Walden Bello
26 June 2009
(Page 2 of 3)
'Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertiliser subsidies, de-control prices and privatise may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production. It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertiliser. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.'[8]
There was a link between the Brazilian model and SAPs. Both were central elements of a capitalist transformation of agriculture that was intended to integrate local food systems via trade liberalisation, into a global system that is marked by a division of labour that would allegedly result in greater efficiency and greater prosperity in the aggregate. Collier fails to see that SAPs were the cutting edge of this process by seeking to supplant peasant producers with capitalist entrepreneurs who are producing not just for local but for global markets as one step towards large-scale globally integrated capitalist industrial agriculture.
DEATH OF THE PEASANTRY?
As for his put-down of peasants and small farmers, Collier is not unique. Many analysts share his view, some of them with progressive credentials. In his acclaimed 1994 book The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that 'the death of the peasantry' was 'the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century,' one that cut 'us off forever from the world of the past.'[9]
Hobsbawm's proclamation of their death as a class struck many as premature since as he himself noted, 'Admittedly... regions of peasant dominance still represented half the human race at the end of our period.'[10] Yet Hobsbawm's views have a respectable pedigree. Marx himself compared peasants to a 'sack of potatoes' with little real solidarity and even less class consciousness, and thus destined for the ash heap of history.
Yet peasants have refused to die and go gently into that good night to which Collier, Hobsbawm, and Marx have consigned them. Indeed, one year before Hobsbawm's book was published, Via Campesina was founded in 1993, and over the next decade this federation of peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the agriculture and trade scene globally. The spirit of internationalism and active identification of one's class interests with the universal interest of society that was once a prominent feature of workers' movement is now on display in the international peasant movement.
Certainly, de-peasantisation and de-agrarianisation have greatly advanced with globalisation, with local self-subsistence production no longer, in many places, the escape that it usually provided for peasants who are caught up in market relations. Summing up a research on 'disappearing' peasantries, Deborah Bryceson writes that under conditions of rapid globalisation and neglected peasant hinterlands, peasants crossing international borders now provide a massive supply of labour for global capital. Although psychologically, many of these peasants still have the notion of a piece of land as a fallback in times of need, in fact, 'as a class, they face proletarianisation by the force of global commodity and labour markets combined with government indifference.'[11]
Yet the belief that the land is waiting, as a refuge of last resort, continues to persist among many peasants-turned-workers, among them those rural migrants in China who are returning en masse to the countryside as factories close owing to the spreading global recession.[12] Indeed, peasants continue to show an extraordinary persistence to survive as a class, and perhaps nothing underlines this more than Mexican peasants who continue to plant corn for subsistence despite their having been priced out of the market by imported corn dumped by the United States. In other areas, small farmers have confounded those who have preached their demise by showing that labour-intensive small farms can be far more productive than big farms. To cite just one well known study, a World Bank report on agriculture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador showed that small farms were three to 14 times more productive per acre than the large farms.[13]
Perhaps the most significant recent development in the long struggle of the peasants as a class has been their organising internationally to protect their interests from the steamroller of industrial capitalist agriculture. Via Campesina - translated as the 'Peasant Way' - has not only been effective in mounting opposition to the World Trade Organisation (WTO); it has also offered an alternative paradigm for agricultural development called 'food sovereignty'. The analysis and appeal of groups like Via Campesina resonate widely because the ability of capital to absorb labour is so limited under the conditions of inequitable globalisation that in recent years, there has been a return to the countryside of significant numbers of both ex-peasants and semi-proletarians, such as the ex-urban dwellers that have driven the land occupations of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil.
Indeed, not only in the South but also in the North, one witnesses farmers and others who seek to escape the dependency on capital by reproducing the peasant condition, where one works with nature from a limited resource base to create a condition of autonomy from the forces of capital and the market. The emergence of urban agriculture, the creation of networks linking consumers to farmers within a given region, the rise of new militant movements for land - all these, according to Jan van der Ploeg, indicate a movement of 'repeasantisation' that has been created by the negative dynamics of 'Empire' and seeks to reverse them. Under the conditions of the deep crisis of globalisation, which is felt widely as a loss of autonomy, 'the peasant principle, with its focus on the construction of an autonomous and self governed resource base, clearly specifies the way forward.'[14]
PRODUCTION PARADIGMS IN CONFLICT
Romanticism, says Collier, is at the root of the increased salience of small-scale agriculture as an alternative to globalised farming in progressive circles. In this he is joined by some intellectuals of the left like Henry Bernstein, who refers to partisans of the new peasant movements as the 'new populists', implying their similarity to the Narodniks of pre-revolutionary Russia. But however their conditions and vicissitudes are analysed by the intellectuals, some of whom even question the label 'peasant' to describe many of them, small food producers are gathering allies, including many of the governments of the South, which torpedoed the Doha Round of the WTO by their stubbornly hanging on to their advocacy of 'Special Safeguard Mechanisms' (SSMs) against agricultural imports and the designation of key commodities as 'Special Products' (SPs) exempt from tariff liberalisation to protect local production, much of it by small-scale farmers. This resistance stemmed not only from the pressure exerted by groups like Via Campesina, which was not negligible, but to a growing sentiment in official circles that corporate industrial agriculture could not be allowed to completely restructure the global economy without any accountability.
More broadly, with environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up, and industrialised agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the 'peasant way' has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organising production, community, and life itself. It is this that lies at the heart of the 'romanticisation of the peasant' that exercises Collier so much.
Ultimately, the battle between globalised agriculture and the new peasant movement will hinge on the question of food production carried out under different paradigms - a global market-driven paradigm on the one hand and a local-market centered paradigm on the other. To people like Collier and Bernstein, the latter is no solution, with Bernstein asserting that 'advocacy of the peasant way largely ignores issues of feeding the world's population, which has grown so greatly almost everywhere in the modern epoch, in significant part because of the revolutions in productivity achieved by the development of capitalism.'[15]
Partisans of the peasant way hotly dispute this, claiming that peasants and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food production, constituting over a third of the world's population and two thirds of the world's food producers.[16] Indeed, according to agroecologist Miguel Altieri:
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