The political economy of food in an unequal world
6th International Conference on Food Science and Nutrition, Paris, July 2024
Introduction
I was once asked my opinion of a Canadian development agency's aid program for rural Mali. They proposed to supply steam-pumps for irrigated rice production, even though dry upland rice is the norm there. I asked why they did not imitate western agricultural policies and give the money to the government to subsidize farm-gate prices for rice without raising food prices in the cities. Malian farmers would gain an incentive to produce more commercial rice and the risk of urban riots would be averted. The officials thought a bit and eventually agreed that this was the most direct way of stimulating rural development in Mali. Then one of them said, "Wait a minute! If the farmers in Saskatchewan hear that we are using taxpayers' money to help Third World producers compete with them in the world food market, they will raise hell and get us closed down!”
There are several characteristic features of this story: inappropriate aid projects geared more to offloading surplus industrial products than to local needs; the idea of paddy rice cultivation as a step forward for Africa; state subsidies to western farmers, but not to their poor counterparts; the threat of the urban mob being stronger than that of the peasantry; weak governments obliged to feed their cities at the lowest cost, that is with subsidized western food; the power of western farmers as a political lobby in their own countries; the ineffectiveness of aid bureaucracies; a skewed world market for food; and so on.
The result is that farmers in places like Mali cannot compete with foreign suppliers of food and the development of rural-urban exchange there is thwarted. How can the situation of the losers in an unequal world be improved radically and soon? Here I will first present in outline my specific policy recommendations. Second, I take a long view of the history, theoretical analysis and solutions for this problem, to throw light on the pathology of a world society growing more unequal even as humanity has potentially solved the question of food supplies for the first time.
Food in a new world economic order: specific recommendations
Markets: 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. Neo-liberal globalization reversed this policy by importing cheap labor and commodities to undermine workers’ combinations at home. The main capitalist governments and autocratic rulers are now reinventing ‘industrial policy’ while retreating from globalization. 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, with some international agreement, would then stimulate national commerce.
World markets must be reorganized radically in the interests of the poor majority. Existing subsidies for western farmers made by tax-rich states should be diverted to the governments of poor countries for similar purposes. Fear of surging violence and mass immigration from the global South might persuade some rich countries to improve the home economies of the desperate poor masses and their access to world markets for the means of life and work. Making global movement a human right would be a strong inducement to this end. Citizens of rich countries could no longer rely on the power of their states to keep the others out. This is already happening anyway. In return, the beneficiary governments must accept certain political obligations to promote a solution to the escalating global crisis.
Machines: The last half-century saw great 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, largely fossil fuels, and we know the urgent need to reduce the world’s dependence on them. A moral revival of humanity is hardly likely, but it is still worth thinking of one as a desirable path to world peace.
The Green Revolution came out of Rockefeller-funded research institutes in Mexico and the Philippines to make Third World agriculture dependent on petrochemicals for fertilizer. Now chemicals corporations are patenting genetically modified organisms (GMO) 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 privatization 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 share culture with each other, as well as 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. The prevalence of what I call the ‘national capitalist’ model divides humanity into so many competing tribes. This is now collapsing of its own accord because globalization has undermined national economies. The old liberal idea that centralized states are more dangerous than capitalism still has some force, while a drive to abolish plutocracy must be paramount.
Territorial states will persist as building blocks of world society; but their powers ought to flow upward into global and regional federations and downward to local and more diffuse associations. The principle of subsidiarity says that decision-making should be devolved to the lowest level of society able to provide effective solutions. We should not denigrate capitalist firms as such.
The production of cheap commodities by profit-making organizations is intrinsic to economic progress if modified by social responsibility. 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 depend closely on the status quo will in time lose out. Solutions based on public-private combinations are better than exclusive reliance on either alone.
We must 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 was 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 by establishing research centers in some non-western countries. East Africa is home to the world’s first multinational telecommunications system; Kenya has pioneered mobile money for the masses using cheap phones, and recycles computers for use by the poor. For the digital revolution in communications to become even more universally available, 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 much of the principle of soil (terroir), the specifics of local environment, when asserting local and national identities against corrosion by globalization. Commercial agriculture there covers a wide range of scales, but the farmers still refer to themselves as ‘peasants.’
Around 1900, the German Marxist leader Karl Kautsky found that Europe's small farmers were not wiped out by capitalism as predicted by Marx, and suggested that their workers’ party should join them. Some rural commodities benefit from the natural protection of local conditions and markets: viticulture, dairy products, and market gardening, for example. Resilient peasants around the world have often proven to be more efficient and durable than large-scale specialized operations.
Many rural areas are diversifying away from agriculture into small-scale industrialization and services such as tourism. The gap in well-being between the city and countryside has been much narrowed by increased circulation of people between them. 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 if the latter’s existing legal privileges are much reduced or abolished.
Organic food: Faced with what often seems a runaway world where remote forces threaten to overwhelm our fragile claims to personal and collective identity, 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 is highly relative. The current wave of ecological resistance to GMO 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 (Organic International) is already lobbying for access to rich countries’ markets and national local protection from global producers. 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 can support grassroots democratic politics linking rural and urban populations. If the western middle classes embrace natural food with the enthusiasm that once turned them from polyester to natural fibers for their clothing, organic farmers could gain an important global ally in their struggle for economic equality. But 95 per cent of international trade in ‘organic’ commodities is now controlled by five giant corporations, led by Nestle.
Circulation between urban and rural areas and their interdependence: I first noticed the importance of people circulating between rural and urban areas in the sixties during Ghanaian fieldwork on poor migrants to Accra from the northern savanna. Neither the city nor the countryside alone could supply individuals their needs throughout the life cycle. Their rural home area supplied access to land; raising young children; marriage; inheritance; ritual security’ senior office in retirement; becoming an ancestor; and a refuge of last resort from absolute poverty, sickness, injury, and unemployment. Urban areas provided more paid employment; wider consumption and entertainment; better housing, transport, medical treatment, and modern education; organized world religions; and opportunities for upward mobility through trade and enterprise. Very few people could build a good life without combining the two.
This is still the dominant residential pattern in France, where many prefer, if they can afford it, to rent accommodation in cities, while keeping a home in their native rural area where their kids can spend holidays with their cousins and other relatives. This is because French families—as in most of India and Africa—privilege descent-groups and networks over mobile nuclear families.
International circulation throughout the life cycle is commonplace everywhere. Several countries I know manage extended family attachment, further education, and occupational mobility through dual residence in the city and countryside as a matter of choice. 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-space. 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.
I hope to have demonstrated that thinking of city and countryside in isolation, rather than as dynamically interdependent, is anathema to any hope of solving the current crisis. The same applies to thinking of ourselves primarily as national, rather than world citizens. The second part of my talk tries to put this conclusion in long-term historical perspective.
The problem of development
Development starts, if at all, in a rural world dominated by agriculture. The economy becomes more differentiated with the growth of urban areas and commerce activates exchange between the two. Why is it so difficult today to bring commerce and division of labor to feed the poor countries of our world? Half of humanity now lives in cities and, in the last century, even the most backward regions experienced massive urban growth. Here I will take a long view of the problem to throw light on the sickness of a world society growing more unequal even as humanity has potentially solved the question of food supplies for the first time.
Our moment in world history stands poised between agrarian civilization and the machine revolution. Failure to use technology and coordinated policies to make a decisive break with unequal society will ruin us all. Westerners and some others live by a rhetoric of modernity, where democracy and science hold sway. After the invention of agriculture, the latest phase of the machine revolution—digital communications—leaves present-day humanity like the first primitive farmers using digging sticks to scratch the ground on the way to inventing an agriculture whose potential they could not imagine, never mind understand. For 5,000 years, the Eurasian land mass was later dominated by urban elites ruling predominantly agrarian societies.
In the last two centuries, the human population has increased eight times, and the rate of growth of energy production has been double that of the population. Many human beings work less hard, eat better, and live longer today as a result. Whereas under three per cent of the world's people lived in cities around 1800, half of humanity lives in them today. This hectic disengagement from the soil as the chief object of work and source of life was made possible by machines, converters of inanimate energy for useful purposes. Before 1800 almost all the energy at our disposal came from animals, plants, and human beings themselves. In the process, we have brought humanity together into a much more integrated global social network.
Increased human connection has gone hand in hand with escalating inequality. Disparities of living standards on the planet are vast. The rich countries account for about 15 per cent of the world's population. The rest must reconcile their relative poverty with an unfinished history of racism, a hangover from the nineteenth century when Europeans used new machines to take over the globe with their colonial empires. A third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands; many individuals have never made a phone call in their life. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, ‘the men in suits’, rules underclasses who are predominantly poor, dark, female, young, and old. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, frantically erect barriers to stem the inflow of migrants forced to seek economic +improvement in their midst. In most respects our world resembles nothing so much as the ‘Old Regime’ before the French revolution.
How could that be? The form of emergent world society is not yet disclosed to us. But the reason it is so unequal now stems first from the role of agriculture in human evolution and from agrarian civilizations in particular; then latterly from the social forms that emerged to control the machine revolution from the top—public and private sector bureaucracies linked by an ideology of nationalism. How can the situation of the losers in an unequal world be improved radically and soon?
We need a political economy of food that protects the interests of the weak for the general good. National solutions to economic disaster in mid-century, such as the New Deal and Keynesian macroeconomics, should be adapted to the scale of world economic problems today. But the hybrid entity that still dominates our world, the nation-state, along with the giant corporations that have flourished under a regime of national capitalism, pose immense difficulties for the achievement of a more equal world society.
Anyone who would work for radical change must first decide which is the greater enemy of human progress, the persisting legacy of agrarian civilization or market capitalism built on machines. National capitalism is a hybrid of both. To promote one side while ignoring the other is a recipe for political failure. State socialism in the last century tried to outlaw markets and money, with ruinous consequences. Now western politicians corrupted by plutocrats, in the name of universal private property and “free” markets, promote the interests of the strong over the weak by emasculating their own and other countries’ capacity for self-government. If we aspire to a more democratic and equal world, we need a more comprehensive historical view of the problems facing humanity at this moment of world crisis.
Agriculture in human evolution
In his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not concerned with individual variations in natural endowments, but with the artificial inequalities of wealth, honor, and the capacity to command obedience that he derived from social convention. The rot set in with the invention of agriculture.
Cultivation of the land led to property institutions whose culmination awaited the development of political society. A ‘war of all against all’ (Hobbes) marked by the absence of law—a result of social development, not an original state of nature—preceded the formation of a civil order (the state). This new social contract to abide by the law was probably reached by consensus. Tt was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity. From this inauspicious beginning, political society then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages.
“The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second, and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus, the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second, and by the third, that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy. It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with excessive luxuries while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”.
Surely, the stale odor of corruption that so revolted Rousseau is just as pervasive today, if not more so.
The force propelling humanity to a new relationship with the natural world is the use of machines as converters of inanimate energy sources. From a modern perspective, human history falls into three periods—two centuries of industrialization, the ten millennia when agriculture dominated world production, and the vast tracts of prehistory before human beings settled down on the land. Until very recently all economic activity rested on harnessing the energy stored in plants and animals, including the work of human beings themselves fueled by energy from consuming plants and animals. Other inanimate energy sources—water, wind, fossil fuels—and machines driven by them made a negligible contribution.
The significance of agriculture lies in the way it changed the balance of human to non-human sources of animate energy deployed in production. Before the invention of agriculture, human beings conserved their own efforts by letting plants and animals do most of the work involved in bringing products to the point of consumption. They moved to locations where these sources grew naturally, leaving human labor to perform only the tasks of collection and processing. People who live this way today (‘hunter-gatherers’) allow large spaces to accommodate small mobile bands and the food quest does not take up much of their time.
Agriculture is a system of food production where the growth of plants and animals comes under the control of human beings. Human work is substituted for natural processes of reproduction. By settling down, communities were obliged to protect animals and plants from threats. Irrigation, pest-scaring, and weeding involved an intensification of labor inputs with diminishing returns. People now had to work harder for proportionately less reward.
This logic of development through intensification of labor would not be chosen by most producers themselves; and society came to be polarized between the powerful beneficiaries of this system and those who did the work. This lent to agriculture a dynamic of inequality that eventually reduced the bulk of a given population in most advanced regions to a life of coercion and servitude—slaves and tied peasants working under varying degrees of domination.
The origins of domestication contained the seeds of the later class divisions of non-industrial civilizations, where splendid urban enclaves were built on the backs of impoverished country-dwellers. The social forces necessary to bring animals and plants under human control thus compelled many to work harder than their reward would justify. It took five millennia, but eventually what we take to be civilizations relied on systematic neglect of the interests of most workers.
Agrarian civilization and national capitalism
Most people still produced food on the land, but a different lifestyle emerged in a few urban centers and manorial estates scattered through the countryside. This involved centralized government, bureaucracy, writing, long-distance trade, markets using money, a complex division of labor, a priestly class and temple organization, landlords, and more elaborate architecture and art—all sustained by transfers to urban centers of agricultural surpluses generated by more intensive technologies, notably the plow and irrigation.
The inequality that separated luxurious elites from the masses became culturally formalized as class distinctions. Through exclusive patterns of kinship, marriage, and inter-generational property transmission—featuring the nuclear family and marrying within your class—the upper classes now enjoyed a much superior lifestyle. All the main Eurasian civilizations—and their tribal predecessors—kept money and markets on the margins of mainstream society by various methods.
The bourgeois revolution looked poised for a decisive victory over agrarian civilization as a result of the industrial revolution after 1800, when its twin offspring—industrial capitalism and the nation-state—combined in the mid-nineteenth century to subvert its original liberal premises. European societies began to embrace a national logic. Nationalism was an escape from modern history—from the realities of urban commercial life—into the timeless rural past of the Volk, the people conceived of as a homogeneous peasantry, living in villages near to nature, unspoiled by social division, the very archetype of a community bound together by kinship. It reflected a worldview that has the whole of humanity pigeonholed as separate tribes, each the owner (or would-be owner) of a hybrid entity, the nation-state.
Capitalism always rested on an unequal contract between owners of money and those who make or buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labor, or borrowers fail to pay what they owe. The capitalists cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. Karl Marx's most vivid contribution to our understanding of the modern world was his characterization of capitalism as feudalism in drag, with the owners of the means of production still extracting surplus labor from tied workers.
Despite a consistent barrage of propaganda telling us that we live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization— territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucratic administration, limited literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion and the nuclear family. This is because the western middle classes’ rebellion against the old regime that gave us the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, as well as the English, American, French, and Italian democratic revolutions, were co-opted by national capitalism. Humanity's progressive emancipation from unequal society was reversed in the last century and a half. The myopia of nationalism prevents us from seeing how contemporary world society replicates the old regime from which the liberal revolutions were supposed to have emancipated humanity.
Africa today is the most poignant symbol of this unequal world. Having entered the last century with an extremely sparse population and next to no cities, Africans leave it having undergone a population explosion and an urban revolution of unprecedented speed and size. Africa largely missed the first and second stages of the machine revolution but is better placed to take advantage of digital communications.
Updating Sir James Steuart’s vision of development
“If you ask why they are not employed, they tell you because commerce is not in the country: they talk of commerce as if it was a man, who comes to reside in some countries to feed the inhabitants” (Principles of Political Economy, 1767)
Sir James Steuart was a Jacobite exile who brought the term ‘political economy’ from France into the English language. He was convinced that successful transformation of an agricultural society required a benevolent and effective state. The problem was how to get farmers off the land, so that they could generate demand for commercial foodstuffs supplied by those who remained behind. This meant migration to the city. People complain, he said, about the “riffraff” in Edinburgh and Glasgow; but if they can stay there by any means— in our terms through the ‘informal economy’—they provide a market for the country's food farmers. With the money they earn from these sales, the farmers in turn generate demand for manufactures and services produced in the cities. Rural-urban exchange based on division of labor is the motor of development. But getting there is not easy.
He observed that the economies he was familiar with, such as France and Spain, prospered under a regime of high food prices. These stimulate the bulk of producers, the farmers, to realize a portion of their output for sale. They need a market of local consumers protected from cheap imports, and the money they earn will be spent on the products of local industries, provided they too are protected from the big beasts of the world market. This protected exchange of agricultural and industrial products was necessary to generate a dynamic commercial division of labor in a country whose economy was initially backward and stagnant.
When some infant commodity-producing sectors grew stronger, government could expose them to the downward spiral of prices and costs. Eventually, the cry would be for low food prices, thereby reducing the cost of local wage labor and enhancing the competitiveness of local firms in world markets. Gradually, poor performers would be eliminated, and successful sectors could begin to compete in the world market on more equal terms, thereby allowing selective tariff reductions. This transition begins with high agricultural prices. A similar principle underwrote food policy in postwar Europe, but here high revenues from domestic taxation subsidized farm prices.
Origins of the first global debt crisis now
For a century after the victory of the free trade movement, the temperate zone lands of new settlement fed Europe, especially Britain. But the Second World War interrupted food supplies drastically in the West and East. Starvation was commonplace during and after the war. The Marshall Plan restored food supplies to some extent; but, when western Europe began to form an economic and political union, regional food security came first on the agenda. The Common Agricultural Policy has notoriously absorbed the bulk of the European budget ever since.
The result of so much public money being given to farmers was predictable: mountains of unsold butter and grain were dumped at giveaway prices on the world market. This forced the rich agricultural exporters, led by North America, to do the same. Since then, international trade negotiations between the club of European diaspora nations have focused on regulating tariffs and tax-giveaways to limit competition between them. The rise of Japan and the Southeast Asian ‘Tigers’—followed by the end of the Cold War and the emergence of China, Russia, India, Brazil, and the Gulf states as capitalist powers—released non-western countries as global actors. The United States, Britain, and the European Union then used the digital revolution to replace postwar industrial capitalist citizenship with plutocracy, identity politics, social media, and reality TV.
In this way, the West reverted to the Old Regime’s system of rent-seeking and political corruption, while using war and the world market for food to restrict the development of the poor majority. What had still been largely a peasant activity in 1945 now became a hi-tech industry combining capital with a highly productive labor force. Despite most consumers in the rich countries being city-dwellers, the farmers' share of the public purse has been untouchable, distorting domestic political economy and world food markets.
Neo-liberalism is a world economic order based on the freedom of capital to move wherever it will—but not people, machines, goods, and information—and on the ability of strong states to impose their will on the weak. This is traditional mercantilism and in modern times no older than the invention of national capitalism one and a half centuries ago. The economic superpower setting the rules for hypocrisy was Britain; today it is the United States. For agrarian civilization invented states to supervise their unequal society; and capitalists, while cloaking coercion and inequality in the old rhetoric of liberal democracy, now co-opted the traditional enforcers for their crowd control functions, not least in acquiring colonial empires.
There is a great lie at the heart of western societies today, one of many lies now gathering in an avalanche of global decline and citizen mistrust. A minority lives in self-proclaimed democracies where all are equally free and claim to be committed to this principle as universal. Yet they grant inferior rights to immigrants, since functional economic inequalities would be threatened otherwise. This double think is enshrined at the heart of western nation-states. Nationalism is racism without the pretension to being as systematic or global. So-called nations link cultural difference to birth, and define citizens’ rights in opposition to all comers. The resulting national consciousness justifies the unfair treatment of non-citizens and blinds voters to humanity's common interests.
This is the context for the impoverishment of Africa, along with much of Asia and Latin America today. The central banks and international agencies quietly dropped the postwar idea of ‘development’, being now concerned only with the survival of regimes whose task is to supervise the flow of cash into the coffers of western banks, corporations, and billionaires. Aid levels have been much reduced; NGOs of bewildering variety now perform functions that neither rulers of weak countries nor their international sponsors are prepared to undertake. ‘Development programs’ are just sticking plaster on ruined economies, not a serious means of economic progress for the poor countries.