The Food Question

Profits Versus People

Henry Bernstein, Maureen Mackintosh, Charlotte Martin, Ben Crow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134158010
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Wasteful over-consumption (by some) in the developed countries and the continuing, in some cases worsening, hunger of millions in the Third World is a dramatic indication that food problems are urgent.

Anger is not enough and this book, which comes from the research group on Development Policy and Practice in the Open University (DPP), aims to provide some of the analytical tools needed for serious action. Case studies to show ways in which food aid has been used by donor countries for political ends; descriptions of the relationships between markets and human needs; articles on the problems associated with the feminization of poverty; pieces on patterns and trends of food production; analysis of land reform; an evaluation of the effects of biotechnology are all part of this rich and lively collection of articles written specially for this book.

1 Introduction

The editors

Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the urgency of food problems, at their most dramatic in the contrast between wasteful overproduction and overconsumption (by some) of food in the developed capitalist countries, and the continuing, in some cases worsening, hunger of many millions of people in the Third World.

This awareness and the concern it generates have been stimulated by a critical campaigning literature in which books like Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’s Food First and Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies are notable landmarks. These authors and others have done much to express and give focus to the growing sense of the inequalities and injustices in the world economic system, and the brutalities resulting from them including the stark facts on hunger.

At the same time we believe that the anger felt by many needs to be matched by an adequate analysis of the sometimes complex reasons for the obscene connections between abundance and scarcity, if radical action for change is to be effective. For those who are concerned and angry, and want to work for change, there is a need to combine emotional commitment with a careful investigation of moral judgements (such as that small farmers are “good” while multinational companies are “bad”) and frequently cited “facts”. It is certainly important to get at the facts, and there are vested interests that try to prevent this (see Jenkins’s comments on the British Nutrition Foundation in Chapter 15 of this volume), but however powerful the facts appear they do not “speak for themselves” (or only do so for those already converted). Facts only become evidence necessary to win arguments when they are combined with analysis and meet its intellectual demands and responsibilities.

The aim of this collection, then, is to contribute some tools of analysis, and to illustrate their applications. We hope to make the results of specialized research more accessible to all those concerned with the issues, so that they are better equipped to confront and assess for themselves the theoretical, political and practical challenges involved.

This aim is also a guiding principle of the research group on Development Policy and Practice (DPP) at Britain’s Open University with which we are associated. DPP is engaged in research on aspects of the food question in South Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Central America, in collaboration with people and institutions in those regions. This collection, therefore, draws on the research and political involvement of colleagues and friends in the Third World, and also in Britain and in North America.

The contributors write from a broadly socialist position. Collectively we have tried both to draw on the historic strengths of socialist analysis concerning social classes and social relations of production and power, and to recognize the need for the contemporary and future agenda of socialism to engage just as seriously with issues of gender, of exchange, of distribution and consumption (as well as production), and of the environment. Hence this book is a contribution to the “political economy” of the food question.

A political economy of food

What do we mean by a political economy of food? At the simplest level, all the chapters in this book examine the interrelations between politics and economics: between political ideas and actions and economic ideas and processes. To do this, they all examine aspects of the social organization, or social relations, of the production, exchange, distribution and consumption of food. And they focus on the contradictions and conflicts which structure these social relations and which drive economic change: class divisions between those who benefit from the work of others and those who are exploited; conflicts between men and women over production and access to food; conflict between governments and between governments and people. Finally, all are concerned with actions and responses: examining ways in which people struggle against their situation and discussing potential responses to the situations analysed.

All chapters explore the political economy of capitalism rather than elaborating alternatives. This is because capitalism has created the world we inhabit and also because it is necessary to understand the complexities and contradictions of “actually existing capitalism” (as opposed to simplistic models of capitalism, whether of an ideologically positive or negative kind) in order to understand the prospects and tasks of radical change.

The food question is a very large one. While we can only cover a fraction of the relevant issues, the book does contain analyses of many different levels of the political economy of food. The chapters examine problems of access to food in city and countryside; changes in production relations in food farming, especially the connections between small peasant farmers and large multinational firms and agencies; how markets work and their effects on local, national and international levels; and the “development” strategies, in relation to food, of the large agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF. The central concern is who gets to eat what – and, especially, why?

We said earlier that socialists have been forced to broaden their agenda from a concentration on class and production to include other social relations within which these are embedded. This is strikingly illustrated in this collection by the emphasis in a number of chapters on analysing markets and on examining relations between men and women.

Socialists have in the past been rather uninterested in the detail of how markets function. They have tended, following Marx, to see markets as “surface” phenomena, disguising the real underlying processes of exploitation. But, while it is certainly the case that a restriction of economic analysis to markets alone does allow the apparent freedom and relative equality of exchange in markets to be used to conceal lack of freedom and unequal power within production, nevertheless, markets are crucial to the maintenance of exploitative and unequal production relations. Markets channel the results of production, perpetuating the control by some of the activities and consumption of others. They are a crucial link in the system which determines who eats, how much and when. Markets, furthermore, are diverse. Markets for huge sums of capital are quite different – in structure and institutions, in the power participants wield, in their implications – from local markets. One of the aims of this book is to examine the variety of markets and their implications for those who participate in them, and for those who wish to change them. The emphasis is on markets for food itself, but markets for labour, land and inputs to food production are also important.

Markets also have diverse impact on production; the creation of markets, which is one of the aims of many international agencies, influences production and consumption in varied ways in different regions, for different classes, and for men as opposed to women. Several chapters examine this issue. Perhaps the key point to emerge is that markets must not be conceptualized as the manifestation of impersonal laws of demand and supply or of a “hidden hand”, but are social institutions and processes that people enter from very different positions in structures of class, gender and power. This in turn affects what they get from markets to secure their livelihoods, to satisfy – or fail to satisfy – their basic needs. There exist no “free” markets without different types of state “intervention”, formal or informal, hence no satisfactory economics of markets without a politics of markets.

The second area is that of gender relations. Many of the images of food production, or food markets, or hunger, which we have been faced with in recent years have been images of women: women hoeing barren land; women market traders in Africa; women looking after starving children. People have begun to talk about the feminization of poverty, and of women being “left behind” by the processes of development. Yet oddly, while women now form so important a part of our images of the food question, so much writing about food and hunger separates the role of women from the analysis of other aspects of the problem, tacking them on at the end as victims or as burdened workers. There is much good writing about women and development, but books not about “women and …” still tend to treat women as a separate issue.

We have tried, not wholly successfully, to avoid this division. The development of food production and of access to food today cannot be understood unless we add to the “kit” of ideas we use to analyse the world, the concept of gender. Gender is different from biological sex. It expresses and investigates the relations between men and women, the constructed social positions and the circumscribed range of activities of men and women which are crucial elements in understanding how society and economy work. It has embedded in it the inequalities between men and women, and the conflicts between them, which are constantly recreated within an exploitative system, and which form a central dynamic in the creation and maintenance of poverty.

Old arguments therefore about whether “class” or “gender” is more important are misleading. Classes are “gendered”. The experience of men and women of one class, though intertwined, is different: “women’s work” and “men’s work”, recognizable categories in all societies, are quite distinct. Also, the genders are divided internally by class, in terms again of their experience of the world: what it is to be male or female is deeply determined by the class within which one lives.

If class and gender are so deeply intertwined then, in our unequal and exploitative societies, the feminization of poverty is a largely inevitable process, though the extent of the poverty and lack of access of the women of the poorest classes can still come as a severe shock. And as inequality grows, through the deepening divisions being enforced on people in the Third World in the wake of recession in the West, so women – and therefore children – increasingly take the brunt: hence the images on the TV screens. Many chapters in this book examine these complexities, focusing on sexual divisions of labour and on women’s access to food.

One of the implications of the feminization of poverty is that women have often been in the forefront of struggles over food: over access to food; over the quality of food; over the conditions of its production. Several chapters examine women’s efforts to feed their households: “survival strategies” in conflict-ridden circumstances. They also describe active resistance to changing terms of food production and the scope for collective response.

This theme of response to pressure is the final issue which we want to draw out of the book as a whole. A true political economy examines not merely what is happening, but also what is being done, how people respond and resist, what can be done. All the contributors pick up this theme. Some analyse particular forms of resistance; others examine the political implications of changes in the rural economy; others point out the implications for political strategies in the Third World or in the West of developments in international and national markets.

It is in the discussion of struggle that the divisions and oppressions of labour by capital emerge most strongly in this book. While the view of capitalism as a mode of production based on private capital ownership and labour “free” to sell its services for a wage remains a central theme of political economy, this book shows the extent to which this has to be tempered by a recognition of the acute limitations set by capitalism on the freedoms of labour. The complexity of the experiences of labour under capitalism is illustrated in this book by the material on class and gender, the analysis of household and contract labour, and the discussion of the casualization of wage work. Resistance to the conditions of food production and other agricultural work is structured by the divisions which capitalism seeks to impose on those who work: divisions by gender, by urban and rural location, by nationality and by position in the organization of production. Several of the chapters address the question of how to find a basis for unity across these divisions.

We hope then that this collection will be a source book of ideas and concepts on the question of food, and that as such it will be useful to people who are seeking to be active on the politics of food.

The essays

Harriet Friedmann’s contribution sets the scene both historically and conceptually with a broad and incisive survey of the post-war international food order and its contradictions. Its central focus is food (especially wheat) production in the United States and how it combined with both domestic farm policy and foreign policy, including food aid, to determine the patterns of world markets in wheat until the early 1970s, when this international food order started to disintegrate. The effects of American food surpluses, foreign policy and food aid for markets and production in many Third World countries, are analysed within a perspective which seeks to show how “food policies are an aspect of class politics, even though they work through international politics”.

Ben Crow provides a detailed case study of American food aid to Bangladesh, also highlighting more general issues of the uses of Western aid to try to impose comprehensive policy “reform” on Third World countries. The conditionality exerted to push economic “development” along lines of market liberalization is expressed memorably in the words of a USAID official quoted: to get “more policy bang per buck”.

Maureen Mackintosh’s essay interrogates the question of markets with special reference to food and whether human needs are satisfied or not. She takes issue with both the ideological advocacy of “the” market as a solution to problems, and the problematic neglect by socialists of key issues about how markets work (reflecting also a simplistic dichotomy between markets and planning). Her contribution serves as a general overview to which other chapters dealing with more specific markets and market issues (e.g. by Friedmann, Harriss and Jenkins) can be related.

Ann Whitehead criticizes an over-simplification which has become common currency in discussions about women in the African countryside: the view that the food crisis in Africa is centrally the result of neglect in some sense of women’s food farming, by both African men and international agencies. Instead, she argues that impoverishment and the struggle for food are faced by both men and women – they are a problem for all members of African rural households. However, men and women face the crisis differently, and in ways which cause conflict between them. She distinguishes the impact of markets (commoditization) for farm products and for land, the influence of gender relations in farming and marriage, and the misogyny of external agencies, in the emergence of general and of female impoverishment, and argues that we must not allow gender conflicts which have developed to be used to obscure the economic forces of capitalism which restructure and exacerbate rural impoverishment.

In his essay Henry Bernstein acknowledges the force of populist and romantic views of the peasantry as one kind of anti-capitalist ideology and critique of the effects of capitalism on agriculture and food production. He questions, however, the effectiveness and political direction of populist analysis, suggesting that the conditions of peasant existence in capitalism are structured in ways that differentiate peasants by relations of class and gender. It is not enough to advocate taking the part of the peasants but is necessary to ask, “Which peasants?”

This has key implications for different strategies to solve the food question, at the same time confronting contradictions in the countryside and between countryside and town that are generated by capitalism.

Two pieces on India concentrate respectively more on patterns and trends of food production and their consequences, and on how food markets work, though both also eloquently illustrate patterns of spatial and regional differentiation and inequality characteristic of capitalism. Utsa Patnaik provides a cogent review of some economic and political consequences of the Green Revolution that casts a necessarily critical light on the now conventional wisdom that it has solved the food problems of India, or more precisely of India’s poor. Her analysis suggests links between class and regional differentiation associated with the Green Revolution, illustrated in particular by the formation of an agrarian-based bourgeoisie and its role in separatist politics in the Punjab.

Barbara Harriss’s piece on the organization of grain markets in India highlights the power of merchants (in particular large merchants), and its significance for agrarian change and economic development more generally. The characteristics of this “awkward class” confound many of the expectations of both advocates and some critics of capitalist development. The accumulation of profits and capital by dominant classes of merchants is not necessarily channelled towards productive reinvestment, any more than the kinds of market power she analyses help the great majority of producers and consumers of food.

Roger Bartra provides an interpretation of Mexico that summarizes a great deal of that country’s rich and complex agrarian history. He argues that a historic land reform provided the basis of a certain kind of state formation and political stability which enabled capitalist investment in agriculture to take place at the expense of peasant production. The limitations of the land reform and contradictions of Mexico’s particular pattern of capitalist agricultural development generated an agrarian and food crisis that in turn is a leading factor in the national political crisis.

The next piece by Marjorie Mbilinyi shows how the World Bank’s efforts to restructure the Tanzanian economy rely on intensifying women’s work in all kinds of farming, for home consumption and for the market, and on pushing women into casualized agricultural labouring. She documents the implications of this for women, and the nature and scale of their resistance to this pressure. As also suggested by Ann Whitehead, an existing sexual division of labour is being transformed under pressure into an intolerable double burden which women seek to escape, not least by migration. There is a danger that poorly thought-out “women in development” programmes, if they do not start from support for women’s efforts to resist and to restructure their own situation, may in practice reinforce the efforts of other agencies to retain women as cheap casual labour on land no longer theirs.

Two further chapters in the very different context of Bangladesh also see women’s social and economic subordination as central to an understanding of hunger and poverty. Jane Pryer describes women’s struggle for access to food in a slum society detached from the land, measuring the scale of deprivation and struggle for survival generated by the particularly severe restrictions on the economic activities of women. Naila Kabeer uncovers the “survival strategies” forced upon rural women, in the face of class and patriarchal oppression, arguing that failure to examine the complex processes of female adaptation and resistan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Origins of Third World Food Dependence
• 3 Moving the Lever: a New Food Aid Imperialism?
• 4 Abstract Markets and Real Needs
• 5 Food Crisis and Gender Conflict in the African Countryside
• 6 Taking the Part of Peasants?
• 7 Some Economic and Political Consequences of the Green Revolution in India
• 8 Another Awkward Class: Merchants and Agrarian Change in India
• 9 Agrarian Crisis and Political Crisis in Mexico
• 10 “Structural Adjustment”, Agribusiness and Rural Women in Tanzania
• 11 Hunger and Women’s Survival in a Bangladesh Slum
• 12 Poverty, Purdah and Women’s Survival Strategies in Rural Bangladesh
• 13 Peasants Under Contract: Agro-food Complexes in the Third World
• 14 Biotechnology and Agricultural Development in the Third World
• 15 Urban Consumptionism as a Route to Rural Renewal
• 16 Further Resources on Food
• Index