The Struggle for Food Sovereignty

Alternative Development and the Renewal of Peasant Societies Today

Remy Herrera, Kin Chi Lau

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745335940
• eBook ISBN: 9781783715060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The world's food system is broken, and today's peasant societies are at a crossroads. This collection explores the multiplicity of problems faced by global family agricultures in the current neoliberal era. The contributors, including include Samir Amin, Joao Pedro Stedile and Utsa Patnaik, argue that an understanding of the revival of peasant struggles for their social emancipation and legitimate right of access to land is essential. Financialisation is undermining their work, and must be resisted if they are to construct a new, socially just food system. This is a response to the confusion surrounding how these urgent problems are understood, with the authors offering solutions as to how they should be resolved. They express the importance of the co-operation and cohesion of the various struggles taking place across Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Europe, and how they must share a common vision for the future.

1

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Food Sovereignty and the Agrarian Question: Constructing Convergence of Struggles within Diversity

Samir Amin

This first chapter provides a series of analytical elements to answer some of the major questions of our times on agriculture: (1) What kind of agriculture – capitalist, socialist, peasant – can guarantee food sovereignty without which the construction of a multi-polar society is impossible? (2) Which food productions should benefit from top priority in the decision-making process for development? (3) How does one conciliate the growth needed for food production with the preservation of the viability of the earth for the generations to come? The present contribution – in defence of the peasant solution – will put the emphasis on building convergences of the struggles operating in diverse conditions in the North and in the South of our planet.

Family Agriculture in the Present World: Convergences and Differences between the North and the South

In the North: An efficient family agriculture perfectly integrated into dominant capitalism

Modern family agriculture, dominant in Western Europe and in the United States, has clearly shown its superiority over other forms of agricultural production. Annual production per worker (the equivalent of 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of cereal) has no equal and it has enabled a tiny section of the active population (about 5 per cent) to supply the whole country abundantly and even produce exportable surpluses (Berthelot, 2001). Modern family agriculture has also shown an exceptional capacity for absorbing innovations and much flexibility in adapting to the demand.

This agriculture does not share a specific characteristic of capitalism, that is, its main mode of labour organisation. In the factory, the number of workers enables an advanced division of labour, which is at the origin of the leap in productivity. In the agricultural family business, labour supply is reduced to one or two individuals (the farming couple), sometimes helped by one, two or three associates or permanent labourers, but also, in certain cases, a larger number of seasonal workers, particularly for the harvesting of fruit and vegetables (FAO, 2006). Generally speaking, there is not a definitively fixed division of labour, the tasks being polyvalent and variable. In this sense, family agriculture is not capitalist. However, this modern family agriculture constitutes an inseparable part of the capitalist economy into which it is fully integrated.

In this family agricultural business, self-consumption no longer counts. It depends entirely for its economic legitimacy on its production for the market. Thus the logic that commands the production options is no longer the same as that of the agricultural peasants of yesterday – analysed by Chayanov (1986) –or of today in Third World countries.

The efficiency of the agricultural family business is due to its modern equipment. These businesses possess 90 per cent of the tractors and other agricultural equipment in use in the world (Mazoyer and Roudart, 1997). The machines are ‘bought’ (often on credit) by the farmers and are therefore their ‘property’. In the logic of capitalism, the farmer is both a worker and a capitalist and his income should correspond to the sum of the wages for his work and the profit from his ownership of the capital being used. But it is not so. The net income of farmers in each country is comparable to the average wage earned in industry in that country (UNDP, various years). The state intervention and regulation policies in Europe and the United States, where this form of agriculture dominates, have as their declared objective the aim of ensuring (through subsidies) the equality of ‘peasant’ and ‘worker’ incomes (CETIM and GRAIN, 2012). The profits from the capital used by farmers are therefore collected by segments of industrial and financial capital further up the food chain. Control over agricultural production also operates down the food chain by modern commerce (particularly the supermarkets).

In the family agriculture of Europe and the United States, the component of the land rent, which is meant to constitute, in conventional economics, the remuneration of land productivity, does not figure in the remuneration of the farmer–owner, or the owner (when he is not the farmer). The French model of ‘anaesthetising the owner’ is very telling: in law, the rights of the farmer are given priority over those of the owner. In the United States, where ‘respect for property’ always has the absolute priority, the same result is obtained by forcing de facto almost all the family businesses to be owners of the land that they farm. The rent of ownership thus disappears from the remuneration of the farmers (Amin, 2005).

The efficiency of this family agriculture is also due to the fact that each unit farms (as owner or not) enough good land: neither too small nor pointlessly large. The area farmed, corresponding, for each stage of the development of mechanised equipment, to what a farmer alone (or a small family unit) can work, has gradually been extended in the interest of efficiency, as Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart’s (1997) analysis of the facts has convincingly demonstrated.

In actual fact, therefore, the agricultural family unit, efficient as it certainly is, is only a subcontractor, caught in the pincers between upstream agribusiness (which imposes selected seeds today, GMOs tomorrow), industry (which supplies the equipment and chemical products), finance (which provides the necessary credits), and downstream in the commercialisation of the supermarkets. The status of the farmer is more like that of the artisan (individual producer) who used to work in the ‘putting-out’ system (the weaver, for example, being dominated by the merchant that supplied him with the thread and sold the material produced).

It is true that this is not the only form of agriculture in the modern capitalist world. There are also large agribusiness enterprises, that is, big owners who employ many waged labourers (when these estates are not leased out to tenant family farmers). This was generally the case with land in the colonies and still is the case in South Africa (this form of latifundium having been abolished by the agrarian reform of Zimbabwe). There are various forms in Latin America; sometimes they are very ‘modernised’ (that is, mechanised), as in the Southern Cone of the continent (southern Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile), and sometimes not. But family agriculture remains dominant in Europe and the United States.

‘Really existing socialism’ carried out various experiments in ‘industrial’ forms of agricultural production. The ‘Marxism’ underlying this option was that of Karl Kautsky who, at the end of the nineteenth century, had ‘predicted’, not the modernisation of the agricultural family business (its equipment and its specialisation), but its disappearance altogether in favour of large production units, like factories, believed to benefit from the advantages of a thoroughgoing internal division of labour (Kautsky, 1988). This prediction did not materialise in Europe and the United States. However, the myth that it transmitted was believed in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe (with some nuances), China, Vietnam (in the modalities specific to that country) and, at one time, Cuba. Independently of the other reasons that led to the failure of these experiments (e.g. bureaucratic management, bad macroeconomic planning, reduction of responsibilities due to lack of democracy), there were also errors in judgement about the advantages of the division of labour and specialisation, extrapolated –without any justification – from certain forms of industry and applied to other fields of production and social activity.

While the reasons for this failure are now recognised, this cannot be said for the forms of capitalist agriculture in the regions of Latin America and Southern Africa mentioned earlier. And yet, the failure is also obvious, despite the profitability and the competitiveness of these modernised forms of latifundia. For this profitability is obtained through horrific ecological wastage (irreversible destruction of productive potential and of arable land) as well as social exploitation (miserable wages).

In the South: Poor peasant cultivators as part of a dominated peripheral capitalism

Peasant agriculture in the South constitutes almost half of humanity – 3 billion human beings. These types of agriculture vary: there are those that have benefited from the green revolution (fertilisers, pesticides and selected seeds) although they are not very mechanised, but their production has risen to between 100 and 500 quintals per labourer; and then there are those which are the same as before the revolution whose production is only around 10 quintals per labourer. The ratio between the average production of a farmer in the North and that of peasant agriculture, which was 10:1 before 1940, is now 100:1. In other words, the rate of progress in agricultural productivity has largely outstripped that in other activities, bringing about a lowering of the real price from 5 to 1 (Mazoyer and Roudart, 1997).

This peasant agriculture in the countries of the South is also well and truly integrated into local and world capitalism. However, closer study immediately reveals both the convergences and the differences in the two types of ‘family’ economy.

The differences are huge – they are visible and undeniable: the importance of subsistence food in the peasant economies, the only way of survival for those rural populations; the low efficiency of this agriculture, not equipped with tractors or other materials and often highly parcellised; the poverty of the rural world (three-quarters of the victims of undernourishment are rural [Delcourt, 2010]); the growing incapacity of these systems to ensure food supplies for their towns; the sheer immensity of the problems as the peasant economy affects nearly half of humanity.

In spite of these differences, peasant agriculture is already integrated into the dominant global capitalist system. As to the extent of its contribution to the market, peasant agriculture depends on bought inputs and it is the victim of the oligopolies that control the marketing of these products. For the regions having ‘benefited’ from the ‘green revolution’ (or half of the peasantry of the South [Mazoyer, 2002]), the siphoning off by dominant capital of profits on the products, both upstream and downstream, is very great. But profits are also siphoned off, in relative terms, for the other half of the peasantry of the South, taking into account the weakness of their production.

Is the modernisation of the agriculture of the South by capitalism possible and desirable?

Let us use the hypothesis of a strategy for the development of agriculture that tries to reproduce systematically in the South the course of modern family agriculture in the North. One could easily imagine that if some 50 million more modern farms were given access to large areas of land for their activities (taking it from the peasant economy and, of course, choosing the best soils) and if they had access to the capital markets, enabling them to equip themselves, they could produce the essentials of what the creditworthy urban consumers still currently obtain from peasant agriculture. But what would happen to the billions of non-competitive peasant producers? They would be inexorably eliminated in a short period of time, i.e. a few decades. What would happen to these billions of human beings, most of whom are already the poorest of the poor, but who feed themselves, for better or for worse – and for a third of them, for worse? No industrial development, more or less competitive, even in the far-fetched hypothesis of a continual yearly growth of 7 per cent for three-quarters of humanity, could absorb even a third of this labour reserve within a period of 50 years. Capitalism, by its nature, cannot resolve the peasant question: the only prospects it can offer are a planet full of slums and ‘too many’ billions of human beings.

We have therefore reached the point where to open up a new field for the expansion of capital (‘the modernisation of agricultural production’), it is necessary to destroy – in human terms – entire societies. Fifty million new efficient producers (200 million human beings with their families) on the one hand, and 3 billion excluded people on the other. The creative aspect of the operation would be merely a drop of water in the ocean of destruction that it would require. I thus conclude that capitalism has entered into its phase of declining senility: the logic of the system is no longer able to ensure the simple survival of humanity (Amin, 1997, 1998). Capitalism is becoming barbaric and leads directly to genocide. It is more than ever necessary to replace it with other development logics that are more rational.

So, what is to be done? It is necessary to accept the continuation of peasant agriculture in the foreseeable future in the twenty-first century. Not due to romantic nostalgia, but quite simply because the solution to the problem is to overtake the logic that drives capitalism and to participate in the long, secular transition into world socialism. It is therefore necessary to work out regulation policies for the relationships between the ‘market’ and peasant agriculture. At the national and regional levels, these regulations, specific and adapted to local conditions, must protect national production, thus ensuring the indispensable food sovereignty of nations – in other words, delinking the internal prices from those of the so-called global market – as they must do. A gradual increase in the productivity of peasant agriculture, which will doubtless be slow but continuous, would make it possible to control the exodus of the rural populations to the towns. At the level of what is called the global market, the desirable regulation can probably be put in place through inter-regional agreements that meet the requirements of a development that integrates people rather than excludes them.

There is no alternative to food sovereignty

At the global level, food consumption is assured, for 85 per cent of it, by local production (FAO, 2013). Nevertheless, this production corresponds to very different levels of satisfaction of food needs: excellent for North America and West and Central Europe, acceptable in China, mediocre for the rest of Asia and Latin America, and disastrous for Africa. One can also see a strong correlation between the quality and the levels of industrialisation of the various regions: countries and regions that are more industrialised are able to feed their populations well from their own agricultural produce.

The United States and Europe have understood the importance of food sovereignty well and have successfully implemented it through systematic economic policies. But, apparently, what is good for them is not good for the others. The World Bank, the OECD and the European Union try to impose an alternative on the Third World countries, which is ‘food security’ (for an overview, see FAO, 1983). According to them, these countries do not need food sovereignty and should rely on international trade to cover the deficit in their food requirements, however large it may be. This is perhaps easy for those countries that are large exporters of natural resources (oil, uranium, etc.). For the others, the ‘advice’ of the Western powers is to specialise their agriculture as much as possible in the production of agricultural commodities for export (cotton, tropical oils, and agro-fuels in the future). The defenders of ‘food security’ – for others, not for themselves – do not take into account the fact that this specialisation, which has been practised since colonisation, has not made it possible to improve the miserable food rations of the peoples concerned, especially the peasants.

Thus, the advice to peasants who have not yet set foot in the industrial era (e.g. in Africa) is not to engage in ‘insane’, ‘negative’ or ‘aberrant’ industrialisation projects. These are some of the terms used by authors (including experts of the World Bank) who go so far as to attribute the failure of agricultural development in Africa to the industrialisation option of their governments. It is precisely those countries that have taken this ‘insane’ option (e.g. Korea and China) that have become ‘emerging countries’ and are able to feed their population better (or less badly), and those that have not done so (in Africa) that are besieged by chronic malnutrition and famine.

This does not appear to embarrass the defenders of the so-called principle of ‘food security’ – or more accurately, ‘food insecurity’. There is little doubt that underneath this obstinacy against Africa committing itself to the path that the success of Asia has inspired lies more than a touch of contempt (if not racism) towards the people. It is regrettable that such condescension is to be found in many Western circles and organisations with good intentions, such as NGOs and even research centres. The complete failure of the ‘food security’ option is demonstrated by governments that thought they could provide for the needs of their poor urban population through exports (oil among others). They now find themselves trapped by the food deficit that is growing at an alarming rate as a result of these policies. For the other countries, particularly the African ones, the situation is even more disastrous.

On top of this, the economic crisis initiated by the financial collapse of 2008 is already aggravating the situation – and will continue to do so. It is sadly amusing to note how the partners of the OECD (such as the EU institutions) are clinging to the so-called food security policies at a time when the ongoing crisis clearly illustrates their failure. It is not that the governments of the Triad (USA, Europe, Japan) do not ‘understand’ the problem; this would be to deny them the intelligence that they certainly possess. So can one dismiss the hypothesis that ‘food insecurity’ is a consciously adopted objective? Has not the ‘food weapon’ already been deployed? Thus, there is another reason for insisting that without food sovereignty, no political sovereignty is possible. But while there is no alternative to food sovereignty, its efficient implementation does in fact require the commitment to the construction of a diversified economy and hence industrialisation.

The Struggles of the Peasants in the South for the Access to Land

As the access to land depends on ‘tenure status’, two types of land tenure system must first of all be defined: those that are based on the private ownership of farmland and those that are not.

Land tenure based on the private ownership of land

In this case, the owner has to use the terms of Roman law, usus (the right to use an asset), fructus (the right to appropriate the returns from the asset) and abusus (the right to transfer). This right is ‘absolute’ in the sense that the owner can farm his land himself, rent it out or even abstain from farming. The property may be given away or sold and it forms part of assets that can be inherited.

Certainly, this right is often less absolute than it appears. In all cases use is subject to public order laws (such as those prohibiting its unlawful use for the cultivation of stupefacients) and, increasingly, to environmental regulations. In some countries where an agrarian reform has been carried through, a limit has been established for the maximum surface area an individual or family can own. The rights of tenant farmers (duration and guarantee of lease and amount of land rent) limit those of the owners in varying degrees to the extent of affording the tenant farmers the major benefit of the protection of the state and its agricultural policies (this is the case in France [Braudel, 1986]). Freedom to choose the crops is not always allowed. In Egypt, the state agricultural services have for a long time determined the proportion of land allotted to different crops depending on their irrigation requirements (Amin, 2011).

This system of landownership is modern inasmuch as it is the product of the constitution of (‘really existing’) historic capitalism, which first originated in Western...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• World Forum for Alternatives
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Family Agriculture in the Present World: Regional Perspectives
• 1. Theoretical Framework: Food Sovereignty and the Agrarian Question: Constructing Convergence of Struggles within Diversity
• 2. Latin America: Reflections on the Tendencies of Capital in Agriculture and Challenges for Peasant Movements in Latin America
• 3. Africa: Rebuilding African Peasantries: Inalienability of Land Rights and Collective Food Sovereignty in Southern Africa?
• 4. Asia (I): Rethinking ‘Rural China’, Unthinking Modernisation: Rural Regeneration and Post-Developmental Historical Agency
• 5. Asia (II): The Political-Economic Context of the Peasant Struggles for Livelihood Security and Land in India
• 6. Oceania: The Papua Niugini Paradox: Land Property Archaism and Modernity of Peasant Resistance?
• 7. Europe: An Overview of the European Peasants and Their Struggles
• Conclusion: Facing the Domination of Financial Capital: The Convergence of Peasant Struggles Today
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index