The different chapters of this book discuss key aspects of agricultural modernization and raise some important questions about politico-economic and socio-ecological transformations taking place in countries of both the Global North (Europe in particular) and the Global South (with specific examples from Brazil and India). Our starting point is that, because of complex socio-economic interactions, environmental pressures, and fierce disputes, agriculture and rural development are today among the most controversial areas of policymaking, planning, and lobbying. With the encroachment of contemporary capitalism upon food production and biological systems, agriculture has become increasingly associated with, and subordinate to, a globalized agroindustrial complex that exerts decisive influence over technology, financing, logistics, and commercialization. In general terms, a—partial and problematic—transition from agriculture to agribusiness has taken place over the last century, with the last two decades or so seeing a further transition to neoliberalized agribusiness. Consequently, the concept of agribusiness, which was originally introduced in the 1950s at the time of Fordist agriculture in the USA, has had to mutate in order to encapsulate agricultural production based on business-friendly state interventions, policy liberalization, and the dominance of transnational corporations.

It is not difficult to empirically verify that most agricultural activities today are shaped by the impact of neoliberal capitalism on production areas and on the processing and distribution of agri-food goods and the management of related services (Heasman and Lang 2004). Examples include a number of techno-economic innovations introduced by neoliberalized agribusiness sectors, for example, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), digital farming technologies, and satellite-guided machinery, as well as new production dynamics such as land and gene grabs, the privatization of common land, pervasive financialization, the decisive role of global corporations, and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. These combine old and new strategies to renovate capitalism and minimize socio-ecological obstacles to economic growth. The results are intriguing, and suggest that further studies are necessary to understand the interplay between agriculture, food insecurity, and socionatural changes. On the one hand, agriculture as neoliberal agribusiness has achieved considerable results during the last three decades, in terms of additional areas under cultivation, intensification of production, and complex market integration. The aim of neoliberalized agriculture is to maximize production and profitability and suppress income gains for the labouring classes in a way that has reconstructed agriculture as a ‘world farm’ (McMichael 2010). On the other hand, however, these are also activities characterized by contradictions, failures, and limitations at local, national, and global scales. Never before has so much food been produced and so much space been used by farmers, but at the same time, record amounts of food are wasted every day, and a significant proportion of the global population struggles to maintain minimum levels of nutrition, while a comparable percentage suffers from the consequences of obesity (Patel 2008).

Taking into account these challenging circumstances, the main rationale for this book is that the staggering complexity of food and agriculture in the early decades of the new century can sometimes go unnoticed in a world dominated by many other urgent concerns and, more importantly, due to the false sense of security offered by intensive technologies and extensive global trade. Particularly in the North, and among high-income groups in the Global South, food is easily affordable and even taken for granted, despite the fact that food supply depends on a highly vulnerable distribution network controlled by a small number of transnational companies and supermarket chains. The following chapters will explore and discuss how the many asymmetries and uncertainties in the agri-food sector are directly and indirectly related to the instabilities of the contemporary economy, characterized by global speculation, structural inequalities, renewed forms of exploitation, and wasteful patterns of production and consumption. Ultimately, the consolidation of a global society centred on market principles has increasingly undermined individual and collective rights, and, even more importantly, subdued other socio-ecological demands. First of all, we will examine in more detail the significance and repercussions of neoliberalized agribusiness.

Agrarian and food studies have certainly travelled a long way in the last hundred years, from a focus on rural communities around the turn of the twentieth century, via the dominance of functionalist theory and the exaltation of technological innovation in the post-war years and, eventually, to the neo-Marxism and other critical approaches introduced in the 1970s (Buttel et al. 1990). Since then, critical authors have started to question traditional scholarship—typically anchored in the supposed stability, desirability, and constant progress of capitalist society in America and beyond—with new interpretations of the rural economy, reasons for the unexpected survival of the peasantry, and the growing commodification of labour and nature. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and consequent sociopolitical adjustments associated with a less polarized world order, the focus of agrarian and rural studies shifted from location, context, and diversity to a range of approaches informed by behavioural research, actor–network theories, food regimes, and regulation theory (Robinson 2004). More than just a technical-economic issue, this reconfiguration of agriculture in recent decades has been described as a sociopolitical project that has come about through the struggle between social classes and different fractions of capital. An especially important part of the discussion has focused on the transition from a Fordist agriculture (focused on mass production, standardization, and higher levels of efficiency) into an alleged post-productivist and multifunctional arrangement that followed the introduction of post-Keynesian policies and the search for additional goals beyond food production (Ilbey and Bowler 1998). See more on this debate in Chap. 3.

However, post-productivist and multifunctional tendencies represent only part of the neoliberalizing pressures that have reshaped contemporary agribusiness and subjected it to the imperatives of flexible accumulation, market globalization, and the systematic concealment of class-based tensions. The intricacies of global agri-food activities today are at once product and co-producer of the dominant modernization of capitalism in accordance with the discourse and the strategies of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not only an economic and social phenomenon, it also constitutes an assertive programme aimed at dislodging the politico-economic approaches adopted before the 1980s (Connell and Dados 2014). It has meant an evolution from the post-war regime, which was defined by the flows of (surplus) food from the USA to its informal empire of post-colonial states (according to the strategic perimeters of the Cold War), towards agri-food liberalization via structural adjustments, lower national trade barriers, the dismantling of farm sector protections, and new intellectual property relations (McMichael 2012). In practice, neoliberal strategies have tried both to win new markets and to placate political resistance through a discourse of multiple activities, environmental responsibility, and supposed food security (Dibden et al. 2009). Neoliberalized agribusiness has also evolved through an incoherent argument about the virtues of free market transactions, while there are simultaneous calls for sustained state interventions to regulate price oscillations and eliminate overproduction.

The complexity of the neoliberal agri-food regime is particularly evident in relation to the uneven geographical development of the capitalist economy, and therefore needs to be understood in the wider context of the world ecology of capitalism (Moore 2015). The geography of neoliberalized agribusiness is characterized by a plurality of production and consumption activities, extending and connecting locales, regions, and nations. It has involved, in particular, the enforcement of free trade and other supranational agreements and the prioritization of the biotechnological production package (Pechlaner and Otero 2008). In practical terms, it is undeniable that neoliberalized agribusiness is less concerned with rural development strategies (as promoted by state agencies during most of the twentieth century) and more focused on a range of processes (rather than one isolated phenomenon with clear-cut boundaries) required for the maximization of profit and rapid capital accumulation from agri-food operations. The neoliberalization of food and agriculture has been a deliberate attempt to fix the systemic crisis of the Fordist agri-food regime without preventing the re-emergence of instability, protest, socio-ecological degradation, and, ultimately, a deficit of legitimacy (Wolf and Bonanno 2014).

It is crucial to observe that contemporary rural development and the agri-food sector have revealed, and largely depended on, the hegemony of transnational corporations, the integration of domestic production into global trade, and a number of free trade agreements. In more general terms, rural development now happens through both vertical (from rural spaces to the agri-food sector) and horizontal (rural spaces linked to other non-agricultural sectors) networks (Murdoch 2000). Yet, because of its bioeconomic properties, agricultural production cannot be integrated in the same way as the industrial sector (Goodman and Watts 1997), which means that local sociocultural factors and socio-ecological conditions remain significant despite the globalization of agribusiness. Likewise, the internationalization and networking of agri-food under the hegemonic influence of transnational corporations has not happened without resistance and reactions. Protests grow through different scales and have resulted in a variety of political, symbolic, and material consequences (Stock et al. 2014), although these have often been unreflexive and superficial (Harris 2009). The socio-ecological contradictions of neoliberalized agribusiness are particularly noticeable in the case of contemporary Brazil and its burgeoning agribusiness-based economy. Due to sustained promotion campaigns and the emphasis placed on it by public policymaking, the term ‘agribusiness’ has a particular meaning in Brazil and is more widely used in common public debates than in other regions of the world. The national experience is briefly analysed in the next section, making use of a simple analytical approach, which paves the way for the subsequent chapters.

Brazil is increasingly perceived as a world agricultural powerhouse which, in principle, could have a lot to offer in terms of preventing a looming, increasingly global, food crisis. Particularly with the slowdown of Brazil’s national economy since 2010 (and especially after the controversial presidential election of 2014), agribusiness is an island of prosperity and dynamism in a context of corporate losses and lack of investment. As a consequence, Brazil has been a strong advocate of free market globalization and has pushed for calculated liberalization of the global agri-food trade (Hopewell 2013). However, as in other parts of the world, neoliberalized agribusiness in Brazil has been severely criticized over its actual beneficiaries and ambiguous prospects. The sector seems to thrive on a peculiar combination of tradition and modernity, which is clearly present in the attitudes and ambivalent discourse of large landowners and allied politicians. Neoliberalized agribusiness has many new features when compared with the previous, nationalistic period of agricultural modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, but it also betrays the strong elements of social exclusion, authoritarianism, and deception that have long governed economic development in the country. The rapid advance of agribusiness towards the central and northern states of Brazil in particular has been associated with severe environmental, cultural, and socio-economic impacts, including deforestation, violence against rural workers and indigenous populations, and notable cases of state capture and corruption.

All this betrays an intrinsic opportunism and demonstrates the peculiar nature of market-friendly rationalities, shaped by the demands of transnational corporations, national politicians, and rural elites (Ioris 2015). Governments and national business associations try to depict the advance of agribusiness in Brazil as the embodiment of the most progressive elements of an emerging economy that is part of the select group of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. Nonetheless, neoliberal agribusiness essentially constitutes a late, already obsolete type of modernity that replicates many mistakes from elsewhere in the country and other parts of the world. If neoliberalized agribusiness has effectively become one of the pillars of the Brazilian economy, it has also had troubling consequences as the country has faced progressive deindustrialization and become increasingly reliant on foreign investments and imports of intermediate inputs and capital goods. All these discursive and material developments are still to be studied in depth by critical scholars, particularly in terms of connecting the specific situations of different localities and regions with broader macroeconomic trends. Challenging the rhetori...