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).
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’)?
