Neoliberalising the food regime ‘amongst its others’: the right to food and the state in India

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores the role of the state in the contemporary food regime in light of critical theories of neoliberalisation. Heeding recent calls for downscaling food regime analysis, I suggest a Gramscian reinterpretation of recent right-to-food legislation in India on the backdrop of longer histories of capital, power and nature. I argue for seeing the recent right-to-food case in India as partaking in a longstanding hegemonic process of neoliberalising the country’s agro-food system, where hegemony is negotiated through unstable equilibria facilitating renewed capital accumulation for dominant classes.

KEYWORDS:

• Food regime analysis
• India
• right to food
• neoliberalism
• the state
• political economy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Desmond McNeill as well as three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jostein Jakobsen is a doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. His ongoing PhD project is centred on India’s role in the contemporary food regime, while his research interests span widely across critical agrarian studies and political ecology. He has also published on the Maoist movement in India. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 In the case of India, the task has not been taken up so far except as an example in broader analyses (Patel 2013; Pritchard et al. 2016), as passing reference (Lerche 2013), as background/context (Gupta 1998) or by ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ in dismissing food regime analysis (Frödin 2013).

2 This point is related to Bernstein’s (2016) criticism of the tendency in food regime analysis to operate with ‘binaries’.

3 The most recent exchange of views is found in a 2016 special edition of The Journal of Peasant Studies, involving McMichael (2016), Bernstein (2016) and Friedmann (2016).

4 Tracing the contours of this debate, arising from – but later going far beyond – subaltern studies scholars’ readings of Gramsci, is beyond the scope of the present paper.

5 The global food security index is available online at: http://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/

6 The IFPRI data are available online at: http://www.globalhungerindex.org/results-2017/

7 See website: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Food/Pages/FoodIndex.aspx

8 To what extent these arguments reflect reality is a question I leave aside for the moment. Important for our purposes are the effects of the arguments first and foremost. As to the argument of India becoming a perceived ‘food surplus’ producer, see Banerjee (2015) for a thorough critique stressing that decreasing demand for food grains rather than increasing production is what has actually happened.

9 See for example the press statement issued by the Right to Food Campaign (2017) in July 2017.

10 This is not to say that criticisms of the FCI have been overall correct. As Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2002, 160–62) point out, notwithstanding inefficiencies the FCI has managed to keep prices below market levels. Problems of food stocks in the midst of hunger, for example, have rather been effects of the limited (‘targeted’) design of the neoliberalised PDS itself.

11 The contested nature of the financialisation of agriculture in India is shown in the fact that the government banned futures trades in food commodities during the height of the global food crisis in 2007–2008; the ban was lifted as soon as tensions lessened – to the great relief of traders and financiers (Reuters 2009).

12 See government website: http://seednet.gov.in/Material/IndianSeedSector.htm

13 This is a partnership of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) institutions with co-sponsorship from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Gates Foundation – international capital, indeed! See their website: http://csisa.org/

14 With regard to the rice–wheat complex in particular, the report tells us that ‘more than half of the rice seed planted in India in 2008–9 was purchased (rather than saved) by farmers’, whereas ‘farmers in India buy less than 20 percent of the wheat seed planted each year, preferring to save their own seed or exchange seed with neighbors’ (Spielman et al. 2014, 3). What the report thus signals is: There is plenty of space for expanding accumulation!