The world market for food is key to solving the current crisis
Food in a new world economic order: general reflections and specific recommendations. References.
Most of this section was not in the original chapter and reflects my current thinking.
1. General reflections
If we are serious about tackling global economic inequality, it would be reasonable to start with the shortcomings of the institutions and powers that currently rule our world, focusing on the US, EU and other regional trade federations, multilateral agencies, and transnational corporations (Bello 2002). I have chosen here to take a longer view. For decades now, nation-states have been losing monopolistic control over their own populations because of neoliberal globalization, so that humanity is now stranded between weakened national societies and a world society that is still embryonic. Although westerners often portray themselves as moderns emancipated from a rural past, they have not resolved the tension between the legacy of agrarian civilization and a machine revolution that has so far failed to support genuinely democratic societies. World capitalism is itself divided between siding with the old ruling interests and pushing beyond the politics of unequal society towards more inclusive associations.
If capitalism is out of control today, what political units and strategies could help to make it more democratically accountable, at least on the scale achieved by the New Deal and the postwar Keynesian consensus? There are three main places to stand: you can put your faith in strengthened global institutions and networks; seek to reinforce the powers of the nation-state against globalization; or develop regional trade federations, such as the EU, ASEAN, Mercosul and NAFTA—as I do for Africa (Hart n.d., Gabi-Williams 2022: sections 14-16), if its 55 nation-states are to raise their economic level to match their booming young populations. Each of these options makes bedfellows of interests that were opposed as right and left before.
A global strategy would thus juxtapose the strongest states, the big corporations and the Bretton-Woods institutions with democratic associations representing popular interests everywhere. The latter were pioneered by the World Social Forum from 2001, while the BRICS each try to repeat the West’s postwar experiment in welfare states to organize their people’s hectic recent move from the countryside to urban labor markets. Nationalism throws together greens, the unions, and racist-6* anti-immigration groups. In regional federations the voices of the member-states and big money drown out those of popular interest groups. “Civil society” is thus politically split between all three levels, thereby adding to the general political confusion.
Which interests are likely to push for a new world economic order? Surely not the existing nation-states. How about the transnational corporations? Are they moving to a stage of capitalism beyond the nation-state? Before we admit to such a possibility, the old question of capitalism's unequal social contract must be answered. Who will enforce contracts under threat of punishment, if not the established governments? They in turn are undermined by a lawless global money circuit running out of control. Corporate capital already employs the services of multilateral organizations to promote the idea of governments policing their inward investments without being allowed to make their own national regulations. I speak here from personal experience, having once been enlisted by the International Labor Office as an expert on informal economy for discussion of this corporate strategy with ministers of labor from 34 countries where SAPs had destroyed national political cotrols.
The balance may be shifting in favor of one or the other traditional interests, but an alliance between international and national governments, business, grassroots organizations and networks is still possible in varying proportion. Radical global change could again be driven by the same impulse that led to the formation of welfare states in the general crisis of the last century’s middle decades. This possibility would be more likely if the rich and powerful become scared that, if they make insufficient concessions to the poor and disenfranchised masses, they could lose everything. Only a global deflationary crisis, perhaps a Greater Depression brewing now, could induce such a development.
Food is important in all this, mainly because a third of humanity still labor in the fields with their hands. Drawing them into the circuit of commerce would go a long way towards ending the world economy’s stagnation that began in the 1970s. But world society is still in the throes of disengaging itself from the institutional logic of agrarian civilization. The Second World War almost brought victory to extreme variants of unequal society, just as the Romans put the lights out on the bourgeois revolution begun by the Phoenicians, Athenians, and Carthaginians. We still have a long way to go before commerce will displace the forces of war. What is to be done?
2. Specific recommendations
This section has the following headings: markets, machines, more inclusive and decentralized societies and networks, small farmers, organic agriculture, and circulation between urban and rural areas.
Markets: The main drift of my argument has been that the world market for food constitutes the main obstacle to the development of poor countries. In the name of free trade, the rich countries dump cheap food on the rest, while raising barriers to their exports. But neoliberal globalization reversed this policy by using imports of cheap labor and commodities to undermine workers’ combination at home. This is now being reversed in turn by the main capitalist governments and autocratic rulers who are reinventing “industrial policy” at home to counter the threat to their own dominance. The recent merger of money and political power in a global plutocracy is divided into national fragments bent on destroying each other’s coalitions. See
The farmers of poor countries need some protection and support, so that a regime of higher producer prices might be established without increasing costs to consumers and non-agricultural producers. The rural-urban division of labor, backed by some international agreement, would then stimulate national commerce.
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Making movement a human right—perhaps led initially by a coalition of some powerful and weak countries rather than a universal law—would be a strong inducement to this end. Citizens of rich countries would no longer be able to rely on the power of their states to keep the others out. This is already happening anyway. In return, the governments that would benefit from this new world order must accept certain political obligations, not only for their own sake, but to promote a solution to the escalating global crisis in time to avoid destruction of some, most, or all of humanity.
Machines: The last half-century saw a radical improvement in the global food supply. This was because of the industrialization of agriculture—not just the use of machinery, but also of pesticides and high-yield varieties. Machines are converters of inanimate energy, which today means fossil fuels, and a minority already know the urgent need to reduce the world’s dependence on them. But this will not happen before a world revolution—one that Arthur Lewis wrote calmly about half a century ago—made possible by extensive warfare and economic collapse. A moral revival of humanity is no more likely at this time than in Immanuel Kant’s, but is still worth thinking of one as a desirable religious path to world peace (Kant 1795, Hart 2020, 2023).
The Green Revolution came out of Rockefeller-funded research institutes in Mexico and the Philippines as a way of making Third World agriculture dependent on petrochemicals for fertilizer (Lipton and Longhurst 1989). Now chemicals corporations are patenting GMOs to tie farmers to their brand of pesticide and seeds. The ecological threat of hi-tech agriculture driven by financial considerations has been well-advertised.
Beyond that, the aggressive private intellectual property strategies of the leading biochemical corporations undermine one of the key planks of the human commons—our right to borrow the means of growing food and sharing culture with each other. A more general approach would focus on protecting public interests from the ravages of private property. That many people still go hungry, despite the increased supply of food, is a function of distribution mechanisms, not of the machine revolution in agriculture as such. Somehow, its benefits should be diffused without the abuses.
More inclusive and decentralized societies and networks. Prevailing torpor in the face of these threats is due to the national capitalism- model that divides humanity into so many competing tribes. This is now collapsing of its own accord because of neoliberal globalization. If the terms can be separated, the old liberal idea that centralized states are more dangerous than capitalism still has some force, while a concerted drive to abolish plutocracy must be paramount.
Territorial states will persist as building blocks of world society; but their powers ought to flow upwards into global and regional federations and downwards to local and more diffuse associations. It is wrong to denigrate capitalist firms as such. The production of cheap commodities by profit-making organizations is intrinsic to economic progress if modified by forces for greater social responsibility than at present (Hart 2020, 2022). The markets, transport, and communications on which we depend cannot function well without them. The classical liberal revolutions against the old regime were fueled by inputs from capital; and some capitalists will play a similar role in future if their interests overlap with those of the revolutionaries. Elements of money and power that c*ling to the status quo will in time lose out.
We need to be more discriminating about the forms of capital. Thus, Red Hat Linux lobbied for the adoption of its software in India's schools on the grounds that it is cheap, flexible, and robust; Microsoft campaigned there on its track record in helping governments to regulate access to the internet. Hewlett-Packard has targeted the four billion poorest people as a market for its computers. East Africa is home to the world’s first multinational telecommunications system; Kenya has pioneered mobile money and recycling computers for use by the poor. If all those excluded from the digital revolution are to join it, some firms will be needed to develop the required infrastructure. This is why putting money into the hands of the poor benefits the rich too.
Small farmers: The French make a great deal of the principle of terroir (soil), the specifics of local environment, when asserting local identity against the corrosion of globalization. This principle is important; agro-industrial corporations dominate the market, but commercial agriculture retains the public image of farmers who still refer to themselves as “peasants.” The German Marxist leader, Karl Kautsky (1899) found that Europe's small farmers were not wiped out by capitalism and suggested that their workers’ party should consider joining rather than denigrating them as a lost cause. Certain rural commodities benefited from the natural protection of local conditions and markets: viticulture, dairy products, and market gardening, for example. Lenin hated this idea,[1] causing a rift between the two main communist parties, then both known as Social Democrats (Hussain and Tribe 1983). Resilient peasantries around the world have often proven to be more efficient and durable than larger-scale specialized operations (Hart 1982).
Now, following this ancient pattern of pluriactivity, many rural areas are diversifying away from agriculture into small-scale industrialization and services such as tourism. The gap in wellbeing between the city and countryside has been much narrowed by increased circulation of people between them. Regional and rural-urban inequality was almost non-existent in Sweden, one of the four countries we surveyed in Bryden and Hart (2004).
The world's poor need more than agriculture to participate in the world economy. The fastest-growing sector of the world market after finance is for digital culture—entertainment, education, media, sport, and information services generally. Cities, not villages will produce most of these; but here too small producers may compete effectively with the giant corporations, especially should the latter’s legal privileges are much reduced or abolished. If commerce feeds the people, it requires free rein to be given to the interdependence of rural and urban areas for their mutual development. Our world can still learn a lot from Sir James Steuart’s vision.
Organic food: Faced with what often seems a runaway world (Leach 1967) where remote forces threaten to overwhelm our fragile claims to personal and collective identities, the idea that natural things are good for us finds fertile ground, especially when it comes to food. Of course, after ten millennia of domestication, the idea of something being natural—or organic if you prefer Greek to Latin—is highly relative. The appeal to nature fueled the rise of nationalism as a reaction to the speed of modern social and technological change. The current wave of ecological resistance to GMOs and pesticides has echoes of previous Luddite rejections of machine civilization. This time it will run up against the farming lobby, the corporations, and the politicians they have bought.
Nevertheless, several themes raised here find echoes in the movement to promote organic agriculture. An international federation of organic agriculture movements (IFOAM)—whose 2003 Bangkok conference drew heavily on members from Germany, Japan, upstate New York, and Thailand—lobbies for national protection from global producers and access to rich countries’ markets. Organic agriculture is often small-scale and more compatible with existing peasant practice; it avoids the excesses and risks of hi-tech production; and it may support a grassroots democratic politics linking rural and urban populations. If the western middle classes embrace natural food with the enthusiasm that on-ce turned them from polyester to natural fibers for their clothing (Schneider 1994), organic farmers could gain an important global ally in their struggle for economic equality. But 95% of international trade in “organic” commodities is now controlled by five giant corporations, led by Nestle. Major NGOs like Organic International and Oxfam should be admitted to the top-down club that currently organizes world trade.
Circulation between urban and rural areas: The gap in wellbeing between the city and countryside has been much narrowed by increased circulation of people between them. I first noticed this translocal phenomenon during my 1960s Ghanaian fieldwork on poor rural migrants to Accra from the northern savanna. Neither rural nor urban areas could supply individuals with their needs throughout the life cycle: their rural home settlements were good for access to land, raising young children, getting married, inheritance, ritual security, senior office in retirement, eventually becoming an ancestor and as a refuge of last resort in absolute poverty, sickness, injury, and unemployment; urban areas provided better opportunities for paid employment, consumption, entertainment, housing, transport, medical treatment, modern education, organized world religion, and personal economic improvement through trade and enterprise. Mantaining links between them made sense then and probably still does.
International circulation throughout the life cycle is commonplace everywhere. Several countries that I know well manage extended family attachment, further education, and occupational mobility through dual residence in the city and in the countryside as a matter of choice. This is true, for example, of France today; and it is becoming more common in India, which is currently the only major country with an urban population share much less than half (currently a third). Citizens of the richer countries have multiple options for combining residence and mobility at home and abroad on a short- and long-term basis. The digital revolution and fast long-distance transport are collapsing time and distance. Paying taxes in one’s home country and enjoying secondary residence in one or more world cities is rapidly extending down the social spectrum from the super-rich to the merely affluent (Chevalier and others 2013, Sassen 1991).
If nothing else, I hope to have demonstrated here that thinking of city and countryside, rich and poor regions, in isolation rather than as dynamically interdependent is anathema to any hope of solving the current crisis. The same applies to thinking of ourselves as national, rather than world citizens (Kant 1795, Hart 2023).
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[1] Lenin in the quote above was obviously wrong, since even hunter-gatherers and tribal societies, never mind peasants, practice division of labor and exchange, sometimes over long distances. Even so, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) is in my view the finest book on development from behind that I know. The chapter on peasants (150 pages) is based on the statistics of marketing agricultural cooperatives formed after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, known as “zemstvo”. Lenin argues against the populists (narodniks) who claimed that a direct transition to communism was possible without a capitalist stage. He shows for the central areas around Moscow and St Petersburg that most capitalism was in rural areas, so that peasants were already an agro-proletariat, except that they cultivated their pieces, no doubt with artisan production and trade too. On this basis, Lenin was one of the few of his followers to dispute Marx's basic class categories since there was no room in them for proletarians with property. Between the 1880s and 1913, Russia was the China of its day, growing at 10% a year on average. He was right in 1899 to say that this capitalist industrialization made a workers revolution feasible, and it helped Stalin to build an army that beat Hitler’s in the Battle of Kursk (July 1943).