Ecology, Capitalism and the New Agricultural Economy

The Second Great Transformation

Gilles Allaire, Benoit Daviron, Gilles Allaire, Benoit Daviron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351210027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

With increasing pressure on resources, the looming spectre of climate change and growing anxiety among eaters, ecology and food are at the heart of the political debates surrounding agriculture and diet. This unique contribution unravels agri-environmental issues at different spatial levels, from local to global, documenting the major shifts in agriculture from a long-term perspective.

The book begins by exploring the changes in the industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture over time, through the lens of institutional economics including The French Regulation School and Conventions Theory. Building on Polanyi's 'Great Transformation', the chapters in this volume analyse long-term and contemporary changes in agriculture and food systems that have occurred throughout the last few centuries. Key chapters focus on the historical changes in provisioning and the social relations of production, consumption, and regulation of food in different socio-political contexts. The future of agriculture is addressed through an analysis of controversial contemporary political claims and their engagement with strategies that aim to improve the sustainability of agriculture and food consumption.

To shed light on ongoing changes and the future of food, this book asks important environmental and social questions and analyses how industrial agriculture has played out in various contexts. It is recommended supplementary reading for postgraduates and researchers in agricultural studies, food studies, food policy, the agri-food political economy and political and economic geography.

1 Introduction

Industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture, towards new regimes

Gilles Allaire and Benoit Daviron

Landscape ecologies and food production and consumption remain major concerns across global ecosystems. This book assembles research from world-leading scholars to explore these issues from an institutionalist perspective that builds directly on the established French Regulation School and Conventions Theory approach to agri-food governance, through novel empirical and theoretical contributions to contemporary questions of food, agriculture and ecology. Going beyond classical French Regulation Theory, with its focus on national ‘regimes of accumulation’ and ‘modes of regulation’, this volume addresses transnational ecological issues that are novel expressions of the global agri-food economy in order to open up new conceptual spaces and theoretical understandings of these issues. Through novel empirical cases and theorisation – namely through engagements with modern economic sociology, political and ecological economy and institutional economics – this book extends institutional approaches and Regulation Theory to capture contemporary changes, impacts and outcomes of global capitalist agri-food and ecological development.

To shed light on the ongoing changes and the future, the book engages with a series of long-term transformations of agriculture and food throughout the 20th century. That century saw wars and violent class struggles, changes in dominant forces and world order, and changes in the nature of capitalism, which today structure the whole world economy. We propose to analyse and discuss these transformations around two processes: the industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture. While these notions have more general uses, we consider here the industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture as processes characteristic of historical capitalism from the end of 19th century.

Industrialisation is a longstanding systemic transformation process characterised by the massive injection of fossil energy into agricultural production. It is defined both by the use of fossil fuels, synthetic fertilisers, biocides and farm machinery and by the spread of generic technical skills. Historically, agriculture has been more or less mechanised using self-built devices, but industrialisation requires a growing investment in inputs from the chemical, mechanical equipment and energy industries and a corresponding need for financial resources and participation in the market, thereby transforming family agriculture. Industrialisation changes both the agricultural ‘metabolic regime’ (Krausmann and Fischer-Kowalski, 2012), and the organisation and the nature of productive work.¹ First, with the use of synthetic and mineral fertiliser, it offers a radical new way to produce and manage soil fertility and to increase yields. Second, it revolutionises manual labour by the use of petrol- or electric-powered engines. Third, and more recently, it is extended by the increasing role of information systems and codified knowledge (progressively from the 1980s), including genetic selection, robotisation and labelling. Public, collective and private investments in these domains have increased from the turn of the 21st century.

Agricultural industrialisation gave humanity the opportunity to escape the curse of Malthus and Boserup: increasing labour productivity was now accompanied by increasing yields. According to Malthus, humans face a given amount of natural resources and technology, and thus have to confront repeated periods of disequilibrium between population numbers and the available food supply that can only lead to demographic collapse (Malthus, 1803). Boserup’s (1965) thesis is less famous and she built her analysis in opposition to Malthus. Basing her argument on a large body of diverse cases, she showed that, far from being fixed, the technologies a society masters respond to demographic pressure, for example, by reducing fallow periods. But she also demonstrates that increased yield is only made possible by an increased amount of human labour, and generally involves a fall in labour productivity.

Simultaneous increases in yields and labour productivity (and, in fact, lower inputs of agricultural labour) that have occurred since 1945 represent a major change in the history of humanity. This can only be understood if one considers that agricultural modernisation not only resulted from the progress of science and improved varieties, but from a positive transfer of energy and matter. Thus, Boserup’s argument is accurate in terms of systemic energy expenditures: increased yields can only be achieved by an increase of energy inputs. During most of human history, this energy was mainly human labour, possibly supplemented by that of animals. During the second phase of the industrial metabolic regime, fossil energy replaced animal and human energies.

In this book, we use the term socialisation to refer to the mediation devices that link individuals and groups or classes to society as a whole. It is a historical dialectic between the irresistible human quest for autonomy and the enlargement of the social structures characterising modernity (Aron, 1969). In a Regulationist perspective, socialisation corresponds to a set of institutional mediations shaping social identities, which allow coherent regimes of growth but which can also fail. Markets function as sites of struggle over values and are in relationship with the creation and evolution of social rights, both collective and personal. From such a Regulationist perspective, we use the notion of the capitalist socialisation of agriculture, referring both to the hegemony of the logic of accumulation and the integration of rural classes in capitalist societies.²

The longstanding socialisation process includes the formation of national agricultural policies and international markets. It corresponds to both the integration of agri-food sectors in a logic of capital accumulation and to the restructuring of peasant and rural classes in an urban economy and economic culture, depending on historical context. National agricultural policies create social rights resulting from social security programmes and specific ways to regulate markets, and thus institutionalise the status of family agricultural labour. But socialisation takes different forms depending on the periods and countries, with different roles for the market, nation-state policy, and social class struggles and compromises in shaping institutional mediations.

Standardisation of resources, products and markets, as well as the individualisation with respect to the shifting social organisation of production and forms of consumption, are part of the socialisation process. The socialisation of agriculture is nested in a wider process of social transformation that emerged with the ‘modernity’ expectations at the end of the 19th century in the USA, Western Europe, and parts of Latin America, with the expansion of the share of monetary earnings in family revenues and of the commodification of food and progressively all of the vital resources.

Peasant classes engaged in socialisation with a claim for autonomy, which translated into both an acceptance of the bourgeois ideology of free enterprise and the important development of agricultural cooperatives movements at several scales and in various domains. This socialisation was primarily supported by farmers’ collective action and makes the rural classes part of the whole society but as a distinct component governed by corporatist organisation and a set of specific public regulations encapsulated in national agricultural policies. Transformations in this mode of regulation, which were initiated in the context of the 1970s crisis, have disrupted stable social mediations, both in the global North and the South. In this new context, food demand becomes organised around the differentiation of product chains and food services, and is associated with a more general change in the competition regime in the post-Fordist period (Petit, 1998). It is part and parcel of the movement of agricultural policy liberalisation initiated in OECD countries after the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). At the same time, new actors emerge in the socialisation of agriculture when environmental issues enter political agendas. Socialisation today happens in a new media order defined by ambivalent processes creating new individual concerns and new communities. While we can observe significant changes in several aspects of individual and collective life in different segments of the contemporaneous societies, the future is largely uncertain.

Two great transformations in the political economies of food and agriculture

The main historic period addressed by the book covers two ‘Great Transformations’ of agriculture and agri-food political economy characterised by epochal changes in the industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture. These two Great Transformations, named following Polanyi (1944), can be interpreted as historical social reactions following periods of domination of liberal thought.³ The first Great Transformation gave birth to the Fordist era. As with the first, the second Great Transformation originates from the reaction to the false promise of a self-governing market, which reappeared with the abandonment of Keynesianism and the justification of deregulation in a neoliberal era. In addition, these two major transformations are also a reaction, but by no means a solution, to the ecological crisis, of, for example, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal (Worster, 1979), and the current energy and climate crisis of what we call the second Great Transformation.

The first Great Transformation of agriculture, which culminated after WWII with the industrial model of the Fordist era (Allaire and Boyer, 1995), boosted production to feed the world, including animal proteins, according to the consumption norm developing with the rise of wages in the global economy, the wealth distribution issue aside. Poverty had certainly not been removed but the advanced societies and the world more generally overcame the Malthusian curse, to a large extent.

As a longstanding transformation of production logics, this process inscribes itself in a change of metabolic regime with the use of fossil biomass (Daviron and Allaire, this volume). The integration of agri-food markets at the national and international levels and national market regulation policies organised the socialisation of agriculture corresponding to the industrialisation model based on the high productivity of mechanical and chemical investment in the agri-food sectors. The accumulation of capital concerned both the physical (the engines but also animals considered as machines) and technical (articulated with the experimental sciences). These investments were ‘socialised’, meaning they were supported and guaranteed by public policies, according to Keynes.⁴ Even though the share of agriculture declined in the global economy, the agri-food complex remains important and accumulation in these areas remains a key component of aggregate demand until at least the 1970s.

Kenney et al. (1989) developed the Regulationist framework to understand transformations in US agriculture during the Fordist era and the agricultural debt crisis of the 1980s. In France, to analyse the agricultural accumulation regime after WWII (Bertrand, 1980) and the mode of regulation installed in the 1960s, Allaire (1988) adopted the same Regulationist framework, though these works were developed independently.⁵ Overall, a variety of works were developed in the 1990s to characterise or criticise this first Great Transformation in agri-food economy.

As termed by Bonanno and Busch (2015: 2), in the case of the USA,

The political economy of agriculture of this Fordist era featured state promoted intervention in a variety of areas, including land redistribution, infrastructure building, publicly sponsored research and development, and price control and commodity programs. The declared goal was to increase production and productivity in order to generate abundant food to feed the growing domestic and world population.

The dynamics of agricultural growth, the policies, and their justification, were similar in Europe but also, with the Green Revolution, in a number of less-developed countries of the Global South, where Fordism involved primarily the application of modernisation policies in peasant-dominated economies (e.g. the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s). Thus, this Fordist-intensive type of agricultural modernisation expanded to countries that traditionally were agricultural exporters.

The political economy of agriculture of this Fordist era also pursued social and economic parity in line with the social benefit and average income enjoyed by the majority of waged society. According to classic French Regulationist authors, the ‘wage nexus’, or employee–capital relation, is the dominant structural or institutional form determining the general regimes of accumulation. Nevertheless, according to work introduced by Aglietta and Brender (1984), in Fordist economies, all types of enterprises and independent or liberal workers, including peasant categories, are included by various mechanisms in the wage society.⁶ Fordist national agricultural policies integrated family agriculture in wage-society mediations. States were socialising investments and instituting mechanisms to stabilise incomes of the farms involved in modernisation (i.e. the social basis for accumulation) and to cover agricultural workers’ social risks (i.e. social security or retirement pensions). In this context, the consolidation of medium-sized farms and the migration of the rural population to the cities – including Mexicans to the US or southern Mediterranean peoples to Northern Europe – was part of the social compromise around the industrialisation of agriculture and food production. Until the recent economic crisis, the wage society extended throughout the world, absorbing a substantial portion of rural classes.

Following his election to the US presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan implemented sweeping new liberal political and economic ideas. Reagan’s counter-revolution had four pillars: tax cuts for the rich; a reduction in spending on education, infrastructure, energy, climate change and vocational training; a huge increase in military expenses; and deregulation of the economy, including the privatisation of public services. Thatcher followed the same orientation in the UK, and more generally neoliberalism inspired monetary and economic policies in the capitalist world. The Reagan administration saw the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as an opportunity to rewrite US agriculture and food policy, and OECD national agricultural policies were progressively liberalised.

The increase in interest rates, costs of agricultural production, and the instability of market prices at several different times from the 1970s and in different countries put farmers in serious financial difficulties, resulting in the closure of farms, and more wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture, towards new regimes
• PART I: Novel approaches and theories of global agri-economies in the second Great Transformation
• PART II: Ongoing transformations of the agri-economy
• PART III: Cases studies Competition in markets and policies
• Index