Agrarian reform and South Africa's agro-food system

The dominant corporate structure of South Africa's agro-food system has led many to suggest there is limited value in redistributing land as a scarce economic resource, or in providing support to black small-scale farmers when large agribusinesses are capable of meeting food needs. Agrarian reform (land reform plus black small-scale farmer support) is not a necessary component of the existing economic system in South Africa. Yet it has tremendous political importance, especially in the context of a stagnant or declining job market. After considering the development of the corporate agro-food system in South Africa, and its impact on agrarian reform, this paper concludes that agrarian reform as a political project and a vision retains the potential to contribute not only to a more just society, but also to progressive economic transformation.     

Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains

This article draws upon existing literature to document and describe the rise of finance in food provisioning. It queries the role of financialization in the contemporary food crisis and analyzes its impacts upon the distribution of power and wealth within and along the generalized agro-food supply chain. A systematic treatment of key nodes in the supply chain reveals four key insights: (1) the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises becoming increasingly involved in financial activities; (2) financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-food system, though they are largely subject to the dictates of finance capital and face renewed competition from financialized commodity traders; (3) financialization has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions, and (4) small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets, they have become weaker vis-à-vis other actors in the agro-food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. The paper concludes by identifying themes for future research and asking readers to reimagine the role of finance in food provisioning.     

Disappearing nature? Agribusiness,biotechnology and distance in Argentine soybean production

A recent trend identified in the agro-food literature is that financialization in the global food system is further increasing the distance between farm and plate as well as abstracting physical commodities into market derivatives. How does food, a basic material need, become a commodity, a financial asset divorced from its physical form? This contribution explores the growing distance and abstraction of food from farm using Argentina's soy model as a case study. I explore the various drivers of distancing across the soy value chain in Argentina, including industrialization, globalization, corporatization and finance. I argue that the push for technological innovation by large-scale agribusinesses, in articulation with financial sector involvement, are both an example of and are instrumental in the process of distancing and abstraction identified in the agro-food literature. This paper also highlights how, despite agribusiness efforts to ‘displace’ and ‘disappear’ nature, these processes are never fully accomplished. I thus reflect on the socio-ecological contradictions that arise from the processes of distancing and abstraction which accompany the financialization of the corporate food system under neoliberal globalization.     

Power to make land dispossession acceptable: a policy discourse analysis of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), Papua,Indonesia

The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) in Papua, Indonesia, is a state-led mega-project to transform local agriculture through large-scale corporate investment in food crops and biofuels for foreign markets. The project has led to extensive land dispossession, accompanied by devastating social and ecological impacts. This contribution analyzes how discourse regarding food and energy crises has been employed to release land from customary tenure to a coalition of state, corporate and local elite actors. The interests of these actors have converged on the state-led mega-project to transform local agriculture through large-scale corporate investment in food crops and biofuels in the name of national food security.     

Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions,continuity and change

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of critical agri-food literature has, to date, focused on the uneven relations of power between the Global North and the Global South, and the neoliberal characteristics of the corporate food regime. This literature has often overlooked the nuances in varieties of capitalism, particularly in East Asia. China is re-emerging as a powerful state actor in an increasingly multipolar global food system. It is also an important hub of capital, facilitating agribusiness mergers and acquisitions, as well as new East–South and South–South flows of agri-food trade, technology and capital. This paper aims to contribute to understanding state-led capitalism in China and neomercantilist strategies in the agri-food sector. The paper provides a critical analysis of a case study of China's state owned agri-food and chemical companies ‘going global’. It contends that the current food regime is in a period of transition or interregnum – a period of fluidity separating the continuity of successive regimes. Arguably, the analytical contours of a contemporary food regime in transition cannot be adequately comprehended without recognising the incipient importance of state-led capitalism and neomercantilism, and how contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics are reshaping relations of power in the global political economy of food.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth century England: A comment

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.     

Female Faith and the Politics of the Personal: Five Mission Encounters in Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article explores female religious interaction in racially divided ‘colonial’ South Africa through the lives of five unmarried Anglican women missionaries who worked in and around Johannesburg between 1907 and 1960. It particularly analyses the quality of their personal relationships with African women converts, colleagues and students.Deaconess Julia Gilpin, in the imperial, anglicizing post-Boer War years, encouraged devout, respectable wifehood on the mine compounds, contributing to the corporate solidarity of praying mothers as a deeply entrenched feature of most black churches. Dora Earthy interacted in a warmer, more egalitarian way with black churchwomen. Her transfer to Mozambique led not only to evangelistic building on African cultural traditions and pioneering anthropological research but also to the protection and validation of Christian widows' autonomy against coerced remarriage.Frances Chilton and Dorothy Maud, despite sharply contrasting class origins, struggled to connect with more assertive networks of married women in the segregationist 1920s and 1930s, devoting their energies rather to guiding and enhancing African girlhood and youth. Hannah Stanton, in the more politically fraught 1950s, recognized the necessary independence of African actors and the limitations of outdated white liberal advocacy. Her training of African women promised new theological and organizational maturity, a potential collegiality, cut short by her detention in the 1960 State of Emergency and subsequent expulsion.The historical sweep of this survey suggests which personal and political conjunctures opened up or closed down meaningful interaction between colonized and colonizing women. It also offers a more positive evaluation of the intersection of race and religion as not invariably a ‘fatal combination’. The politics of the personal in women's joint educational, mission and social welfare ventures across the racial divide helped keep alive the idea of a single society and thus aided the surprisingly peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa in 1994.     

The EROI of agriculture and its use by the Via Campesina

Via Campesina supports peasant and small farmer agriculture both in the South and in the North. Its basic doctrine is that of ‘food sovereignty’. It is a movement that defends an ‘ecological neo-Narodnism’. Among the analytical tools used by this international peasant movement is the comparison between the energy efficiency of traditional small farm agriculture and modern industrial agriculture. This article briefly recalls the history of agricultural energetics, and then looks at the use of the concept of EROI (energy return on energy input) by Via Campesina when it claims that ‘industrial agriculture is no longer a producer of energy but a consumer of energy’, and that ‘peasant agriculture cools down the Earth’. The absence in Marxism of a tradition of analysis of energy flows is also reviewed here, since it is of interest in order to bring together the classic economic concept of decreasing returns with the more recent notion of a declining EROI. The article also draws on work analysing how environmental activists use concepts from ecological economics, while at the same time ‘activist knowledge’ contributes to ecological economics in a two-way communication between activism and science.     

Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's 'double-movement' thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as 'Neoliberal', 'Reformist', 'Progressive', and 'Radical', respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.     

工会经费和财产的法律保护

工会的财产和经费是工会作为社会团体法人的条件和工会活动的物质基础。修改后的《工会法》在工会经费和财产的来源、归属、收缴、管理、使用及保护等方面增加了许多新的规定 ,加大了对工会的经费和财产法律保护的力度 ,使工会经费、财产有了切实的法律保障     

Food security,food sovereignty,and local challenges for transnational agrarian movements: the Honduras case

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.     

Wild property and its boundaries – on wildlife policy and rural consequences in South Africa

Against the backdrop of post-Apartheid neoliberal reform, South African landowners have gained the option to acquire full ownership over wild animals on their land. Corresponding with this, approximately one sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production (i.e. hunting, ecotourism, live trade and venison production). This article analyzes the institutional process in which authority concerning access to wildlife is being restructured, and argues that the unfolding property regime leads to an intensified form of green grabbing. To demonstrate this, the article singles out three particular wildlife policy institutions which make clear (a) how private property rights to wildlife are negotiated and implemented, (b) how wildlife ownership is firmly interlocked with land ownership, (c) how natural entities are being converted to robust political and economical assets, and (d) what social consequences this has for rural South Africa.     

Financialization,distance and global food politics

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.     

Sacred groves,sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization,intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.     

‘Pinstripes on the prairies’: examining the financialization of farming systems in the Canadian prairie provinces

Drawing on recent scholarship on the financialization of agro-food systems and the global land grab, this paper examines new forms of financial investment in agriculture in the Canadian prairie provinces. We examine the factors underpinning investor involvement in the sector, including its anticipated financial performance as well as processes of agricultural restructuring that, combined with government actions to liberalize farmland ownership, have facilitated the enrollment of land and labour into new financial vehicles. We focus in particular on the emergence of two new forms of investment vehicles – farmland investment funds and an exchange-traded farming corporation – comparing the business model and investment strategy of each. In doing so, we highlight the ways in which the new investment patterns may propel the restructuring of the agricultural sector, alter power relations among key actors, and introduce new logics into the farming landscape. Our findings allow us to comment on the relevance of the land grabbing frame for making sense of the financialization of agriculture in the global North.     

‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

Biotechnology and bio-hegemony in Uganda: unraveling the social relations underpinning the promotion of genetically modified crops into new African markets

This paper aims to uncover the social relations used to promote genetically modified (GM) crops into new African markets. It unravels the network of corporate actors, development agencies, policy officials, and research scientists that support the unquestioned dominance of GM in Uganda, which houses one of the largest experimental program dedicated to agricultural biotechnology on the continent. Gramscian insights reveal how these constellations of power align to support biotechnology at the expense of other technological possibilities, and how this consensus maintains its position of dominance while remaining largely unquestioned and unchallenged.     

David L. Behncke,The Airline Pilots,and the New Deal: The Struggle for Federal Labor Legislation

In the first half of the twentieth century, South Africa's two main coal-producing provinces, Natal and the Transvaal, were regarded as having separate industries. Comparing the two, the article shows that their geology, markets, ownership and organization were distinctive. In contrast, the patterns of labour struggles were alike, reflecting labour processes, racial divisions, and legal and ideological frameworks that were similar. The historiography of South African mining labour has emphasized the role of black migrants, who ‘oscillated’ between the mines and the rural areas from where they originated and to which they retired. While structuralist analyses argued that migrancy was the bedrock of a cheap-labour system that underpinned white power, leading social historians stressed that migrants were primarily rural men. The account presented here rejects the thrust of both positions, showing that a high proportion of coal miners settled around the mines. More of them would have done so had this been permitted, and the same applies to Africans working on the gold mines. Given that cheap-labour theory strengthens the exceptionalism that runs through much South African history, rejecting it can open up new possibilities for comparative study. In passing, the article reveals that black workers participated in the militant 1913 strike by the Witwatersrand's white mine workers.     

Neoliberalising the food regime ‘amongst its others’: the right to food and the state in India

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores the role of the state in the contemporary food regime in light of critical theories of neoliberalisation. Heeding recent calls for downscaling food regime analysis, I suggest a Gramscian reinterpretation of recent right-to-food legislation in India on the backdrop of longer histories of capital, power and nature. I argue for seeing the recent right-to-food case in India as partaking in a longstanding hegemonic process of neoliberalising the country’s agro-food system, where hegemony is negotiated through unstable equilibria facilitating renewed capital accumulation for dominant classes.     

Contesting the boundaries of gender,race and sexuality in Barbadian plantation society

After decades of scholarly neglect, the pivotal roles played by enslaved African women in the sociocultural and economic development of New World plantation societies is finally receiving critical attention as historians embark on gendered reappraisals of Caribbean history. Understanding how African women experienced slavery has considerably enriched our knowledge of the complexity of gender, race and sexuality in structuring colonial social relations. However, considerably less attention has focused on the experiences of white women within these societies. Dismissed, at best, as the languid and leisured wives of male planters, and at worst, as a socially and economically unproductive parasitical category, white Caribbean women arguably constitute the most marginalised of social actors within Caribbean history. This article seeks to disrupt the uncritical representations that frame our epistemological understanding of the experiences of white colonial women. Taking the plantation society of Barbados as a case study, the author argues that white women were crucial actors in the reproduction and social stability of successful slave economies. In Barbadian plantation society, ideologies of white supremacy legitimised African slavery, and race became the principal mode of social stratification.