BRICS and MICs: Implications for Global Agrarian Transformation

Ben Cousins, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Sérgio Sauer, Jingzhong Ye

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The economic and political rise of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and powerful middle-income countries (MICs) such as Argentina, Indonesia and Turkey, has far-reaching implications for global agrarian transformation. These countries are key sites of agricultural commodity production, distribution, circulation and consumption and are contributing to major shifts in the character of agro-food systems.

This comprehensive collection explores these issues through the lens of critical agrarian studies, which examine fundamental social change in, and in relation to, rural worlds. The authors explore key themes such as the processes of agrarian change associated with individual countries within the grouping, the role and impact of BRICS countries within their respective regions, the role of other MICs within these regions and the rising importance of MICs within global and regional agro-food systems. The book encompasses a wide variety of case studies, including the expansion of South African agrarian capital within Africa; Brazil as a regional agro-food power and its complex relationship with China, which has been investing heavily in Brazil; the role of BRICS and MICs in Bolivia's soy complex; crop booms within China; China's role in land deals in Southeast Asia; and Vietnamese investment in Cambodia.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers of critical agrarian studies, with a focus on BRICS and MICs. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

BRICS, middle-income countries (MICs), and global agrarian transformations: internal dynamics, regional trends, and international implications

Ben Cousins, Saturnino M. Borras, Sérgio Sauer and Jingzhong Ye

ABSTRACT
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries are emerging as key sites of agricultural commodity production, distribution, circulation, and consumption, contributing to major shifts in the character of regional and global agro-food systems. Their growing importance within the world food economy presents new challenges for scholars, activists, policy-makers, and development practitioners. The articles in this collection are located in their wider context, and the significance of their insights for a longer term research agenda within critical agrarian studies is explored. Four key themes are discussed: processes of agrarian change under way within BRICS countries; the role and impacts of BRICS countries in their respective regions; the rising importance of middle-income countries (MICs) within global and regional agro-food systems; and how the recent emergence of forms of populism, authoritarianism, and combinations of these two (i.e. ‘authoritarian populism’) is linked to the rise of the BRICS.

Introduction: framing a research agenda for critical agrarian studies

The economic and political rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries and powerful middle-income countries (MICs) such as Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Turkey, more or less from the early 1990s onwards, has far-reaching implications for global agrarian transformation. These countries are emerging as key sites of commodity production, distribution, circulation, and consumption, including in relation to agricultural commodities, and are contributing to major shifts in the character of regional and global agro-food systems. The five BRICS countries are working both separately, and increasingly together, to shape international development agendas, both as partners in and perhaps as an alternative to the mainstream development paradigms promoted by the traditional hubs of global capital and western-dominated international financial institutions such as the World Bank.

The rise of the BRICS countries alongside some powerful MICs, and emerging alliances between them, has sparked debates about whether or not they herald a new era for international economy and politics. Do they constitute an alternative to the conventional North Atlantic-anchored neoliberal prescription for capitalist development, or are their models of development problematic in both old and new ways (Bond & Garcia, 2015; Scoones, Amanor, Favareto, & Qi, 2016; Taylor, 2014)? More profoundly, the growing importance of BRICS countries within the world economy challenges dominant conceptions of global inequality, in which the North–South divide is viewed the most significant axis of major differences in power and wealth. What appears to be an evolving polycentric world order presents new challenges to, as well as opportunities for, scholars, activists, policy-makers, development practitioners, and other actors, and processes of knowledge production need to respond to these.

In this introduction, we locate the articles in this special issue in their wider context, and explore the implications of the rise of the BRICS countries for critical agrarian studies. The latter focuses on questions of fundamental social change in relation to rural worlds, including the role of unequal power relations among and between agrarian classes and other social groups.

Constructing a research agenda for critical agrarian studies of the BRICS has to build on the insights of what other scholars have contributed to understanding the dynamics and impacts of this grouping of countries, especially those located in the disciplines of international political economy, international relations, international development studies, strategic, and geopolitical studies. A critical agrarian studies focus is urgent and necessary, in our view, because the rural dimensions of the BRICS are a strategically important component of these emerging realities, but are somewhat under-studied at present. It is true that academic research on the role of agriculture in bilateral relations between BRICS countries has blossomed in recent years, but most of these initiatives have been somewhat Africa-centric to date, and have tended to focus on the impact of development policies pursued by a specific BRICS country in African contexts: China in Africa, Brazil in Africa, and so on (Amanor & Chichava, 2016; Cabral, Favareto, Mukwereza, & Amanor, 2016; Hall, Scoones, & Tsikata, 2015; Scoones et al., 2016; Scoones, Cabral, & Tugendhat, 2013). This work has produced important insights, for example, on the influence of a country’s history of agrarian development on how it frames programmes of developmental assistance to African countries. In attempting to construct a wider research agenda, it is important to build on high-quality scholarship of this kind – but also to expand the focus of work, as required.¹

Key themes: agrarian change in BRICS countries

Much current scholarly research on the rise of the BRICS and MICs, while focusing on critically important themes such as impacts on the character of the global political economy, has left key gaps in relation to agrarian change, which the current collection attempts to address. It is important to note some key features of this work. First, the primary concern of these authors is not the nature and impacts of BRICS as an organization, but rather processes associated with individual countries within the grouping, both within their national borders and in their regional contexts. Second, although this collection does focus on the role and impacts of BRICS countries in other regions, such as investments by Chinese companies in Brazil (i.e. on inter-regional dynamics), equally important, but generally absent in the literature, is a key focus on BRICS countries in their respective regions (i.e. on intra-regional dynamics). Third, as a result of this intra-regional lens, authors also focus on the role of other important players within the respective regions, namely, MICs. The rising importance of MICs within global and regional agro-food systems is another under-explored dimension of contemporary agrarian transformations. These are evident in differences between the expanding activities and impacts of China in Southeast Asia vis-à-vis those of Thailand in East and Southeast Asia, and the complex role of Argentinian soya seed firms in the Brazilian seed industry. Fourth, the rise of different forms of populism, authoritarianism, and combinations of these two (i.e. ‘authoritarian populism’) is one of the defining features of the current political moment among BRICS countries, as well as many of the MICs, and key developed countries such as the United States and many countries in Europe. Our hunch is that the rise of populism, authoritarianism, or authoritarian populism in various parts of the world is interconnected, and that their rural roots and dynamics, although largely under-studied to date, need to be better understood (Scoones et al., 2018).

This collection, together with the recent set of papers published in Third World Thematics, can to be seen as a preliminary attempt to help kick-start a conversation around these themes, and to shape an emerging research agenda. Below we argue why such a research agenda matters for critical agrarian studies.

Internal agrarian transformations within BRICS countries

In each of the BRICS countries, profound changes are under way in rural society and their agrarian economies. These include increased levels of concentration in landholdings, changes in the character of rural–urban links, shifting patterns of migration, the promotion of smallholder farming alongside the rise of corporate agribusiness, increasing degrees of vertical integration within value chains, the intensified ‘supermarketization’ of food retailing, and different combinations of these processes. Understanding why BRICS countries have aggressively crossed borders to seize and take control of natural resources (land, water, seas, forests, minerals, commodity chain, and so on) in distant places requires getting to grips with the concrete conditions found in these settings, as well as identifying accumulation imperatives within the BRICS countries. These play out in various interrelated ways, including: (a) an over-accumulation of capital and hence the need to invest it elsewhere; this is evident in the Belt and Road Initiative of China; (b) the need to secure cheaper sources of the means of agrarian production (land, labour, raw materials); this is largely what has been driving the global land/resource rush that has involved the BRICS countries as farmland investors; (c) the limits of domestic markets within the BRICS countries, and the need to gain control of lucrative markets abroad; and (d) more straightforward political motivations, such as the need to secure a stable supply of cheap food for internal consumption, to appease an inherently politically volatile working class and ensure affordable food provisioning.

In addition, and closely linked to the above processes, a fuller understanding of why the BRICS countries have engaged in aggressive cross-border economic and political activities over the past two decades requires a systematic understanding of internal agrarian transformations within these countries. This in turn requires us to examine BRICS countries as key sites of the contemporary commodification of remaining agrarian commons’ (land, water, seas, forest, and minerals) and labour, intimately related to the extension of the broader spheres and structures of commodity production, distribution, circulation, and consumption – and how these are dialectically linked to ‘external’ social, economic, and political processes. This is evident in a number of ways, two of which are strategically important.

On the one hand, we see a significant restructuring of commodity production, distribution, and circulation dynamics within these countries and beyond. For instance, the demise of soya production inside China was not an accident. Considerations of productivity and competitiveness motivated a government policy decision to aggressively outsource soya production (Hairong, Yiyuan, & Bun, 2016), thus triggering the rise of a BRICS country, Brazil – in combination with an MIC, Argentina, as a new global hub of soya capitalism, with far-reaching implications for the United States, the traditional site of most soya production and consumption (Oliveira, 2016, 2017; Oliveira & Schneider, 2016). Ripple effects included the emergence of a soya complex in the southern cone of Latin America (Escher, Schneider, & Ye, 2017; Sauer, Balestro, & Schneider, 2017). McKay (2017) has shown how the global-regional restructuring of the soya complex in turn prompted the creation of the Bolivian soya complex, facilitated by both the Brazilian and Bolivian states and dominated by Brazilian capital.² Similarly, Craviotti (2017) discusses how Argentinean soya seed companies have responded to these processes by becoming multilatin firms, merging or joining (multi-) national companies taking advantage of governmental support (Sauer & Mészáros, 2017).

On the other hand, we see significant global shifts in relation to specific commodities that in turn trigger the restructuring of commodity chains within BRICS countries. For example, the rise of the ‘flex sugarcane complex’, in which commodities produced from sugarcane crop can be used for multiple purposes (as sweeteners, ethanol, and other commercial and industrial uses), has seen a net increase in the area of sugarcane area planted globally over the past two decades. Brazil is a key player in the global flex sugarcane complex (McKay, Sauer, Richardson, & Herre, 2016; Borras, Franco, Isakson, Levidow & Vervest, 2016), which is shaping the sugar industry in regions such as Southern Africa (Dubb, Scoones, & Woodhouse, 2017) and in countries such as India and China. Borras et al. (2017) trace the trajectory of the boom of sugarcane production in south-eastern China during the past decade or so, that has significantly different features from crop booms elsewhere. This is partly because it is based on production on the small plots of thousands of smallholders, who have either leased their lands to companies or have engaged directly in sugarcane production themselves. Unlike the soya sector, signals from the sugarcane sector indicated that production in south-eastern China could be globally competitive. However, recent indications suggest that the inability of Chinese producers to secure productivity increases through mechanization and irrigation may undermine the sustainability of the sugarcane boom, forcing companies to cross borders and tap into the cheaper means of production and labour in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, as argued by Mills (2017) and Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest (2017).

Interconnected processes of social change within and in relations between the agrarian sectors of BRICS countries, MICs and other countries, and the broader patterns they reveal, require deeper empirical investigation. Contributions to the current collection, together those in the special issue of Third World Thematics (2016), have been able to undertake only initial explorations. Many relevant and consequential questions require further reflection and investigation, including: what are the key similarities and differences between the agrarian structures of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa? What are the historical processes that shaped these countries’ current situation, with special attention to convergences and divergences between these countries? What is the role of smallholders and family farmers in the agrarian system? What challenges and pressures are they confronted with, and what patterns of social differentiation are emerging? What forms of collective action are evident and possible? How are local and national processes of agrarian transformation being shaped by global and transnational processes of investment, trade, and inter-state relations (and vice versa)? What contradictions and antagonisms have emerged, and, as Escher et al. (2017) ask, how should social struggles in these contexts be characterized (e.g. in terms of Polanyi’s notion of a ‘double-movement’)?

The role of BRICS countries within their regions

Internal agrarian transformations in BRICS countries are in turn interacting with changes in rural societies and agrarian economies in their neighbouring countries. As several articles in this collection discuss, BRICS countries are expanding their presence in their respective regions, partly by promoting state and corporate partnerships and investment deals, as well as supporting private individual business transactions. These processes do not simply represent the expansion of these countries into their respective regions, as ‘imperial or sub-imperial’ powers (Bond, 2015); rather, the strategies and actions of both states and companies interact with dynamic changes already under way within these regions. At least three impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 BRICS, middle-income countries (MICs), and global agrarian transformations: internal dynamics, regional trends, and international implications
• 2 Exporting contradictions: the expansion of South African agrarian capital within Africa
• 3 The ambiguous stance of Brazil as a regional power: piloting a course between commodity-based surpluses and national development
• 4 Agrarian trajectories in Argentina and Brazil: multilatin seed firms and the South American soybean chain
• 5 Control grabbing and value-chain agriculture: BRICS, MICs and Bolivia’s soy complex
• 6 The agrifood question and rural development dynamics in Brazil and China: towards a protective ‘countermovement’
• 7 Chinese land grabs in Brazil? Sinophobia and foreign investments in Brazilian soybean agribusiness
• 8 Land control and crop booms inside China: implications for how we think about the global land rush
• 9 Holding corporations from middle countries accountable for human rights violations: a case study of the Vietnamese company investment in Cambodia
• 10 Framing China’s role in global land deal trends: why Southeast Asia is key
• Index