Discourse on Soil Protection within the Expansion of Crop Farming Under Neo-Virgin Land Campaigns in Mongolia
Tuya Shagdar (National University of Mongolia)
Unlike the socialist-era Virgin Land Campaigns, which focused on large state-run farms spanning tens of thousands of hectares, the contemporary neo-Virgin Land Campaign (VLC) consists of privately enclosed farms. Since the launch of VLC IV in 2019, alongside the promotion of intensive crop farming in Mongolia, there has been a growing discourse on soil protection. The increasing visibility of barbed wire fences, now seen across vast stretches of land, is framed as a strategy to safeguard both crops and soil fertility. Although the Virgin Land Campaigns originated during the socialist era, their current forms are shaped by new political and economic dynamics and specifically by new developments in Mongolia’s rural economy (hödöö aj ahui). The paper focuses on the fragmentation of steppe land into numerous individualized plots and discusses its consequences for the historical organization of common resources, where crop farming was viewed as a supplement rather than displacement of pastoral agriculture (mal aj ahui).
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