Food regimes and the production of value: Some methodological issues

In critically re-examining the concept of food regime this article argues for an alternative formulation thatposits the concept on the foundation of the theory of value, rather than the developmentalist framework of the regulation theory within which it was originally posed. This is possible because while the insights of food regime analysis were rooted in a world historical perspective on global value relations, its presentation always subordinated the latter to the more abstract stage theory of the regulation school. Disentangled from regulationism, the concept of food regime is central for a labour-oriented perspective on imperialism as a relation of production embedded in global value relations. This is part of a broader methodological critique that locates the problematic of development (and consumption, in the postdevelopmentalist era) within the discourses of bourgeois modernity (and postmodernity) and seeks to differentiate these from the problematic of labour and labour emancipation. The article addresses the problem of a conflation of theory and history in connection with a developmentalist/positivist reading of Marx, and suggests 'global value relations', 'global working day', 'global worker', as world historically informed concepts that capture the 'unity of the diverse'. Global value relations include the politics of state relations, the world market, colonization and imperialism, and the (often geographically segregated) labour regimes of production of relative and absolute surplus value. The latter is posed as a contemporary relation of neo-liberal capitalism involving (postmodern) over-consumption on the one hand and (still modern) forced under-consumption on the other hand. 'World hunger amidst global plenty' is an expression of these relations.     

Fuel,feed and the corporate restructuring of the food regime

The agrofuel boom has brought about some of the most significant transformations in the world food system in recent decades. A rich and diverse body of agrarian political economy research has emerged that elucidates the conflicts and redistributional shifts engendered by these transformations. However, less attention has been given to differences within agri-food capital. This paper contributes to the existing literature on agrofuels, by showing how one cluster of agri-food corporations and farmers within the US has benefited from soaring ethanol production at the expense of another cluster. More specifically, I delineate and chart the pecuniary trajectories of two corporate-led distributional coalitions that have vied over the course taken by the US ethanol sector: the ‘Agro-Trader nexus’ and the ‘Animal Processor nexus’. My main finding is that the US ethanol boom has been a vector of redistribution: increasing the earnings of the Agro-Trader nexus and corn growers while reducing the earnings of the Animal Processor nexus and livestock farmers. This finding points to the limits and contradictions of agrofuels capitalism and the acute tensions that exist at the heart of the corporate food regime.     

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

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.     

Rethinking food regime analysis: an essay on the temporal,spatial and scalar dimensions of the first food regime

This paper argues for the reconceptualisation of the first food regime. First, it situates the origin of the first food regime in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Second, it suggests that the concept must be extended to other ‘moments’ of the circuit of capital. Third, it argues for a scalar shift in order to take into account national and subnational processes and dynamics. Problematising working conditions in the British baking industry c. 1830–1914, I demonstrate how relations of distribution were embedded in global value relations essential to the articulation and deployment of the first food regime.     

Deepening,and repairing,the metabolic rift

This paper critically assesses the metabolic rift as a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism. As a social concept, the metabolic rift presumes that metabolism is understood in relation to the labour process. This conception, however, privileges the organisation of labour to the exclusion of the practice of labour, which we argue challenges its utility for analysing contemporary socio-environmental crises. As an ecological concept, the metabolic rift is based on outmoded understandings of (agro) ecosystems and inadequately describes relations and interactions between labour and ecological processes. Historically, the metabolic rift is integral to debates about the definitions and relations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity as historical concepts. At the same time, it gives rise to an epistemic rift, insofar as the separation of the natural and social worlds comes to be expressed in social thought and critical theory, which have one-sidedly focused on the social. We argue that a reunification of the social and the ecological, in historical practice and in historical thought, is the key to repairing the metabolic rift, both conceptually and practically. The food sovereignty movement in this respect is exemplary.     

Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.     

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.     

A materialist analysis of slavery and sharecropping in the Southern United States

The historical nature of Southern slavery and of the social relations established after its abolition have for a long time been a source of heated debate among American historians. During the last decades, historians have tended to divide into two camps: neoclassical economic historians, who identify slavery and sharecropping with capitalism, and social historians, more or less influenced by Marxism, who define them correctly as pre‐capitalist social relations. Yet the contributions of the social historians have been marred by their empiricist approach and by their reluctance to avail themselves of the theoretical tools provided by classical and Marxist political economy. This work examines Southern slavery and sharecropping in the light of the studies of the European Marxists on ancient slavery and of the works of the classical political economists and Marx on French metayage. This comparison reveals the pre‐capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after the abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans’ plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place from above’ (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre‐capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the racist prejudices born of slavery among whites — thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life.     

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade. The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa. It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa. There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state. Initial evidence suggests that recent land investments have consolidated the earlier trend away from (re)distributive land policies in most countries in the region, and are likely to result in widespread reconcentration of land and capital.     

The agrarian question,past and present

Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, by Terence J. Byres. London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Pp.xxiv + 490. £60 (hardback). ISBN 0 333 66657 7

In his Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, T.J. Byres has as his concern an examination of the contemporary relevance of critical issues surrounding the development of agriculture in capitalist societies, as these unfolded in the past. Part of that relates to the agrarian roots of capitalist industrialisation. The historical experience, in this regard, of England, Prussia, the United States, France and Japan, is his chosen terrain, and in the present volume the manner of resolution of the agrarian question in two of these, Prussia ('capitalism from above') and the United States ('capitalism from below'), is addressed. In a rich, thoroughly researched and carefully argued examination of ‘agrarian transition’ in these cases ‐ in which he stresses that in the United States there were two distinct instances of transition, one in the South and the other in the North and West — he offers a nuanced assessment, in considerable historical depth, and develops new and important explanations of agrarian change, and its implications, in the two countries. Some of his major conclusions are discussed, and issue is taken with Henry Bernstein's argument/critique, developed with respect to Byres s conclusions, that the breakdown of boundaries which has occurred in the era of globalisation may signal the ‘end of the agrarian question’ in the sense of the elimination of any prospects of agrarian transition as a route to comprehensive industrialisation in contemporary poor countries.     

East Asian food regimes: agrarian warriors,edamame beans and spatial topologies of food regimes in East Asia

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning body of work thinking differently about food regimes. Drawing on the concepts of a corporate food regime and a corporate-environmental food regime, this paper highlights the constituent parts of East Asian food regimes, addressing the food regime transition that has taken place in the region. The first part of the paper addresses the role played by agrarian-scientific institutions in this transition; specifically, it investigates the spatial topologies, political economy, histories and socio-cultural contexts of agrarian knowledge production and practices that have conditioned East Asia’s transition to a corporate-environmental food regime. The second part offers an analysis of a specific food commodity – edamame beans – to illustrate how East Asian food regimes have changed as they have been incorporated into a corporate-environmental food regime. In investigating the evolution of edamame production and trade, I analyze how edamame production and trade has been reorganized under this new regime. My study argues that broadening the conversation about the food regimes approach requires a regional-geographic perspective in order to understand the spatial topologies, uneven development and socio-cultural-ecological differentiation characteristic of food regimes.     

Plantation rubber,land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.     

A pluralist and pragmatist critique of food regime’s genealogy: varieties of social orders in Brazilian agriculture

ABSTRACT

The food regime approach occupies a privileged place in the sociology of agriculture and food. However, it is criticized for its structural, universalist and homogenizing bias. From a dialogue between institutionalism and pragmatism, this contribution discusses an alternative framework constructed from the ‘social order’ concept, which defines the existence of different arrangements of practices related to socio-technical and institutional apparatuses. Both the critique of the ‘regime’ narrative and the new proposition are associated to a reinterpretation of Brazil’s agricultural trajectory. Contrasting with the overemphasized export-oriented plantation/agribusiness image that prevails in the majority of analysis about Brazilian insertion in globalized agri-food regime, this paper explores the heterogeneity of production and consumption practices, arguing for the coexistence of multiple and contradictory ordering processes.     

From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's ‘grand escape’ from hunger, and the peasantry and ‘depeasantization’ as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.     

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.     

From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's 'grand escape' from hunger, and the peasantry and 'depeasantization' as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.     

Flexible for whom? Flex crops,crises, fixes and the politics of exchanging use values in US corn production

Flexible allocation of crops among food and non-food uses is a key driver of global agri-food system change. Focusing on United States corn production, I explore the dynamics of flex crops, scrutinizing agri-industrial relationships and the distribution of agri-food system value and control. I situate crop flexing as exchanging use value, as opposed to converting use into exchange value without altering the commodity's use. Asking ‘Flexible for whom?' in the context of agri-food system crises, I find: (1) flex crops exacerbate contradictory food security and over supply crises, and that the distribution of flexibility and benefit in the agri-food system they provide depends on the organization of labor; (2) crises of accumulation tie flex crops to agri-food system financialization, which subordinates use to exchange value, obfuscating their relationship and distancing agricultural products and uses from their basis in nature and labor; and (3) debates over US corn flexing illustrate the utility of focusing on power and politics in crop flexing decisions and demonstrate US corn flexing to be a fix for climate and accumulation crises. Findings suggest that examining the distribution of value and control and the positions of labor and nature in the agri-food system may be productive for global flex crop research and advocacy in the future.     

Commentary: Food regime for thought

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.     

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.     

Green grabbing at the ‘pharm’ gate: rosy periwinkle production in southern Madagascar

The following article contrasts contemporary rosy periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) extraction in southern Madagascar with original bioprospecting research conducted 50 years ago. My study shows how plant extraction firms have shifted their approaches by creating new labor forms, which devolve risk and increase exploitation in attempts to capture the valuable biogenetic material needed for drug discovery. The periwinkle symbolizes a complex picture of many dynamic barriers to capitalist penetration at work, including the natural, social and political. Over time, these barriers change and act in conjunction to provide a complex commodity chain expressing many exploitative labor relations of green capitalism.