Commentary: Food regime for thought

Abstract

This essay engages with Henry Bernstein's critical survey of food regime analysis, focusing on the claim that my interpretation of the food regime takes a misguided ‘peasant turn’. I argue Henry's representation loses sight of my reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’, as more than analysis of the uneven process by which capital subordinates landed property, and therefore of the class fate of the peasantry, as such. Rather it is about social and ecological fate on a global scale, involving questions of ecosystem survival, precarious labor circuits, urban slum proliferation, privatization of states, financialization, intellectual (property) rights, climate change mitigation and so on. Significantly, global recognition of these connections to processes of agro-industrialization and enclosure was informed by a ‘peasant’ mobilization that would be unthinkable within the terms of the classical agrarian question. Peasant organizations catalyzed challenge to the neoliberal food order institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, in a time of massive dispossession. Politicizing neoliberal ‘food security’ as an agribusiness project, the ‘food sovereignty’ counter-movement used a politics of strategic essentialism to unmask the undemocratic and impoverishing architecture of the ‘free trade’ regime privileging corporate rights over state and citizen rights. In effect, this counter-movement performed a food regime analysis from within, importantly reaching beyond a peasant project. This essay revisits the comparative-historical method by which the food regime trajectory can be understood, as a contradictory set of interacting forces and relations that complicate and shape and reshape its politics, and yet allow identification of emergent possibilities.

Keywords:

• food regime
• food sovereignty
• peasant mobilization
• enclosure
• historical method
• agrarian question

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Raj Patel, Max Ajl, Elisa Da Vía, Divya Sharma, Mindi Schneider, Harriet Friedmann, Alessandra Corrado and University of Calabria colleagues, and an anonymous reviewer, for their helpful reflections on this debate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Darcy's review is forthcoming in Estudios Críticos del Desarrollo, along with my response.

²For the authoritative account of these peasant organizations, see Desmarais (2007).

³As exemplified in Dixon's study of Egypt, and North Africa (2014).

⁴Bové and Dufour (2001) first introduced the idea of ‘food from nowhere', prompting the counterpart in ‘food from somewhere’ (McMichael 2002). Not just a spatial issue, ‘food from somewhere’ invokes local common pool resources, managed by self-organizing land users with shared rules which ‘differ from the logic of capital – they reflect, instead the interests and perspectives of the involved producers, ecological cycles and/or principles such as social justice, solidarity, or the containment of (potential) conflicts’ (van der Ploeg, Jingzhong, and Schneider 2012, 164).

⁵Cf. an earlier reframing of the agrarian question (McMichael 1997).

⁶We are now seeing manipulation by industrial agriculture of ‘flex crops’ (Borras et al. 2012) for profit in the name of green transition. This extends to food companies struggling to capture (affluent) consumer dollars by producing healthier products for supermarket shelves – anticipating (in part) a ‘corporate-environmental regime’ (Friedmann 2005). A recent study suggests ‘There is a consumer shift at play that calls into question the reason packaged foods exist … much of their time is being spent in the perimeter of the store with its vast collection of fresh products. Sales of fresh products have grown nearly 30 percent since 2009 … The outlook for the center of the store is so glum that industry insiders have begun to refer to that space as the morgue’ (Taparia and Koch 2015, 4).

⁷This is perhaps a key issue in the debate, as a ‘third’ food regime is contemporary and less amenable to the stylized characterization of the first two food regimes (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). As such, it is necessary to understand the shifting political-economic landscape. I analyze various transformations unfolding through the rise and decline of the WTO, the rise of finance capital, agrofuels, land grabbing, the 2007–2008 food price inflation and food riots, South-South relations and multi-centrity, institutional reformulation of development agencies and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and maturation and elasticity of the food sovereignty movement. The following publications speak to these developments (McMichael 2005, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2010a, 2012a, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Patel and McMichael 2009). Rehearsing these publications is not for show but to underline ongoing analysis of food regime contradictions.

⁸Not all ‘peasants’ (mobilize to) defend their way of life, as, often, given various processes of ‘accumulation by encroachment’ (Patnaik 2008), it is indefensible or inadequate, requiring other income sources, including export crops such as cacao and palm oil, or carbon forestry (e.g., Li 2015; Rist, Feintrenie and Levang 2010; Osborne 2011).

⁹These are relational processes, becoming more concrete to the extent that a counter-narrative is constructed regarding these place-based developments (e.g., Lohmann 2003; Patel 2006; McMichael 2010b). See also De Schutter and Gliessman (2015).

¹⁰As noted elsewhere: ‘People and communities everywhere are devising social and ecological experiments towards the goal of greater autonomy, or self-reliance. It is not out of the realm of possibility that such self-organizing communities and regions might come to exert increasing pressure on governments to support such home-grown wealth as stabilizing citizenship in a resource/energy-challenged era, thereby transforming states from within, and shifting the language of valuation from price to socio-ecological interdependence. This is an organic process – certainly not easy, nor untrammeled, but nevertheless food sovereignty in practice’ (McMichael 2014c, 8). In this regard, Martha Jane Robbins thoughtfully problematizes food sovereignty's ‘localization’ narrative (2015; see also Akram-Lodhi 2015).

¹¹Critics may argue: What is ‘peasant interest’? The issue, rather, is how land (and water) is used – it is processual and relational, not definitional (cf. Hart et al. 2015).

¹²For the extended version of this critique, see McMichael (2012b).

¹³And these political-economic and political-ecological interventions are undergirded by struggles internal to the movements regarding gender imbalances and participatory learning in proliferating agro-ecological schools, as well as representational issues between constituencies and the newly established Civil Society Mechanism within the FAO's Committee on World Food Security (Trujillo 2015; Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012; McKeon 2015).

¹⁴In my own work with representatives of the movement in the Committee on World Food Security, the care with which they strive to maintain trust with (and faithfully represent) their respective constituencies is quite apparent, and distinguishes International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) process from the bureaucratic style typical of other social movements (cf. Trujillo 2015).

¹⁵This of course does not mean there is no positive movement within the food regime or on its ‘margins’ – this is also symptomatic: of shortcomings (also) identified by the food sovereignty movement (cf. Levidow 2015).

¹⁶Les Levidow develops this stylized tension usefully for the European case, noting that ‘contending narratives justify different trajectories for an agro-food transition’ (2015, 76).

¹⁷I commented at the time with respect to the Bank's report: ‘increasing assets of poor households, making smallholders more productive and expanding the rural nonfarm economy [is] logical enough if the goal is to expand the realm of monetary values and developing statistics’ (McMichael 2009c, 236).

¹⁸Contrarily, Ploeg documents substantial instances of ‘new peasantries’ emerging from debt relations by detaching their farming (ecological) wealth from upstream commercial inputs (2009).

¹⁹Thus, the corporate food regime ‘pivoted on the internalization of neoliberal market principles by states subject to privatization via mandated structural adjustment and free trade agreements – as an alternative to a stable, hegemonic international currency’ (McMichael 2013a, 15).

²⁰This includes some fair trade style food and dedicated supply chains (see Friedmann and McNair 2008).

²¹Thus, Karen Pederson, past president of the National Farmers Union of Canada, remarked: ‘Historically, we were peasants, then when that term came to mean “backward” we became “farmers”. In these days “farmer” has the connotation of inefficiency and we are strongly encouraged to be more modern, to see ourselves as entrepreneurs. I am reclaiming the term peasant because it stands for the kind of agriculture and rural communities we are striving to build’ (McKeon 2015b, 241–42).

²²This is analogous to Hannah Wittman's concept of ‘agrarian citizenship’ (2009).

²³Who are responsible for up to 70 percent of the world's food (ETC 2009), and thus a key to reducing food insecurity.

²⁴Landscape farming is practiced by a number of producer communities (Hart, McMichael, Milder and Scherr 2015).

²⁵In this sense, what Henry dismisses as website ‘agit-prop’ I regard, in the case of the member organizations of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, as the distillation of substantial experience, deliberation and debate emerging from constituent grassroots organizations, regarding the critique and documentation of ‘food regime’-associated initiatives and struggles. Some of it is ‘evidence’, and some of it is political intervention to reframe what is underway and to draw attention to what may be at stake. This is not something capital can do.

²⁶From 2000 to 2010, China lost over a million villages – nearly 300 per day. By 2030, 300 million more peasants are to be ‘urbanized’, making 1 billion city dwellers in what are called ‘ghost cities’ (Shepard 2015, 7, 24, 27).

²⁷This is the method of ‘incorporated comparison', which brings spatially, and temporally, separated processes into relation to understand the complexity of the food regime at large, as a succession of periodic cycles across modern time, or as a stable conjuncture expressing a dominant configuration of power (cf. McMichael 1990).

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Philip McMichael

Philip McMichael is a professor of development sociology, Cornell University. He is a member of the Civil Society Mechanism in the FAO's Committee on World Food Security (CFS). His current research is on land questions, food sovereignty and food regimes. He is author of the award-winning Settlers and the agrarian question (1984), Development and social change: a global perspective (2016) and Food regimes and agrarian questions (2013), and editor of Contesting development: critical struggles for social change (2010).