Northern agriculture ā capitalist agriculture ā has emerged over the last few decades in the rural heartlands of countries in the global north. This is an input-dependent, mechanized, quasi-industrial type of agriculture which produces enormous quantities of food and looms large over the whole global food system. From the perspective of governments across the global north ā and increasingly in countries in the global south, too ā ultimately only northern agricultural practices will be able to answer the proletarian food question. Alternative visions might exist of how agriculture should operate, how it might relate with the land and ecological systems and draw upon labour, but they are marginal to a dominant understanding of how food production should occur today.
1.2.1. The governance of agriculture
By using the term āgovernanceā here, I mean that agricultural production on the land is shaped not just by local or national governments, but also by multilateral governance institutions, not the least of which is the all-important World Trade Organization (WTO). I will come to the WTO soon, so let me turn now to consider some of the ways that governments affect what happens on the land.
Given the sorts of complexities contemporary society throws up, governments are more-or-less obliged to keep an eye on things in agriculture. That regulation and governance of agriculture exists is really no big deal. Nevertheless, even if we might tend to imagine a capitalist society as ānormalā and might assume that social relations framed by capitalism are just the way things are, it is notable how governments in the worldās leading capitalist societies have used their agencies and institutions ā in other words, they have mobilized āthe stateā ā to shape a food system amenable to capitalist firms. Upstream of the farm there is action, intent, planning, deliberation. All of this reaches downstream onto the farms where food production actually occurs. I think we need to view this action as held together by an overriding consensus about what sort of agricultural system is best placed to answer the proletarian food question. But to get to that conclusion, it is necessary to step back a little and take a broad view of how the state interacts with agriculture.
Undoubtedly central to the overall story here is that agricultural sectors in places where northern agriculture has emerged have enjoyed decades of extensive government support. Although not all of these supports are explicitly directed at agriculture ā a decision to build a new road that passes through an agricultural zone might benefit farmers and agri-businesses, but when governments allocate money for such a project they usually have the general population and more specifically industry in mind ā many certainly are, especially those that help cover some of the costs of producing food. In other words, and to introduce a controversial concept in debates about the global food economy, the state in countries such as the US and Japan, and then in Western Europe, has tended to offer agriculture āsubsidiesā.
āSubsidiesā typically refer to a form of support which the state extends to businesses. Farmers, shipbuilders, even car manufacturers might all conceivably receive subsidies from the state. From the point of view of governments, these supports might be acceptable if they help employers stay afloat and retain jobs; from the perspective of firms, subsidies might be the difference between surviving and going out of business, or at least between making profits or a loss in a specific time period. Wherever we find them, therefore, subsidies highlight and reflect the existence of complex political decisions about who deserves the stateās support and why. The point is: governments cannot simply extend supports to everyone; there will be winners and losers.
For anyone unfamiliar with farming the land, the nature of these supports might not be too easy to comprehend. However, consider a more obvious way that the state can support agriculture: public support for food and agricultural research (Norton, 2004: 404ā420). Such research, usually based in universities, might entail work on developing the productivity of crops, controlling pests, or how best to store or move food. Since 1960 publicly funded research on food and agriculture has grown by about 700 per cent, from around $5 billion to $35 billion per year (in constant 2005 prices) (Pardey et al., 2014: 3). Research by the private sector has grown as well, and now totals around 45 per cent of all research funding. In total, around $60 billion was spent by governments and the private sector on food and agricultural research in 2009, and 78.3 per cent of this was spent by high-income countries such as the US, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK (Pardey et al., 2014: 3). In short, research on food and agriculture is heavily dominated by action occurring in a small group of wealthy countries. This sort of spending reflects a determination on the part of these governments to develop knowledge and capacities to improve agricultural performance. The calculation is that skilled researchers in universities can use the stateās support to find innovative solutions to the developing proletarian food question and the related challenges presented by population growth and changing dietary habits. So the state intervenes upstream of the farm: it spends money, appoints panels to decide how research money is invested, and generally supports (although its level of support might rise and fall from time to time) the development of a research infrastructure that can prop up agriculture.
In addition to research, of course, the state has at its disposal a wide variety of other interventions that it can use to help agriculture or to encourage farmers to change what they do. It can, for instance, provide direct payments to farmers to help them stay afloat; offer āset-asideā payments to take land out of production; extend loans at low interest rates; promise guaranteed prices for crops if market prices fall below production costs; offer low-cost insurance policies; and extend subsidies to cover potential losses made by exporters (see Carolan, 2011: 194). And indeed exactly these sorts of instruments have been widely used. In the US, for example, the government created a variety of policies to support agriculture in response to an agricultural crisis in the 1930s, which saw many farm incomes collapse (Friedmann, 1993). Some of these actions were intended to maintain prices, such as by offering a minimum price to farmers or by paying them to remove their worst land from production and thereby reducing supply. Then there were subsidies in the form of credit that paid a portion of fertilizer, seed, or machinery costs. The idea was to protect the agricultural sector ā to lend it support, to nurture it ā with a view to developing its capacity to produce. Likewise, the agricultural sector across Europe has enjoyed extensive government support. Individual countries had their own policies to promote food security or provide extension, but in 1962 the European Economic Commission, which later became the European Union, introduced a wide-ranging package of supports under the name of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (see Weis, 2007: 66ā67). Some supports provided farmers with guaranteed prices, while others protected European producers from imports (Friedmann, 1993). Initially these were āproductivistā supports that aimed to boost output; later they became post-productivist, in so far as the desired outputs were less about crops and more about keeping farmers on the land, even if they were not working at their full capacity (e.g. see Marsden, 2013). Supports continue to reach agriculture. For example, in the 49 countries examined in a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation report (OECD, 2015), agricultural producers received a total annual average of $601 billion in the years 2012ā2014. How this money is spent varies from one place to another: some governments focus on price supports; others on reducing the costs of inputs or credit; while others still use direct payments to help cover incomes or to encourage farmers to adopt more environmentally sensitive operations (OECD, 2015: 7). The key point, then, is that rich-world or āglobal northā governments intervene and extensively support their agricultural sectors.
For many farmers operating on a relatively small scale, receiving any payments or support from the state will always be welcome, and may even be what helps keep the farm going. In this regard it is worth noting here that policies to support farmers covered 18 per cent of gross farm receipts in OECD countries in 2014 (OECD, 2015). Yet agricultural subsidies do not only support small-scale farmers. In fact, in the US and Europe it is the larger farmers as well as some agri-businesses that benefit the most from subsidies. Between 1995 and 2009, for example, the US government distributed $24.5 billion to around 1.76 million farms, but another $186.5 billion to just 460 000 of the wealthiest farmers (Carolan, 2011: 193): that is, 88 per cent of the subsidies went to ...