Does China's ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new food regime?

ABSTRACT

China's new Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is commanding attention, in this moment of international disorder, as a global strategy reflecting its growing political-economic power. This essay offers a ‘food regime’ lens on these developments. There are two, related, dimensions: the first concerns how China is addressing future food security requirements, via domestic and international food provisioning; and the second situates China's recent ‘going out’ policy with respect to global food regime transitioning.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• BRI
• food regime
• food security

Acknowledgments

The author is very grateful for helpful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, in addition to those of Mindi Schneider, Xu Huijiao, and Kiah Smith.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As documented in Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodivesity and Ecosystem Services (2019).

2 Serious yield declines in industrial food production stem from annual losses in soil erosion from overuse of inorganic fertilizer at a rate likely to destroy two-thirds of the world's productive land by 2050, collapse of the global nutrient cycle with phosphorus peaking in 2030, rising competition for available freshwater for agriculture, already using 70% of known supplies, predicted collapse of the ocean fish catch by 2040, and serious diminishing of world phosphate reserves, essential to crop and pasture growth and with no substitute (Cribb 2010, 10–11, 54, 76). And it is predicted that yields will further decline between 5% and 50% over the next century, ‘depending on the time frame, crop, location, and extent to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today's prodigious rates. World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by 2050’ (Patel and Moore 2017, 160), underscoring the likelihood of a fundamental rethinking and change of course in how the world farms – already underway.

3 Central to this was China's evident ‘workshop of the world’ function, constituted as it was in the later twentieth century by transnational investments and supply chains in China's special economic zones and specialty factories catering to global consumer (and increasingly producer) markets – in the absence of US competition (Arrighi 2007, 353–61).

4 While their individual equity holdings are not substantial, their access to information via algorithms on their Big Data platforms provides strategic knowledge of market and merger conditions.

5 The challenge is distinctive to this moment, even as it resembles Britain's late-nineteenth century formation of the initial food regime: ‘gigantic sums of British capital, in the form of loans, flowed out of London and toward the rest of the world, especially to build railroads – which in turn were central to the next century's extraordinary cheapening of food and raw materials’ (Patel and Moore 2017, 69).

6 Respectively, McMichael (1996), Lewis (1954), and Patel (2013).

7 This is a dynamic process, for which the ‘food regime’ concept offers a specific lens – initially problematizing the ‘world system’ framework. The succession of food regimes offers methodological resolution to this abstract governing frame via ‘incorporated comparison’ (McMichael 2015). Here, successive (and inter-related) food regimes contribute to formation and re-formation of the state-system, as an expression of the political history of capitalist relations. And these ongoing temporal/spatial relations in turn find expression within individual food regime dynamics.

8 These three sets of relations (residual, dominant, and emergent) need historicization – notably along the lines of Marx's method of political economy (1973). This method insists, for example, that while landed property was dominant prior to the age of capital, it must now be analysed through a capital lens, with quite different meaning and consequence. So, for example, US/European mercantilist practices, held over from the US-centered food regime in the process and practices of the successor corporate food regime, were thereby reformulated.

9 Such ‘complusions’ are not givens, rather they are introduced/recommended by planners or development agencies, and in fact may strengthen a state's role in prosecuting ‘market rule.’ For example, in detailing introduction of neoliberal-informed policies to develop the private sector in Egyptian agriculture (under the aegis of USAID) Mitchell notes: ‘The actual effect of these programs, however, was to strengthen the power of the state. This was not simply some fault in the design or execution of the programs. USAID itself is a state agency, a part of the “public sector,” and therefore worked in liaison with the public sector in Egypt. By its very presence within the Egyptian public sector it strengthened the wealth and patronage resources of the state’ (2002, 22), enhanced by increasing commercialization of the agricultural sector.

10 Except perhaps in China and now the US … 

11 Note here that the origins of free trade fetishism so evident in the UN/CFS deliberations and the construction of the WTO are embedded in the New World states (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as Argentina) central to food regime agro-exporting.

12 While this has been an ongoing struggle in recent decades, expressed in a politics of ‘food sovereignty,’ it is rising now, both as struggle against powerful corporate and financial forces, as well as very recent significant policy recommendations in the UN's Committee on World Food Security (CFS 46), driven by incipient recognition of biodiversity loss, species extinction, and climate emergency, opening up explicit recognition of agroecology's potential in stabilizing and restoring ecological and social landscapes.

13 ‘Open’ to ‘dispossessions by accumulation’ as indigenous inhabitants and their sophisticated ecologies of social reproduction were overridden and erased by settler agriculture (e.g. Grey and Patel 2015; Mayes 2018; Pascoe 2014).

14 In the early twentieth century Karl Kautsky predicted such a development (1988, 252). Note that, consistent with food regime frontiering, indigenous inhabitants continue to be dispossessed of their access to common lands in these developments, for example: Cerrado dwellers ‘forced to emigrate to urban Campos Lindos’ (Gross 2018).

15 For example: ‘Since 2008, leading farm management companies such as Cresud/Brasilagro, Adecoagro, SLC Agrícola, El Tejar, TIAA-CREF, Multigrain/Xingu Agro, and V-Agro acquired collectively over 750,000 ha in Brazil, drawing venture capital from multiple financial partners in Brazil, EU, and especially US and Japan’ (Oliveira 2018, 118).

16 This is expressed, through a developmentalist lens, as ‘new, hybrid relationships between states and businesses, where state funding supports and guides and businesses implement … [revealing] the emerging ways that expertise, technology, and finance are deployed in agricultural development through “development cooperation”’ (Scoones et al. 2016, 2).

17 Cf Ruggie (1993).

18 This includes mergers and acquisitions conducted by Chinese global agribusiness, challenging northern agro-industry monopoly (Oliveira 2018).

19 Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People's Republic of China (2015).

20 Rockström et al. (2017, 10).

21 Whether this is a model for export, remains in question – as Benabdallah (2019, 8) claims: ‘China's foreign policy does not exhibit a particular interest in promoting its governance model as a condition for financial loans (in the same way that democratization became a staple condition of IMF and World Bank loans).’

22 There is an extensive literature regarding the specificity of this relationship, in particular the exaggerated claims of Chinese land grabbing in Africa, coupled with movement of Chinese farmers to work this land for food exports back to China. These claims have been substantially critiqued by Bräutigam and Ekman (2012), and Bräutigam (2015). A more recent investigation by Bräutigam found that ‘the amount of land actually acquired by Chinese firms was only about 240,000 hectares’ (2018, 3).

23 The ‘globalization project’ conceptualizes ‘globalization’ as a geo-political-economically instituted discipline within the international order, represented as ‘Washington Consensus’ and geared to market governance (McMichael 1996). As suggested here, it is currently unraveling, even as China has participated in its market-centered framework.

24 See also Scoones et al. (2016, 4). It remains to be seen whether the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) initiated by the EU and the G-8 powers in 2013, together with the African Union, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), several African governments, and over 100 private corporations via Cooperation Framework Agreements requiring participating governments to make land available for high-input agriculture will materialize as a significant agro-export base (see McKeon 2014). France has already pulled out.

25 Stemming from the imposition of severe austerity measures on societies, north and south. Fouskas and Gökay note that ‘this new authoritariansm stems from the declining power center of the USA and spreads, especially through international organizations and bilateral agreements, across the globe; and, as far as the EU is concerned, the monetary-managerial centre of Germany’ (2018, 16). It is, in Gramscian terms, a ‘morbid symptom’ reflecting and managing populism from below.

26 Camus (2018).

27 In detailing Brazil and China's engagements in African agriculture, Scoones et al. identify a ‘new geo-politics’ involving south-south developmentalism, where ‘a more flexible, long-term, experiential form of development cooperation may yet emerge from the Chinese and Brazilian experience’ (2016, 8–9).

28 Cf, ‘while Chinese engagements with Africa can be framed in terms of “new imperialism” or part of a benign process of “mutual learning,” in practice a more nuanced perspective is needed. African states have agency in the process of negotiation, and the Chinese always adopt an incremental and adaptive approach to policy in Africa as in China. There is no single top-down plan to be forced on unwilling recipients’ (Scoones 2019).

29 Thus Ferguson writes: ‘It is worth asking whether Africa's combination of privately secured mineral-extraction enclaves and weakly governed humanitarian hinterlands might constitute not a lamentably immature form of globalization, but a quite “advanced” and sophisticated mutation of it’ (2006, 12). Cf John LeCarre, The Mission Song (2006). Lee cautions that these kinds of relations are not monolithic, the Chinese impact depending on local political conditions and the learning curve of Chinese firms (2009, 652).

30 Thus: ‘the Chinese Government has promoted pro-free trade and foreign investment policies globally through international cooperation agreements on issues ranging from tax, investment and commercial dispute resolution, intellectual property and on sectors such as the “Digital Silk Road,” agricultural cooperation and maritime cooperation’ (Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest 2019, 5).

31 Especially given how relatively dominant the US dollar remains (Goodman 2019; Hung 2016). In 2015 the IMF awarded the yuan reserve currency status, adding it to its Special Drawing Rights basket, alongside the Euro, the yen the pound and the dollar. Amadeo claims Chinese leaders wanted to improve China's standard of living to avoid revolution. Fixing the yuan exchange rate with the dollar not only expanded low-cost exports to the US, but also increased its use to become the third most-used currency (2019).

32 Cf, ‘Contrary to much of the commentary on the BRI, the Chinese Government is not seeking to overthrow the international system nor is it attempting to undermine international organisations. On the contrary the Chinese Government is attempting to use these organisations to increase legitimacy for the BRI’ (Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest 2019, 7).

33 Cf Corporate E (2019).

34 Such as food riots (Patel and McMichael 2009), and the IPC for Food Sovereignty challenge to FAO to resume its central role in governing world food security and nutrition (McKeon 2011).

35 According to Jones and Zeng (2019, 11), by 2015, the BRI essentially became three land routes (to Europe, and the Middle East, through Central Asia, to India via SE Asia), two maritime routes (to Europe via the Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific via the South China Sea), and six corridors (the new Eurasian Land Bridge, China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Indochina, China-Central Asia-West Asia, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar).

36 A prominent instance is China's recent large-scale investments in Australian farmland (Hemphill 2017), to the tune of about 15 million hectares. ‘The importance of dairy, beef, and sheep – all commodities with growing demand in China – and trade agreements further enhance the attractiveness of this region. China has sought out both low- and high-value commodities in the form of barley, sorghum, wheat, milk powder, cheese, live cattle, beef, and infant formula’ (Gooch and Gale 2018, 32). Meanwhile, as pork consumption rates subside somewhat, beef and chicken consumption rates rise in comparison. And growing consumer recognition of the link between healthy diets and environmentalism spawns a rising consumption of fruits and vegetables – for example, according to UN figures, between 2010 and 2016 avocado imports grew from 1.9 tonnes to 25,000 tonnes (a 13,000-fold increase), largely supplied by Mexico and Chile (Zhang 2018).

37 This refers to land acquisition by default, where contract farming becomes a ‘debt trap’ for small farmers (McMichael 2013c).

38 According to the Land Matrix data, Chinese and Korean land acquisitions for food production account for 42 projects mainly in South-Eastern Asia and East Africa, and ar led by public or state-owned companies’ (Anseeuw et al. 2012, 30). Note also that the Land Matrix emphasizes what tends to be characteristic about ‘land-grabbing,’ namely that it is often unrealized productively. Thus in 2012, only 35 of China's approximately 85 land deals were reliable (Anseeuw et al. 2012, 21).

39 In the name of ‘development cooperation’ for example (Scoones et al. 2016).

40 Thus President Lukashenko of Belarus looks ‘increasingly to China for money and inspiration: Europe has lost much of its sheen as an economic model, but China offers an example of how authoritarian politics can mix with robust economic growth’ (Higgins 2019).

41 Here the commercial benefits of such infrastructural support services are not viewed as ‘unwanted costs that should be borne by the government’ and do not require ‘asset stripping of government services’ – associated with neoliberal ‘conditionalities’ (Amanor 2013, 88). Nevertheless the BRI is subject to US (and other) claims of ‘debt trap diplomacy’ (Bräutigam 2019; cf Wijayasiri and Senaratne 2018) – and indeed in a celebrated case, PM Mohammad Mahathir recently renegotiated a price-inflated Rail Link in Malaysia with a Chinese corporation (Sharma 2018). Bräutigam disputes ‘debt trap’ claims, arguing that ‘B.R.I isn't debt-trap diplomacy: It's just globalization with Chinese characteristics’ (2019).

42 In the same vein (an apparently realistic South-South perspective under controversial circumstances), the Nigerian ambassador to China claimed: ‘China is 10 times the size of Nigeria's population but they have developed a system that can take care of their people. These are examples we want to adapt,’ (quoted in Feng and Pilling 2019).

43 Cf: ‘For some countries that take on large amounts of debt to fund the necessary infrastructure, BRI money is seen as a potential poisoned chalice. BRI projects are built with low-interest loans as opposed to aid grants … Some BRI investments have required the use of Chinese firms and their bidding processes have lacked transparency,’ with contractors sometimes inflating costs, ‘leading to canceled projects and political pushback.’ Meanwhile some argue there is a silver lining for the US in the BRI, ‘as a way to have China pay for infrastructure initiatives in Central Asia that are also in the U.S. interest’ (Chatzky and McBride 2019).

44 Cf, Karatasli and Kumral (2017), who argue China is presently unlikely to challenge the global status quo (such as it is).

45 Cf Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest (2019, 10).

46 See also Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest (2019, 4). It is interesting to compare with the US food-aid program (1954-), which involved recycling surplus foodstuffs (arising from the mid-century agricultural Commodity Stabilization Agreements, in response to the agricultural and dust-bowl crisis of the inter-war years) to strategic states on the Cold War perimeter, to provide cheapened wage-foods, promoting industrial sectors in these front-line states, enlarging the ‘free world’ (Friedmann 1982), as a hegemonic project.

47 In relation to this, Harvey claimed: ‘The relative spaces of the global economy are being revolutionised (yet again!) not because it is a good idea or desperately wanted and needed in itself, but because this is the best way to stave off depression and devaluation’ (2018, 191).

48 Pritchard might say: ‘you’ll know it when you’ve seen it’ – given his notion that food regime analysis is a ‘tool of hindsight’ (2009, 8).

49 For a historical perspective see Mishra (2017).

50 See, in particular, Bello, who observes: ‘The BRI is at heart a twentieth century top-down technocratic project being transposed into the twenty-first century, along with the attendant flaws’ accompanying ‘massive construction projects’ involving large-scale extractivism and ecological damage (2019). See also GRAIN (2019b).

51 Alternative to the ‘multi-polar’ patterning. For example, China's state-owned enterprise, Beidahuang Land Cultivation Group, ‘has secured a deal with the governor of Rio Negro in Argentina to lease some 570,000 acres. It also tied up a long-term agreement with Argentine land giant Credus, which controls more than 2 million acres of farms’ (Pearce 2012, 202).

52 Rather, ‘feed security,’ as well as ingredients for industrial processing – note that over the last quarter century the global production of maize has increased by over 100% an that of soybeans by over 200% while global rice production increased by 35%, and wheat production by 25%, even as ‘wheat dependence in poor countries has increased over the past 40 years’ (González-Esteban 2018, 19; cf Hawkes 2018).

53 As distinct from ‘extensive,’ and ‘intensive,’ accumulation regimes characterizing the first two food regimes (Friedmann and McMichael 1989).

54 Shiva (2019).

55 Cf the privileging of market instrumentality in the NAFSN as a G-8 ‘public-private partnership,’ in requiring states to implement private (intellectual) property policies, including land enclosure for high-tech agriculture.

56 As coined by La Via Campesina (1999, 3).

57 ETC Group (2018b), and ETC Group and Heinrich Boll Foundation (2018).

58 Certainly subject to appropriation by redefinition – quite evident in the CFS 46 Plenary reception of the HLPE Agroecology Report (2019), as delegates from the agro-exporting settler states (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina) and the private sector challenged the showcasing of Agroecology, arguing either that it was ‘just one tool in the toolbox’ alongside precision agriculture, Sustainable Intensification and/or Climate Smart Agriculture, or that these other methods included some agroecology. While there may be some (potential) overlap, agroecology is not simply a technique, but also a knowledge, a farming culture, and involves a key human rights dimension insofar as small-scale low-input farming systems (lacking public support) continue to account for around two-thirds of the world's food supply. These dimensions were acknowledged by CFS 46 delegates from many other states in an encouraging moment in which the discourse was centered on the need for a fundamental change of direction away from what is usually termed, misleadingly, ‘conventional agriculture.’

59 Khadse and Rosset (2019).

60 Ploeg characterizes this as a movement towards ‘re-peasantization’ – essentially withdrawing from commercial inputs and rebuilding ecological wealth on the farm (2018).

61 Note here Arrighi's reference to the formation of the G-20 in 1999, noting ‘a lack of awareness – in the South no less than in the North – of the extent to which the monetarist counterrevolution of the early 1980s has backfired, creating conditions more favorable than ever before for a new Bandung to bring into existence the “commonwealth of civilizations” that [Adam] Smith envisioned long ago’ (2007, 384, emphasis added).

62 Echoes here of Arrighi's observation that Chinese political culture embodies a Confucian (‘social harmony’) vision of an ‘industrious revolution’ rather than the labor-saving ‘industrial revolution’ of Western origins, including supporting a ‘natural’ rather than rapacious path of development (2007).

63 Resembling the current Polanyian anti-commodification alliances underlined by Harvey (2018), reflecting the contemporary condition of financialized capitalism.

64 This lens complements Day and Schneider's claim that a pro-peasant/cooperative politics has lost salience over the last decade, given the precarity of the ‘peasantry’ in the PRC, suggesting that the potential political force today, most subject to relations of inequality, is ‘an increasingly less demarcated surplus population that shifts between spheres for subsistence in both countryside and city’ (2018, 1240; cf Yan and Chen 2015) – and this population is, in Escher et al.'s terms, subject to ‘in-place urbanization and commercialization’ as a government strategy recognizing the limits of continuing large-scale peasant migration to large cities (2018, 104). See, for example, Shepard (2015).

65 Recognition is one thing, the footprint of a ‘corporate-environmental’ food regime: Unilever, Pepsi, General Mills and ConAgra have invested in niche market start-ups claiming green nutritional standards. But given market volatility via current tcchnological, digital and financial relations, the recent IPES report, Too Big to Feed, observes, for example that with the dominance of specific firms, with the ability to gain representation in industry associations and ‘exert downward pressure on standards,’ ‘the process of continual buyouts may in itself undermine firms’ ability to meet their stated commitments to sustainability … and consider more fundamental shifts in their business models.’ When Coca-Cola's acquisition of a 10% share in Keurig Green Mountain was followed by the coffee roaster's acquisition in 2015 by private equity firm JAB Holding Co., the company has ‘progressively reduced its spending on social responsibility programs’ (Mooney 2017, 59–61).

66 In relation to this, Tooze remarks that with the trumping of the US Republican Party, ‘it is an open question whether the American political system will support even basic institutions of globalization, let alone any adventurous crisis fighting at a national or global level’ (2018, 610).

67 In both senses of the term.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924243).

Notes on contributors

Philip McMichael

Philip McMichael is professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. He is author of Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (Fernwood, 2013), Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Sage, 2016, 6th edition), and the award-winning Settlers and the Agrarian Question (Cambridge, 1984); and has edited Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, 2010), and Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change, with Jun Borras and Ian Scoones (Routledge, 2011). He works with the Civil Society Mechanism in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and has consulted with UNRISD, the FAO, La Vía Campesina and the IPC for Food Sovereignty, and IPES-Food.