Global Development and The Corporate Food Regime

Abstract

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

Full text

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE
CORPORATE FOOD REGIME
Philip McMichael
ABSTRACT
The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of
global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and eco-
logical contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical con-
juncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key
mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global dis-
placement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket
revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sov-
ereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land,
farming and food.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of ‘global development,’ informing the Doha Round, is prem-
ised on the political reconstruction of agriculture as a world economic sec-
tor. In 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman, envisioned a
‘global agriculture (where) future agriculture policies must be market-ori-
entedythey must integrate agriculture into the global economy, not insu-
late us from it’ (quoted in IUF, 2002, p. 4). Such reference to a ‘global
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New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development
Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Volume 11, 269–303
Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1057-1922/doi:10.1016/S1057-1922(05)11010-5
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agriculture’ is a discursive construct embedded in the political narrative of
globalization, as a progressive realization of economic liberalization. The
narrative is prescriptive, but not inevitable. And yet, while agricultural trade
remains the center of political controversy in the WTO, the seemingly ir-
resolvable nature of these trade rules will continue to realize this narrative.
Meanwhile, Vı
´a Campesina, the transnational peasant coalition, observes
that the ‘‘massive movement of food around the world is forcing the in-
creased movement of people.’’ Notwithstanding the profound impacts of
human displacement on such a growing scale, the juxtaposition of new
circuits of food and labor represents a historic moment in the reproduction
of capitalism through mechanisms of ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ The
latter is both an originating and a self-propelling dynamic, where capital
expands through the release of assets, whether new or over-valued: ‘‘[w]hat
accumulation by dispossession does is to release a set of assets (including
labour power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Over-accu-
mulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to
profitable use’’ (Harvey, 2003, p. 149).
In the context of corporate globalization, ‘accumulation by dispossession’
operates through general mechanisms of structural adjustment, which de-
value and privatize assets across the global South, as well as through par-
ticular mechanisms of displacement of peasant agriculture, as a world of
agriculture emerges. Here, local provisioning is subjected to the combined
pressures of dumping of Northern food surpluses, an agro-industrial su-
permarket revolution, and the appropriation of land for agro-exporting.
That is, through economic liberalization, new food circuits relentlessly dis-
place small farmers into an expanding circuit of casual labor, flexibly em-
ployed when employed at all. Thus, a global labor reserve, and (displaced/
released) cultures of provision, represent new opportunities for accumula-
tion in a global project of ‘development.’
This chapter proceeds by examining the institutional tensions in the Doha
Development Round associated with the pursuit of global development, via
the corporate food regime. While the rhetoric of development frames the
WTO Ministerial meetings since the Doha Ministerial in 2001, the practice
of global development is filtered through the competitive relations among
(unequal) states. And these competitive relations are increasingly governed
by the corporate pursuit of ‘comparative advantage’ across the state system.
The latter is decisive in constructing a world of agriculture, generating the
new circuits of labor fueling ‘global development.’
The corporate food regime is a key vector of the project of global de-
velopment. This project is characterized by the global de-regulation of fi-
PHILIP MCMICHAEL270

nancial relations, calibrating monetary value by credit (rather than labor)
relations – as practiced through the privatizing disciplines internalized by
indebted states, the corporatization of agriculture and agro-exports, and a
world-scale casualization of labor (McMichael, 1999). The corporate food
regime exemplifies, and underpins, these trends, through the determination
of a world price for agricultural commodities strikingly divorced from cost.
It is one thing to subject agriculture to the price form, but quite another,
through political means, to artificially depress agricultural prices through a
food regime of overproduction and dumping. While the postwar U.S.-cen-
tered food regime managed overproduction to serve targeted Third World
markets, the world price of the corporate food regime is universalized
through liberalization (currency devaluation, reduced farm supports, and
corporatization of markets), rendering farmers everywhere vulnerable to
dispossession as a precondition of the construction of a world agriculture.
THE DOHA MINISTERIAL AS A DEVELOPMENT
INITIATIVE
The designation of the WTO Ministerial in Doha (2001) as the ‘development
round’ responded to concerns in the global South that ‘globalization’ was
not meeting its promise. Accordingly, the Doha Development Agenda
Round aimed to strengthen globalization as an inclusive force. Naming it a
development round recalls the legitimizing function of development dis-
course in moments of intensified global inequality, like the era of decolo-
nization (Escobar, 1995). It also reminds us that calling the new round
‘development’ simultaneously promises and proscribes.
The Doha Round proposed to facilitate new trade-offs for the global
South, whereby further de-regulation of Southern economies would be
matched with possible Northern concessions. These concessions were:
1. Freer trade, e.g., improved access to Northern agricultural markets, and
reduction of Northern subsidies of farmer and agro-exports.
2. Qualification of WTO protocols, e.g., public health emergencies overrid-
ing specifications of TRIPs for trade in pharmaceuticals.
3. Management of liberalization of services to enable participation by
Southern countries in service trade.
4. Reinforcement of Special and Differential Treatment provisions to ad-
dress food security and rural development needs of Southern countries.
5. Technical assistance and capacity building schemes for the global South,
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especially for the ‘least developed countries.’
As it happened, the development round was stillborn, because of insti-
tutional inertia, concessions by Northern states to corporate lobbies (e.g.,
the pharmaceutical industry), and lack of capacity in Southern states to
address and/or implement reforms. In the run-up to the Cancun Ministerial
in September 2003, the Northern states adopted a more aggressive stance,
reformulating the Doha Round as an opportunity to impose a corporate
agenda of equal domestic treatment of foreign corporations, notably in
private investment in public services, in return for Northern action in ending
farm subsidies. However, where the latter decoupled subsidies from farm
prices, removing farm assistance to the WTO’s ‘non-trade-distorting’ Green
Box (as part of the Agreement on Agriculture), the Northern states, and
especially the EU, disingenuously retained the capacity to dump cheap farm
produce onto the world market.
The combination of the Europeans’ attempt to reintroduce the Singapore
agenda regarding a global investment treaty, and the North’s avoidance of
the dumping question, crystallized a counter-mobilization in Cancun (Sep-
tember 2003) of the global South, represented by the so-called G-20 (the
Southern equivalent of the Cairns Group of agro-exporting states). Since
Cancun, while trade negotiations have slowed if not stalled, the parties have
regrouped – the U.S. around bilateral negotiations, the G-20 around re-
gional agreements, and the Europeans around CAP reforms offset by
progress in ‘trade’ in services, via the GATS. At the same time, the EU and
the U.S. have made attempts to co-opt the leaders of the G-20, Brazil and
India (Wiggerthale, 2004, p. 20).
Revival of the Doha Round pivots on agriculture, whose centrality to
Doha is reflected in its contentiousness. New negotiations in 2004 involved a
revision of the pre-Cancun agreement struck between the EU and the U.S.,
including counter-proposals by the G20 (Oxford Analytica, 2004). The focus
of the new March text included the three key, original issues of market
access, export subsidies, and domestic support policies. The subsequent
‘July Package’ contained a commitment to end export subsidies, but over at
least a decade. Meanwhile, additional demands from the global South, led
by the newly empowered G-33 (exporters dedicated to protecting their do-
mestic markets), for a ‘Development Box,’ to sanction subsidies supporting
agriculture which is farmer-driven rather than trade-driven (surplus dump-
ing) gained little ground (Khor, 2004, p. 3). While agricultural reform is
central, it unfolds in piecemeal fashion, with the EU making what it con-
siders concessions in decoupling farm payments from commodity prices
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(though without ending overproduction), and successful WTO litigation by
Brazil on U.S. cotton subsidies, which have wrought havoc on African
producers.
In short, Doha concentrates international tensions and the contradictory
relations which constitute ‘development.’ Currently, Doha claims further
global deregulation as the premise of development. Historically, Doha rep-
licates the GATT Uruguay Round of the 1980s, which aimed to liberalize
agriculture and services (then banking, insurance, and telecommunications)
in which the North held a competitive advantage. At the time the global
South was skeptical, as its cheaper exports of steel products, footwear,
electronic products, and agricultural products were limited by Northern
protections. India and Brazil led the resistance to broadening GATT, but
Northern pressure and the promise of open markets, including agricultural
markets, tipped the balance (Adams, 1993, pp. 196–197). When GATT be-
came the WTO, the liberalizing Agreement on Agriculture was the quid pro
quo for the global South’s acceptance of TRIPs and TRIMs, which ‘‘soon
proved to be a double threat to food security and sovereignty in the de-
veloping world’’ (Wallach & Woodall, 2004, p. 193).
The Doha Round continues this dance, disingenuously representing
GATS 2000 as a trade agreement, which demands openness to ‘cross-bor-
der’ provision of services (by TNCs) as a condition for opening EU and U.S.
markets in garments, textiles, and agricultural products (Wallach, 2003).
Oxfam’s Kevin Watkins (2002, p. 21) argues this replays the Uruguay
Round, when the global North offered market access in return for protec-
tion of TNC patents (costing the South $40 billion in technology rents). He
maintains that while the game has changed, the rules are the same: ‘‘The
West buys your bananas and shirts if you give its banks and insurance
companies unrestricted access to your markets’’
Offering perspective on the terms in, and means by, which Doha ad-
dresses agricultural reform, Vı
´a Campesina, noted: ‘‘The negotiations on
agriculture still seem to be a fight between the ‘corporate elephants of the
agro-industry’ represented by the European Union, the United States and
the Cairns group instead of negotiation on how to come to fair, equitable
trade relations that give protection to domestic food production and con-
sumption and the world’s environment’’ (quoted in Wallach & Woodall,
2004, p. 215). Sophia Murphy (2004, p. 4) suggests ‘‘the U.S. and the EU are
fighting what is likely to be a losing battle to maintain their export share in
world agricultural markets’’. Subsidizing their farmers is a short-term, and
increasingly untenable, tactic in the world market where countries like Bra-
zil, Argentina, Russia, China, and India can offer cheaper farm commodities
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to transnational agribusinesses concerned with reducing costs and accessing
emerging markets of middle class consumers in these countries. She con-
cludes: ‘‘While the U.S., E.U. and Cairns Group/G20 fight with each other
over who will get (or keep) the investment of transnational agribusiness,
most development countries [notably in sub-Saharan Africa] are left on the
sidelines’’ (idem).
LINEAGES OF A CORPORATE FOOD REGIME
The losing battle within the global North nevertheless conditions the con-
struction of a ‘world agriculture.’ The combined dumping of subsidized
food surpluses and growing agribusiness access to land, labor, and markets
in the global South clears the way for corporate-driven food supply chains
binding together a (selective) global consumer class. I examine this historic
process via the concept of the ‘food regime.’
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Food regime analysis has centered on distinguishing specific political–
economic organization of food production and consumption relations dur-
ing the periods of British and U.S. hegemony (Friedmann, 1987; Friedmann
& McMichael, 1989). As Harriet Friedmann (2005, p. 129) puts it, ‘‘Free
trade in agriculture, key to British hegemony, gave way under U.S. hegem-
ony to managed agriculture within the Free World’’. The point of such a
distinction is to account for the particular developments in agriculture as-
sociated with each regime. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the
British-centered world market encouraged the incubation of industrial ag-
riculture in settler states geared to supplying cheap foodstuffs for a pro-
letarianizing Europe. Through the devices of the U.S.-aid program of the
mid-twentieth century, surplus foods and green revolution technologies
from the First World entered the urban markets and the agrarian sectors of
the Third World, respectively.
The continuities across these two eras were the progressive industriali-
zation and specialization of agricultures (alongside tropical export agricul-
tures originating in colonialism), and a project of state-building, proceeding
from the settler colonies to the ex-colonies, as European empires collapsed
and the development era took shape. But there the similarities end. In fact,
these periods reveal quite distinct principles with respect to food and cap-
italism.
The first period was anchored in Britain’s model of ‘free trade imperi-
alism,’ the deployment of a policy of economic liberalism to gain access to
the economies and colonial empires of its rival European states, and thereby
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consolidate British commercial dominance in the world economy. The City
of London and the sterling/gold standard facilitated capital’s first world
market, especially in channeling investment to the ‘peripheries’ of the world
economy given the protectionism of European rivals (McMichael, 2005a,
pp. 11–27). Within these global circuits the ‘‘first price-governed market’’ in
food emerged, anchored in the U.S. frontier of family farming, which pro-
duced low-cost wheat relative to that produced on capitalist farms in Europe
(Friedmann, 2005, p. 125, 1978 QA :1). Cheap foodstuffs from the colonies (from
sugar to grains) sustained capital’s primitive wage-relation in Europe, where
elites remained committed to restricted consumption for the proletariat
(Mintz, 1986 QA :2; Halperin, 2004, p. 91).
The second period, characterized as ‘‘embedded liberalism’’ (Ruggie,
1982, but see Lacher, 1999), was governed by a series of social protections,
from policies of full employment, through fixed monetary exchanges, to
managed farm sectors. Farshad Araghi views this as an ‘‘aid-based food
order of an exceptionally reformist period of world capitalism’’ (2003, p. 51)
rather than as a ‘food regime of capital.’ The question here concerns both
history and intentionality. Historically, Britain formed its free trade empire
spatially through incorporation of new lands and resources, politically
through backstopping the gold standard (as an instrument of economic
liberalism), and temporally through manipulating countries’ sterling bal-
ances in London to deepen the circulation of capital. The U.S., by contrast,
was not concerned with outmanoeuvring economic rivals, so much as con-
taining the Soviet empire. Accordingly, it reconstructed the capitalist world
order ‘‘not through formal empire, but rather through the reconstitution of
states as integral elements of an informal American empire’’ (Panitch &
Gindin, 2004, p. 17). Central to this objective was political legitimation via
the ‘development project:’ a state-building process in the Free World via
economic and military aid, with the U.S. model of consumption as the
ultimate, phenomenal, goal of development (McMichael, 2004a).
This model, represented as the endpoint of development (Rostow, 1960),
was historically particular to the U.S. as one of a set of (mainly settler) states
lacking a landed aristocracy, which might restrict domestic markets and
consumption levels for the working poor (Halperin, 2004, p. 280). In ad-
dition, the Fordist response to the Great Depression in the U.S. promoted
mass production via mass consumption (Halperin, 2004, p. 282). The ‘inner-
directedness’ of this dynamic model, integrating agriculture and industry,
facilitated the incorporation of food consumption relations into an inten-
sified capital accumulation in the postwar period, and distinguished the U.S.
model of modernity (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989). Following the British
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imperial legacy, ‘beefing up’ (steak and fast-food hamburger) was the dietary
form in which modernity was represented (Rifkin, 1992). Historically, it was
a product of a ‘managed agriculture,’ depending on commodity stabilization
programs and public support for capital-intensive agriculture, and expressed
in mounting food surpluses (a model also adopted in Europe, stimulated by
Marshall Plan aid).
The food aid regime was a solution to the overproduction of agricultural
commodities within a heavily protected U.S. farm sector, offering food at
concessional prices as aid to friendly Third World regimes on the Cold War
perimeter. Local, counterpart funds generated through this program pro-
moted agribusiness and adoption of western diets (Friedmann, 1982). Thus,
the Pax Americana centered on states as guarantors of markets. Agricultural
commodity prices remained relatively stable during this period of publicly
regulated trade in foodstuffs (Tubiana, 1989). Hegemony was achieved
through the development project, which was also a vehicle for the ‘freedom
of enterprise’ associated with the reach of the U.S. multinational corpora-
tion (Arrighi, 1982).
The distinctiveness of these food regimes lay in the instrumental role of
food in securing global hegemony – in the first, Britain’s ‘workshop of the
world’ project linked the fortunes of an emergent industrial capitalism to
expanding cheap food supply chains across the world; in the second, the
United States used food politically to create alliances and markets for its
agribusiness. The model of accumulation differed markedly across these two
eras.
The point is not to hypostatize ‘food regimes.’ They constitute a lens on
broader relations in the political history of capital. They express, simulta-
neously, forms of geo-political ordering and, related, forms of accumula-
tion, and they are vectors of power. In the first, British hegemony, premised
on ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and a sophisticated financial architecture centered
on London, constructed a price-governed world market through which food
resources were developed in, and appropriated from, ‘European peripheries’
to cheapen labor costs (Friedmann, 1978; Luxemburg, 1963; Davis, 2001).
In the second, U.S. informal empire balanced the historic commitment to
the social contract with containment-driven state-building, legitimized
through the aid regime of the development project. Food’s role was to
subsidize, simultaneously, the First World social contract and Third World
urban-industrial development.
The difference across the two ‘food regimes’ was the realization of First
World citizenship and Third World independence. This emerged through
the crisis of the British model (Polanyi, 1957 QA :3), social transformation pre-
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cipitated by ensuing warfare in Europe (Halperin, 2004), the collapse of
European empires, and the completion of the state’s system – championed
by the rising power of the U.S. and its model of accumulation anchored in
national economic integration. Through these successive food regimes, the
relations of production and consumption of food expressed the distinct
moments in the political history of capital.
The ‘corporate food regime’ is yet another moment. It carries legacies of
the previous food regimes, nevertheless expressing a new moment in the
political history of capital. The political decomposition of citizenship and of
national sovereignty, via the neo-liberal ‘globalization project,’ reverse the
political gains (‘welfare’ and ‘development’ states) associated with the period
of U.S. hegemony, facilitating an unprecedented conversion of agriculture
across the world to supply a relatively affluent global consumer class. The
vehicle of this corporate-driven process is the WTO’s Agreement on Ag-
riculture, which, as above, institutionalizes a distinctive form of economic
liberalism geared to deepening market relations via the privatization of
states.
The distinguishing mark of the corporate food regime as a new moment in
world capitalism lies in the politics of neo-liberalism. As argued elsewhere,
the ‘globalization project’ emerged to resolve the crisis of the ‘development
project,’ in which the financial relations associated with the rise of trans-
national corporations and banks, and offshore money markets, were con-
strained by the social and spatial limits of the national state and its charge of
civic protection (McMichael, 2004a). The 1980s debt crisis of the Third
World revealed a world-economic crisis generated by over-reaching: of the
U.S. dollar, transnational bank lending, and borrowing by Third World
states. In this atmosphere of crisis, investors chose financial instruments
over productive investments and firms relocated manufacturing to Third
World export processing zones.
This was enabled by the new ‘conditions’ of structural adjustment, and
the dumping of cheap foodstuffs (lowering wage costs), stemming from the
breaching of the U.S.-centered food regime in the 1970s. Here, U.S. de
´tente
with the Soviet Union was marked by massive U.S. grain shipments to the
Soviet Union, opening the door to an escalating trade war with Europe in
commercial food exporting (Friedmann, 2005, pp. 132–133). Behind the
protections of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Europe had
achieved self-sufficiency by the 1970s, in the form of an imported (U.S.)
model of industrial agriculture producing surpluses of butter, milk, cereals,
and beef. With the French government proclaiming ‘Produce to export:
agriculture is France’s green petrol’ (Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p. 148), and the
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U.S. committed to agro-exporting as a rear-guard ‘green power’ strategy
expressing hegemonic decline (Revel & Riboud, 1986), intensified compe-
tition for world market outlets via agro-export dumping shaped the tran-
sition from developmentalism to globalism.
Agro-export dumping undermined the U.S.-centered food regime’s sys-
tem of stable prices and managed disposal of food surpluses. World agri-
cultural prices fell from a mean of 100 in 1975 to 61 by 1989 – a 39 percent
decline. Bearing less and less relation to the cost of production, which in-
cluded increasingly expensive farm subsidies, price volatility, and decline
brought the agro-exporting states to the 1986 GATT Uruguay Round
(1986), declaring ‘‘an urgent need to bring more discipline and predictability
to world agricultural trade’’ (quoted in Watkins, 1991, p. 44). The outcome
of this round was the signing of the Agreement on Agriculture in the newly
founded WTO, 1995, and the institutionalization of the corporate food
regime.
ORIGINS OF ‘FOOD SOVEREIGNTY’
As a lens on the political history of capital, the ‘food regime’ embodies the
tensions of periods of world ordering. In this sense, the food regime is not a
political–economic order, as such, rather it is a vehicle of a contradictory
conjuncture, governed by the ‘double movement’ of accumulation/legitima-
tion. The British-centered food regime embodied the tensions associated
with the demands for citizenship and decolonization, realized in the sub-
sequent U.S.-centered food regime, which modeled the possibilities of each
via economic nationalism. The U.S.-centered regime, in turn, embodied the
tensions associated with social protectionism, as the principle of ‘freedom of
enterprise,’ central to the U.S. informal empire, undermined economic na-
tionalism (Arrighi, 1982; Lacher, 1999; Friedmann & McMichael, 1989).
Resolution via economic transnationalism has been institutionalized in the
governance mechanisms of the multilateral institutions, led by the WTO.
Here, the corporate food regime embodies the tensions between a trajectory
of ‘world agriculture’ and cultural survival, expressed in the politics of ‘food
sovereignty.’
The current political conjuncture is the culmination of a long-term im-
perial trajectory – not simply the conversion of the non-European world to
export monocultures, but also the power relation consigning the peoples of
the colonized hinterlands to an unseen, racialized underconsumption that
has become the condition for metropolitan development and overconsump-
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tion. In this trajectory, the appropriation of agricultural resources for cap-
italist consumption relations (encompassing regions of capitalist modernity
in much of the global North and parts of the global South) is realized
through an expanding foundation of human impoverishment and displace-
ment, and the marginalization of agrarian/food cultures. This much the
generic capitalist dynamic of accumulation/dispossession would predict.
What is distinctive about this conjuncture is how dispossession is accom-
plished. Briefly, where the ‘development project’ socialized security, the
‘globalization project’ privatizes security. These phases both represent po-
litical solutions to material needs. But Third World material needs under the
development project were already the result of colonial-induced social ca-
tastrophes. Mike Davis (2001) has documented, for example, how empire
dismantled village grain reserve systems in the non-European world, by
commodifying grain and transforming it into an export product.
The insecurities attending colonialism animated the twentieth-century
decolonization movement. However, despite Frantz Fanon’s warnings
(1967), in the execution of the development project across the postcolonial
world: ‘‘Instead of the state being used as an instrument of development,
development became an instrument of the state’s legitimacy’’ (Bose, 1997, p.
34 QA :4). In other words, while all states were officially charged, under the UN
system, with implementing the social contract, most ruling elites saw that as
an opportunity to centralize power and thereby progressively undermine the
viability of cultural forms of security in the name of development. To this
end, they prosecuted cash cropping with World Bank funding, prioritized
industrialization as the centerpiece of development, promoted mechanisms
of urban bias for political purposes, dam-building, and imported cheap
foodstuffs via the food aid regime. The managed construction of the Third
World (urban) consumer paralleled the decimation of peasant agriculture.
Each confirmed the central tenets of the development vision: that the west-
ern consumption pattern was a universal desire and peasants were historical
remnants destined to disappear.
The development project incorporated post–colonial states into a univer-
sal system of national accounting methods, standardizing the measurement
of material well-being (GNP), and the ‘externalization’ of a variety of en-
vironmental degradations and social catastrophes. Only monetized trans-
actions were counted as productive, devaluing subsistence, cooperative
labor, indigenous culture, seed saving, and managing the commons as un-
productive, marginalized and undeveloped activity. As a consequence, the
world’s rural population decreased by some 25 percent in the second half of
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the twentieth century with the steady displacement of peasant cultures
(Hobsbawm, 1992, p. 56; Araghi, 1995, 1999).
It is important to stress that this process is not simply the realization of
the development narrative – a preordained movement of rural populations
into an increasingly urbanized wage-labor force – but the displacement of
biodiversity, customary forms of knowledge and moral economy. This his-
toric rupture accounts for the emergence of ‘food sovereignty’ as an alter-
native to the productivist paradigm, which measures food security in the
quantitative/monetized terms of market transactions. Food sovereignty is as
much a cultural, as a material, principle. How this rupture came to express
itself in the ‘food sovereignty’ paradigm depended on the de-legitimization
of development.
The development honeymoon lasted at most for three decades (ca 1950–
1980). The so-called ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s was a key turning point, as the
management of the debt crisis heralded three profound changes in the global
political economy. First, the deployment by the debt managers (IMF, World
Bank, G-7) of structural adjustment conditions across much of the Third
World punctured the ‘developmentalist illusion’ (Arrighi, 1990 QA :5). States,
compelled to adopt neo-classical economic solutions, reversed course on the
social contract. Second, on a world scale, neo-liberalism reinforced a fi-
nancialization of capital, away from productive investment toward sec-
uritization and business mergers and takeovers. Third, international power
relations were recast in terms of the North/South axis, rather than con-
tainment politics legitimized by developmentalism.
The debt regime began the institutionalization of the ‘globalization
project,’ via the WTO, as the mother of all trade agreements (though not the
father, given the virulence of NAFTA, for example). During this transition
from a collapsing development, and emerging globalization, project, the
Agreement on Agriculture sprung from the Uruguay Round’s movement to
reform farm sectors and agricultural trade. Consistent with the neo-classical
agenda, ‘food security’ came to be redefined, and institutionalized, in the
WTO as an inter-national market relation. That is, in spite of the asymmetry
between the Northern and Southern agricultural labor force percentages – 4
percent, versus 30–70 percent, respectively (Kwa, 2002), a system of ‘free
trade’ in agricultural products was installed to privatize food security as a
global, corporate relation.
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PRIVATIZATION OF FOOD SECURITY VIA THE
CORPORATE FOOD REGIME
The shift in the ‘site’ of food security from the nation-state to the world
market was engineered during the Uruguay Round (1986–1994), anticipat-
ing the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (1995). Under this agreement,
states no longer have the right to food self-sufficiency as a national strategy.
The WTO’s minimum import rule requires all member states to allow im-
ports of food up to at least 5 percent of the volume of domestic consumption
– despite Article 25 (1) of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
and Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights, which viewed ‘‘the right of peoples to exercise sovereignty
over their natural wealth and resources’’ as essential to the realization of
human rights (Desmarais QA :6, 2003, p. 148).
On the face of it, states appear to have been trumped by the WTO,
exposing their domestic food markets to the grain traders. French Farmers’
Confederation leader, Jose Bove
´declares this is a ‘‘totalitarian exercise’’ that
allows the TNCs to force domestic producers ‘‘to submit to their logic’’
(Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p. 137). Nevertheless, the logic of subordinating
agriculture to the corporate model is not synonymous with a stateless world
food market.
In the first place, the U.S. introduced a redefinition of food security as
‘‘best provided through a smooth-functioning world market’’ (quoted in
Ritchie, 1993, fn 25) into the Uruguay Round in order to secure a com-
petitive advantage for U.S. agribusiness via the GATT, and subsequently
the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture. Second, and related, the WTO re-
tains this mercantilist imprint in managing asymmetrical agricultural rela-
tions, founded in an unequal state system. Third, corporate agriculture’s
trajectory is governed by historic divisions of labor and current financial
mergers that centralize agribusiness capital. Unlike industry or services, the
capitalization of agriculture retains important spatial dimensions, expressed
politically in Northern agribusiness lobbies and farm sector policies geared
to producing (and dumping) food surpluses.
Thus, in Europe food self-sufficiency was the initial postwar goal, shaping
Common Market policies in 1957, and into the 1960s. In return for the right
to protect large-scale staple food production (cereals, milk, beef, sugar), the
EEC agreed to import U.S. soya beans for European livestock in the Ken-
nedy Round of 1962–1967 (Herman & Kuper, 2003, p. 5). Bove
´notes: ‘The
arrival of the first soya beans in French ports, not subject to any Customs
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duties, signaled the start of agricultural industrialization’’ (Bove
´& Dufour,
2001, p. 61). Cheap imported soya beans, complementing local maize grains
and silage, underwrote a global livestock complex (cf. Friedmann, 1994 QA :7).
This in turn drove a CAP (1962) geared to guaranteed high internal prices
and the overproduction of cereals, generating food surpluses and their un-
tidy dumping on the world market. CAP management of overproduction
involved establishing production quotas, reducing the farm population by
90 percent, and hastening corporate monocultures (Herman & Kuper, 2003,
pp. 10–11). Moving to manage overproduction internationally, the U.S.
Agriculture Secretary, John Block, observed in 1986: ‘‘the idea that devel-
oping countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone
era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agri-
cultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost’’ (quoted
in Schaeffer, 1995, p. 268).
This form of global ‘food security’ is accomplished through the political
construction of commodity prices. In 1986, U.S. corn dumping forced Zim-
babwe’s grain marketing board to cut domestic producers prices almost in
half and to reduce its purchase quota from these producers (Watkins, 1991,
p. 43). A decade later, in 1996, politicization of price was key to NAFTA –
in 8 months the domestic price of Mexican maize fell almost 50 percent,
‘‘converging with the world price 12 years earlier than envisaged’’ (Herman
& Kuper, 2003, p. 72). In 2002, the average price below the cost of pro-
duction of various U.S. agribusiness exports was 43 percent for wheat, 25
percent for soybeans, 13 percent for corn, and 35 percent for rice (IATP,
2004, p. 3).
The political determination of world agricultural commodity prices
emerged through the Uruguay Round negotiations, which sought to stem
the escalation of farm subsidies and manage the crisis of overproduction
arising from the U.S. and European Community agricultural policies (Da-
wkins, 1999). Anticipating the outcome of the Round, in 1992 (by the
‘McSharry reform’) the EU began switching from its original CAP farm
price support policies to U.S.-style government subsidies (Dawkins, 1999).
Replacing a guaranteed price with direct payments introduced the ‘world
price’ to European producers, stimulating rather than eliminating surpluses
(Herman & Kuper, 2003, pp. 27–28), and synchronizing EU policy with that
of the U.S. in favoring traders over producers.
The preference given to the price form disempowers farmers, and em-
powers agribusiness, across the world. In the North, traders and processors
purchase commodities through farm contracts at low prices unrelated to
production costs. For processors, artificially cheapened corn subsidizes ‘su-
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persizing’ in the fast food industry (Manning, 2004, p. 43). For traders, low
commodity prices enable commodity dumping in the world market (assisted
by export subsidies, especially European), forcing local prices down at the
expense of small farmers. The resulting, or potential for, low-cost agricul-
tural production in the global South in turn enables global sourcing by
agribusiness to exert further downward pressure on Northern farmers. The
result has been a mass exodus from farming in North, and South. It is
accomplished by depressed prices and the competitive advantage of inten-
sive agriculture integrated into agribusiness, and favored by a system of
asymmetrical farm supports. Privileging the price form facilitated the re-
structuring of Northern farm sectors, dominated by corporate agriculture.
2
Synchronization of Northern farm policy anticipated the WTO’s Agree-
ment on Agriculture. Despite the rhetoric of free trade, the Northern agenda
is realized through a corporate-mercantilist comparative advantage in a
highly unequal world market. The Agreement on Agriculture was designed
to open agricultural markets through minimum import requirements and
tariff and producer subsidy reductions. Southern states signed on in the
hopes of improving their foreign currency income from expanded agro-
exports (under the imperative of servicing foreign debt). But the effect was
to open markets for northern products, strengthening the position of the
global North in the international division of labor in agriculture (Pistorius &
van Wijk, 1999, pp. 110–111). From 1970–2000, declines in the world per-
centage of agri-exports from Africa (10 to 3 percent), Latin America and the
Caribbean (14 to 12 percent), and the ‘Least Developed Countries’ (5 to 1
percent), contrasted with a Northern increase from 64 to 71 percent
(FAOSTAT, 2004 QA :8).
Within the rules set by the WTO, delinked from the UN Charter’s pro-
visions for economic and cultural (food) sovereignty, growing food de-
pendencies fulfilled the global vision of ‘food security.’ National health,
social, and environmental regulations are assumed to restrict trade, and,
therefore, were required by the WTO to be translated into visible and
quantifiable tariffs, then subject to reduction over time. In addition, a sub-
sidy hierarchy was constructed, where subsidies were consigned to ‘boxes,’
arranged according to degree of protectionist effect (Herman & Kuper,
2003, pp. 35–36). The box system works to the advantage of the Northern
states, which routinely consign decoupled farm support payments to the
‘non-trade-distorting’ Green Box. The CAP, in particular, justifies such an
arrangement through a ‘rural development’ initiative prepared for the 1999
WTO Ministerial, whereby direct farm payments support the ‘multifunc-
tionality’ of agriculture.
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Besides allowing for a bait and switch operation to hide Northern sub-
sidies, the box system also disadvantages Southern states, which lack the
resources for (decoupled) farm support programs. The combination of re-
duction of customs duties via ‘tarrification’ and protection of expanding
farm subsidies via ‘boxes,’ has constructed a regulatory system that transfers
resources from public to private hands in the North, and exports food
dependency (and insecurity) to the South via dumping.
3
Already in the mid-
1990s, half of the foreign exchange of the FAO’s 88 low-income food deficit
countries went to food imports (LeQuesne, 1997). The destabilizing effects
of intensified export dumping, and Northern agricultural subsidies, frame
Doha and the geo-political tensions expressed at Cancun.
While the WTO is composed of member states, the very asymmetry of the
state system privileges corporate solutions in the implementation of rules.
For instance, the recent CAP reform, introducing ‘multifunctionality’ as a
method of renaming the decoupling of farm subsidies to reward agricul-
ture’s non-remunerative services (environment, space, rural habitation, food
safety, and animal welfare) and making the CAP WTO-compliant, ‘‘paves
the way for the end of any policy of market management’’ and allows
‘‘beneficiaries of decoupled subsidies to produce without restraints (other
than those of a phony ecology), to produce what they want and eventually
to change their production every year’’ (Herman & Kuper, 2003, p. 84). The
logical extension of this reform is the ‘de-localization’ of agricultural pro-
duction to preserve the European environment, while importing food from
offshore regions with low wages and weak environmental regulations – as
the Doux group, the foremost French and European poultry producer, ac-
complished by purchasing Frangosul, the fourth largest poultry producer in
Brazil, where production costs undercut those in France by two-thirds (ibid.,
pp. 21–22). De-localization is part of the global sourcing strategy of U.S.
corporations (Blank, 1998; Public Citizen, 2001), a movement confirmed by
the recent migration of failing U.S. soy farmers to Brazil’s expanding and
low-cost Matto Grosso region.
The WTO policy eliminating ‘market management’ of agriculture shifts
priorities from public interest in producing use-values for domestic provi-
sioning, to private/public encouragement of producing exchange-values to
expand profits and export revenues. Liberalization is the means to this end –
either through de-coupling, which supports Northern agribusiness with
public monies, or through reduction of Southern protections – opening
economies to food importing and/or agribusiness offshore investment. Le-
gitimized by the discourse of food security, its privatization conditions an
emerging world agriculture subordinated to capital.
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WORLD AGRICULTURE AND EMPIRE
Historically, the movement of capital involves the progressive subordination
of agriculture, as an attempt to resolve agro-ecological crises stemming from
the ‘metabolic rift,’ in a deepening of the rupture in nutrient cycling between
countryside and city (Moore, 2000, p. 123). Across the former food regimes,
subordination occurred within the framework of the nation-state, whether
via the national/colonial state nexus, or the national/neo-colonial state nex-
us. The WTO, as the material expression of the state/capital nexus, con-
tinues this process of subordination by capital on behalf of its member
states.
The WTO is not a state, rather a disembodied, and unrepresentative,
executive, but on a world scale. Comprised of member states, the WTO not
only instrumentalizes the competitive and hierarchical relations among
those states (cf. Buttel, 2003), but it also denies civil society full represen-
tation. In these terms, the Cancun impasse expressed opposition to North-
ern hypocrisy by Southern states, disenfranchised by WTO procedures and
overwhelmed by the material consequences in the erosion of their domestic
farm sectors. But, ironically, the G-20’s call for greater market access ex-
presses at one and the same time a formal demand for equivalence in trade
opportunities, and yet a substantive complicity in the movement toward a
world agriculture based in agro-exporting (Peine & McMichael, 2005).
G-20 complicity expresses the logic of the Agreement on Agriculture,
namely to complete the liberalization of trade relations as the condition for
a world agriculture. But a world agriculture involves more than an inten-
sifying system of food swapping across national boundaries. It is premised
on the green revolution principle of ‘appropriation,’ the progressive removal
of components of agricultural production from the control of the farmer via
intervention in natural processes (Goodman, Sorj, & Wilkinson, 1987),
starting with bio-engineered seeds, and complemented with a range of
chemical and mechanical inputs and specialized agricultural inputs (e.g.,
livestock feed).
Green, and subsequently, gene revolution technologies deepen the elim-
ination of biodiversity, seed saving, and local knowledge via agro-industrial
monocultures. Bio-engineering has transformed the crop development in-
dustry
5
through the concentration and centralization of agri-chemical cor-
porations (Pistorius & van Wijk, 1999), and the corporate ‘gene giants’
already account for more than one-third of the global seed market and 100
percent of the transgenic seed market (Shiva, 2000, p. 9). Deploying the
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discourse of intellectual property rights, the biotechnology industry seeks to
institutionalize gene patenting, through the WTO’s TRIPs protocol,
6
as a
key to elaborating a world agriculture, premised on the elimination of extant
agricultures and agro-ecologies through the privatization of knowledge – a
principal feature of the corporate food regime.
The abstraction from ecology and local entitlements associated with a
world agriculture privileges the production of inputs for food processors,
agri-chemical companies or global retailers. Agro-industrialization, deliver-
ing agriculture to an array of input industries (from energy through fertilizer
to animal feed), consolidates a specialization process whereby ‘‘[I]n intensive
farming the object is to adapt the soil to the crop, never the other way
round’’ (Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p. 67), also a movement of abstraction
anticipating a world agriculture. While this movement of abstraction is as-
sociated with the history of the agricultural frontiers of European capitalism
(Friedmann, 2000; Moore, 2000), its completion as a world agriculture is
prefigured in the biological and socio-economic blueprints of the gene rev-
olution and the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture.
The concept of a ‘world agriculture’ refers, not to the entirety of agri-
culture across the earth, but to a transnational space of corporate agricul-
tural and food relations integrated by commodity circuits. Justin Rosenberg
terms this space ‘the empire of civil society’: a politically managed ‘‘material
integration of social reproduction across borders’’ involving ‘‘the extraction
and relaying of surpluses’’ (Rosenberg, 2001, pp. 134–135, 131). But the
material integration of social reproduction across borders is not simply a
space of globalized commodity flows creating new interdependencies – an
immanent tendency in the history of capital. Rather, beyond Rosenberg’s
formulation, a world agriculture resembles Hardt and Negri’s emergent
concept of ‘Empire,’ characterized by the removal of boundaries – either
spatial or temporal (implicit in the process of abstraction), and, most sig-
nificantly, a ‘‘paradigmatic form of biopower’’ (2000, p. xv), where capital
reconstitutes humans through reconstituting the natural order, in the name
of food security and peace. This is particularly the case for agricultural
workers, more than half of whom are women, and who comprise a third of
the 1.3 billion people actively engaged in agricultural production (half of the
world’s labor force), concentrated in the global South, and as high as 80
percent of the workforce in some countries (IUF, 2002, p. 3).
Deborah Barndt’s representation of one set of increasingly common con-
ditions of social reproduction of the agricultural labor force in corporate
agriculture captures this process:
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[T]he only Mexican inputs are the land, the sun, and the workersy. The South has been
the source of the seeds, while the North has the biotechnology to alter agro-export
production also denies them participation in subsistence agriculture, especially since the
peso crisis in 1995, which has forced migrant workers to move to even more scattered
work sites. They now travel most of the year – with little time to grow food on their own
plots in their home communitiesy[W]ith this loss of control comes a spiritual loss, and a
loss of a knowledge of seeds, of organic fertilizers and pesticides, of sustainable practices
such as crop rotation or leaving the land fallow for a year—practices that had main-
tained the land for millennia (1997, pp. 59–62).
Such abstraction of agriculture through its incorporation and reproduction
within global capital circuits imparts a ‘food from nowhere’ character to the
corporate food regime (Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p. 55). At the core of this
process is the appropriation of farming, via the expulsion of rural popu-
lations through land dispossession and concentration, as farming is ren-
dered unviable by withdrawal of public supports and exposure to a world
price, or the conversion of farmers to contract farming or hired/plantation/
migrant labor, depending on context and crop. Mexico, the home of maize,
has been so transformed by liberalization and NAFTA into a food deficit
country, and forced to import yellow corn from the U.S. at the expense of
almost 2 million campesinos, unable to compete with corn price falls on the
order of 70 percent (Carlsen, 2003; Oxfam, 2003). In Brazil, price falls for
staple crops like rice and beans render small farming increasingly non-vi-
able, exacerbating a swelling rural exodus and rising urban unemployment
(Cassel & Patel, 2003); while in China recent liberalization associated with
WTO accession has accelerated a swelling rural migrant population that
overwhelms urban job markets, coinciding with the shrinking of state en-
terprises (Eisenburger & Patel, 2003). In a 1997 FAO study of 16 Southern
countries, reporting the dispossession of at least 20–30 million people, the
overall impact of liberalization was identified with: ‘‘ya general trend to-
wards the concentration of farms, in a wide crosssection of countries. While
this led to increased productivity and competitiveness with positive results,
in the virtual absence of safety nets the process also marginalized small
producers and added to unemployment and poverty’’ (Madeley, 2000; p.
75).
Loss of land, livelihood, and knowledge constitute the core of cultural
displacement and dispossession. But empire, as the corporate food regime,
emerges through related forms of dispossession, notably of local food mar-
kets and cuisines – such as displacement in Mexico of inexpensive white
maize tortillas by yellow corn tortillas manufactured at triple the price
(Bensinger, 2003; Oxfam, 2003, p. 19). Analytically, the construction of a
world agriculture involves ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003).
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While this process is both secular and cyclical, the neo-liberal project focuses
the expansion of profit on the release or privatization of (public) assets.
Here, the global integration of social reproduction is effected through the
appropriation of farming and informal provisioning (wet markets, street
vendors, and the commons). These processes eliminate extant systems of
provisioning, converting them to inputs for the corporate food regime’s
proliferating supply chains.
Land expropriation may be the original form of ‘accumulation by dis-
possession,’ but the realization of the corporate food regime involves a
deeper, and broader, reconstitution of material culture, centered on bio–
political mechanisms. Thus, the global fast food industry, grossing $110
billion a year in the U.S., provides cheap and unhealthy convenience foods,
based on the appropriation of home-cooking activities and knowledges (cf.
Friedmann, 1999). The supermarket revolution in the global South (Rear-
don, Timmer, Barrett, & Berdegue, 2003) intensifies the combination of
food processing and retailing accumulation, incorporating small or inde-
pendent producers and local markets and street vending into new corporate
circuits and biopolitical relations.
In the 1990s, supermarkets expanded their reach in Latin American
countries from 15–30 percent to 50–70 percent of national retail sales – a
growth rate five times that in the U.S., and accelerating now across Asia. In
Latin America, firms, including Ahold, Carrefour, and Wal-Mart, comprise
70–80 percent of the top five supermarket chains, centralizing procurement
from farmers across the region (and their own global processing plants), and
serving regional consumers (Regmi & Gehlhar, 2005). In a case study of
Guatemala, where supermarkets now control 35 percent of food retailing, it
was reported that ‘‘their sudden appearance has brought unanticipated and
daunting challenges to millions of struggling, small farmers’’ – especially
tenuous relations in the absence of binding contractual agreements, re-
warded only if they consistently meet new quality standards, but subject to
declining prices as retailers have virtually unlimited suppliers (Dugger,
2004). Meanwhile, urban diets converge on a narrowing base of staple
grains, increasing consumption of animal protein, edible oils, salt and sugar,
and declining dietary fiber, as consumption of brand name processed and
store-bought foods rises, contributing to an increasing prevalence of non-
communicable (dietary) diseases and obesity (Kennedy, Nantel, & Shetty,
2004, p. 14).
Corporate circuits frame the global transformation of social, biopolitical
and ecological relations. Thus, the director-general of the Centre for Inter-
national Forestry Research (Cifor) noted: ‘‘In the 1970s and the 1980s most
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of the meat from the Amazon was being produced by small ranchers selling
to local slaughterhouses. Very large commercial ranchers linked to super-
markets are now targeting the whole of Brazil and the global market’’
(quoted in Vidal, 2004, p. 3). Huge ranching operations organized by Eu-
ropean supermarkets now dominate the beef export market (75 percent of
Brazil’s beef exports flow to Europe and the Middle East). At the same time,
corporate-led factory farming is transforming the food sector – currently
targeting Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines,
South Africa, Taiwan, and Thailand. Asia, whose global consumer class
outstrips that of North America and Europe combined, leads the livestock
revolution (French, 2004, p. 148). Two thirds of the global expansion of
meat consumption is in the global South, sourced with Brazilian soybeans.
As a Chinese middle class emerges, China has shifted from a net exporter of
soybeans to the world’s largest importer of whole soybeans and oils – even
Brazilian pastures are converted to soyfields, pushing cattle herds deeper
into the Amazon (Rohter, 2003, p. 3). In this way, biopolitical dynamics are
expressed in dietary and ecological transformations.
Neo-liberal discourse represents the material integration of social repro-
duction as an expansion of market efficiencies through freedom of trade and
enterprise. However, it is premised on the deployment of the price weapon,
through dumping, to undermine local farming and incorporate local con-
sumption relations into global circuits, as well as on agro-exporting, via
structural adjustment measures, to displace publicly entitled foods. Given
the extent of displacement and dispossession, what is being socially repro-
duced? The contradictory relations of the corporate food regime. The par-
adox of this food regime is that at the same time as it represents global
integration as the condition for food security, it immiserates populations,
including its own labor force. The perverse consequence of global market
integration is the export of deprivation, as ‘free’ markets exclude and/or
starve populations dispossessed through their implementation. In turn, dis-
possessed populations function as reserve labor, lowering wages and offer-
ing the possibility of labor casualization throughout the corporate empire.
More than simply a cumulative agro-ecological crisis (Moore, 2000), the
corporate food regime is also realized through social crisis. For example,
neo-liberal policies introduced in 1991 threaten India’s tens of millions of
small farmers, the livelihood source of 75 percent of the population. In 2000,
the Indian Ministry of Agriculture observed: ‘‘The growth in agriculture has
slackened during the 1990s. Agriculture has become a relatively unreward-
ing profession due to an unfavourable price regime and low value addition,
causing abandoning of farming and migration from rural areas’’ (quoted in
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Paringaux, 2000, p. 4). Corporate seed prices have inflated tenfold, cheap
imports (notably of rice and vegetable oils) have undercut local farmers and
processors, and policies promoting agro-exports of high-value commodities
like farmed shrimp, flowers, and meat in the name of food security increase
human insecurities. Every dollar of foreign exchange earned on meat ex-
ports destroys 15 dollars’ worth of ecological capital stemming from the use
of farm animals in sustainable agriculture, according to Vandana Shiva
(2000, p. 14). In other words, a condition for the social reproduction of
affluence is cultural displacement and unsustainable ecologies.
Is this an inevitable condition? Certainly not: the global integration of
social reproduction is an immanent, rather than an absolute, process, in
tendency and scope. The corporate food regime is a political construct, and
its beneficiaries constitute only about a quarter of the world’s population,
despite the widening effects of social exclusion, through the appropriation of
resources (material, intellectual, and spiritual), and the privatization of
public goods. At the same time, these effects generate the conditions for
overcoming the social and ecological crisis of the corporate food regime, in
resistance movements dedicated to the social re-embedding of markets. Ul-
timately, the trajectory of the corporate food regime is constituted through
resistances: both protective (e.g., environmentalism) and proactive, where
‘food sovereignty’ posits an alternative global moral economy.
THE FOOD SOVEREIGNTY MOVEMENT
Food sovereignty represents an alternative principle to food security, as
currently defined by the corporate food regime. But it is not the antithesis of
food security, rather, food sovereignty is a premise for genuine food secu-
rity, since ‘‘food is first and foremost a source of nutrition and only sec-
ondarily an item of trade’’ (Vı
´a Campesina, 2002, p. 8).
In the terms of the corporate food regime, ‘food security’ is to be achieved
through trade, rather than through a strategy of self-sufficiency. The chair-
man of Cargill put it recently like this: ‘‘There is a mistaken belief that the
greatest agricultural need in the developing world is to develop the capacity
to grow food for local consumption. This is misguided. Countries should
produce what they produce best – and trade’’ (quoted in Lynas, 2001). This
definition frames the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture.
In this context, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ was developed by the
international farmers’ movement, Vı
´a Campesina, and introduced into
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public debate during the 1996 World Food Summit. Vı
´a Campesina defines
food sovereignty in the following way:
In order to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s
peoples, it is essential that food be produced through diversified, farmer-based produc-
tion systems. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own agriculture and
food policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in
order to achieve sustainable development objectives, to determine the extent to which
they want to be self reliant, and to restrict the dumping of products in their markets.
Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade
policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically
sustainable production (Vı
´a Campesina, 2001).
It is important to emphasize that trade is not ruled out, under the Vı
´a
Campesina vision, rather it is a question of the regime under which trade
occurs. The anti-capitalist resistance represented by the Vı
´a Campesina does
not reject the global for the local, rather it redefines the global in terms
appropriate to democratic conditions of food production and distribution.
As Judit Bodner emphasizes in her interpretation of the conflict between the
French Farmers’ Confederation and MacDonalds in 1999, Jose Bove
´and
his followers destroy transgenic corn produced by global firms ‘‘not because
the seeds are produced by ‘others’ but because of the way they are pro-
duced’’ (Bodner, 2003, p. 141). Under the slogan of ‘the world is not for
sale,’ Bove
´and the Vı
´a Campesina emphasize two central premises: first,
that the international tensions surrounding the politics of food ultimately
derive not from conflict between governments, but that between models of
production and rural development – ‘‘a conflict that exists in both the North
and the South’’ (Vı
´a Campesina, 2003, p. 5); and second, that the struggle is
global but decentralized in content and leadership. Bove
´articulates the lat-
ter point as follows:
The strength of this global movement is precisely that it differs from place to placey.
The world is a complex place, and it would be a mistake to look for a single answer to
complex and different phenomena. We have to provide answers at different levels – not
just the international level, but local and national levels too (Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p.
168).
Embedded in this quote is the ‘global’ vision represented by the Vı
´a
Campesina, namely that an alternative modernity depends on rejecting the
WTO/corporate move to privatize modernity and erase (shared) local
knowledges (cf. Desmarias, 2003), and on reinstating ‘‘the right of peoples,
communities and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, fishing,
food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and
culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances’’ (quoted in Ainger,
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2003, p. 11). Bodner’s study emphasizes that, despite Bove
´’s relative priv-
ilege in producing the internationally traded Roquefort cheese, as an artisan
he represents a production model that appeals to farmers and consumers
worldwide, striving for transparent production and distribution in opposi-
tion to the mass production model of industrial agriculture. In addition, the
model elevates democratic economy and fair trade principles, as essential to
a global civil society, over the reactionary ‘‘link between land and nation’’
(Bodner, 2003 QA :9, pp. 141–143).
On the other side of the world, this sentiment echoes through another
constituent of the Vı
´a Campesina, the landless-workers’ movement in Brazil,
where exports of coffee, sugar, poultry, cacao, orange juice concentrate, and
soy and corn destined for livestock in the global North leave behind 44
million chronically hungry Brazilians – as Candido Grzybowski (2004), di-
rector of IBASE in Rio de Janeiro, observed:
Probably in Brazil there exists no greater taboo than that centuries-old question, the
agrarian question. But there is no question that is more current because it is not limited
to the countryside itself, to its populationy. The modernity of the MST consists in
questioning us about this, about the past of our agrarian origins and about the future in
the use of our natural resources, with the question of land at the centery. We are, of the
large countries of the world, the least demographically dense, the most privileged in
terms of natural resources – land, water, biodiversity – and at the same time, the most
unequal and tragically, the most predatory. For how long, in the name of an even more
narrow vision, will we be able to maintain the right to act on this part of Planet Earth in
a way that is so socially and ecologically irresponsible?
This appeal to a global movement against the uniformity of the corporate
trade regime, in the interests of the future sustainability of the social and
natural world, proceeds from an analysis of the power base of the neo-
liberal model. First, the Vı
´a Campesina argues that a world market of ag-
ricultural products is non-existent, rather, the corporate food regime, ac-
counting for 10 percent of world agricultural production, is:
an international trade of surpluses of milk, cereals and meat dumped primarily by the
E.U., the U.S. and other members of the CAIRNS group. Behind the faces of national
trade negotiators are powerful TNCs such as Monsanto and Cargill who are the real
beneficiaries of domestic subsidies and supports, international trade negotiations and the
global manipulations of trade regimes (2001, p. 6).
Second, agro-industrialization is being rapidly globalized through the mo-
bility of financial capital, and its ability to rapidly concentrate, centralize,
and coordinate global agribusiness operations. According to Joao Stedile of
the MST, world agriculture is dominated by 10 TNCs, such as Monsanto,
Bayer, Cargill, Nestle, Syngenta, BASF, Novartis, and ADM, operating in
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and across distinct sectors related to agricultural production, and control-
ling commercial agriculture, agrobusiness, the agro-toxins, and seeds: ‘‘now
capital is not content to buy labor and hold land as private property, but it
also wants to turn knowledge, technology, farm technologies and seeds into
private property’’ to increase productivity per acre, with the goal of devel-
oping a food model based in the unification of eating habits across the world
(Vı
´a Campesina, 2004c, p. 2). The power relation in the corporate food
regime is expressed in the Vı
´a Campesina claim that ‘‘multinational corpo-
rations want to manipulate our crops to be able to control all of the food
chain around the world, requiring us to stop producing food and start
consuming their products’’ (2004b, p. 3).
The mechanism realizing this world agriculture is the neo-liberal model,
institutionalized in the WTO and structural adjustment policies. As the Vı
´a
Campesina’s website observes:
The specialisation of production in regions that can export at lowest costs, importation
of agricultural products at prices below the cost of production in the importing country,
the agreement by the WTO of public support that allows the rich countries to export at
prices below their cost of production, is destroying food sovereignty in all regions. Prices
called global, are artificial and result in dumping. They are disconnected from the reality
of production. Many countries are forced to export because of their debt and the struc-
tural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank (http://
ns.rds.org.hn/via/).
Within this context, the Vı
´a Campesina reformulates the crisis of the cor-
porate food regime, critiquing unequivocally the representation of the Can-
cun standoff as a North–South conflict. Maintaining that the real conflict is
‘‘between centralized, corporate-driven, export-oriented, industrial agricul-
ture versus decentralized, peasant- and family farm-based sustainable pro-
duction primarily oriented towards domestic markets,’’ – a conflict
invisibilized in global trade negotiations – the Vı
´a Campesina argues that
the WTO, a ‘‘totally inappropriate institution for democratic decision-mak-
ing’’ regarding food sovereignty and social and ecological sustainability,
should get out of agriculture (1999, p. 3). Through this critique the Vı
´a
Campesina separates itself from the ‘freer trade’ bid by the G-20, which it
views as promoting agro-export interests in the South at the expense of the
majority of domestic producers:
they too are demanding the abolition of ‘trade distorting’ subsidies and more access to
markets, both in the North and in the South, without acknowledging that it is in fact the
unbalanced focus on exports and corporate interests which is the main problemy.
Increased liberalization and generalized market access will serve only to strengthen the
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grip of multinational agribusiness cartels, deepening the problems of poverty and social
exclusion of millions of people in the world (2003, p. 5).
The Vı
´a Campesina opposes the WTO’s neo-liberal project of constructing a
world agriculture based in ‘comparative advantage,’ because it is not about
strategies of regional differentiation so much as about corporate global
sourcing strategies, premised on the existence of a reserve army of cheap
labor. Noting that ‘‘the massive movement of food around the world is
forcing the increased movement of people,’’ the Vı
´a Campesina offers a new
paradigm based in self-reliance at the national or community scale, as the
anchor of an alternative globalization. Here, food sovereignty depends on
access to credit, land and fair prices to be set via rules negotiated in a
reformed UN and alternative multilateral institutions such as a Convention
on Food Sovereignty and Trade in Food and Agriculture, an International
Court of Justice, a World Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Food
Sovereignty, and so forth (2001, p. 8). As Bove
´asks, ‘‘Why should the
global market escape the rule of international law or human rights conven-
tions passed by the United Nations?’’ (Bove
´& Dufour, 2001, p. 165). The
premise, of course, is ‘‘the active participation of farmers’ movements in
defining agricultural and food policies within a democratic framework.’’ The
specificity of this politics is that, while the consumer movement has discov-
ered that ‘‘eating has become a political act,’’ articulating the health/trans-
parency relations of food, Vı
´a Campesina adds the social/ecological and
historical dimension: ‘‘producing quality products for our own people has
also become a political actythis touches our very identities as citizens of
this world’’ (www.ns.rds.org.hn/via/).
In sum, the coherence of the Vı
´a Campesina vision, uncompromising in
its relationship with the growth paradigm of neo-liberalism, and with NGOs
and multilateral institutions (Desmarais, 2002 QA :10), constitutes a distinctive
politics of modernity rooted in a global moral economy. Echoing the early
twentieth-century argument by Peter Kropotkin that the preminent social
question is the ‘question of bread,’ Amory Starr proposes that the global
anti-capitalist movement for ‘diversity’ is best summarized as ‘agricultural:’
encompassing first world farmers seeking market protection, farmers resisting genetic
engineering, indigenous sovereignty movements seeking to control land and practices,
sustainable development, localist economic visions, and third world peasant movements
reacting to the failures of urbanization and neoliberalism by insisting on rights to land
and subsistence. These movements have a variety of relationships to political economy,
formal democracy and existing nations. But none imagines that growth, modernization
or technology provide answers to their problems; indeed they see corporate technology
as economically and ecologically dangerous (2001, p. 224).
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And just as Starr characterizes the core of the anti-corporate globalization
movement as centered on agricultural issues, so the Vı
´a Campesina can be
viewed as the core of the resistance to the corporate food regime by ar-
ticulating that which it seeks to eliminate. There are many strands of re-
sistance to the corporate food regime, from environmentalists through seed
savers to community supported agricultures, but the Vı
´a Campesina’s
unique method of uniting the diversity of agrarian producers across the
world unifies a heterogeneous resistance in which social, economic, cultural,
and environmental relations feature in different configurations across the
world.
GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE CORPORATE FOOD
REGIME
The phenomenal dynamics of the corporate food regime, namely global
dispossession of farmers, reorganization of food supply chains, and cen-
tralization of agri-food relations, express the immanence of capital and its
drive to deepen commodity relations. The question is how these dynamics
also specify the world-historical conjuncture? The answer lies in the politics
of the corporate empire, that is, how a reconfigured state system accom-
modates the strategy of corporate globalization, centered on a U.S. imperial
strategy.
The origins of corporate globalization stem from the de-regulation of
financial relations in the 1970s, as a U.S. strategy to unburden itself of rising
claims on the dollar, relocate debt to weaker states in the currency hier-
archy, and reassert U.S. power within an emergent neo-liberal framework
(Helleiner, 1996, pp. 111–119). Decoupling the dollar from gold in the early
1970s allowed currencies to float, and facilitated a rapid expansion of the
offshore dollar market and global banking institutions. The era of ‘finan-
cialization’ expressed a hegemonic crisis (Arrighi, 1994; Panitch & Gindin,
2004) as the U.S. state moved to reconstitute its power through eliminating
capital controls, and laying the conditions for gaining access to global sav-
ings by liberalizing capital markets, with lowered trade and investment
barriers benefiting U.S. transnational corporations. This strategy was the
condition of and for a counter-mobilization of capital to disorganize labor,
globally. It shaped a general reconstitution of states, via structural adjust-
ment and free trade agreements, to institutionalize ‘financialization’ in the
WTO and GATS protocols, and, more recently, has governed U.S. ‘pre-
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emptive’ neo-liberal development policies for ‘failing’ states (Soederberg,
2004; Panitch & Gindin, 2004).
Financial liberalization encouraged securitization (tradable debt) and the
proliferation of a variety of financial instruments, creating new money out
of expected future income. As argued elsewhere, under this regime the value
of money is determined increasingly by its ability to command credit, rather
than by creating value through the wage relation (McMichael, 2000). This is
consistent with Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ where
capital expands through releasing, and centralizing, assets. The decompo-
sition of the wage relation (casualization) is directly related to the decom-
position of the nation-state, as capital undermines its foundation in a wage–
labor order (embedded in the modern social-democratic state) by seeking to
evade or weaken organized labor through access to a world market in labor.
Since the wage form no longer governs valorization, various forms of labor
are valorized directly through political/non-market mechanisms as corpo-
rate globalization reconstitutes its labor force on world scale, through dis-
possession, casual contracts, and the recursive ‘race to the bottom’ dynamic.
The reproduction of money, via global financial relations, supplants cap-
italism’s earlier focus on the reproduction of wage–labor in the consolida-
tion of the nation-state (cf. Hoogvelt, 1997 QA :11; Polanyi, 1957).
An emergent ‘world agriculture’ is premised on three key dynamics. First
is the reconstitution of capital through financialization, such that corporate
strategies intensify vertical integration (from seed to supermarket) with
flexible horizontal mergers and alliances, on a global scale. Vı
´a Campesina
has noted that agri-power no longer resides in control over land, rather it
resides in the relations that surround agricultural production – those that
‘‘control loans, materials supply, the dissemination of new technologies,
such as transgenic products, on the one hand, and those that control na-
tional and international product warehousing systems, transportation, dis-
tribution and retail sales to the consumer, on the other hand, have real
power’’ (Vı
´a Campesina, 2004a, p. 5). As Burch and Lawrence (2004) QA :12have
shown, one pertinent form of this reconstitution is the rise of highly inno-
vative and flexible (generic) ‘own brand’ agri-food manufacturers serving
supermarket chains (with specialty foods, including home meal replace-
ments, organic foods, functional foods and prepared dietary products) and
challenging the independence of brand-based manufacturing capital in the
supply chain stemming from the so-called Fordist era.
Second, the privatization of states via the relations of financialization,
including WTO trade and investment rules, reconstitutes capital on a global
scale, and the transformation of food security into a private relation
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(McMichael, 2004b). Under this dynamic, agricultural protections mutate
from a public food security/self-sufficiency goal into a goal of subsidizing
corporate agriculture, agro-exporting, and global sourcing, facilitated by the
power relations within the WTO, as well as currency devaluations induced
by structural-adjustment policies in the global South.
Third, the priority given to the reproduction of money has specific po-
litical and social consequences. The preservation of money value increas-
ingly governs institutional politics in global and national arenas,
generalizing a cycle of liberalization and crisis management through struc-
tural adjustment, at the expense of sustained social policies. Globally, the
casualization of labor through redundancy and flexibility practices is linked
to, and conditioned by, peasant expropriation. This reserve army of labor,
within a transnational space governed by WTO principles of liberalization,
is the foundation for capitalist development on a global scale.
CONCLUSION
The argument of this chapter is that the ‘food regime’ is a vector of social
reproduction of capital on a world scale. As such, it expresses the genetic
structure of capitalism in the accumulation/dispossession dynamic, and the
political structure insofar as states govern transnational circuits of food, and
their role in subsidizing the wage relation. Nonetheless geo-politics and the
accumulation/legitimation dialectic order the political history of capitalism
in distinct ways. The moment of world capitalism that defines the corporate
food regime is realized through the construction of a world agriculture. The
discursive element of this construction is akin to Cameron and Palan’s
‘‘imagined economies of globalization’’ (2004, p. 15), where authority and
sovereignty no longer inhabit the same space. These imagined economies
inhabit ‘‘different normative and cognitive spaces whereby the boundaries
of the state yare rendered multiple, complex and dynamic’’ (ibid., pp. 15–
17), and while they have an ontological force, ‘‘their importance lies less in
what they describe than in what they narrate. In representing a dynamic
respatialization of social and economic relations, the discourses of global-
ization and exclusion posit the immanent development of new spatial forms
to which policy-makers, industrialists, jurists and ordinary people must
adapt’’ (ibid., p. 20). Such construction of a world agriculture serves to
legitimize this transnational circuit and its assault on peasant cultures, as a
condition for global food security.
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The immanence of a world agriculture is ultimately shaped by the world-
historical conjuncture, which I specify via analytical comparison. Polanyi
viewed the institution of the self-regulating market as an attempt to com-
modify land, labor and money, and the protectionist movement as a coun-
ter-movement of regulation of each of these social substances. The counter-
movement involved a cumulative politics of nation-state formation, whereby
labor legislation, agrarian protectionism, and central banking attempted to
re-embed the market in society. But this was a nineteenth and early twen-
tieth-century double movement that configured the modern welfare/devel-
opment state (McMichael, 2005b). In the twenty-first century, this trinity no
longer operates through the same double movement. Rather, the regulation
of money is no longer vested in the state per se, but in instrumentalities such
as the IMF, whose task has become a generalized imperative to reproduce
(corporate) money through expending labor and land across the world with
decreasing regard for their sustainability. The construction of a world ag-
riculture, deepening the instrumental use, misuse, and abandonment of
natural and social resources, unfolds within this general imperative.
Arguably, the food sovereignty movement is the most direct symptom of
this socio-ecological crisis, especially insofar as it embodies a diversity of
responses corresponding to the re-spatialization of social and economic re-
lations in the corporate food regime. As an expression of the corporate food
regime, it reveals both the immanent, and the historical, conditions govern-
ing the politics of capitalist development in the twenty-first century. That is,
in the crisis of the Doha Round, the discourse of development is most
clearly framed by the dialectic of ‘food security’ versus ‘food sovereignty.’
UNCITED REFERENCES
Araghi (2003); Barndt (1997); Burch, Lawrence, (forthcoming); Cameron &
Palan (2004); Fanon (1967); Friedmann (1993); Hardt & Negri (2000); Starr
(2001); Vı
´a Campesina (1999); Vı
´a Campesina (2004b); Wallerstein (1995).
NOTES
1. In relation to Harriet Friedmann’s chapter in this volume, which reworks the
‘food regime’ concept in politico-normative terms, I offer a complementary use of the
food regime as a vector of the social reproduction of capital on a world scale, and as
a lens focusing on the social fact of dispossession. While a ‘price-governed market’ is
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the common feature of food regimes, the construction of this relationship is specific
to the historical conjuncture in which each operates.
2. By the mid-1990s, 80 percent of farm subsidies in the OECD countries con-
centrated on the largest 20 percent of (corporate) farms, rendering small farmers
increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a de-regulated (and increasingly pri-
vately managed) global market for agricultural products. U.S. farm income declined
by almost 50 percent between 1996 and 1999 (Gorelick, 2000, pp. 28–30), and Europe
lost half of its full-time equivalent agricultural employment between 1980 and 2001,
with the equivalent of 1 million farm jobs disappearing in the latter half of the 1990s
(Herman & Kuper, 2003, pp. 29–40).
3. Dumping was institutionalized within the WTO, via what is know as the ‘Blair
House Agreement,’ concerning exports, negotiated between the U.S. and the E.U.
The agreement ‘‘tied reductions in both domestic support and export subsidies to
baseline levels of 1986, when stocks and subsidies were at their peak, thus giving both
the E.U and the U.S. ample flexibility in meeting their obligations,’’ and established a
‘peace clause’ regarding action against farm support programs and export subsidies
(Dawkins, 1999). The legitimation of export subsidies (for 25 of 132 WTO members)
perversely allowed the U.S. and the E.U to intensify export dumping such that ‘‘just
3 (members) are responsible for 93% of all subsidized wheat exports and just 2 of
them are responsible for subsidizing 94% of butter and 80% of beef exports’’ (Da-
wkins, 1999).
4. Thus, in 2001, President Bush proclaimed, on the eve of the WTO Doha Min-
isterial, ‘I want America to feed the world yIt starts with having an administration
committed to knocking down barriers to trade, and we are’ (quoted in IUF 2002, p.
4). The associated U.S. vision of a ‘global agriculture’ is premised on the superiority
of a corporate-dominated world market for foodstuffs over domestic food systems
(Peine & McMichael, 2005).
5. ‘‘Typically, a crop development conglomerate is organized around one OECD-
based transnational enterprise (TNE), rooted in the chemical, pharmaceutical, or
food processing industry. This TNE maintains a network of linkages with one or
more plant breeding firms, new biology firms, genomics and software firms, and also
with public research institutes. The nature of the linkages is diverse and varies from
temporary research collaboration to complete take-overs’’ (Pistorius & van Wijk,
1999, p. 118).
6. The TRIPs protocol requires states to regulate biological resources, whether
through patenting or an effective sui generis system, deriving from the 1992 Con-
vention on Biological Diversity. Although the protocol is yet to be universally im-
plemented, states choosing the latter path remain under pressure to market their
genetic resources for foreign exchange (McMichael, 2003, pp. 183–184).
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