The agrarian question, like most questions about the trajectory of (capitalist) development, was framed as a national question about a national process. This article critiques the latter assumption, arguing, as Karl Polanyi did, that the classical agrarian question was a national interpretation of a global process. It also argues that the current processes of globalization crystallize the
... [Show full abstract] agrarian question in new and challenging ways. The key to these arguments is that the capitalist organization of agriculture is a political process, and is central to the dynamics of an evolving state system (including supra-statal institutions). The discussion contextualizes agricultural developments within the contradictory dynamics of the two main periods of world capitalism over the last century: the national (developmentalist) and the global movements. The crisis of developmentalism coincides with the crisis of the post-Second World War food regime. It is currently generating new social movements that combine original and tenure questions with food and green questions, reversing the anti-agrarianism of the development, or productivist, paradigm.