The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism, dispossession and agroecology

Abstract

This contribution reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. In particular it engages with the debate between Henry Bernstein and Philip McMichael and analyzes their different conceptualizations of agrarian capitalism. It critically identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to one-sidedly emphasize accumulation by dispossession and enclosure and thereby to overlook the importance of expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge which is devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past and to the local. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization and complex chains for feeding the world population, and the support of state and science, as well as social movements, for realizing a food sovereign alternative.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• agroecology
• dispossession
• expanded reproduction
• agrarian crisis
• capitalism
• farmer knowledge
• productivity
• GMO

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Saturnino ‘Jun’ Borras for encouraging me to write this paper, Antonio Castellanos-Navarette and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Diana Kay for her editing excellence. Of course, all inconsistencies, lacunae and errors are mine. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Food sovereignty: a critical dialogue’ Colloquium at the ISS in The Hague.

Notes

¹I will refer mostly to Bernstein (2014), McMichael (2014) and van der Ploeg (2014), but sometimes I quote the earlier version of these papers presented at the conference on ‘Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue’ held at Yale University, 14–15 September 2013. References to the conference papers concern elements that have since disappeared from but do not, in my view, contradict the final versions.

²This summary necessarily simplifies Bernstein's critique.

³Bernstein (2013) is concerned about that literature which lumps different types of farmers together as peasants, neglects internal class contradictions and opposes the peasant as a non-capitalist category to an external agrarian capitalism. He seems to exempt van der Ploeg's writings on the peasantry from his critique (see his notes 23 and 44), but without providing a coherent argument why. He only refers to the high quality of van der Ploeg's work. In my reading of van der Ploeg (e.g. 2014), all Bernstein's concerns are present in van der Ploeg's work. Bernstein (2014) analyses more critically the work of van der Ploeg, but several critical points still tend to remain implicit; see for example notes 28 and 30, and pp. 19–20.

⁴McMichael uses the metaphor of the canary in the mine to characterize the role of the peasant movement in signalling the current global agrarian crisis.

⁵The third notion of crisis, an ecological crisis, will be discussed in the section below on agroecology.

⁶Higher food prices support not only the corporate food regime but also local agroecological and organic farming initiatives, the favoured alternative to the corporate food regime.

⁷One reviewer raised the important question of ‘who is the sovereign?’ (the urban poor, the rich and middle ‘peasants’ producing for the market, or other groups such as processing industrialists, retailers and financial capital). This question is not properly dealt with in the food sovereignty literature though important for formulating alternatives. One example which discusses contrasting views on food policies in ‘food sovereign’ Bolivia is Córdoba and Jansen (2014).

⁸Furthermore, agrarian capitalists do not necessarily seek low prices: as producers they can make more profit with high farm-gate prices and, as marketers and retailers, calculating on the basis of proportionate profit margins, they gain more with generalized higher prices. For this reason, global food companies source and sell higher-priced organic and fair trade bananas not to ‘greenwash’ but as a good ‘business case’ (Jansen 2004, 2006). In fact, low prices as a result of competition in the food regime go against the direct interest of individual capitalists; individual capitalists would prefer monopolies with their high prices (e.g., through branding) to the dumping of food.

⁹Bernstein (2006) calls this the agrarian question of labour. I will not go into the disagreement between Bernstein and McMichael (2013b) about the definition of ‘the agrarian question’, as clarifying how each misinterprets the other's use of the term would require too much space.

¹⁰A similar perspective can be found in actor-oriented approaches which first conceptualize a structure that exists without any agency, followed by a critique of explanations that refer to structures, arguing that such explanations neglect agency (e.g. Long and van der Ploeg 1989).

¹¹This summary simplifies the views of McMichael and Bernstein but the key opposition between them relates to this difference.

¹²The concept has been used for labelling appropriation or dispossession in a wide range of contexts, for example around seeds (Kloppenburg 2010), post-communist transition (Toleubayev, Jansen, and van Huis 2010), environmental conservation (Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012) and, in particular, land grabbing (e.g. Levien 2011 and several papers in the special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 39, nos. 3–4, on land grabbing).

¹³The iconic case for theorizing the emergence of agrarian capitalism is the enclosure movement in England; cf. Marx (1887), Polanyi (1957) and (Wood 2000).

¹⁴Such an analytical distinction may be helpful in the land grabbing debate. Many reported cases are examples of brutal dispossession or privatization of common or state land made possible by corrupt and/or neoliberal states. But many other cases are the result of expanded reproduction: simple commodity producers or capitalist entrepreneurs selling or renting their land to large firms. In the context of capitalist property relations and capitalist markets, these are entirely legal land transactions. The social struggle around the former may need to differ from the development of an alternative for the latter. For more nuanced analyses in the land grabbing debate, see Borras et al. (2012) and Oya (2013).

¹⁵Harvey (2003, 176) considers that such ‘differences cannot be buried under some nebulous concept of “the multitude” in motion’.

¹⁶Rosset and Martínez-Torres (2013, 13) rightly point out that technological choice always ‘brings political and ideological baggage with it’. This truism, however, does not prevent a critical examination of agroecology's technical merits.

¹⁷One should not infer from the critique of Malthusian thinking that total food production is never a problem. Political economists face the task of combining a critique of unequal distribution with positive thinking on how much should be produced and how. Agroecology produces ingenious ideas and methods on the how but is silent or too optimistic on the how much.

¹⁸This includes precision agriculture to reduce fertilizer and pesticide application and water use, integrated pest control, recycling nutrients and residues in run-off water, biodiversity conservation, and so on.

¹⁹While agroecology is sometimes equated with organic farming, they are not necessarily the same. However, with regard to the productivity debate, the lines of argument are often similar. Since there is much more data available on organic farming, I use this here as an example. Agroecology without external inputs would probably yield much less than the forms of organic farming discussed in de Ponti et al. (2012).

²⁰Organic farming may be as driven by external input supply, commodity markets and agribusiness (Guthman 2004) as conventional farming.

²¹A lot of farmer activism has focused on organizing input delivery under control by farmer associations to become (more) independent from powerful traders or corporate capital and not to become independent from external inputs.

²²Agroecology is part of a broader trend in the late 1980s and 1990s that revaluates indigenous technical knowledge (Jansen et al. 2004).

²³In contrast to the centrality of science in the modernization of agriculture, authors sometimes introduce the notion of farming (by peasants) as an art or craftsmanship, which is disappearing because of the scientization of agriculture (e.g. van der Ploeg 2013b). The appeal of the art or craftsmanship metaphor can be found in many professions, as seen in such expressions as ‘the art of investment banking’, ‘the art of science’ or the ‘art of the entrepreneurial marketer’. It also appeals to many deeply involved in agricultural practice. But what does it tell us? Trusler's (1810) publication on the art of farming is illuminating in this context. Trusler aims to give gentlemen who take up farming ‘insight into the nature of farming, as will enable them to check the negligence, correct the ignorance, or detect the imposition, of servants’. As an early lesson in capitalist entrepreneurship and the technicalities of agricultural production, the book opens with a cost-benefit analysis (showing that profits can be made even in a context of rising rents and input prices) and emphasizes that the art of farming starts with proper bookkeeping. Moreover, the art of farming is about controlling servants, expressed in sentences like: ‘All that is necessary for a master to take care of, is, that his ploughman does not ride upon the handles of the plough, but plough the ground as deep as the plough will effect it, or as the upper staple or layer of the land will admit’, 118).

²⁴The same Conway has been an influential advocate of genetically modified crops for poor farmers (Jansen and Gupta 2009).

²⁵Corporate dominance in the production and distribution of GMOs has been well documented and need not be repeated here (see, for example, Harvey 2004; Pelaez and Schmidt 2004; Otero 2008; Glover 2010a).

²⁶The early phase of agroecology, which throve on new insights from ecology, entomology and complex systems theory, may provide important lessons. One point of contention is to what extent the latest molecular bioscience can be incorporated.

Additional information

Kees Jansen is based at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group in the Social Sciences Department at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His current work focusses on pesticide risk governance, the multi-level governance of plant diseases, and the greening of the agrarian question. He has a long-term interest in rethinking linkages between social justice and risk theories, understanding technology/nature-society interactions and developing critical political ecology. Among his publications is Agribusiness and society (2004). His other passions include gardening and bass playing. Website: www.keesjansen.eu