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A Politico-Ecological Interrogation of Class-based Analyses of Green Grabbing Inés Jiménez Rodríguez, Spain
By Inés Jiménez Rodríguez, Spain
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Introduction
This discussion is based on a previous essay which analysed green grabbing in Tanzania through a class-based approach - better known as Agrarian Political Economy (APE). While there is a slight thematic overlap with said previous essay, this essay provides a different perspective, and therefore emphasises different features within the phenomenon of green grabbing. In this essay, I interrogate APE’s analysis of green grabbing from a Political Ecology approach. I argue that Political Ecology evidences and provides solutions to some crucial shortcomings of class-based analysis: namely, by emphasising the causality of the non-human world in shaping agrarian transformations, as well as by proposing a closer engagement with ‘lived environments’, as sites of socio-environmental relations that encompass more than material (re)production. The discussion benefits from including specific examples. For the sake of clarity and coherence, all examples used in this essay draw from instances of green grabbing in Tanzania: for example, it refers to community-based conservation in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area or to the development of green economy projects such as the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). These cases have been included for illustrative purposes, and I refrain from going into excessive detail regarding their specificities so as to not divert us from the aim of the essay: i.e. a political-ecological interrogation of class-bases analyses of green grabbing. The essay starts with a brief evaluation of the Agrarian Political Economy (APE) approach and the Political Ecology Approach in order to demonstrate their complementarity in analysing contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism. The following discussion is structured in two basic sections. The first section engages in a broad discussion of how these theoretical traditions would conceptualise and interpret green grabbing. Special attention is given to a political-ecological reading of the Agrarian Question - as this concept is understood to comprise the main dynamic of agrarian transformation engendered by green grabbing. The following section uses Political Ecology to expand our analyses of green grabbing, featuring phenoena that APE has hitherto neglected or been incapable of analysing properly - related to state-society relations, conflict, and resistance.
The theoretical traditions
The class-based approach, also known as (Marxist) Agrarian Political Economy (APE), is a tradition concerned with elucidating the asymmetrical and consequential import of rural class differentiation. ‘Class’ signifies a social relationship that differentiates people accordingly to their relation to the means of production, whereby they are “compelled to engage in the same activities if they want to make the best use of their endowments (i.e., tangible property, intangible skills, and cultural traits)” (Elster, 1985, p. 331). Class-based analysis provides a disaggregating lens into agrarian phenomena, investigating how the differentiated inclusion/exclusion from processes of production and reproduction shape and stratify rural societies (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). It is also concerned with (historical and contemporary) processes of change in agrarian societies and, relatedly, engages with the notion of agency as something bounded within class-determined structures of freedoms, interests, and constraints (Herring and Agarwala, 2016).
Many describe a decline (Herring and Agarwala, 2006) or impasse (Levien et al, 2018) in class analysis over recent decades. Some ‘endogenous’ reasons behind this impasse derive from the hyper-structuralist analysis hitherto characterising Orthodox Marxism, as a universalising framework (a) grounded on a teleological understanding of agrarian change, as an evolution in the modes of production, and (b) tending to dismiss or understate peasant agency and non-class forms of oppression (Levien et al 2018). On the other hand, this impasse also derives from the empirical challenges of contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism. This refers to inter alia, the fragmentation of the classes of labour: leading to (a) the emergence of scarce, precarious, and irregular forms of waged employment (characterised by pluriactivity, plurilocality, semi-proletarianisation); and (b) to the increasingly causal intersections between class formation processes and relations of gender, race, caste (Levien et al, 2018). This has created challenging new patterns in agrarian class formation and classbased mobilisation, to which APE has sought to adapt. In this context, APE is experiencing a new momentum in trying to grasp contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism (Herring and Agarwala, 2006; Levien et al, 2018). Notably, recent years have seen a proliferation of class-centred analyses in response to the neoliberal transformation (and acceleration) of capitalism’s metabolic rift9, which has widened the contradictions between the global economy and the global environment. This is the root cause of several of the crises supposedly amended through green grabbing including food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and climate change (Taylor, 2015; Bergius et al, 2020). ‘Green grabbing’ entails the appropriation and dispossession of control over the means of production, legitimised through narratives of environmental protection, green growth, or sustainable agriculture and development (Green and Adams, 2015). Contemporary green grabbing is therefore embedded in a broader capitalist conjunction, whereby strategies of capital accumulation (and their rush to capture resources) are competing and overlapping with each other in their response to the converging crises of the metabolic rift (Taylor, 2015). In this context, political ecology helps us evaluate the extent to which class-based analysis remains a relevant and effective research programme. The commonalities between these traditions are well noted. In the years following the publication of Blaikie and Brookfield’s seminal piece, Land Degradation and Society (1987), political ecology drew significantly from the Marxist tradition in positing its fundamental premise: that changes in the relations between nature and society are driven by the socio-environmental contradictions derived from capital accumulation, which materialise in the form of resource degradation and conflict in local rural societies (Robbins, 2012). Thus, political ecology stems from a similar ontology and empirical concerns as APE. However, and particularly during recent decades, this tradition has undergone some significant renovations. These have arguably distanced Political Ecology from the more ‘classic’ premises of class-based analysis - yet at the same time, they have also proven the combination of these two theoretical traditions to be increasingly important. Similar to APE, political ecology underwent a significant period of change since the 2000s (Jones, 2008; Rocheleau, 2007). This ‘second generation’ Political Ecology has progressively shifted away from unilinear and structural forms of explanations like those characterising Orthodox Marxism as aforementioned, in favour of more post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-colonial approaches (Jones, 2008; Blaser and Escobar, 2016). New
9 i.e. the inherent rupture between nature and a developing capitalist society, as capital demands the dislocation of production from nature’s biophysical cycles of regeneration, thus leading to an eventual ecological crisis (Taylor, 2015).
features include a higher attention to grassroots and peasant agencies, as well as an expanded understanding of the arenas where power relations can unfurl (Jones, 2008). Particularly in its ‘third generation’, political eecology is also becoming increasingly attentive to the world’s diversity of understandings, meanings, and relations with nature - which is thus understood as more than an objective biophysical reality (Blaser and Escobar, 2016). This contrasts with the epistemological realism typically employed by APE (Levien et. al., 2018). As will be seen throughout the following discussion, these recent developments within political ecology will be extremely useful in evidencing and amending some of the aforementioned impasses in class-based analysis.
The implications of green grabbing with regards to the agrarian question
Before delving further into the issue, we need to first understand how the employed theoretical approaches would conceptualise and problematise green grabbing: what specific features and continuities do they pay attention to? What are their observed implications of the phenomenon, and the importance attributed to them? From an APE viewpoint, green grabbing can be understood within the agrarian question, which studies: the encroachment of capitalism onto the rural world, its reconfiguration of the access and control over the means of production, and its resultant transformation of peasant societies “making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones” (Kautsky, cited in Taylor, 2015, p. 108). These processes result in the social differentiation of a hitherto undifferentiated peasantry, now divided into rural classes according to their differential capacity to integrate in capitalist circuits of agricultural production (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009). Social differentiation would expectedly engender an increasingly polarised division between a rural proletariat and an agrarian bourgeoisie (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009). In Tanzania, and within the broader context of the neoliberal reconfiguration of agrarian capitalism, many authors are observing the transformation of a rural society hitherto characterised by small-scale pastoralism and farming, as well as by abundant land (Greco, 2015). This transformation was driven by the differentiated impact of several processes and avenues of accumulation, which have enabled the consolidation of neoliberal agrarian capitalism in Tanzania: some pre-existing, and now reinforced (like land privatisation and enclosure, and imposed villagisation and settlement); and others introduced through current (green) resource grabs (such as ‘community-based’ neoliberal conservation, and the expansion of irrigated cultivation within agricultural supply chains) (McCabe et. al, 2010; Bergius et. al. 2017). Green grabbing is thus situated within this broader process of agrarian transformation and resource grabbing. Across Tanzania’s peasant and indigenous societies, this has often jeopardised - and in some cases, led to the actual dissolution of - local livelihood systems, as well as their constitutive institutions of production, reciprocity, and socio-political organisation (Butt, 2012; Green and Adams, 2015). In this context, poorer peasants and pastoralists lost access to the means of production and have often adapted through a partial proletarianisation, engaging in various configurations of pluriactivity and plurilocality that include self-subsistence cultivation, petty trade, and waged labour (McCabe et. al., 1992; Greco, 2015). Conversely, a select minority was able to successfully integrate into recent resource grabs: in the case of green grabs, as conservation officials or commercial out-growers within sustainableagriculture schemes; in the case of general resource grabs, through their engagement with irrigated cultivation and intensive livestock farming (Bergius et. al., 2020). The richer segments have sometimes hired poorer pastoralists as herders and moved to urban centres while maintaining their rural property through waged labour (McCabe et. al., 1992).
This presents a generalised picture of the social differentiation processes engendered by green grabbing, and within the broader context of neoliberal agrarian capitalism in rural Tanzania. Nevertheless, and as I discuss below, these processes of agrarian transformation have also unfurled through a series of spatial and socio-environmental interconnections, which have been missed through this class-based analysis.
Political ecology elucidates the oversights or actual shortcomings of the APE approach. Foremost, this refers to a political-ecological critique of the understanding of the Agrarian Question hitherto presented by APE, as well as its application in the case of green grabbing. Taylor’s (2015) critique of the Agrarian Question makes a crucial point in noting its hitherto lacking engagement with the surrounding environment. APE generally assumes a clean dichotomy between nature and society, whereby the rural landscape is a mere setting onto which politico-economic phenomena unfold (Taylor, 2015; Robbins, 2012). Relatedly, the drivers of agrarian transformation identified within the Agrarian Question remain primarily Anthropocenic: they reference, namely, changes in the access and control over the means of production, as well as in the relations of capital and labour (Taylor, 2015; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009). A political-ecological reading of the Agrarian Question does not require any fundamental change in the premises of this concept, but an expansion of its scope. It proposes, foremost, to emphasise the causality of the non-human world in shaping agrarian transformations. This stems from an acknowledgement that rural societies are embedded in their relations with the surrounding biophysical system, local nature, and non-human actors (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). This is easily fitted within premises of the Agrarian Question: indeed, an ‘ecological agrarian question’ is increasingly recognised in the current APE literature, drawing from these same arguments (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010). Taking it further, our re-reading also proposes a closer engagement with “lived environments as active sites of socio-ecological production” (Taylor, 2015, p. 114). This references a more socioecologically grounded understanding of people’s identities, interests, and behaviour patterns: whereby these are defined not only by the material or biophysical circumstances of (re)production, but also by contingencies of space and place, related to the everyday practices and relations whereby people engage with nature, perform their identities, and reproduce themselves (Butt, 2012). This draws from second- and third-generation Political Ecology. It is due to similar considerations that Gadgil and Guda (1995) created their typology of socio-ecological classes, which distinguishes between: omnivores, ecosystem people, and ecological refugees. While maintaining APE’s focus on social differentiation through changes in material (re)production, this typology also considers transformations in the meaning-laden human interactions with the ecologies of their particular localities (Butt, 2012). In short, it considers the socio-ecological mechanisms of social differentiation whereby people are uprooted or displaced from their particular socionatures. These socionatures signify the material and cultural constructions that ground one’s belonging to a location, reproduced through everyday interactions and co-dependencies between human and non-human actors (Butt, 2012). This political-ecologic reconceptualisation can contribute a better picture of the Agrarian Question and green grabbing in Tanzania. Ecosystem people are generally prevalent before green grabbing, and perhaps closer to the APE’s idea of the middle peasant. The concept comprises those whose livelihoods are embedded in the surrounding environment, and their material needs dependent on the natural resources of their own locality (Gadgil and Guha, 1995; Meher, 2011). In Tanzania, many
remain on the land between protected areas, or try to sustain their livelihood within them (as part of community-based conservation programmes) (Mariki et. al., 2014). This class has not been/is yet to be displaced from their socionatures. However, their relations and perception of the surrounding ecologies have increasingly been transformed through the encroachment of green grabbing processes, in a sort of ‘epistemological’ displacement that ultimately translates into material transformations. This is not always imposed on the affected population, but strategically adopted and adapted by them, in accordance to their interests. Following the establishment of (community-based) wildlife management areas across rural Tanzania, involved communities have often internalised a commodified view of their surrounding nature (Green and Adam, 2015). In order to secure rents, the surrounding ecologies are re-interpreted as conservation and wildlife resources, property of village elders or those with a formal title to the pertinent land (Green and Adam, 2015). The omnivore class comprises those successfully integrated into the resource grabs following this transformation - as well as the elites, urban and rural populations benefiting from the goods and services that derive from resource grabs (Gadgil and Guha, 1995). The ecological refugees class comprises those displaced and dispossessed by resource grabs (Gadgil and Guha, 1995). In Tanzania, ecological refugees are a rapidly growing class, formed by the small-scale cultivators and pastoralists that have been marginalised and dispossessed by the convergence of green grabbing with other processes of accumulation and dispossession, such as capitalist-agricultural expansion (Mariki et al., 2014; Green and Adams, 2015). Compared to the expected proletariat, the concept of ecological refugees is perhaps more illustrative of contemporary rural capitalism, which has generally failed to create a polarised class structure as expected by traditional APE (Herring and Agarwala, 2016). Green grabbing rarely creates wage labour opportunities, nor are the dispossessed populations easily absorbed in a neoliberal economy that generally prioritises growth over livelihoods (Weldemichel, 2021). Ecological refugees are generally ‘caught in the middle’ of shifting modes of production and property, in ways that severely constrain their reproduction: their access to the natural world for self-subsistence has drastically diminished, yet the capitalist system has failed to integrate them enough to ensure their dependency on market relations and waged foods - commodities they generally cannot afford (Gadgil and Guha, 1995; Meher, 2011).
In the context of resource grabs and neoliberal environmental governance, Tanzania’s ecological refugees comprise those populations most affected by the weakened authority of local agrarian institutions, which generally based the governance of the commons on which their livelihoods depended (Kisoza, 2007). This is the case, most notable, of the Maasai pastoralists across Ngorongoro and Serengeti (Green and Adams, 2015). Uprooted from their localities, their reproduction is conditioned on self-exploitation, pluriactivity when possible, and migration (Greco, 2015; Green and Adams, 2015). Community insider/outsider dynamics mean that ecological refugees are not always integrated in the socio-environmental relations, institutions, and reciprocities basing their ‘host’ socionatures; furthermore, their displacement has significant spillover effects in the surrounding areas, as local ecosystems now deal with the added pressure of reproducing displaced populations (Mariki et. al., 2014). This has led to the augmentation of land conflict, land degradation, and human-wildlife conflict - particularly against elephant populations (Butt, 2012 Mariki et. al., 2014). Their displacement is often associated with material processes of accumulation by dispossession, such as evictions or the prolonged effect of economic marginalisation (such as dispossession by the market) (Weldemichel, 2021). However, social differentiation also stems from politically-laden contradictions between different discourses and interpretations of their relations with the surrounding nature, which legitimise the interventions and transformation of local socionatures (Robbins, 2012; Bergius et. al.2017). This further demonstrates the explicitly ecological side of agrarian transformations bolstered by green grabbing.
Ecological refugees have often been directly evicted from conservation areas, as conservation stakeholders interpret their livelihoods as environmentally irresponsible, or unfitting with Tanzania’s plan for a modernised, green agricultural sector (Mariki et. al., 2014). These narratives have been employed in recent green growth initiatives, such as the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which led to the violent eviction of 5,000 pastoralists and small-scale farmers out of the Kilombero Valley in 2012 (Mariki et al, 2014). In other instances, and particularly in so-called community-based conservation projects, peasants have been forced out due to the prolonged effect of economic marginalisation and lack of viable livelihoods (Weldemichel, 2021). In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Northeastern Tanzania), Maasai pastoralists have been economically pressured to relocate themselves due to increasingly stringent conservation-related restrictions on cultivation and pastoralism: indeed, the ‘community’ aspect has often been trumped by the interests of conservation agencies and (Western) safari tourists, who demand ‘pristine environments’ completely isolated from human contact (Weldemichel, 2021). Hitherto, we have interrogated the APE approach through a political-ecological reading of the Agrarian Question. This has improved our understanding of the general dynamic whereby green grabbing transforms the affected agrarian societies. The following chapter expands this political-ecological interrogation of APE, discussing the processes of dispossession, accumulation, and resistance that enable the materialisation of contemporary green grabs. In doing so, we can also elucidate and ‘amend’ more of APE’s shortcomings, largely derived from (a) its inability to conceptualise nature-society relations outside of issues of (re)production, and (b) its lacking attention to everyday practices and positionalities.
Struggles, and resistances related to green grabbing, within the state-society context
As we delve deeper into our interrogation of APE, we must start with a brief discussion of how state-society relations are conceptualised by these traditions. This will provide a necessary foundation for the following discussion. Political ecology’s basic understanding of state-society relations does not diverge significantly from its Marxist roots. Both traditions have progressively departed from simplification of the state as a ‘black box’ of capital accumulation, for instance simply the enabler of dominant class interests within processes of capital accumulation (Byres, 1995). In seeking a more nuanced approach, both traditions have favoured more relational approaches to the state-society. With regards to green grabbing, it is acknowledged that the control over natural resources is claimed and contested through a multi-scalar, polycentric web of relations - comprising “customary, state leveraging, and market strategies of land access” (Pallotti and Tornimbeni, 2016, p. 7; Greco 2015). This is a necessary adaptation to the contemporary processes of green grabbing. In Tanzania, the appropriation of land for conservation has been majorly driven by state authorities, international conservation organisations and, to a smaller extent, private companies (Mariki et. al., 2015). However, and following the expansion of community-based conservation since the 1980s (with generally questionable results regarding actual community engagement), local actors have become a causal force in shaping resource grabs once they materialise on the ground - be it through their resistance, acquiescence, or active endorsement (wanting to be integrated on their own terms) (Green and Adams, 2015). Furthermore - and as structural adjustment led to the decentralisation of natural resource control, and thus the de jure devolution of authority over natural resources to villages and local institutions - green grabbing has necessarily unfurled in the fluid and customary norms of land access demarcated by agrarian communities (Pallotti and Tornimbeni, 2016; Pedersen, 2016). Combinedly, these
dynamics have led to a conflictive state-market-society arena, whereby the actual materialisation of green grabbing is highly contingent. This demonstrates a less deterministic analysis of green grabbing. Furthermore, recent ‘generations’ within political ecology enable an even more nuanced interrogation of APE’s approach to state-society relations and green grabbing. Foremost, this is thanks to the tradition’s new emphasis on the socio-ecological constitution of state-society relations, with the state reconceptualised as a constellation of socio-environmental relations, processes, and practices (Angel and Loftus, 2019; Loftus, 2020). State-society relations are understood as causal in the ‘creation’ of nature: referring not only to actual transformations of the surrounding environment, but also changes in the perception of nature and socio-ecological relations by the involved groups (Loftus, 2020). Furthermore, state-society relations are also causal in the creation of ‘environmental’ subjects: according to PE’s ‘Environmental Subjects and Identity’ thesis, relations with the surrounding environment (including habitational, cultural, and livelihood relations) are constitutive of peoples’ political identities and behaviour (Robbins, 2012). This understanding of state-society relations was implicitly employed in the previous chapter, as we discussed the socio-environmental mechanisms of social differentiation that were adopted, adapted, or contested through this polycentric state-market-society arena. This included the interiorisation of a commodified understanding of wildlife by some community members, the imposed distinction between ‘pristine natures’ and ‘human natures’, as well as from categorisations of ‘appropriate’ relations with the surrounding environment, which generally vilify small-scale farming and pastoralism (Robbins, 2012; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). The discursive frames comprised in these processes, as well as their realisation through evictions, enclosures, and other mechanisms of dispossession, have unfurled through state-society relations (Butt, 2012; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). This re-conceptualisation of state-society relations is also necessary for our analysis of conflict and resistance related to green grabbing. In Tanzania, and to the best of my knowledge, organised resistance to green grabbing has been rare; even rarer has been the success of such mobilisations, or their expression of a specifically class-based consciousness (Benjaminsen et. al., 2013). While this can be associated with the risk-avoidant behaviour often attributed to peasants, it should not be confounded with passivity. There are myriad noted instances of resistance to the dispossession and marginalisation enacted by state officials and green-grab stakeholders in Tanzania. However, they have generally taken the form of ‘weapons of the weak’: strategies that avoid and/or contest the oppressor without their direct confrontation, through techniques such as “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on” (Scott, cited in Mariki et. al., 2015, p. 21). The lack of an overt class component severely limits APE’s capacity to evaluate these instances of resistance. Conversely, the political-ecologic reading of social differentiation and the Agrarian Question does allow some significant insights. Indeed, relations and perceptions of the surrounding nature, as well as perceptions of inequality within nature-society relations, have often been made more explicit (Butt, 2012; Benjaminsen et. al., 2013). Notably, elephant killings and guerrilla agriculture (i.e., cultivation in zones demarcated exclusively for nonhuman life) are two of the most common exercises of resistance against green grabbing in Tanzania (Butt, 2012; Mariki et. al., 2015; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). They can be easily associated with resistance over current conditions of (re)production, such as elephant killings as an engagement with alternative (illegal) livelihood opportunities, such as ivory trading, and guerrilla agriculture as a survival strategy to the reproductive crisis engendered
by green grabbing. Alternatively, and through an analysis of their hidden transcripts10, several authors have understood these instances to also comprise a re-assertion of people’s position and ancestral roots within the socionatures they are being displaced from (Mariki et. al., 2015). Thus, the identified interests of these socio-environmental classes concern not only people's livelihoods, but the socio-environmental relations and place on which these livelihoods were embedded, and which are constitutive of their identity (Butt, 2012; Robbins, 2012). Local peoples may continue hunting and cultivating in enclosed areas in order to defend their ancestral, customary, human, and property rights, and to implicitly invalidate the changes in control affected by green grabbing (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2017). Sometimes, these forms of resistance also contest the ‘enfranchisement’ of non-human life – for example elephants, which are highly protected despite the dangers and damages they entail to local producers - in comparison to the marginalisation of ecological refugees (Mariki et. al., 2015).
Conclusion
Agrarian Political Economy is arguably experiencing some serious analytical shortcomings in its attempted analysis of contemporary developments in global agrarian capitalism. Here, these shortcomings were most evident as we discussed the spatial and socio-environmental interconnections through which contemporary green grabbing unfurls. The essay has demonstrated the utility of a political-ecologic interrogation of APE’s basic analytical premises. This has allowed me to identify and provide solutions to some crucial shortcomings of class-based analysis in its evaluation of green grabbing. This interrogation has paid special emphasis to a political-ecological reading of the agrarian question, as this concept is understood to comprise the main dynamic of agrarian transformation engendered by green grabbing. Through this re-reading, we have emphasised the causality of the non-human world in shaping agrarian transformations, as well as the socioecological mechanisms of social differentiation whereby people are uprooted or displaced from their particular socionatures. When applied to Tanzania, this has provided a more accurate understanding of the processes of agrarian transformation that have been engendered by green grabbing. As discussed, the formation of the socio-environmental classes responded not only to transformations in the material conditions of (re)production, but also to politicallyladen contradictions between different discourses and interpretations of nature-society relations. The above discussion posited that state-society relations, and the state itself, are constituted through a constellation of socio-environmental processes, practices, and contestations. This provided some added nuance to our understanding of the processes of social differentiation and accumulation by dispossession that were discussed in the previous chapter. Furthermore, it enabled a better understanding of rural agencies and instances of conflict and resistance to green grabbing. The discussion of socio-environmentally motivated weapons of the weak enabled a more accurate understanding of the interests and rationalisations that base the resistance of classes affected by green grabbing.
10 “...the narratives that subaltern groups use to interpret their own experience of domination or oppression” (Mariki et. al., 2014).
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