Fossil food: landed property as a hidden abode of global warming

Abstract

This article analyzes the relation between climate change and the globalization of food systems. Although the corporate food regime made possible by the logistics revolution has been deemed highly intensive in its use of fossil fuels, the political economy of its energy foundations is yet to be deciphered. Based on EDGAR-FOOD, a global database that measures carbon emissions in the food system, we built a sample of nine South American economies to assess the extent to which capital mobility triggers emissions across different sectors. Findings from our study reveal that although food distribution was the most dynamic sector during the period in assessment, land-based emissions remained overwhelmingly larger in absolute terms. This, the paper concludes, highlights the definitive role that landed property – and the structural heterogeneity of agrarian capitalism more broadly – performs in the politics of carbon emissions. Accordingly, our findings lay bare a hidden abode of heterogeneous relations of production – chief of which are unpaid work, petty commodity production, and rent – that lies at the basis of a polarizing, hierarchically-structured international division of labor.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• fossil capitalism
• rentier capitalism
• dependency theory
• social reproduction theory

Acknowledgements

This article greatly benefitted from the insights and feedback provided by four anonymous reviewers at Review of International Political Economy, as well as from the editorial work of Jennifer Bair. An early draft of this article was presented at the Food Policy Working Group (GEPA for its Spanish acronym), Universidad de Los Lagos, Chile. Research for this paper has been funded by the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), FONDAP Number 11140083, by the Millennium Science Initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism, as well as by Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development, ANID (grant 11180099).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The origins of this concept in the dependency tradition, as Diego Giller (2020) explains, can be traced to the publication of the Spanish translation of Marx’s manuscript on precapitalist social formations. Originally titled Formen by Marx, this manuscript was later to be included in the Spanish version of the Grundrisse, published in 1971. Translated by Wenceslao Roces and published in the Mexican journal Historia y Sociedad in 1965, the Formen reintroduced the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, thereby laying the foundations for a critique of linear and stagist conceptions of historical change. In Latin American proto-dependentista debates, the Asiatic mode of production provided insights to lay bare and assess the coexistence between modes of production in the absence of a predefined historical teleology.

2 We refer to rent as an extramarket relation insofar as the monopolistic control of landed (as well as non-landed) property by the rentier class and the state often enables wealth to circulate in ways that are relatively autonomous from the price system and from inter-capitalist competition. Although rentier dynamics can – and often also are – mediated by market dynamics and more generally by the formation of the general rate of profit, this relation is one that is to be broached at the empirical level and cannot be assumed a priori.

3 This internalization of social roles means that owner-producers are “not limited by the average profit on capital” and, as a result, they can produce at a lower price than regulates the market, ensuring both their reproduction and ongoing self-exploitation (Marx, 1991 [1894], p. 941–942).

4 LULUC emissions were superseded by production around 2015 in Brazil and Colombia, but not so much due to an increase in production emissions but because of a sharp drop in LULUC emissions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Interdisciplinary Center for Indigenous and Intercultural Studies (CIIR).

Notes on contributors

Martín Arboleda

Martín Arboleda is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. His research interests encompass the fields of global political economy, critical social theory, and development studies.

Thomas F. Purcell

Thomas F. Purcell is Lecturer in International Political Economy at the Department of European & International Studies, King’s College London. His research focuses on the Marxian critique of political economy with a regional focus on uneven geographical development in Latin America. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester.

Pablo Roblero

Pablo Roblero is an Independent Scholar whose work attempts to combine community organization and academic research. His topics of interest are inequalities, social organization and resistance, and global political economy. He holds a MSc Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.