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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the global agrarian question as implicated in, and implicating, the current conjuncture of crises by historicizing them – where the past permeates a present, now challenged by a problematic future. I suggest a methodological approach connecting these morbid symptoms to inform a critical agrarian studies, especially insofar as the agrarian world is shaped by, and shapes, global capitalist and environmental relations.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Heloise Weber, Martin Weber, and Geoffrey Lawrence, and two helpful reviewer comments on an initial version of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Given the recurrence of ‘food crises,’ not to mention being a constant presence for particular regions and populations during the colonial era through to the present (cf. Patel and Moore Citation2017; Patel Citation2012).
2 Exemplified in classical economic theory, where the rural delivers ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ for economic development, given ‘disguised unemployment’ in agriculture. See Lewis (Citation1954), and Ranis and Fei (Citation1961).
3 See Beckert et al. (Citation2021).
4 See Chowdhury (Citation2022), and Menon (Citation2022).
5 Fishman (Citation2022). And, this may well continue, despite Lula’s presidential victory in October 2022: Duran (Citation2022).
6 For example, the chief executive of Obria, an anti-choice and anti-contraception organization in the US, amply funded by the Trump administration, claims Christianity is dying out because of contraception and abortion, with the effect of ‘replacing’ Europeans with immigrant Muslims (Kirchgaessner Citation2019). And, see Hedges (Citation2022).
7 Thus, ‘fascists achieve power by creating parallel institutions – schools, universities, media platforms and paramilitary forces – and seizing the organs of internal security and the judiciary. They deform the law, including electoral law, to serve their ends. They are rarely in the majority’ (Hedges Citation2022).
8 Cf., Patnaik (Citation2021).
9 Including right-wing rural populism, Borras (Citation2019), and TNI (Citation2020). For case studies, see Bello (Citation2019).
10 Serving to build alliances among repressive states.
11 See also Badham (Citation2022), and Bello (Citation2019).
12 ‘Stop the Steal is a metaphor’ for shared grievance of this Republican-inspired movement: ‘a belief that their status is under threat from Obama-like interlopers, by a liberal media, by those movements demanding visible equality in the culture. That they are losing control’ (Skocpol, quoted in Bardhan Citation2022).
13 Cf., Patel and McMichael (Citation2004).
14 See, e.g. Bello (Citation2019).
15 Cumming-Bruce and Ramzy (Citation2022), see also Friedman (Citation2022).
16 In 2023, 85% of the world’s population would experience stringent austerity according to Oxfam (Citation2022).
17 For PM Modi’s rejection of welfare entitlements in the sadistic name of ‘self-reliance,’ see Menon (Citation2022).
18 Similarly for Australia: Denniss (Citation2022).
19 Notably, Rodrik underscores this is not a return to Keynesianism policies of redistribution, social transfers, and macroeconomic management, rather a response to ‘economic populism.’ See also: Stiglitz (Citation2022).
20 G-20 challenges at the 2003 Cancun Ministerial – US Trade Representative warned: ‘As WTO members ponder their future, the US will not wait: we will move towards free trade with can-do countries’ (quoted in Bello Citation2020).
21 See also ETC Group (Citation2022): https://www.etcgroup.org/content/food-barons-2022
22 Relatedly, ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both digital and offshore realms fused to constitute an extraterritorial capitalist system of sorts, turning elites invisible whilst subjecting the rest of society to mass surveillance’ (Hendrikse Citation2021, 73). See also Zuboff (Citation2019).
23 Here, ‘the rollout of data-driven technologies increasingly requires the rollback of liberal protections by design, in order to make way for a political economy based on mass surveillance and AI’ (Hendrikse Citation2021, 84).
24 La Vía Campesina: https://viacampesina.org/en/a-g8-on-agriculture-without-farmers-more-hunger-and-poverty/
26 Especially previous food and financial crises, and conventional neoliberal responses, notably the ‘institutionalization of public-private partnerships (PPP’s). See Patel and McMichael (Citation2009).
27 Cf., the well-known phrasing from Marx (Citation1852): ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’
28 McMichael and Schneider (Citation2011).
29 See also Bello (Citation2022b).
30 Following the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, which, for the first time in a quarter of a century recognized smallholder farming (McMichael Citation2009).
31 Contrarily, a subsequent UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Report on Smallholders noted: ‘Smallholders are engaged in a variety of markets. They are present above all in local informal markets which are easier for them to access; this is particularly the case for women’ (Citation2015, 1).
32 https://viacampesina.org/en/civil-society-declaration-of-the-terra-preta-forum/ (emphasis added). This author assisted Shalmali Guttal in formulation of this declaration, overseen by Maryam Rahmanian.
33 IPES-Food (Citation2017), including profiteering by the ‘food barons’ (ETC Group Citation2022).
34 In 2020, the pandemic increased hunger by 8.4%, with 811 million undernourished, with another 40 million facing acute food insecurity (IPES-Food Citation2022, 4). This figure was 828 million in 2022: https://www.worldhunger.org/
35 Flora Sorkin of the Society for International Development. https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2022/07/world-bank-and-imfs-response-to-global-food-crisis-misses-mark-as-financial-speculation-drives-food-prices-to-historic-highs/?utm_source=emailmarketing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=new_bretton_woods_observer__summer_2022_out_now&utm_content=2022-08-16
36 China’s holdings of over half of the global grain stock also affects prices (Joles Citation2022).
37 See, for example, Davis (Citation2000), on British merchant and telegraph technology capturing wheat from village grain reserves, in India, and China, in addition to enclosing lands/forests, provoking famines.
38 Cf., Yaşin (Citation2022).
39 Cf., Araghi (Citation2003).
40 As a concrete example, in 1998 I keynoted a conference in Manizales, Colombia, on world-economic trends, organized by the National Coffee Growers Federation (FEDECAFE) – which was experiencing intensified competition in the global marketplace from new coffee growing countries, such as Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Honduras …
41 Deterritorialization may include ‘agro-security mercantilism’ (McMichael Citation2013c), led by Saudi Arabia and South Korea, and other Gulf and East Asian states, with state-led securing of food producing land offshore in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Makki Citation2013; Cochrane and Amery Citation2017; Townsend Citation2020; Henderson Citation2022).
42 Stead and Hinkson (Citation2022).
43 Carrington (Citation2018). An alternative crisis perspective is that the global food system ‘is not broken … It is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society’ (Holt-Giménez Citation2019, 89).
45 In its many guises (Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder Citation2019), even as it registers the offensive against national/sovereign agri-food policy, biodiversity, as well as the assault on domestic farming cultures.
46 Palumbo and Corrado (Citation2020).
47 CFS (Citation2022/2012). The Tenure Guidelines informed land struggles in India, Mali, Uganda, Argentina, and Italy (Nora Citation2013), though recent assessments suggest uneven implementations. See also a complementary update on feminist activism in La Vía Campesina and the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) in the CFS regarding new Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: MacInnis et al. (Citation2022), which CFS 50 (Citation2022/2012) failed to adopt: https://www.actionaidusa.org/cfs-50-was-completely-stalled-by-geopolitical-interests/
48 We Belong to the Land (May 26, 2022) – with over a hundred organizational signatories: https://www.inclusivedevelopment.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/EN_We-Belong-to-the-Land_Statement_10yearsTG.pdf
49 This term from Reich (Citation1991, 42). See (Halperin Citation2013) for a historical perspective on cross-national elite alliances.
50 George (Citation2012).
51 In the same year, the US Business Roundtable proposed ‘An Economy that Serves All Americans’ (2019): https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans But see: Lowenstein (Citation2022).
52 Patel and McMichael (Citation2009).
53 Klein (Citation2017).
54 The Gates Foundation is now rebranding the AGRA fiasco (Brzezinski Citation2022). For a critique from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, see: https://afsafrica.org/african-civil-society-and-faith-leaders-say-rebranding-the-green-revolution-is-no-solution-we-need-agroecology-for-food-and-climate-action/
58 Resort to multi-stakeholderism arguably parallels the use of vigilantism insofar as each involves selective conferment of responsibility for managing ‘disorder’ and/or an order in the making.
59 For a trenchant critique of such disarticulation of knowledge and power, see Montenegro de Wit and Iles (Citation2021).
60 FAO et al. (Citation2022). https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/09/21/pr22313-second-joint-statement-by-the-heads-of-fao-imf-wb-wfp-and-wto-on-the-global-food-security
62 This may well be the long-term consequence of the UNFSS ‘inflection point’: https://www.rural21.com/english/news/detail/article/a-critique-of-the-global-alliance-for-food-security.html and https://www.cidse.org/2022/10/18/food-security-at-stake-multilateralism-at-risk-when-politic-fails/
63 While the claim for big data is objectivity and efficiency, ‘company scientists design the dominant commercial agricultural AI to include data only on a small selection of major agronomic crops, those grown on large farms’ (Bronson Citation2022). The CSIPM critiqued the V0 draft of the CSIPM’s Data Working Group on the v0 Draft: Data collection and analysis tools for food security and nutrition (2022), pointing out that focusing on data only, net of the ‘infrastructures of data collection, distribution, processing an ownership, the report evades key issues about the political economy and physical impacts of data.’
64 The recent attempt to refashion Chile’s constitution (inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship), while an overreach at thie point for about 60% of the citizenry, nevertheless is a promising reminder of such possibility with its attention to social, ecological and reproductive rights.
65 This term comes from Bové and Dufour (Citation2002). The UN, WHO and the WTO all responded to the pandemic supply chain crisis by simply encouraging open borders. While offering short-run international access to some food, it bypassed the need for long-run re-imagining of (emissions-reducing) domestic food security conditions.
66 See, e.g. Bello (Citation2022b).
67 E.g. Wittman, James, and Mehrabi (Citation2020. And, new and distinctive forms are appearing, for example: Lakhani and Oyster (Citation2022). and Golden (Citation2022) and McNulty (Citation2022).
68 For Polanyi, labor, land, and money are not actually produced for sale … .as exchange values, even as the ‘economistic fallacy’ (assuming socially-disembedded markets), identifies them as commodities (Citation1957/1944). See also Varoufakis (Citation2022a).
69 See, for example Raworth (Citation2017), Mazzucato (Citation2021), Stiglitz (Citation2022), and DePillis (Citation2022).
70 For elaboration of the bankruptcy of ‘economism,’ see McMichael and Weber (Citation2022).
72 See also the rise of ‘smart agriculture’ associated with digitalization: https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/big-tech-and-the-smartification-of-agriculture-a-critical-perspective/
73 Represented in the Red Lobster salutation: ‘Endless Shrimp.’
74 The UN International Organization for Migration estimates ‘as many as 1.5 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years’ (Vince Citation2022, emphasis added). Meanwhile, movement of peoples is increasingly politicized – where northern states elaborate and export border controls to the Global South, which function ‘as a technology of spatial control that upholds regimes of racialized exploitation and dispossession’ (Friedman Citation2022).
75 This concept, rehabilitating agrarianism vs. a ‘planet of slums’ (Davis Citation2005), complements Ajl’s ‘planet of fields’ proposal: ‘It means drawing on the best of the past, not as a curio, retrograde ‘traditionalism, or out of nostalgia, but to find the way to a better future’ (Ajl Citation2021, 118). In this vein, see also Duncan (Citation2000).
76 See Barbosa and Coca (Citation2022) for a critical case study of food futures enactment at the national level (Brazil).
77 Emulated in the Belo Horizonte program of local food security, connecting urban institutions to adjacent farming systems (Chappell Citation2018).
78 See, e.g. Moore’s documentation of resistances to ‘water grabbing’ (Citation2023), which she calls ‘expropriation’ to underscore the reproductive dimensions of extractivism.
79 Including farmworker and consumer health from chemical agriculture: ‘pesticide use is up 81 percent in the past 35 years, with some regions of the world spiking considerably. South America, for instance, has seen an almost 500 percent jump in use during that period’ (Lappé Citation2022). Cf., Leguizamón (Citation2020).
80 See Borras et al. (Citation2021).
81 Whether nativist or unionist.
82 McMichael (Citation2020, 126).
83 As represented in the CFS’ Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM).
84 As addressed in November 2022 by the CSIPM: https://www.csm4cfs.org/you-do-politics-we-go-hungry/
85 In fact, at the 2017 World Economic Forum, China was referred to as ‘the present champion of economic globalization’ (cited in Zeng Citation2019, 578).
86 ‘Globalization Project’ conceptualizes ‘globalization’ as a (Western) instituted world-scale system of ‘market rule,’ following the economic nationalism of the ‘Development Project’ (McMichael Citation1996).
87 China has signed over 100 agricultural cooperation agreements with countries included in the Food Silk Road (Tortajada and Zhang Citation2021, 1).
88 As a buffer against future global food shortages that could rebound negatively on China’s offshore supplies (Bloomburg Citation2018, 53–4; Tortajada and Zhang Citation2021, 9).
89 China holds two-thirds of world grain stocks, and President Xi aims to balance domestic self-sufficiency with international food security. Such a balance has been rendered somewhat problematic following devastating climatic effects in China: Nierenberg (Citation2022) and Bossons (Citation2022).
90 Unlike the initial industrial source, coal, which, in requiring extraction by concentrations of miners, was more vulnerable to industrial strife (see Mitchell Citation2011).
91 And, here it is important to note that ‘If the US military were an independent state, it would be the 47th largest polluter in the world, slotted between Peru and Portugal’ (Ajl Citation2021, 155). Meanwhile the Pentagon has served as the largest landholder in the world.
92 See, e.g. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/1/jamaica-sending-team-to-canada-to-probe-work-conditions-on-farms
93 For example, between Whole Foods and WalMart foods (Friedmann Citation1982, 261).
94 AGRA modeled this relationship, with $1billion in public funding (Malkan Citation2021).
95 Note that even as domestic markets are routinely ignored in dominant narratives, ‘80% of the world’s food reaches those who consume it not through formal value chains and retail networks, but through territorially-rooted markets’ (McKeon Citation2018, 2). See also https://www.csm4cfs.org/connecting-smallholders-markets-analytical-guide/ and Da Vìa (Citation2012).
96 Cf., Navdanya International (Citation2020).
98 https://www.theguardian.com/climate-academy/2020/oct/12/indigenous-communities-protect-biodiversity-curb-climate-crisis. And, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/dining/native-american-agriculture.html
100 See, for example: https://www.foei.org/publication/double-jeopardy-report-nature-based-solutions/
101 Jayati Ghosh notes: ‘Some of the less rational aspects of global supply chains, especially in the multinational food industry (which has encouraged produce from one part of the world to be shipped to another part of the world for processing, before coming back to places near its origin to be consumed), will be questioned and could decline in significance’ (quoted in Bello Citation2020).
102 See McMichael (Citation2020, 143–46), and IPES-Food & ETC Group (Citation2021).
103 E.g. agrarian and civil society movements, perhaps echoing the recent civil rebellion against PM Modi’s attempt to recolonize the Indian farm sector for corporate takeover. Relatedly, the ongoing pervasive commodification of life prepares conditions for anti-capitalist political alliances founded in production and social reproduction domains (Harvey Citation2017; Moore Citation2023) – integrating demands, for example, from workplaces including farmwork and teaching, through renters and consumers, to healthcare providers to small/family farmers (cf, Selwyn Citation2016; Fraser Citation2013; Caouette and Kapoor Citation2015).
104 E.g. ‘climate-smart,’ ‘nature-based,’ ‘innovation,’ stakeholder.’
105 Between Colombia and Panama. https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-risk-death-journey-us
107 See Halperin (Citation2021) for a longue durée perspective on far right political histories.
108 Here, the ‘harnessing of fossil fuel power seemed, for a couple of centuries at least, to have freed large parts of humanity from the need to be in constant dialogue with nature … Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all’ (Klein Citation2014, 175).
109 Quijano (Citation2000). This theme shapes Patel and Moore’s (Citation2017) account of the historic cheapening of minority lives, nature, money, energy, work, food, and care, as integrated dimensions of capitalist modernity.
110 As Malm notes: ‘The significance of that terrible destiny, so often warned of in climate change discourse, is the final falling in of history on the present’ (Citation2016, 9).
111 As early as 1965, the president of the American Petroleum Institute reported to its members fossil fuel carbon emissions could cause ‘marked changes in climate’ by the year 2000. WTF.
112 Notably, COP 27 was perversely swamped by the fossil fuel lobby: Michaelson (Citation2022).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Philip McMichael
Philip McMichael is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. He has authored the award-winning Settlers and the Agrarian Question (Cambridge University Press, 1984), edited Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, 2010), authored Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (Fernwood, 2013), and Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Sage, 2022, 7th ed.). He works with the UN Committee on World Food Security’s Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism.