New Waves of Sugarcane Commercialisation: Unequal Forms of Exchange in a North Indian Village

ABSTRACT In Uttar Pradesh, the largest producer of sugarcane in India, the crop is grown on family farms and marketed under an outgrower model with state regulation. Higher productivity and production from a new ‘wonder’ variety, an expansion of private mills and modernisation of infrastructure has led to a new wave of commercialisation. This paper examines implications for agrarian structure and agrarian relations in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, drawing on secondary sources of data, two rounds of village‐level quantitative surveys (2006 and 2023) and insights from qualitative fieldwork (2022–2024). Three findings are of note. First, contrary to the received literature, the sugar boom has not led to a further concentration of landownership. Secondly, while corporate control over mills has grown, it has not led to corporatisation of production. Thirdly, even as absolute incomes rose, returns per hectare varied systematically across socio‐economic groups with the highest returns among landowning dominant‐caste households. These differences, we argue, arise out of unequal forms of exchange linked to tenancy arrangements and interlinked transactions.