Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

Abstract

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.

Keywords:

• transitions
• agrarian
• food regimes
• food sovereignty
• commons
• incorporated comparison
• postcapitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹I am grateful to both Philip McMichael and Henry Bernstein for detailed and helpful comments on an earlier version. Each of them appreciated and objected to completely different elements, and helped me with the challenge of simultaneously widening the frame and focusing on the debate. Each of them has engaged with me in very difficult intellectual conversations in the spirit of deep friendship, which I trust will outlive this version. Mindi Schneider gave very useful comments, and Jun Borras simply and helpfully insisted that I address the debate. I have gained very much over several months of sometimes obsessive infliction of evolving ideas on friends, some of whom have little interest in the subject and some of whom are skilled in the emotional intelligence that intellectuals and activists, certainly including me, must cultivate, especially when we engage with ideas we hold dear. The goal is to treasure relationships while saying what needs to be said.

²Although Bernstein compares my approach favourably to McMichael's after 2005, he does not develop the argument about dialectic of creativity and appropriation I suggested in that year and think has become ever more important, as I note below.

³I discuss Bernstein's useful distinction between farming and agriculture below.

⁴Wilkinson and colleagues refer to the purchase of Brazilian firms Noble and Nidera, so the term ‘neocolonial’ may jar less than it would if applied to the purchase of the US meat giant Smithfield; however, the similarities and differences between how they are operated by COFCO are important to investigate.

⁵Then, mainly separate machinery, agrichemical and livestock feed industries ‘upstream’ and food manufacturing industries ‘downstream’.

⁶An important literature names this dynamic socio-technical transitions. It has not yet been applied to agriculture, as I discuss below.

⁷For example, Canada has developed a ‘food sovereignty policy', invoking its ‘principles of respect and inclusion of ordinary people, traditional knowledge, and the natural world … [E]ven where the term “food sovereignty” is not used, the essential notion that people can assert control over the decision-making that guides their food systems is now widespread across Canada’. (FoodSecure Canada 2015)

⁸These increasingly seem to accompany recognition that the urban-rural divide is increasingly anachronistic and the institutions built up over centuries around it are a crucial part of ‘locked-in’ institutions (Steel 2008). See transitions discussion below.

⁹It is possible that Bernstein holds to a classical Marxist imagination of postcapitalist possibilities: socialism or barbarism. Despair about the impossibility of proletarian revolution implies that a capitalist future is better than barbarism. It is easy to read present politics through this lens.

¹⁰The trope of 9 billion population by 2050 needs the same kind of deconstruction as Tomlinson's (2011) of the trope of ‘food production’. All such projections are the arbitrary result of various bureaucratic reports using different estimates, assumptions and models. Like Tomlinson's investigation into the history of projections of food production, questions need to be asked about the history of the stabilization of population projections. I am confident that deconstruction of the ‘9 billion' trope would conclude by returning to widely accepted insights among demographers comparable to Tomlinson's (2011, 5) return to the widely shared understanding among food system analysts that ‘the dominant framing sees food security as a problem of inadequate agricultural production (availability), sidelining the other two pillars of access and utilisation and the perspective that sees food security as a distributional issue and of ensuring regular, appropriate, affordable access to food’. For instance, Mamdani (1972) identified causes of decline in fertility to include empowerment of women, something widely accepted in development institutions and discourses. Another insight was that provision of old age security also led to fertility decline, as parents no longer had to depend on multiple offspring for care. Sadly, it is harder to imagine its growth now than it was in 1972. Of course, women's self-organization is now threatened on multiple fronts, including social dislocations of rampant capital in agriculture. My point is that such numbers are not innocent, reliable or stable, and statistical projections of this kind hide politics in need of exposition, and invite politics that would shift population dynamics. My thanks to Henry Bernstein for forcing me to re-read Tomlinson.

¹¹The shift could also be due to perceptions shaped by changing food regimes; the ‘land grabs' of the 1990s named what seemed to be a new phenomenon, but were actually a cyclical return to land investment by a renewed prominence of finance capital, after an interlude of (often) leaving farmland to farmers during the food regime of 1947–1973. Araghi (1995), always offering a different chronology (and always suggestive), described this as a ‘global enclosure’ of the remaining peasants of the world, evoking a longer cycle lasting centuries rather than decades.

¹²There, enclosure of customary lands, leading to enrichment for a few and desperate situations for many, was voluntary as well as enforced. For Li, the main solution, however unlikely, would be some sort of mobilization by dispossessed highlanders to demand cash payments and services from the Indonesian government; she sees little hope for protection or support from social movements, or for recovery or reconstitution of common institutions for land and livelihood.

¹³Is ‘the state', after all, in the words of the Communist manifesto, ‘a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’? Even panicked mainstream pundits invoked Marx in the wake of financial chaos in 2008 (Mason 2015).

¹⁴There are exceptions, such as the celebration of ‘family farming’ in the United States and overseas development as part of Cold War rhetoric which shaped farm policies in the NATO bloc in rivalry with collectivization in the Soviet bloc.

¹⁵Otherwise, geography and history, power and material relations, are brought in as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not as Hamlet – that is, as minor characters, to whom the world seems random, not as the main character, whose actions determine the plot. I apologize for this self-indulgent, Eurocentric literary reference.

¹⁶As readers of this journal are familiar with arguments about the ecological limits of industrial agriculture and for the (re)emergence of farming, I will not repeat them here. New readers may turn to the writings of Weis (2007, 2013) and Van der Ploeg (2008, 2013). I have omitted a long section considering measurement, especially efficiency and monetary phenomena, as misleading sometimes to the point of illusion. I suggest Cronon's (1991) concept of ‘second nature’ as a starting point. I see it as a material counterpart to Marx's concept of ‘commodity fetishism'; although he doesn't criticize measurement in that work, it is background to understanding the confusion we all experience in face of production, trade, population and yield statistics. Ecological economics, among other disciplines, is taking it up. Cronon shows the origins of the complicated material and monetary systems that proliferate as capital disrupts natural and social relations, and as each disruption creates new profit opportunities.

¹⁷This applies to agriculture the theoretical argument by Sandler (1994).

¹⁸Geneticist Wes Jackson experiments in natural systems agriculture, which focuses on a visionary project to create perennial prairies capable of yielding edible grains and pulses with minimal or no soil disturbance. He is founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which hosts collaborations among scientists and farmers to solve the problems of creating large quantities of food in ways that begin with respect for soil, seeds, and other natural aspects of farming (Jackson 1994; McDaniel 2005). https://landinstitute.org Accessed December 22, 2015

¹⁹USC-Canada, an inspiring organization working to support seed diversity in situ – that is, by farmers and gardeners – in many parts of the world, and the Toronto Seed Library, an offshoot of Occupy Gardens, itself part of Occupy Toronto; seed libraries exist with various degrees of connection to public libraries across North America; it is hoped we will succeed with Toronto Public Libraries, and have a dedicated seed librarian.

²⁰Such as racist ‘blood and soil’ ideologies. In the early 1990s, I was once accused by a respected colleague of sounding like a fascist in response to a talk I gave arguing for a return to natural and social cycles. It encouraged me to look into the dangerous histories of nativist ideas during the 1920s and 1930s especially, but also to notice survivalist and racist versions of autonomy and self-sufficiency.

²¹For instance, soy-based meat substitutes are apparently getting better, supported by vegetarian businesses and public institutions; the latest may also allow for production with a machine small enough for and at temperatures achievable in a butcher shop. The prototype was created partly by a public research facility using crowd funding. Like so many innovations, it is important to locate this in the history that can be stylized as maize subsidies led to maize monocultures led to intensive livestock led to soy monocultures lead to vegetarian substitutes from a local shop (see Krintiras 2016).

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Harriet Friedmann

Harriet Friedmann is a professor emeritus of sociology and fellow of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, and a visiting professor at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Her publications in several social science disciplines span several aspects of food and agriculture, notably through the food regimes approach which she developed with Philip McMichael, and more recently on food system transformation and emergent governance across scales, from urban regional foodsheds to the biosphere and ethnosphere. Her current project is Global Political Ecology of Food. Friedmann was chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council within Toronto Public Health in the 1990s, and is now in her third term as councilor. She serves on several editorial boards of food, agriculture and global change journals and the boards of USC-Canada, which supports small farmers in its Seeds of Survival projects across the world, and of the Toronto Seed Library, the International Urban Food Network. She served as chair of the Political Economy of the World-System Research Section of the American Sociological Association, and participated in the IAASTD Global Report. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement award from the Canadian Association of Food Studies. www.harrietfriedmann.ca