"Food Wars," Walden Bello and Mara Baviera, Monthly Review (July-August 2009)
Michael Thompson
In 2006–08, food shortages became a global reality, with the prices of
commodities spiraling beyond the reach of vast numbers of people.
International agencies were caught flatfooted, with the World Food
Program warning that its rapidly diminishing food stocks might not be
able to deal with the emergency.
Owing to surging prices of rice, wheat, and vegetable oils, the food
import bills of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) climbed by 37
percent from 2007 to 2008, from $17.9 million to $24.6 million, after
having risen by 30 percent in 2006. By the end of 2008, the United
Nations reported, “the annual food import basket in LDCs cost more
than three times that of 2000, not because of the increased volume of
food imports, but as the result of rising food prices.”1 These
tumultuous developments added 75 million people to the ranks of the
hungry and drove an estimated 125 million people in developing
countries into extreme poverty.2
Alarmed by massive global demand, countries like China and Argentina
resorted to imposing taxes or quotas on their rice and wheat exports
to avert local shortages. Rice exports were simply banned in Cambodia,
Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Viet Nam. South-South solidarity, fragile
in the best of times, crumbled, becoming part of the collateral damage
of the crisis.
Global Crisis, Global Protests
For some countries, the food crisis was the proverbial straw that
broke the camel’s back. Some thirty countries experienced violent
popular actions against rising prices in 2007 and 2008, among them
Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guinea,
India, Indonesia, Mauretania, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal,
Somalia, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Across the continents, people came out
in the thousands against uncontrolled rises in the price of staple
goods that their countries had to import owing to insufficient
production. Scores of people died in these demonstrations of popular
anger.
The most dramatic developments transpired in Haiti. With 80 percent of
the population subsisting on less than two dollars a day, the doubling
of the price of rice in the first four months of 2008 led to “hunger
so tortuous that it felt like [people’s] stomachs were being eaten
away by bleach or battery acid,” according to one account.3 Widespread
rioting broke out that only ended when the Senate fired the prime
minister. In their intensity, the Haiti riots reminded observers of
the anti-International Monetary Fund (IMF) riots in Venezuela — the
so-called Caracazo — almost two decades ago, which reshaped the
contours of that country’s politics.
The Perfect Storm?
The international press and academics proclaimed the end of the era of
cheap food, and they traced the cause to a variety of causes: the
failure of the poorer countries to develop their agricultural sectors,
strains on the international food supply created by dietary changes in
China and India’s expanding middle classes who were eating more meat,
speculation in commodity futures, the conversion of farmland into
urban real estate, climate change, and the diversion of corn and
sugarcane from food production to the production of agrofuels to
replace oil.
The United Nations’ World Economic Situation and Prospects spoke about
the crisis being the product of a “perfect storm,” or an explosive
conjunction of different developments. Speculative movements that
brought about the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer
of 2007 were implicated in the food crisis. According to the United
Nations, the impact on food prices of speculation by financial
investors in commodities and commodity futures markets “has been
considerable.” It could be argued, said the report,
that increased global liquidity and financial innovation has also led
to increased speculation in commodity markets. Conversely, the
financial crisis contributed to the slide in commodity prices from
mid-2008 as financial investors withdrew from commodity markets and,
in addition, the United States dollar appreciated as part of the
process of the de-leveraging of financial institutions in the major
economies.4
Others, like Peter Wahl of the German advocacy organization WEED, were
more emphatic, claiming that, in fact, speculation in agro-commodity
futures was the key factor in the extraordinary rise in the prices of
food commodities in 2007 and 2008. With the real estate bubble
bursting in 2007 and trading in mortgage-based securities and other
derivatives collapsing, hedge funds and other speculative agents, they
asserted, moved into speculation in commodity futures, causing a sharp
increase in trades and contracts unaccompanied by little or no
increase in production of agricultural commodities. It was this move
into commodity futures for quick profits followed by a move out after
the commodities bubble burst that triggered the rise in the FAO food
price index by 71 percent during only fifteen months between the end
of 2006 and March 2008 and its falling back after July 2008 to the
level of 2006.5
The Agrofuel Factor
Speculation was certainly among the factors that created a “perfect
storm” in 2006–08. An even more prominent explanation was the
diverting of cereal, especially corn, from serving as food to being
used as agrofuel or biofuel feedstock.
On July 3, 2008, the Guardian came out with an exposé on a secret
report made by a World Bank economist that claimed that U.S. and EU
agrofuels policies were responsible for three quarters of the 140
percent increase in food prices between 2002 and February 2008.6 This
figure was significantly higher than the 3 percent previously reported
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Oxfam’s estimate of
around 30 percent, the IMF figure of around 20 to 30 percent, and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 60
percent. The report’s conclusion was straightforward:
[T]he most important factor [in the food price increases] was the
large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and the E.U. Without
these increases, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined
appreciably, oilseed prices would not have tripled, and price
increases due to other factors, such as droughts, would have been more
moderate. Recent export bans and speculative activities would probably
not have occurred because they were largely responses to rising
prices.7
Completed as early as April 2008, the Mitchell report — named after
the lead economist of the World Bank research team, Donald Mitchell —
was allegedly suppressed by the World Bank out of fear of embarrassing
former U.S. president George Bush and his aggressive agrofuel policy.8
The agrofuel factor affected mainly U.S. farming, where much of corn
production was shifted from food to agrofuel feedstock. This is hardly
surprising since over the last few years, the Bush administration’s
generous subsidies, made in the name of energy “independence” and
combating climate change, has made conversion of corn into agrofuel
feedstock instead of food very profitable
Pushed by a corporate alliance that included some of the biggest names
in the energy and agrifood industries, such as ExxonMobil, Archer
Daniels Midland, and Cargill, Bush made agrofuel development one of
the pillars of his administration’s energy policy, with the announced
goal that renewable sources should comprise a minimum of 20 percent of
the energy portfolio in the transport sector within ten years.
In 2007, with the administration’s active lobbying, the U.S. Congress
passed the Energy Independence and Security Act that focused on
promoting agrofuels and the automobile fuel industry. The act targeted
the increase of agrofuels production by more than eightfold from 4.7
billion gallons in 2007 to at least 36 billion gallons in 2022 —
unusually high standards that would evoke significant changes in
agricultural production. As of late 2007, there were 135 ethanol
refineries in operation and 74 more being built or expanded.9
Midwestern America saw itself slowly being transformed into a giant
agrofuels factory. In 2008, around 30 percent of corn was allocated
for ethanol, with rapid increases occurring since 2006. Not
surprisingly, the strong mandate and generous subsidies, as well as
high tariffs against imported sugar-based Brazilian ethanol, ensured
that such a large portion of U.S. corn was being allocated for
agrofuel feedstock, with a not inconsiderable impact on grain prices.
While the actual impact of agrofuel production was bad enough, the
future impact in developing countries was even more worrisome. Huge
land lease deals are said to be taking place with land-rich countries
like the Philippines, Cambodia, and Madagascar.10 There are widespread
reports in international media of private firms and governments from
countries that lack arable land striking lease agreements. Some of
these deals are for food production, others for agrofuels, but with
land being commodified, what is produced on the leased lands will
ultimately depend on what is most profitable to bring to the global
market at a given time.
The most controversial of these deals was the Korean firm Daewoo
Logistics’ plan to buy a ninety-nine-year lease on more than three
million acres of land in Madagascar for agrofuel production. Maize and
palm oil were to be cultivated on almost half of the arable land in
the country.11 There are reports that the new government that came to
power in a coup in March 2009 has cancelled the Daewoo contract owing
to popular opposition. There is no certainty, however, that it will
not be renegotiated.
Similarly, Cambodia and the Philippines are negotiating “agricultural
investment” projects. Kuwait is trading loans for Cambodian produce.
The Philippines and Qatar are currently negotiating the lease of
100,000 hectares of land.12 In effect, the food crisis and energy
crisis are causing countries to secure food supplies and agrofuel
feedstock in unconventional ways. It is no longer sufficient to import
grains. The land that produces that grain must be secured through
contracts. Land is now the desired commodity, to the detriment of
local populations who depend on the land for their own food
consumption. Political elites in land-rich countries appear to be all
too happy to oblige at the expense of their own country’s food
security. Multimillion dollar leases, such as those being offered by
the Chinese to the Philippine corporate groups, are a strong
incentive.
Structural Adjustment and Trade Liberalization
While speculation on commodity futures and the expansion of agrofuel
production have been important factors contributing to the food price
crisis, long-term processes of a structural kind were perhaps even
more central. The role of these factors accounted for the fact that in
the years leading up to the food price spike of 2006–08, demand for
basic grains — rice, wheat, barley, maize, and soybeans — exceeded
production, with stocks falling to 40 percent of their levels in
1998–99, and the stocks-to-use ratio reaching record lows for total
grains and multi-year lows for maize and vegetable oils.13 A key
reason behind the fact that “production has fallen woefully short of
growth in food demand,” asserted the United Nations, was the
degradation of the agricultural sectors of developing countries owing
to the marked “weakening [of] investment and agricultural support
measures in developing countries, resulting in a condition in which
“productivity growth for major food crops has stalled, and there has
been no significant increase in the use of cultivated land.”14
As a result of supply constraints resulting from lack of investment,
the FAO reported, “even before the recent surge in food prices,
worrisome long-term trends towards increasing hunger were already
apparent,” with 848 million people suffering from chronic hunger in
2003–05, an increase of six million from the 1990–92 figure of nearly
842 million.15
In short, there were a combination of structural and policy
ingredients in the mix that led to the food price spike of 2006–08,
and certainly, a key element was the massive economic reorientation
known as “structural adjustment.” This program, which was imposed by
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on over ninety
developing and transitional economies over a twenty-year period
beginning in the early 1980s, was most likely the conditio sine qua
non for the global food price crisis.
Eroding the Mexican Countryside
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico
early in 2007 to protest a sharp increase of over 60 percent in the
price of tortillas, the flat unleavened breads that are Mexico’s
staple, many analysts pointed to agrofuels as the culprit since Mexico
had become dependent on imports of corn from the United States, where
subsidies were skewing corn cultivation towards agrofuel production.
However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: How on earth
did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was first domesticated,
become “dependent” on imports of U.S. corn in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into
account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the
homeland of corn had been converted to a corn importing economy by
free market policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), World Bank, and Washington. The food price crisis in Mexico
must be seen as one element in the concatenation of crises that have
rocked that country over the last three decades and brought it to the
verge of being a “failed state.” The key link between the food crisis,
the drug wars, and the massive migration to the North has been
structural adjustment.
In the countryside, structural adjustment meant the gutting of the
various reformist government programs and institutions that had been
built by the Partido Revolucionario Institucionalizado(Party of the
Institutional Revolution) from the 1940s to the 1970s to service the
agrarian sector and cater to the peasantry that had served as the base
of the Mexican Revolution. The sharp reduction or elimination of the
services they provided, such as credit, extension, and infrastructure
support, had a negative effect on agricultural production and
productivity.
The erosion of the capacity of peasant agriculture was further eroded
by the program of unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade in
the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement in the
mid-1990s, which converted the land that domesticated corn into an
importer of the cereal and consolidated the country’s status as a net
food importer.
The negative effects of structural adjustment and NAFTA-imposed trade
liberalization were compounded by the halting of the five-decade-long
agrarian reform process as the neoliberals at the helm of the Mexican
state sought to reprivatize land, hoping to increase agricultural
efficiency by expelling what they felt was an excess agrarian
population of fifteen million people.16
Over twenty-five years after the beginning of structural adjustment in
the early eighties, Mexico is in a state of acute food insecurity,
permanent economic crisis, political instability, and uncontrolled
criminal activity. It may not yet be a “failed state,” to use a
fashionable term, but it is close to becoming one.
Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines
Like Mexico in the case of corn, the Philippines hit the headlines
early in 2008 for its massive deficit in rice.
From a net food exporter, the country had become a net food importer
since the mid-1990s, and the essential reason was the same as in
Mexico — that is, the subjugation of the country to a structural
adjustment program that was one of the first in the developing world.
The program involved a massive reduction of funding for rural programs
that were set up during the Marcos dictatorship in the latter’s effort
to convert the peasantry into a pillar of the regime.
The deleterious effects of structural adjustment, which sought to
channel the country’s financial resources to the payment of the
foreign debt, were compounded by the entry of the country into the
World Trade Organization in the mid-1990s, which required that it end
the quotas on all agricultural imports, except for rice. In one
commodity after another, Filipino producers were displaced by imports.
Contributing to the decline of agricultural productivity was the
grinding to a halt of the agrarian reform program, which was not only
successfully stymied by landlords but was not accompanied by an
effective program of support services such as those that aided
successful land reforms in Taiwan and Korea in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today, the status of the Philippines as a permanent importer of rice
and a net food importer is implicitly accepted by a government that
does not see agriculture playing a key role in the country’s economic
development, except perhaps to serve as a site for plantations rented
out to foreign interests to produce agrofuels and food dedicated for
export to the latter’s markets.
Destroying African Agriculture
As a continent that imports some 25 percent of the food it consumes,
Africa has been at the center of the international food price crisis.
In recent years, understanding of the roots of the crisis has been
derailed by the fashionable notion that the reason Africa has a
massive food deficit is its not having undergone the Green Revolution
that Asia and Latin America experienced.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment, with its
gutting of government budgets — especially its drastic reduction or
elimination of fertilizer subsidies — was key factor that turned
relatively underpopulated Africa from a net food exporter in the 1960s
to the chronic net food importer it is today. As in Mexico and the
Philippines, the aim of adjustment in Africa was to make the
continent’s economies “more efficient” while at the same time pushing
them to export-oriented agricultural production to acquire the foreign
exchange necessary to service their burgeoning foreign debts.
This doctrinaire solution, which was applied with the World Bank and
the IMF micromanaging the process, created instead more poverty and
more inequality and led to significant erosion of the continent’s
agricultural and industrial productive capacity. In Malawi, it led,
earlier this decade, to famine, which was only banished when the
country’s government reinstituted fertilizer subsidies.
As in the Philippines and Mexico, the right hook of structural
adjustment was followed by the left hook of trade liberalization in
the context of unequal global trading rules. Cattle growers in
Southern Africa and West Africa were driven out of business by the
dumping of subsidized beef from the European Union. Cotton growers in
West Africa were displaced from world markets by highly subsidized
U.S. cotton.
The World Bank now admits that by pushing for the defunding of
government programs, its policies helped erode the productive capacity
of the agriculture. The 2008 World Development Report contained the
following damning admission:
Structural adjustment in the 1980s dismantled the elaborate system of
public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit,
insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was
that removing the state would free the market for private actors to
take over these functions — reducing their costs, improving their
quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t
happen. In some places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best,
limiting private entry. Elsewhere, the private sector emerged only
slowly and partially — mainly serving commercial farmers but leaving
smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction
costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and
institutional gaps impose huge costs in forgone growth and welfare
losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in
many cases, their survival.17
Rather than allow Africans to devise indigenous solutions to the
continent’s agrarian crisis, however, the Bank is currently promoting
a new development strategy relying on large-scale corporate
agriculture while creating “protected” reserves where marginalized
populations would eke out an existence based on smallholder and
communal agriculture, for which the Bank does not see much of a
future.18
Capitalism versus the Peasant
The World Bank’s promotion of corporate agriculture as the solution to
Africa’s food production problems after the devastation of structural
adjustment is a strong indication that, whether the designers of
structural adjustment were conscious of it or not, the program’s main
function was to serve as the cutting edge of a broader and longer-term
process: the thoroughgoing capitalist transformation of the
countryside.
That the dynamics of capitalist transformation is what lies at the
heart of the food crisis is essentially what Oxford economist Paul
Collier contends in presenting the orthodox account of the causes and
dynamics of the food price crisis in Foreign Affairs.19 A large part
of the blame for the crisis stems from the failure to diffuse what he
calls the “Brazilian model” of commercial farming in Africa and the
persistence of peasant agriculture globally.
Despite what he knows to be the negative environmental impacts
associated with the Brazilian model, Collier uses the term to
underline his claim that capitalist industrial agriculture, introduced
in the United States and now being perfected by Brazilian enterprises
for developing country contexts, is the only viable future if one is
talking about global food production keeping up with global population
growth. The peasantry is in the way of this necessary transformation.
Peasants, he says, are not entrepreneurs or innovators, being too
concerned with their food security. They would rather have jobs than
be entrepreneurs, for which only a few people are fit. The most
capable of fitting the role of innovative entrepreneurs are commercial
farming operations:
[Re]luctant peasants are right: their mode of production is ill suited
to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful. In
modern agriculture, technology is fast-evolving, investment is lumpy,
the private provision of transportation infrastructure is necessary to
counter the lack of its public provision, consumer food chains are
fast-changing and best met by integrated marketing chains, and
regulatory standards are rising toward the holy grail of traceability
of produce back to its source.20
In his dismissal of peasant agriculture, Collier is joined by many,
including scholars otherwise sympathetic to the plight of the
peasantry and rural workers such as Henry Bernstein, who claims that
advocacy of the peasant way “largely ignores issues of feeding the
world’s population, which has grown so greatly almost everywhere in
the modern epoch, in significant part because of the revolution in
productivity achieved by the development of capitalism.”21 Indeed,
some progressives have already written off the peasantry, with the
eminent Eric Hobsbawm declaring in his influential book The Age of
Extremes that “the death of the peasantry” was “the most dramatic and
far-reaching social change of the second half of [the twentieth]
century,” one that cut “us off forever from the world of the past.”22
The Brazilian agro-enterprise that Collier touts as the solution to
the food crisis is a key element in a global agrifood system where the
export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large
industrial farms with global supply chains like those run by the Thai
multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by
advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. The global
integration of production is accompanied by the elimination of tariff
and non-tariff barriers to facilitate the creation of a global
agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced
by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland
and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the
French-owned Carrefour. These processes of integration and
liberalization are governed by multilateral superstructure, the
centerpiece of which is the World Trade Organization.
According to Harriet Friedmann, the “dominant tendency” in the
contemporary agrifood system
is toward distance and durability, the suppression of particularities
of time and place in both agriculture and diets. More rapidly and
deeply than before, transnational agrifood capitals disconnect
production from consumption and relink them through buying and
selling. They have created an integrated productive sector of the
world economy, and peoples of the Third World have been incorporated
or marginalized — often both simultaneously — as consumers and
producers.23
Indeed, there is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and
urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to
giant suburban favelas, where they have to contend with food prices
that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural
reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural
activities and are increasingly vulnerable to hunger. In their
deconstruction of World Development 2008, Kjell Havnevik and his
associates assert (as noted above) that, indeed, the World Bank’s view
of the future of Africa is one where agriculture is dominated by
large-scale corporate agriculture while “protected” reserves are
created where marginalized populations would eke out an existence
based on smallholder and communal agriculture. The bank does not see
much of a future for this arrangement, as it is reminiscent of the
Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa.24
These developments constitute not simply the erosion of national food
self-sufficiency or food security but what some students of
agricultural trends call “de-peasantization” — the phasing out of a
mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for
intensive capital accumulation.25 This transformation has been a
traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant
production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of
life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized
peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of
Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in
2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995
to 3,926 in 2005.26 One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers
have taken their lives over the last few years,27 and global justice
activist Vandana Shiva explains why: “Under globalization, the farmer
is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A
farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold
by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money
lenders locally.”28
Resistance
Yet peasants have refused to go gently into that good night to which
Collier and Hobsbawm — not to say Marx — would consign them. Indeed,
one year before Hobsbawm’s book was published, in 1993, La Vía
Campesina was founded, and over the next decade this federation of
peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the
agriculture and trade scene globally. The spirit of internationalism
and active identification of one’s class interests with the universal
interest of society that was once a prominent feature of workers’
movements is now on display in the international peasant movement.
Vía Campesina and its allies hotly dispute the inevitability of the
hegemony of capitalist industrial agriculture, asserting that peasants
and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food
production, constituting over a third of the world’s population and
two-thirds of the world’s food producers.29 Smallholders with farms of
under two hectares make up the bulk of the rice produced by Asian
small farmers.30
The food price crisis, according to proponents of peasant and
smallholder agriculture, is not due to the failure of peasant
agriculture but to that of corporate agriculture. They say that,
despite the claims of its representatives that corporate agriculture
is best at feeding the world, the creation of global production chains
and global supermarkets, driven by the search for monopoly profits,
has been accompanied by greater hunger, worse food, and greater
agriculture-related environmental destabilization all around than at
any other time in history.
Moreover, they assert that the superiority in terms of production of
industrial capitalist agriculture is not sustained empirically. Miguel
Altieri and Clara Nicholls, for instance, point out, that although the
conventional wisdom is that small farms are backward and unproductive,
in fact, “research shows that small farms are much more productive
than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from
a single crop. Small integrated farming systems that produce grains,
fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per
unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale
farms.”31
When one factors in the ecological destabilization that has
accompanied the generalization of capitalist industrial agriculture,
the balance of costs and benefits lurches sharply towards the
negative. For instance, in the United States, notes Daniel Imhoff,
the average food item journeys some 1300 miles before becoming part of
a meal. Fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, waxed, colored,
irradiated, fumigated, packaged, and shipped. None of these processes
enhances food quality but merely enables distribution over great
distances and helps increase shelf life.32
Industrial agriculture has created the absurd situation whereby
“between production, processing, distribution, and preparation, 10
calories of energy are required to create just one calorie of food
energy.”33 Conversely, it is the ability to combine productivity and
ecological sustainability that constitutes a key dimension of
superiority of peasant or small-scale agriculture over industrial
agriculture.
Contrary to assertions that peasant and small-farm agriculture is
hostile to technological innovation, partisans of small-scale or
peasant-based farming assert that technology is “path dependent,” that
is, its development is conditioned by the mode of production in which
it is embedded, so that technological innovation under peasant and
small-scale farming would take different paths than innovation under
capitalist industrial agriculture.
But partisans of the peasantry have not only engaged in a defense of
the peasant or smallholder agriculture. Vía Campesina and its allies
have actually formulated an alternative to industrial capitalist
agriculture, and one that looks to the future rather than to the past.
This is the paradigm of food sovereignty, the key propositions of
which are discussed elsewhere in this collection.
The Conjuncture
To be fully understood, the global food price crisis of the last few
years, which is essentially a crisis of production, must be seen as a
critical juncture in the centuries-long process of displacement of
peasant agriculture by capitalist agriculture. Despite its dominance,
capitalist agriculture never really managed to eliminate peasant and
family farm-based agriculture, which has survived till now and
continues to provide a substantial share of the food for the national
population, particularly in the South.
Yet, even as capitalism seems poised to fully subjugate agriculture,
its dysfunctional character is being fully revealed. For it has not
only condemned millions to marginalization but also imposed severe
ecological costs, especially in the form of severe dependency on
fossil fuels at all stages of its production process, from the
manufacture of fertilizers, to the running of agricultural machinery,
to the transportation of its products.
Indeed, even before the food price crisis and the larger global
economic crisis of which it was a part, the legitimacy of capitalist
industrial agriculture was eroding and resistance to it was rising,
not only from the peasants and small farmers it was displacing but
from consumers, environmentalists, health professionals, and many
others who were disconcerted by the mixture of corporate greed, social
insensitivity, and reckless science that increasingly marked its
advance.
Now, with the collapse of the global economy, the integration of
production and markets that has sustained the spread of industrial
agriculture is going into reverse. “Deglobalization” is in progress
“on almost every front,” says the Economist, adopting a word coined by
one of the authors nearly a decade ago.34 The magazine, probably the
most vociferous cheerleader of globalization, warns that the process
depends on the belief of capitalist enterprises “in the efficiency of
global supply chains. But like any chain, these are only as strong as
their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this
way of organizing production has had its day.”35 The next few years —
nay, months, given the speed with which the global economy is plunging
into depression — will provide the answer.
As the capitalist mode of production enters its worst crisis since the
1930s, peasants and small farmers increasingly present a vision of
autonomy, diversity, and cooperation that may just be the key elements
of a necessary social and economic reorganization. As environmental
crises multiply, the social dysfunctions of urban industrial life pile
up, and globalization drags the world to a global depression, the
“peasant’s way” has increasing relevance to broad numbers of people
beyond the countryside.
Indeed, not only in the South but also in the North, there are
increasing numbers who seek to escape the dependency on capital by
reproducing the peasant condition, one where one works with nature
from a limited resource base to create a condition of relative
autonomy from the forces of capital and the market.
The emergence of urban agriculture, the creation of networks linking
consumers to farmers within a given region, the rise of new militant
movements for land — all this, according to Jan van der Ploeg, may
point to a movement of “repeasantization” that has been created by the
negative dynamics of global capitalism and empire and seeks to reverse
them. Under the conditions of the deep crisis of globalization, felt
widely as a loss of autonomy, “the peasant principle, with its focus
on the construction of an autonomous and self governed resource base,
clearly specifies the way forward.”36
Notes
United Nations, World Economic Situation and Prospects 2009 (New York:
United Nations, 2009), 7-8. Go back
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “Briefing Paper: Hunger on
the Rise” (United Nations, September 17, 2008), ix. Go back
Reed Lindsay, “Inside Haiti’s Food Riots,” Al-Jazeera, April 16, 2008. Go back
Ibid., 46. Go back
Peter Wahl, “Food Speculation: the Main Factor of the Price Bubble in
2008” (Berlin: WEED, 2009). Go back
Aditya Chakrabortty, “Secret Report: Biofuels caused food crisis,” The
Guardian, July 3, 2008. Go back
Donald Mitchell, “A note on rising food prices,” World Bank Web site,
July 2008. Go back
Chakrabortty. Go back
APEC Biofuels Web site, July 21, 2008,
http://www.biofuels.apec.org/me_united_states.html. Go back
“Global trends driving ‘land grab’ in poor nations: activists,” AFP,
January 3, 2009. Go back
Richard Spencer, “South Korean company takes over part of Madagascar
to grow biofuels,” Telegraph Web site, November 20, 2008. Go back
“Global trends.” Go back
United Nations, 48. Go back
Ibid. Go back
FAO. Go back
Armando Bartra, “Rebellious Cornfield: Towards Food and Labor
Self-Sufficiency,” in Gerardo Otero, ed., Mexico in Transition
(London: Zed, 2004), 23. Go back
World Bank, World Bank Development Report 2008: Agriculture for
Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008), 138. Go back
Kjell Havnevik, Deborah Bryceson, Lars-Erik Birgegard, Prosper
Matondi, and Atakilte Beyene, “African Agriculture and the World
Bank,” Pambazuka News, March 11, 2008. Go back
Paul Collier, “The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the
Food Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 6 (November/December 2008),
67-79. Go back
Ibid., 71. Go back
Henry Bernstein, “Agrarian Questions from Transition to
Globalization,” in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay, eds.,
Peasants and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2009), 255. Go back
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,
1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), 289. Go back
Ibid., 272. Go back
Havnevik, et al. Go back
Deborah Bryceson, “Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labor Redundancy in
the Neo-Liberal Era and Beyond,” in Bryceson, Cristobal Kay, and Jos
Mooij, eds., Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labor in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America (London: Intermediate Technology Publications,
2000), 304-05. Go back
Utsa Patnaik, “External Trade, Domestic Employment, and Food Security:
Recent Outcomes of Trade Liberalization and Neo-Liberal Economic
Reforms in India,” paper presented at the International Workshop on
Policies against Hunger III, Berlin, October 20-22, 2004. Go back
The Hindu, November 12, 2007. Go back
Vandana Shiva, “The Suicide Economy,” Znet, April 2004. Go back
Wayne Roberts, cited in Philip McMichael, “Food Sovereignty in
Movement: the Challenge to Neo-liberal Globalization,” draft, Cornell
University, 2008. Go back
Miguel Altieri, “Small Farms as a Planetary Ecological Asset: Five Key
Reasons Why We Should Support the Revitalization of Small Farms in the
Global South,” Food First, 2008. Go back
Miguel Altieri and Clara Nicholls, “Scaling up Agroecological
Approaches for Food Sovereignty in Latin America,” Development 51, no.
4 (December 2008), 474. Also see Peter Rosset’s essay in this issue.
Go back
Daniel Imhoff, “Community supported Agriculture,” in Jerry Mander and
Edward Goldsmith, The Case against the Global Economy (San Francisco:
Sierra Club, 1996), 425-26. Go back
Ibid., 426. Go back
“Turning Their Backs on the World,” Economist, February 21-27, 2009,
59. The author’s book that the Economist refers to is Walden Bello,
Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (London: Zed Press,
2002). Go back
Ibid., 61. Go back
Jan van der Ploeg, The New Peasantries (London: Earthscan, 2008) 276. Go back
--
-------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Thompson
Masters Candidate
Global Environmental Politics Program
School of International Service
American University
Political Ecology of Food and Agriculture
http://groups.google.com/group/pefas08
Simon Nicholson
I meant to tell you, too, that the short article you helped me revise
appeared on the Foreign Policy website last week. Here's the link:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/23/a_sea_change_in_food_aid
Cheers,
simon