The Rural

Critical Essays in Human Geography

Richard Munton, Richard Munton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351882378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The rural has long been regarded as an important site of geographical inquiry even if our understanding of it has not always been treated as conceptually different from the urban. That said, rural research has pursued a number of distinct empirical agendas ranging from the operation and impacts of agribusiness, to local resistance to global food supply chains, to differing representations of the rural. In doing so, rural geographers have critically examined the relevance and significance of ideas drawn from numerous traditions including political economy, ecological modernization and cultural theory, amending them as appropriate, in their search to understand the nature and trajectory of rural areas. Up until the 1980s, attention remained largely focused upon agriculture as the primary land-use but increasingly new forms of rural consumption - housing, recreation, nature conservation - have taken centre stage as the primacy of local agricultures has been undermined by reduced state protection and 'new' rural populations which have migrated out from the city. More recently, research has been dominated by the 'cultural turn' with particular emphases upon society-nature relations, interpretations of landscape, marginalised others, and analyses of the relations between representation and practice. In the last decade, a more holistic view of the rural, bringing together different aspects of the two previous themes, has emerged through more politically-oriented studies of rural governance concerned with the functioning of interest groups, participation, protest and the allocation and management of resources. The volume is thus structured into three sections concerned with agriculture and food, the rural, and rural governance. The great majority of the selected papers combine both empirical material - often highly informative case studies - and important conceptual arguments about change in the rural condition that can be linked to ideas being employed elsewhere in Geography and the Social Sciences more generally. These critical reflections have been drawn very largely from research conducted in advanced economies which at least provide some commonality of experience allowing the transfer of ideas between what otherwise might be seen as very differing geographical contexts.

Part I
Agriculture and Food

[1]
The New Industrial Agriculture: The Regional Integration of Specialty Crop Production

Margaret FitzSimmons

University of California, Los Angeles

Studies within the theoretical framework of “the new industrial geography” have depended on manufacturing and service industries, overlooking the primary sector. When compared with manufacture, agriculture exhibits similarities and distinctions which reveal the particular historical role of natural processes and cycles in restricting the conditions of profitable production, systematically distinguishing agriculture from manufacturing and encouraging subsectoral differentiation around particular commodity complexes. This case study of specialty crop production shows that agriculture is also being restructured—vertically integrated by the concentration of control (within marketing and processing firms) over the production process at the same time as production activities within the farm and the sector are vertically disintegrated through a complex web of capacity and specialty subcontracting. Discovery of these integrated processes can lead to new understanding of the forces which produce agricultural regions.

The “new industrial geography” represents a topical and theoretical shift away from prior themes in economic geography. In place of abstract location models which assume continuity of the essential components of the economy—the firm, the labor force, the business environment, even the product—this approach examines the practices, institutions, and social relations of economic activity as complexly determined in social form, time, and space.

Though proponents of this perspective are committed to sectoral comparisons, most empirical work has been clustered about the traditional manufacturing industries of the American Snow Belt and the English Midlands, focusing upon the insurgent high-technology industries of the U.S. Southwest and English south [5; 14; 46; 56]. This is a consequence of the recent decline of the old regions and the explosive growth of new industrial zones. These situations draw attention to circumstances of crisis on which the old theories were silent. However, study of a few specific industries and circumstances carries substantial theoretical risks, of “essentialism” through the formalization of time- and place-bound observations as general laws or tendencies [66] or of misidentification of necessary and contingent causes [59].

In this paper I apply certain concepts of the new economic geography to agriculture, an industry regularly overlooked in work from this perspective. This neglect may stem from a recent decline in interest in agriculture among theoretically-oriented economic geographers. Though agriculture stimulated numerous von Thunen models and studies of innovation diffusion into the early 1960s [12; 34], geographers subsequently seem to have concluded that international markets had reworked the spatial organization of farming to the point where modern spatial patterns were the product of varying environmental parameters, of physical variations in comparative advantage as Baker had earlier suggested [2]. This presumption depends on what the rural sociologists Friedland and Thomas [25] call “agricultural exceptionalism,” i.e., the assumption that, though we now understand manufacturing and the service sector to be more complexly structured, agriculture is composed of myriad small producers in near-perfect competition. If perfect competition reigns and environmental factors dominate agricultural geography, the agricultural sector is straightforwardly organized and in constant near-equilibrium, and there is little to interest contemporary economic geographers.

In fact, agriculture is not characterized by simple competition among similar firms. In the last fifty years specialization in agriculture has proceeded until the sector is best treated not as a homogeneous whole but as a complex set of specialized subsectors organized by commodity groups. Control of production of most commodities is now concentrated in large agricultural corporations as producers, processors, and distributors. This concentration of control has integrated farms into the world economy and broken down local systems, making smaller producers more vulnerable to national and international perturbations in interest rates, foreign trade conditions, and the price of inputs. In many areas the role and circumstances of farm workers and the environmental consequences of farm activities are also matters of concern. At the same time, this increased systemic vulnerability is offset somewhat by a more fluid and elaborate differentiation of a complex production space within which regions are constantly both distinguished and integrated.

Moreover, agriculture is also in crisis. In much of the United States, farm foreclosures have increased to a level equalled only during the Depression. Even major creditors—banks, insurance companies, and the semi-public farm credit system— find it difficult to absorb the results of such dislocation. The effects of this restructuring are differentially distributed by region and subsector but appear likely to multiply throughout the agricultural economy.

In this paper I treat the differences between agriculture and manufacture observed historically as related to the effects of the temporality of natural processes and to the uneven development of production organization in these two sectors of economic activity. I address three questions which might be applied to agriculture from within the theoretical structures of the new industrial geography: How and to what degree has industrial agriculture come to resemble manufacturing? What forms do the processes of vertical integration and disintegration take in agriculture? and, What might study of the primary sector offer to the general theoretical development of the new industrial geography? Primary data for the paper is drawn from an extended study of the Salinas Valley of California, one of the richest farm regions in the United States [24]. I refer to other agricultural production systems where appropriate and discuss some of the paths by which subsectoral differentiation has proceeded in agriculture.

The Industrialization of Agriculture

To assess the industrialization of agriculture, “industrialization” must be defined. In the agriculture literature the term is often untheorized, used chaotically to acknowledge change in the structure of agricultural production which adds up to the end of agricultural exceptionalism. Changes noted include increased labor productivity, purchased farm inputs and machines, crop specialization, land reorganization, huge irrigation works, international markets, complex output processing, and the appearance of large corporations.

The social forces underlying these changes are a source of disagreement among scholars. In the neoclassical view, industrialization is driven by technological change as firms prepared to implement advances in agricultural production technology displace now-inefficient marginal firms [54]. To agrarian populists, industrialization results from political and financial power, not increased efficiency [29; 47; 57; 79]. Marxist studies of industrialization in agriculture emphasize the transformation from petty commodity production to capitalist production, with a shift to wage labor, increasing capital investment, and intensified competition leading to rapid agglomeration of enterprises [4; 18; 19]. In fact, in the United States true petty commodity production—farms owned and worked by family members alone—has been an ideal type, always uncommon and now largely limited to particular commodity subsectors where it may be a transitory form.

I treat industrialization as a resolution of certain distinctions in the circumstances of production and accumulation which formerly appeared between agriculture and manufacture. These distinctions were well described by Karl Marx, an acute nineteenth-century observer.

Marx [40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45] saw production in agriculture as differing from manufacturing because agriculture was comparatively restricted by particular constraints: in the productivity of labor, in the difference between production time and necessary labor time, in the circumstances of circulation and the realization of value, and in the peculiar importance of private property in land. Together, Marx suggested, these constraints disadvantaged investment in agriculture in the rate of appropriation and accumulation of surplus value (in money terms, profit) and in the allocation of this surplus.

The productivity of labor increased more slowly in agriculture than in manufacture. In part, this resulted from slower growth of scientific knowledge to control the natural processes involved [44, p. 110]. Agriculture depends on chemistry and biology to a greater degree than did early manufacturing, and knowledge developed more slowly in these sciences than in mechanical engineering. So, technological changes in agriculture were long limited to physcial manipulation of the soil and the harvestable product. Manufacturers could intensify production through extension of the working day, through an elaborated and articulated division of labor, and through the use of supplemental labor-saving machinery. Without effective control over biological and chemical factors—crop genetics, plant nutrition, and disease and pest control—farmers could not accelerate or standardize agricultural production.

Production time in agriculture differs substantially from the direct labor time required. The pace of farm production is largely determined by environmental and biological factors, the seasons, and the particular characteristics of the crop. From soil preparation through harvest, storage, and processing, labor is required only occasionally. Since farmworkers must be paid wages which support them throughout the year, they may not be working continuously, the rate of profit is reduced. Traditional diversified farming systems accommodated this interrupted labor process by temporal integration of production tasks for various products. When expanding markets intensified competition, encouraging specialization by farm and region, farmers were driven to one of two solutions: heavy investment in machines used episodically by a stable labor force, or complex regional social forms which provided casual labor in large numbers when needed. Both strategies resolve this difficulty only partially, however, since capital invested in heavy farm implements is employed only periodically, and casual labor systems, however regionally integrated, carry heavy transaction costs for both workers and employers.

The problem posed by investment in farm machinery is a special case of a more general problem of investment. The long period required for the production of most crops presents what Marx referred to as a “problem of circulation and the realization of value.” In many crops, investment is made at the beginning of the crop year and profits are realized at the end, often only one production cycle each year. Farmers become particularly dependent for operating capital on annual loan rollovers, funds available directly to moderate-sized farmers only against equity in land and equipment. Profits realized cannot be reinvested as quickly as in manufacture, restricting the cumulative annual rate of profit on the original investment. Land and machinery investments are large-scale investments which must be amortized over long periods, making it difficult for farmers to respond to “market signals.” This intensifies cycles of under- and over-production of particular commodities, which strongly affect profits and greatly increase investment risk. Though in the United States farm operators, unlike manufacturers, are permitted to join together to moderate production, this has had limited effect in stabilizing wholesale product prices, given economic and environmental variability.

Finally, farming is more dependent on land than is manufacture. For all farmers, land is a means of production for which there are no substitutes, an inescapable cost of production whose price is influenced by not just area and location in reference to a generalized rent surface but also by fertility and climate. Further, land markets are complex, localized, affected by demands arising outside the agricultural sector, and relatively “sticky” in response to economic fluctuations. Farmers who own or lease land cannot rapidly reduce or expand this investment as other conditions change. Fertility can be exhausted by farming, and competitive pressures make it hard for farmers to avoid such resource extraction.

Marx anticipated that these distinctions between agriculture and manufacture might disappear: they were moments in a historical process of uneven development of two sectors of necessary productive activity, under capitalism.

Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same times it creates the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have acquired during their...