment, only to have their passport confiscated and forced into work for little or no remuneration. Modern slavery contributes to around US$9 billion per year globally in agricultural production. (International Labour Office 2014) One form of slavery found in many parts of the world and of particular relevance to farm operations is debt bondage. Debt bondage is the condition by which a farmworker is working off a debt incurred to the person for whom he or she is working. However, the farmworker is overcharged for expenses associated with transportation (legal or illegal) to the worksite, or assessed excessive amounts for clothes, food and shelter, visa or work permit and other mocked up legal expenses. The result is that the farmworker makes little or no progress in repayment (Barrick 2016;Barrick et al. 2014).
Even though Barrick and associates work is centred on the US, farmworker abuse can be found everywhere, and indeed resembles debt bondage because most abuse includes attempts to control the free movement of farmworkers. The Guardian ( The various examinations and analyses of farmworker abuse and trafficking by criminologists, journalists and international organisations concerned with social justice and human rights have three characteristics in common. First, whether the farm operation is small or large, many of these exploited farmworkers plant, cultivate and harvest food products for sale in globalised markets geared to urban consumers in more affluent countries. It is no different from examples of sweatshops in the textile industry located in various south Asian countries (such as Thailand), to which the general public and public institutions in advanced capitalist societies have reacted to and for which numerous attempts to curtail purchases of these products have been made. Second, IJCJ&SD 127 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) governments and organisations representing farm owners/agricultural corporations frequently ignore the problem or deny that the problem is extensive or serious. Indeed, it is difficult to police and these workers are either in a host country because of temporary work visas or have been smuggled across the border as illegal immigrants. Either way, they have a limited recourse to local police authorities. Third, agricultural workers, like low-wage labourers in many other industries, are politically disenfranchised (Freedom Network 2013). Without reliance on outsider international organisations, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, among others, who come into a country and uncover systematic abuse, little action to alleviate conditions and further justice would occur.

Conclusions
There are simply too many rural issues to squeeze into a single journal article about a global criminology of the South and rural criminology. Suffice it to say that three interrelated issues of farm victimisation, food security, and farmworker abuse and trafficking are a sampling of the extent that a mature and fully developed criminology of the global South must account for crime and justice 'beyond the metropole' (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016).
Each topic was selected for three distinctive, yet related, reasons. The farm victimisation studies from Africa illustrate how a world-wide problem, namely farm crime, can only be understood within localised contexts of climate, community and culture. Food security reveals how not everything theoretical, conceptual and empirical developed north of the equator is hegemonic for issues south of the equator, even if adjustments to northern scholarship are necessary. In particular, the work of Smith, McElwee and associates on the connections between local farmers and organised crime is valuable as a first step toward examining the same thing south of the equator. Finally, farmworker abuse and trafficking demonstrates that some offending is global, not only because of forces connected to the globalisation of economies and a capitalist mode of production-seeking profit wherever it can be found, but global because this issue shows how the movement of labour (including illegal workers, refugees, and so on) enables crime associated with trafficking and abuse. As Byrne and Smith (2016) so cogently describe it, there are indeed modern forms of slavery.
The list of rural criminological issues of centrality to a southern global criminology is extensive and extends well beyond the limits allowed in a journal article. Land theft (White 2012) is one issue. Land theft itself ranges from governmental expropriation of the land of local rural peoples to the invasion of ranchers and logging companies on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples, and of the physical violence and disruption/destructions of traditional ways of living inflicted on them. It can also include the acquisition of land for large, plantation style operations, such as palm oil developments in parts of Africa, Indonesia, South America and elsewhere, and their environmental and social (including crime) impacts on local rural communities (Butler and Laurance 2009). Violence against women is another, not only in terms of cultural traditions that enable violence (Krishnan 2005;Panda and Agrawal 2005), but also in the ways change, such as in the form of energy exploration in rural regions of the global South (Carrington et al. 2013), affects changes in the nature and incidence of this violence. As well, interpersonal violence of any kind in a rural context is important for development of a rural criminology of the global South (Hogg and Carrington 2016). Drug use, production and trafficking is likewise of central importance as it illustrates the linkages between where substances are grown and where they are consumed, another form of globalisation and, in the tradition of CW Mills' The Sociological Imagination, how the local is affected by larger social structural and economic forces. Plus, rural areas where plants related to drug production are grown, and where raw ingredients are processed into a finished product, can also have deleterious environmental consequences (McSweeney et al. 2014). As well, the illegal trafficking of flora, fauna and wood products cannot be ignored if rural criminology is to make a significant contribution to the development of a global southern criminology (McMullan and Perrier 2009).
IJCJ&SD 128 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(1) The interconnectivity of global south criminology and rural criminology is necessary for, if not, the intellectual development of both will be stunted. This connection is more than just an emphasis on the size of the rural population in the global South, the significance of agriculture to the national economies of many countries south (and north) of the equator, and of the local economic well-being of the thousands of towns, villages and hamlets therein. It is greater than an acknowledgement of the ways that rural regions are enmeshed in a dependency relationship with the urban centres who mostly hold political, military and social control over their hinterlands. It exceeds any realisation that inequities within most countries, regardless of location, must be understood within the context of the ways that land, resources and rural peoples are exploited for the enrichment of elites who live in the regional and federal capital cities of these societies.
Perhaps the greatest significance and most important contribution of rural crime studies to the development of a criminology of the global South is that it compels scholars interested in advancing criminology beyond its western, urban biases to avoid the development of categories of knowledge that create new forms of hegemonic thinking (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016;Connell 2007). As the oft-quoted observation from philosopher and novelist George Santayana (1905: 285) (and mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill by many) frames it: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'. It means giving more than lip-service -a kind of 'yeah, yeah, yeah; rural is important too' -to criminological thinking about the global South.
In turn, it is truly hard to imagine that rural criminology can go anywhere without substantial growth in its focus, theorising, and empirically-based research on the global South. Otherwise, it is merely a rural criminology of the western world; that is, the more advanced capitalist countries north of the equator and selected enclaves of the symbolic north located south of the equator, such as Australia and New Zealand.
To conclude, as I pointed out in my final statements in the introductory chapter to the Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology (Donnermeyer 2016a: 8) about the mindset of mainstream criminology: … the issue is more collectively cultural (i.e., collective consciousness). Hence, rural criminology's slow and laggard development -until more recent times -is embedded in the same insidious narrowness as decried in a discipline still struggling with its white, male and Western roots, and a heritage of shortsightedness and therefore lack of scientific rigor.