Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

Abstract

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.

Keywords:

• world capitalism
• food
• international divisions of labour
• agrarian political economy
• the ‘peasant turn’

Acknowledgements

This is a substantially revised version of ‘Food Regimes and Food Regime Analysis: A Selective Survey’, BICAS Working Paper 2, 2015. I am grateful to conversations with Harriet Friedmann and to the Journal’s anonymous reviewers for improvements; shortcomings are my responsibility alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹For an elaboration of these observations about agrarian political economy, and many references, see Bernstein and Byres (2001).

²They explicitly acknowledged the influence of regulation theory in the work of Aglietta (1979) in their periodisation, in which Polanyi (1944) and Arrighi (1978) were also important influences. Subsequently, the influence of Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1983), which was there from the beginning, was acknowledged explicitly (e.g. Friedmann 2000). The original article ‘shifted Regulation School focus from national states to the system of states, and from industry to agriculture. It added to early world-systems theory empirical mappings of class relations and geographical specializations related to historically specific commodity complexes’ (Friedmann 2009, 335). The first published appearance of the term ‘food regime’ I am aware of was in Friedmann (1987), although Friedmann (1982) had used ‘international food order’.

³Also, of course, the moment of the inception of modern imperialism in Lenin's (1964) account.

⁴If not most of Africa; see Goody (1982).

⁵Other sources include Magnan's survey of food regime analysis (2012), McMichael's ‘food regime genealogy’ (2009), and his recent book on Food regimes and agrarian questions (McMichael 2013). Interested readers are advised to consult for themselves these sources and some of the many references they contain.

⁶McMichael (2009, 141) subsequently dated the first food regime from the 1870s to the 1930s, in effect including the three decades following its demise (1914–1945) before the emergence of the second food regime.

⁷‘International’ to signal that in this phase exchanges were between national economies, rather than transcending their political reach to become transnational or ‘global’, on which more below.

⁸Albeit agriculture in the settler states ‘was industrial mainly in its external links, purchasing inputs from industry and providing raw materials to industries doing minimal processing', but had not yet internalised industrial production in its labour processes (Friedmann and McMichael 1989, 102, 111, emphasis in original). The more comprehensive industrialisation of agriculture emerged more strongly in the second food regime, and is a central focus of political ecology today (see the excellent analysis by Weis 2010), on which more below.

⁹Indeed, the seminal work on sugar by Sidney Mintz (1985) made its own contribution to the formation of the food regime approach.

¹⁰Also termed by McMichael (2013, 26–32) ‘the British-centered imperial food regime’.

¹¹This specific element derived from Friedmann's previous work (1978a, 1978b, 1980).

¹²Also relevant here is the apparently limiting case of capitalist ‘high farming’ in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its high labour intensity and exceptional yields until it was outcompeted on price by transatlantic grain imports. The achievements of ‘high farming’ and their conditions were stressed in the work of Colin Duncan (1996, 1999), referred to by Friedmann (2000, 489–91) and McMichael (2013, 70–71).

¹³Magnan (2012, 377) locates the crisis of the first food regime between 1925, when world grain prices collapsed, and 1945.

¹⁴Explanation of how US grain surpluses returned so quickly after the ‘ecological catastrophe’ of the 1930s remains elusive in accounts of the second food regime and the transition to it from the first. New Deal farm support programmes were key, as well as measures applied by the Soil Conservation Service, formed in 1935, in the worst-affected areas (the southern high plains). The drama of the dust bowl in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s and US government policies of environmental conservation had a wide international impact including on colonial administration in Africa (e.g. Anderson 1984).

¹⁵Friedmann (2009, 337, note 5) later observed ‘key exceptions, notably India’ to the generalisation of food-import dependence in the South during the second food regime.

¹⁶In my estimation, this remains the single most powerful application of a food regime analysis.

¹⁷Although note Friedmann's prediction (1993, 47–48, emphasis added) that ‘The separation of farm income supports from production – that is, the end of price supports – is the likely future for North America and Europe. The shift to income supports is likely to continue, because it confirms in policy what has already occurred structurally'.

¹⁸On the plane of inter-state and multilateral organisation and rules, Friedmann (2005, notes 9 and 15, 260–61) notes the missed opportunities of more progressive arrangements in the proposed International Trade Organization (1948), opposed by the US Congress and which gave way to GATT, and the kinds of ‘global Keynesian solution’(s) of issues of international trade and their bearing on economic development in the South associated with the founding rationale of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (1967) and the Brandt Commission recommendations (1980).

¹⁹Winders (2012) is an essentially ‘interest group'-type account of farm lobby politics and the trajectories of US farm policy that argues for the significance of three lobbies differentiated by commodity and regionally, those for wheat, maize/corn and cotton. He traces their divisions and alliances, and shifting fortunes, during the twentieth century. Winders (2009) compares the formation of US agricultural policy in the second food regime with British policy in the first regime, notably the emblematic repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (‘corn’ here being wheat), the division between British livestock and wheat interests, and subsequent British imposition of free trade in grains on other European countries.

²⁰Indeed, for some purposes the issues around a third food regime, and resistance to it, might be stated without any reference to work on the previous two food regimes, nor the political economy of capitalism it deployed – and often are, especially in activist discourses.

²¹One possible expression of the ‘faltering’ WTO is the proliferation of regional trade blocs and bilateral trade agreements.

²²As McMichael would no doubt agree, issues of the relations between costs of production and prices are more complex than his abbreviated formulation here suggests.

²³‘The agrofuels project represents the ultimate fetishization of agriculture, converting a source of human life into an energy input at a time of rising prices’ (McMichael 2009, 155).

²⁴China presents a characteristically distinctive, apparently aberrant, example here: in the face of the country's food scandals of recent years, there is a preference by those who can afford it for buying meat from large corporatised companies which claim (and are believed) to exercise strict quality controls over the chain from livestock production through slaughter to retail distribution (Schneider and Sharma 2014).

²⁵Recall that the crisis of the second food regime was manifested in rapid price inflation in the early 1970s.

²⁶There is also an echo here of the second food regime in which US (and European Union) agricultural policies deepened, rather than resolved, the problem of chronic surpluses and how to manage them (above). In this instance, though, the point is more fundamentally systemic: the current moment ‘of absolute exhaustion of the conditions of capital accumulation … with land grabbing going through the motions of a final, desperate enclosure’ (McMichael 2013, 156, emphasis added).

²⁷Central here is Marx's notion of the ‘metabolic rift’ which is at the centre of much recent materialist work and debate in ecology – for example, in Foster's claims for ‘Marx's ecology' (2000) and in Moore's extraordinary project of capitalism as ‘world ecology’ (2011, also 2010a, 2010b, forthcoming) – and is deployed by McMichael (e.g. 2013, 107–08).

²⁸‘The problem here, ultimately, is epistemic’ (144).

²⁹This is strongly emphasised, and explored, in the work of van der Ploeg (2008) and others.

³⁰LeHeron and Lewis (2009, 346) refer to a ‘resurrection moment’ of food regime analysis from the mid-2000s, with reference to Friedmann (2005) and McMichael (2005) – which begs the question ‘resurrection’ without crucifixion?

³¹In fact, Friedmann (2009, 341) later refers to the ‘prolonged death throes of the old [second] food regime’ and their effects up to the present moment.

³²The last kind of point is found in other critics, like Busch and Juska (1997) who recommended going ‘beyond political economy’ and bringing in actor-network theory, and later LeHeron and Lewis (2009), influenced by ‘Post Structural Political Economy', who remark that ‘the concept of food regime has proven to be very productivist, and thus resistant to recognising the diversity of actor subjectivities in both production and consumption’ (346). Goodman (1997) elaborated aspects of his earlier article with Watts through a detailed assessment of literatures on internationalisation, advising that globalisation be treated as ‘a contingent empirical category and not as a metatheoretical construct or heuristic framework’ (677), and warning against representations of it ‘as the consummated transition to a new era of world economy’ (674).

³³There is much slippery ground here, which it is inevitably risky to try to cover in the truncated manner of this paper. Araghi's charge of ‘agrarian exceptionalism’ might apply to the postmodernist ‘abstract particularism’ he detects in Goodman and Watts (1994), but surely not to their abbreviated formulation of ‘agriculture's difference’ (with industry), deriving from ‘the land-based character of production, the physiological requirements of human food consumption, and the cultural significance of food in social practice’ (Goodman and Watts 1994, 37–38, 39–40). These qualities are central to the agroecological turn of food regime analysis, and not least its criticism of how capital dispossesses ‘peasants’, industrialises farming processes and generates ‘food from nowhere’, all of which contribute to social and ecological devastation, as Araghi agrees (e.g. Araghi 2009b).

³⁴Araghi points to broadly similar issues to those highlighted, albeit in very different manner, by Jairus Banaji (2010), and his arguments about applying Marx's method in constructing ‘theory as history'. One problem in both Araghi and Banaji concerns the character and range of theoretical ‘determinations’ needed to pursue historical analysis, raised in my review essay on Banaji (Bernstein 2013). One should ask of Araghi's ‘global value relations include … ’: where does the list of possible inclusion end? Is there any hierarchy of ‘determinations’? If so, how is that hierarchy itself determined? If not, then what? And so on.

³⁵In fact, Friedmann (1980) addressed the differences between simple commodity production, exemplified by the North American family farm, and ‘peasant’ production in the Third World; her argument was discussed by Bernstein (1986). She also made it clear that the most pervasive and strategic manifestation of ‘non-wage labour’ in capitalism, and in both simple commodity production and ‘peasant’ farming, is generated by gender relations.

³⁶There is thus also a political difference between Friedmann and McMichael, whether cause or effect of their intellectual differences concerning food regime analysis and its uses. Friedmann has produced several studies of alternative food politics in action (e.g. 2011; Friedmann and McNair 2008). Her article with Amber McNair (Friedmann and McNair 2008, 427) counterposes ‘the Builder as opposed to the Warrior approach to social change’ and explains the authors’ preference for the former; the latter is exemplified by ‘oppositional politics of a “call to the barricades” kind', as LeHeron and Lewis (2009, 347) characterise McMichael's stance.

³⁷Finance is central to the theorisation of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ in the history of capitalism as world system by Arrighi (1994), conveniently summarised in Arrighi and Moore (2001). In the 1920s, Chayanov (1966, 202) had already suggested the domination of American farmers by finance capital. ‘Financialisation’ – often, and plausibly, regarded as the dominant mode of accumulation in ‘neoliberal globalisation’ – and its effects for agricultural investment and trade today are explored by Moore (2011), Clapp (2014), Fairbarn (2014) and Isakson (2014).

³⁸It can be suggested here, though not pursued further, that agribusiness had two locations of origin (both in the period of the first food regime): the world market grain region of the American prairies centred on Chicago (Cronon 1991) and the organisation of export agriculture in the ‘new’ (industrial) plantations of the colonies, notably in Southeast Asia (Stoler 1985) as well as Brazil and the Caribbean.

³⁹McMichael (2006, 178–79) moves directly from a sentence about the corporate food regime to report that today ‘about 40 percent of the surface of the planet has been converted to crop or pasture lands, compared with 7 percent in 1700’. What is the link here, or is it a non sequitur? Why the reference date of 1700? What happened between 1700 and the 1980s when the corporate food regime started to emerge? Is it significant that the increase in the area farmed over three centuries that he cites is (much) less than the increase in world population in the same period?

⁴⁰I am grateful to Harriet Friedmann (personal communication) for this important point of clarification, among others. I should also note here the important observation by one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper that historically ‘there were also less stark divisions between agricultural and non-agricultural land, and vastly greater absolute and relative scale of food/biomass to be extracted from surrounding ecosystems’.

⁴¹Intent is central to any notion of a ‘project’, of course, but is not always self-evident nor adequate to explaining the rationale of any project, let alone the actions taken (or not taken) to realise it and their relative success or failure. Friedmann (2005, 232) observed that ‘The world wheat market that arose in the decades after 1870 was not really anyone's goal’, although it helped meet the goals of different classes at the time. Treating the documents of organisations like the World Bank and WTO as self-evidently ‘legible’ statements of intent is also problematic. Matteo Rizzo (2009) usefully distinguished between challenging the World Bank's World Development Report of 2008 on Agriculture for development ‘for what it says’ and not challenging it ‘when it contradicts itself’ – ‘the politically more fertile way of reading the [Report] … is to make sense of its numerous internal contradictions’. Ways of ‘reading’ the WTO as the cutting edge of global market liberalisation, as La Vía Campesina and other social movements do, tend to overlook its various contradictions, which have made it much less effective as a ‘neoliberal’ institution, as various commentators recognise. More (most?) generally here, in terms of methodology, is the danger of explaining everything that happens in capitalism as manifesting a ‘capital logic’, with any further assumption that such logic is pursued by capitals rationally and consistently both in their economic strategies and a fortiori politically. That is indeed the road of ‘functionalist’ explanation. Rather, much of what happens in capitalism is the unintended and unexpected effects of contradictory social relations – and effects which then exert their own determination, of course.

⁴²For example, in the 24 pages of references in the little book by McMichael (2013), there is no mention of the research of the Copenhagen–Montpellier group on commodity chains, with its mass of empirical research and precise analysis – for example, Raikes and Gibbon (2000), Daviron and Gibbon (2002), Gibbon and Ponte (2005), Daviron and Ponte (2005).

⁴³The second issue of the 40^th anniversary volume of the Journal of Peasant Studies is titled Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty. It contains some more and less critical articles by Agarwal (2014), Bernstein (2014) and Edelman (2014), albeit outnumbered by (re-)statements by food sovereignty advocates, including van der Ploeg (2014) and McMichael (2014). The last is subject to a critical discussion by Jansen (2014); among other recent papers in the Journal see also Li (2015) and McMichael's response (2015) to Bernstein (2014).

⁴⁴In a similar vein, McMichael (2013, 84–96) provides sketches of large regions (East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) within the third food regime.

⁴⁵Were there any ‘world-historical subjects’ of earlier periods of (international) capitalism? If so, who were they?

⁴⁶And makes it impossible to assess such highly aggregated ‘stylised facts', like the claim that smallholders in some estimates produce 70 percent of the world's food, cited above. What exactly is the ‘small’ in these ‘smallholders’? Who are they? Are they all farming in the same ways? etc.

⁴⁷The same reviewer cited earlier suggests that ‘“Self-organizing and agro-ecology” are … antithetical – agroecology entails the deliberate/conscious organization of agro-ecosystems, focusing on diversity and complementarity, and if the “self” is meant to refer to peasants as individual agents, that doesn't fit with agroecology either as it is interested in not only peasant knowledge but combining modern scientific research in “communities of practice”’.

⁴⁸Also relevant here, from another context, is Michael Burawoy's discussion (2010, 2011) of the ‘false optimism of global labor studies’.

⁴⁹And/or voluntarist fashion, as in Ploeg's insistence on peasants’ definitive striving for autonomy, recently restated in his ‘Chayanovian manifesto’ (2013). McMichael (2013, 145) observes that van der Ploeg (2008) ‘universalizes the peasant condition’ and commends this, while I suggest it is part of the basic problem; see also Araghi (1995) on this issue.

⁵⁰For illuminating illustrations of rural class formation, and dynamics of accumulation from below and above, in China today, exploring the first and second types of (‘internal’) determination, see Zhang, Oya and Ye (2015), Yan and Chen (2015) and Zhang (2015) in the special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change (Oya, Ye and Zhang 2015). For recent class analyses of Indian agriculture in the context of liberalisation since the early 1990s, combining to various degrees ‘internal’ and ‘external’ determinations, see Basole and Basu (2011); Lerche (2013); Ramachandran (2011); Ramachandran and Rawal (2010); and for excellent analyses of ‘accumulation from below’ in contemporary Southeast Asia, Hall (2012) and Li (2014).

⁵¹Weis (2007) is among those who argue that small-scale agroecological farming can feed the world, and indeed must do so on a smaller-area portion of the globe than is currently used for agricultural production (Weis 2013, chapter 4), a position that requires radical changes in diets, especially away from current and growing levels of meat consumption; more sceptical interrogations of this belief are provided by, inter alios, Woodhouse (2010); Jansen (2014). This is not to argue by default in favour of hypertrophied, and reified, notions of labour productivity – criticised by Weis and Friedmann – which in practice are almost always associated with reifications of economies of scale.

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Henry Bernstein

Henry Bernstein is Adjunct Professor in the College of Humanities and Development, China Agricultural University, Beijing, and Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was coeditor, with Terence J. Byres, of The Journal of Peasant Studies from 1985 to 2000, and was founding editor, again with Terence J. Byres, of the Journal of Agrarian Change in 2001, of which he became Emeritus Editor in 2008. He has a longstanding interest in the political economy of agrarian change, as well as social theory, and more recently in globalisation and labour. His ‘little book on a big idea’ Class dynamics of agrarian change has been published in Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish, as well as English, editions, with forthcoming translations in French, Russian and Thai.