Walden Bello
26 June 2009
(Page 3 of 3)
'Millions of small farmers in the Global South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet's rural and urban populations. In Latin America, about 17 million peasant production units occupying close to 60.5 million hectares, or 34.5 per cent of the total cultivated land with average farm sizes of about 1.8 hectares, produce 51 per cent of the maize, 77 per cent of the beans, and 61 per cent of the potatoes for domestic consumption.[17]
From the perspective of the defenders of peasant agriculture, it is capitalist industrial agriculture, with its wrenching destabilisation and transformation of land, nature, and social relations, that is mainly responsible for today's food crises, and it points to a dead end both socially and ecologically. For instance, to capital, food, feed, and agrofuels are interchangeable as investment areas for capital, with rates of profit determining where investment will be allocated. Satisfying the real needs of the global majority is a secondary consideration, if indeed it enters the calculation at all. To the critics of capitalist agriculture, it is this devaluation and inversion of real relations into abstract relations of exchange - otherwise known as commodification - that is at the crux of the crisis of the contemporary food system.
* This article is taken from the author's upcoming book Food Wars, published by Verso Books. Food Wars will be available in July 2009. We are grateful to Women in Action for permission to reproduce this article from their publication.
* Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.
NOTES
[1] Paul Collier, 'The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis,' Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2008).
[2] Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[3] Gerardo Otero and Gabriela Pechlaner, 'Latin American Agriculture, Food, and Biotechnology: Temperate Dietary Pattern Adoption and Unsustainability,' in Gerardo Otero, ed., Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology Revolution in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 50.
[4] Lim Li Ching, 'A New Green Revolution,' Development, Vol. 51, No. 4 (December 2008), p. 572. The IAASTD is the equivalent in the agricultural sciences of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on global warming issues.
[5] Paul Collier, 'The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis,' Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2008), p.73.
[6] Ibid., p. 71.
[7] Ibid.
[8]'World Bank Neglects African Farming, Study Says,' New York Times, Oct. 15, 2007.
[9] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 289.
[10] Ibid., p. 291.
[11] Deborah Bryceson, 'Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labor Redundncy in the Neo-liberal Era and Beyond,' in Bryceson, C. Kay, and J. Mooij, eds., Disappearing Peasantries (London: Intermediate Techology Publications, 2000), p. 313.
[12] 101 East, Al Jazeera, Dec. 19, 2008.
[13] Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, 'Why Can't People Feed Themselves?,' in Douglas Boucher, ed., The Paradox of Plenty (Oakland: Food First, 1999), p. 65
[14] Jan van der Ploeg, the New Peasantries (London: Earthscan, 2008) p. 276
[15] Henry Bernstein, 'Agrarian Questions from Transition to Globalization,' in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 255.
[16] Wayne Roberts, cited in Philip McMichael, 'Food Sovereignty in Movement: the Challenge to Neo-liberal Globalization,' Draft, Cornell University, 2008.
[17] Miguel Altieri, 'Small Farms as a Planetary Ecological Asset: Five Key Reasons why We Should Support the Revitalization of Small Farms in the Global South,' Food First, 2008; http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2115
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