working paper 20 The political economy of global and regional agro-food system change Key questions and issues Ben Cousins* and Jun M Borras Jr**

Transcription

1 working paper 20 The political economy of global and regional agro-food system change Key questions and issues Ben Cousins* and Jun M Borras Jr** 2016/07/07

2 The political economy of global and regional agro-food system change: Key questions and issues by Ben Cousins* and Jun M Borras Jr** * PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, South Africa ** International Institute for Social Studies, Netherlands Published by: BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) in collaboration with: Universidade de Brasilia Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro Brasília DF Brazil Tel: sauer@unb.br Website: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Av. Paulo Gama, Bairro Farroupilha Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul Brazil Tel: schneide@ufrgs.br Website: Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17 Bellville 7535, Cape Town South Africa Tel: Fax: info@plaas.org.za Website: College of Humanities and Development Studies China Agricultural University No. 2 West Yuanmingyuan Road, Haidian District Beijing PR China Tel: Fax: yejz@cau.edu.cn Website: Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) Rua Quirino de Andrade, 215 São Paulo - SP Brazil Tel: bernardo@ippri.unesp.br Website: Transnational Institute PO Box LD Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel: Fax: tni@tni.org International Institute of Social Studies P.O. Box LT The Hague The Netherlands Website: Tel: Fax: information@iss.nl Website: Future Agricultures Consortium Institute of Development Studies University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9RE England Tel: +44 (0) info@future-agricultures.org Website: June 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher and the author. T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e Copy editor: Rebecca Pointer Editorial committee: Ben Cousins, Ben McKay & Juan Liu Design & Layout: Rebecca Pointer Published with support from: Open Society Foundation, which funded the publication and the April 2015 BICAS conference i

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4 Abstract The BICAS research agenda focuses on agrarian change at three levels (global, regional and national) and their interconnections. Contemporary agro-food transformations at all levels involve shifts in the relative power and influence of the state and large corporate actors, especially transnational corporates involved in agricultural inputs supply, processing and retailing. But national states and their policies remain important, even as their ability to regulate international capital has declined. Inter-state relations within the global political economy continue to mediate global flows of capital and commodities, not least in relation to agricultural products. The BRICS group of countries may not prove to be greatly significant, but the rise of Middle Income Countries (MICs) in the global South in recent years, and the challenges they present to the old hubs of global capital in the USA and Europe, are urgently in need of assessment. This means that wider debates on the character of the global political economy are relevant and should inform the BICAS research agenda. These include those on changing relations between emerging global and regional hegemons and subordinate states, and thus the character of imperialism at present; the character and causes of the current global recession (or accumulation crisis ); and the role of primary commodities (including agricultural products) and resource frontiers in capital accumulation. Keywords Critical agrarian studies; agro-food system transformations; imperialism; accumulation by dispossession; ecological regime T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e iii

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6 1. Introduction The BICAS initiative aims in its first phase to engage in comparative research within and across three regions (SE Asia, Latin America, and Southern Africa), and does not as yet include researchers from India and Russia. This paper briefly introduces BICAS and outlines its research agenda. Research questions in the BICAS agenda have to date been framed in terms of the core themes of what is now called critical agrarian studies, or agrarian political economy, which focuses on processes of agrarian change and ensuing transformations in contemporary agro-food systems, as well as on political contestations over who benefits from such transformations and the potential use value of research findings to those engaged in these struggles. However, it has become clear over time that such processes and outcomes cannot be fully understood if we view them only through a narrowly focused set of agrarian lenses, without consideration of how farming systems, agricultural sectors and agro-food value chains nest within and help to constitute larger regimes of unequally distributed power and wealth. Equally, as is painfully clear here in South Africa, agrarian struggles, often bound to specific places and spaces, are unlikely to succeed if disconnected from the struggles of others located elsewhere in society. Activists and their constituencies thus need to forge alliances with other formations if they are to gain traction beyond local arenas and contribute to system-wide change. This paper, therefore, tries to locate the BICAS agenda within some broader debates on global political economy and geopolitics, and argues that we cannot afford to ignore these kinds of wide-angle lenses in our research and activism. In fact, we should aim to integrate them more fully into our activities, however challenging this may appear. These debates include those on: changing relations between global and regional hegemons, and thus the character of imperialism at present (a concept that has recently returned to centre stage); the character, causes and consequences of the current global recession (also characterised as a severe accumulation crisis within capitalism); and the role of primary commodities (including agricultural products) and resource frontiers in processes of capital accumulation and territorial expansion, both past and present. 2. What is critical agrarian studies? The agrarian political economy is currently enjoying an exciting period of rejuvenation, with new centres of scholarship emerging across the world, as reflected in the widespread authorship of articles in the Journal of Agrarian Change, the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) and other journals. These show both continuities with older traditions of enquiry and open up new issues and thrusts. Since 2009, under the editorship of Jun Borras, JPS has described its mission as: (a) provoking and promoting critical thinking about social structures, institutions, actors and processes of change in and in relation to the T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e 1

7 rural world (emphasis added); (b) It encourages inquiry into how agrarian power relations between various social groups and classes are understood, created, contested and transformed, and pays special attention to the question of the agency of marginalised groups in agrarian societies ; (c) JPS promotes contributions that question mainstream prescriptions or interrogate orthodoxies in radical thinking (emphasis added)and welcomes contributions that explore theoretical, policy and political alternatives. The four fundamental questions that inform agrarian political economy, suggested by Henry Bernstein, are: who owns what? who does what? who gets what? and what do they do with it? (Bernstein 2007). To which some suggest now adding the question: how are nature and the environment implicated? b i c a s w o r k i n g p a p e r In his inaugural editorial 2009 essay in JPS vol 36 (1), Borras also suggests that just as the agrarian transformations themselves are politically contested, so are interpretations of these transformations. This, he argues, has provoked vibrant debates and discussions within and between broad theoretical camps, e.g. materialist political economy, sustainable livelihood approaches, and mainstream economics. One key challenge is the need to (re-)engage with older critical traditions of theory, but a second is how to determine actual or potential analytical links with approaches such as political ecology, gender studies, everyday peasant politics, and sustainable rural livelihoods. However, Borras places a strong emphasis on understanding the relational dimensions of agrarian change to help ground inter-disciplinary dialogue. The BICAS research agenda strongly suggests that another field of enquiry be added to the list of complementary approaches: that of critical international relations and global political economy, that takes as its object the shifting balance of power between nation-states, in the context of an increasingly integrated capitalist global economy that redefines the character and role of states. In addition, scholars such as Andries du Toit and David Neves (2014) argue that critical studies of governance, that include analyses of biopolitics and distributional regimes should also be engaged with, as exemplified in the work of Talia Murray Li (2010) and James Ferguson (2013) as well as global value chain (GVC) analyses. Critical agrarian studies require complex and rigorous methodologies in research, which includes the need for systematic comparative approaches, either cross-country or cross-regional, or in longitudinally, as in classic studies by Byres, Banaji and others. The message is clear: beware of the ghetto, whether sectoral or theoretical, and engage with wider contexts as well a variety of theories and concepts. One word of warning: eclecticism runs the risk of conceptual incoherence, at the other end of the spectrum from coherent but potentially irrelevant or unproductive narrow-lensed approaches. Finally, a key emphasis in agrarian political economy remains an attempt to forge strong links between scholarship and the world of politics. For critical agrarian studies, the point, as Borras (2009) argues, is not only to interpret the agrarian world in various ways, but also to change it. This prompts collaborative and action-oriented research by academics and activists of the kind that we hope to explore over the next few days with civil society groupings here at this conference.

8 3. The BICAS research agenda In building our network, our approach differs from conventional research on the BRICS: We are not primarily concerned with the BRICS as an organisation, but with the constituent countries themselves and the changes underway within their national territories, around them regionally (i.e. intra-regional dynamics), and their activities in other regions (inter-regional dynamics). We are scholars rooted in the contexts of BRICS countries and their neighbours, seen as new centres of capital accumulation. These should also become hubs for knowledge production, and BICAS is founded on a desire to shape the process and politics of knowledge about the BRICS, from within them. We do not focus exclusively on the BRICS countries; rather, we want to examine them in relation to both the older hubs of global capital in the North Atlantic, and rising Middle Income Countries (MICs). BICAS promotes critical and collaborative research to deepen our understanding and to inform responses at local, national, regional and global levels. Our concerns are threefold: to promote world-class, cutting-edge research on emerging global agrarian transformations, its drivers and its implications; to facilitate graduate student exchanges, comparative analysis and research collaboration among the BRICS and MICs, thereby improving scholarship and strengthening the next generation of intellectuals concerned with agrarian change and with the politics and economics of land, food and agriculture; and to respond to the challenges faced by civil society organisations of how to respond to a more polycentric world, and to inform strategic thinking within these movements. BICAS focuses on four clusters of research questions: i. Changes in the BRICS countries: e.g. what are the key similarities/differences of the agrarian structure in Brazil, China, and South Africa? What are the changing dynamics within these BRICS countries as sites of production, circulation and consumption of agri-commodities? ii. BRICS and MICs in their regions: e.g. what agrarian transformations are underway in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Southern Africa? What is the character of investment and trade relations between the BRICS countries and MICs located within their regions, and what food systems are emerging at the regional level? iii. Dynamics in the agro-food system: e.g. what are the changing dynamics in the patterns of production, circulation and consumption of food, at national, regional and global levels? Where and how is concentration of ownership and control in these value chains taking place, with what effects for investment, production, labour regimes and accumulation? iv. BRICS and MICs in relation to the old hubs of global capital: e.g. What is the role of BRICS and MICs in global trade of food and agricultural commodities and how is this changing? What new sites of contestation are opening up around food production, circulation, consumption, and forms of accumulation in the agro-food sector, with what possibilities for alternative systems to emerge? T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e 3

9 4. Debates on global contexts, systems & processes b i c a s w o r k i n g p a p e r Globalisation, geopolitics and imperialism One key issue we cannot ignore as scholars of contemporary agrarian change is the character of the global system of unequal power and wealth. The original debate on these kinds of questions was centred on the massive expansion of colonial rule by European powers in the late 19 th century and defined in terms of imperialism. This tradition has been renewed in recent decades, in particular following the publication in 2000 of Hardt and Negri s Empire, Harvey s 2003 book The New Imperialism and Ellen Meiksens Wood s 2005 book, Empire of Capital, (all from within the Marxist tradition) as well as the work of Giovanni Arrighi (2007) and his collaborators, from within another stream of political economy, world system theory. A number of aspects of this debate are relevant for agrarian political economy. a. Empire and capital What is the nature of the links between politics and economics in inter-state relations, or less crudely, as Sutcliffe (2007: 60) puts it, two layers of reality: (a) the hierarchies, conflicts and alliances political, military and economic between countries, and (b) the workings of the productive system and the hierarchy of classes it generates? The first is about unequal relations or exploitation of some countries by others, the second about the dominance and exploitation of some classes by others. Political economy explores the elements of autonomy in each one as well as the links, complementary and contradictory, between the two (ibid: 61). This debate is critically important for agrarian studies, e.g. in thinking through recent large-scale land deals in which nation-states and corporate interests often collaborate, but sometimes do not, sometimes offering opportunities for resistance. Harvey (2003: 26) is criticised by many other Marxists for his use of Arrighi s (2007) distinction between a territorial logic of power based on command over a territory and a capacity to mobilise its human and natural resources towards political, economic and military ends, and a capitalist logic in which molecular processes of capital accumulation result in economic power, through flows across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities through the daily practices of production, trade, etc. As Brenner (2007: 83) notes, Harvey s (2003) notion of contemporary imperialism as a contradictory fusion of these two logics gives way in practice to a conception in which contemporary capitalist states are dependent upon capital, because those who govern will tend to find that the realisation of their own interests depends upon the promotion of capitalist profits and capital accumulation, as they are sine qua non for economic growth and financial solvency, and thus for stability domestically and strength internationally. Brenner (2007) argues that there it is indeed possible for gaps to open up between foreign policy and the needs of capital, as in late 19 th century colonialism, because the framework of multiple states that governs capitalism emerged through historical processes that cannot be simply dissolved, a system that creates profound difficulties for the consistent pursuit by individual governments of policies compatible with the requirements of capital. Foreign policy as actually

10 implemented, he asserts, is always the outcome of the imperfectly co-ordinated actions of multiple states, which may turn out to contradict the interests of all of them (ibid: 84). Ashman and Callinicos (2007) offer similar views on the dialectical relationship between empire and capital. This is based on the intersection of two different forms of competition, economic and geopolitical, the distinct interests of capitalist and state managers, and the tensions that can then arise. Wood bases her arguments on the formal separation of the political and the economic in capitalism, and relations between the economic power of surplus appropriation and the extra-economic powers of administration and enforcement which support it. b. Accumulation by dispossession Another controversy in the wider literature on imperialism that is directly relevant to the BICAS initiative is that focused on the concept of accumulation by dispossession. David Harvey (2003) has argued that so-called primitive accumulation, or accumulation based upon predation, fraud and violence, which as Marx showed, was integral to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, should not be seen as being confined to only that original stage but persist within the long historical geography of capital accumulation, and takes a wide variety of forms both historically and in the present (Harvey 2003: ). These include the commoditisation and privatisation of land, including the commons, the commodification of labour power, colonial appropriations of assets, and the workings of the credit system. However, Harvey (2003) includes a range of other processes within his preferred term of accumulation by dispossession, which he argues is a key means to overcome the massive problem of over-accumulation facing Western capitalism. Examples include the asset stripping and speculative raiding facilitated by financialisation, the recognition of intellectual property rights to genetic material, the commodification of nature and culture, privatisation of social housing, universities and water utilities and the enclosure of the commons of state pensions and national health care, etc. In his view these processes rely on extra-economic coercion rather than the dull compulsion of economic forces to be implemented, as in the early stages of the capitalist transition. This idea has been powerfully influential in critical agrarian studies, with numerous articles framing their discussion of land grabs as an example of ubiquitous processes of accumulation by dispossession in the contemporary world. But other authors dispute Harvey s views. Fine (2007:143) argues that by casting the net so wide, Harvey homogenises what are diverse and complex moments in the economic and broader restructuring of capital. For Brenner (2006: 98), he elides Marx s precise concept of how dispossession helps establish the social-property relations constitutive of capital and this blurs the distinction between primitive and normal accumulation (i.e. expanded reproduction). Wood (2007: 20) suggests that Harvey s emphasis is on the concentration of wealth rather than on the transformation of social-property relations. The new logic, once fully established, still involves predation, fraud and violence, but now it is a consequence and not a cause of a dynamic specific to capitalism. It is fundamentally about the continuing imposition, maintenance and intensification of market imperatives. T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e 5

11 This debate is important for how we conceptualise phenomena such as land grabs, but also for how we understand agrarian change and its broad significance in the contemporary world more broadly. c. Characterising China s rise and trajectory A linked debate is on the overall trajectory of global geopolitics. Key questions include: is the hegemony of the USA in terminal decline, as China and its Asian neighbours rise, with a new centre of global power in formation, or will the Asian economies remain subordinate to a weakened but still dominant USA-European axis? A second question: does China represent an alternative developmental model to Western-style capitalism (as proposed in Arrighi s (2007) notion of a market economy in which capitalist interests do not reign supreme), or is it fundamentally capitalist in character, albeit one that is managed and coordinated in a distinctive manner? In answering these questions, agrarian studies has much to contribute, given the central issue of the fate of the countryside, its people and production systems, in China s accumulation and development path. This includes issues of the scale and relations of production, as well as property rights, and of course that of changing patterns of food consumption and their implications for global agricultural trade. b i c a s w o r k i n g p a p e r Again, fierce debates rage on these issues. Walker (2010: 68) for example, asserts that all the earmarks of a transition [to capitalism] are in place, however much they are embedded in the particular characteristics of Chinese civilisation. Arrighi attributes too much to the singularity of China and is unable to adequately handle the dialectic of capital s universal logic and its embedding in local conditions, which produces multiple paths to capitalism (ibid). He queries Arrighi s notion of accumulation without dispossession, which ignores the fact that the greatest migration in history has just occurred (involving 100 million people from the countryside moving to the cities in 30 years). 5. The current economic downturn/recession Another raging debate, on the causes and trajectory of the current global recession, is also of relevance to the analysis of agrarian change at different scales. From a materialist political economy perspective, the causes of this great recession, the most profound downturn since that initiated in 1929, are generally agreed to be a capitalist crisis of overaccumulation. At some point, crisis will yield to a renewed period of growth, after sufficient value destruction has occurred, as in the past, although possibly centred on East and South Asia rather than the Atlantic. Much disputed, however, are the precise meanings of over-accumulation and the significance of the financialisation of capitalist economies that has occurred in recent decades. In one version it is primarily a crisis caused by under-consumption, in another, the causes are multiple and overlapping, and in a third it is primarily Marx s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF). David Harvey is an influential exponent of the multi-causal approach. He focuses on financialisation, the role of credit, the devaluation of fixed capital, and the limits of consumer demand as a result of holding down wages relative to profits. Crucial is the secondary circuit

12 of capital and the distribution of surplus this involves, including speculative overproduction, as well as accumulation by dispossession, organised through the credit system. This is a key lever of crisis (Harvey 2003). Nuanced versions of the LTRPF (Roberts 2015) are perhaps more convincing. Debate continues, and we in BICAS should pay attention to it. What role does the globalised agro-food system play in this economic crisis, and how does crisis shape the further evolution of that system? Are land grabs, and expansion of production regimes aimed at cheap food, a crisis response prompted primarily by constrained conditions for global accumulation, or are they mostly the result of emerging opportunities within a corporate food regime that relentlessly pursues expanded production across the globe? If a mix of both, then how are crisis and opportunity connected? 6. Capitalism as ecological regime Jason Moore s innovative project to theorise capitalism as an ecological regime is another wider debate that agrarian studies and BICAS should seek to draw insights from and contribute to. By this concept Moore means the relatively durable patterns of governance (formal and informal), technological innovations, class structures, and organizational forms that have sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation since the long 16 th century (Moore 2011: 34). Its theorisation is based on value-relations as guiding methodological principle, and comprises analysis of those market and institutional mechanisms necessary to ensure adequate flows of energy, food, raw material, and labour surpluses to the organising centres of world accumulation, as well as the production complexes that consume these surpluses and set in motion new (and contradictory) demands upon the rest of nature (ibid). The centrality of food production and consumption to this conception is clear. According to Moore, waves of accumulation unfold through expanded ecological surpluses, which find their expression in cheap food, cheap energy and cheap inputs. He argues that to the extent that new labour surpluses can be mobilized through deruralisation, labour costs can be driven down as well through cheap food (driving down the minimum wage necessary for social reproduction) and cheap energy (central for rising labour productivity). Moore goes on to suggest that we are currently seeing a signal crisis of neoliberalism, manifesting in rising rather than declining commodity prices for food, energy and inputs, and asks: might this also represent an epochal crisis, in which a transition to another mode of production (i.e. beyond capitalism) takes place? 7. Conclusion BICAS has set itself an ambitious research agenda. As we move forward, should we try to address some of the large and more difficult questions I have identified here? Do we have the capacity to do so? At very least, I think we need to take note of these wider dynamics and realities and think about how they manifest in our field sites and how they might figure in our individual research projects. T h e p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o f g l o b a l a n d r e g i o n a l a g r o - f o o d s y s t e m c h a n g e 7

13 b i c a s w o r k i n g p a p e r References 1. Arrighi, G., Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Vol. 3). London: Verso. 2. Ashman, S. and Callinicos, A., Capital accumulation and the state system: assessing David Harvey's The New Imperialism. Historical Materialism, 14(4), p Banaji, J., Theory and History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Vol. 25). Brill. 4. Bernstein, H., Agrarian questions of capital and labour: Some theory about land reform (and a periodisation). In: L. Ntsebeza and R. Hall (eds), The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, pp Borras Jr, S.M., Agrarian change and peasant studies: Changes, continuities and challenges An introduction. Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), pp Brenner, R., What is, and what is not, imperialism? Historical Materialism, 14(4), p Byres, T.J., Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy. London: Macmillan. 8. Du Toit, A. and Neves, D., The government of poverty and the arts of survival: Mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(5), pp Ferguson, J., 2013, 2013, How to Do Things with Land: A Distributive Perspective on Rural Livelihoods in Southern Africa. Journal of Agrarian Change, 13: doi: /j Fine, B., Debating the new imperialism. Historical Materialism, 14(4), pp Hardt, M. and Negri, A., Empire. Harvard University Press. 12. Harvey, D., The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, USA. 13. Moore, J.W., Transcending the metabolic rift: A theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1), pp Li, T. M. 2010, To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations. Antipode, 41: doi: /j x 15. Roberts, M., Monomania and crisis theory a reply to David Harvey [blog]. Available at: Sutcliffe, B., Imperialism old and new: A comment on David Harvey's the new imperialism and Ellen Meiksins Wood's empire of capital. Historical Materialism, 14(4), p Walker, R., Karl Marx between two worlds: The antinomies of Giovanni Arrighi s Adam Smith in Beijing. Historical Materialism, 18(1), pp Wood, E.M., Empire of Capital. Verso. 19. Wood, E.M., Logics of power: A conversation with David Harvey. Historical Materialism, 14(4), p.9.

14 working paper series BICAS is a collective of largely BRICS based or connected academic and policy oriented researchers concerned with understanding the BRICS countries and some powerful middle income countries (MICs) and their implications for global agrarian transformations. Critical theoretical and empirical questions about the origins, character and significance of complex changes underway need to be investigated more systematically. BICAS is an engaged research initiative founded on a commitment to generating solid evidence and detailed, field based research that can deepen analysis and inform policy and practice with the aim of ultimately influencing international and national policies in favour of rural poor peoples. In BICAS we will aim to connect disciplines across political economy, political ecology and political sociology in a multi layered analytical framework, to explore agrarian transformations unfolding a national, regional and global levels and the relationships between these levels. BICAS is founded on a vision for broader, more inclusive and critical knowledge production and knowledge exchange. We are building a joint research agenda based principally on our capacities and expertise in our respective countries and regions, and informed by the needs of our graduate students and faculty, but aiming to scale up in partnership and in dialogue with others, especially social movement activists. BICAS Working Paper Series is one key venue where we hope to generate critical and relevant knowledge in collaborative manner. Our initial focus will be on Brazil, China and South Africa, the immediate regions where these countries are embedded, and the MICs in these regions. While we will build on a core coordinating network to facilitate exchange we aim to provide an inclusive and dynamic space, a platform, a community, hence we invite participation. Published with the support of: