Abstract
Following the First World War, the USA began to emerge as the hegemonic capitalist power globally, a position which it was to attain unambiguously by the end of the Second World War. In this latter post-war period, the dynamics of US domestic agricultural class fractional politics came to exert a dominant influence on food policy worldwide, just as British capitalist class fractions had exerted an overwhelming influence on the parameters of the ‘Liberal’ food regime of the previous century. The majority of US agricultural commodity producers developed, from the 1930s, a concern to protect their enterprises from falling prices and began, therefore, to call for active intervention by the state. Agricultural producers in the USA were, however, competitive in the world economy, and in contrast to their counterparts in early nineteenth-century Britain did not, therefore, seek protection from overseas competition. Rather, these agricultural class fractions, especially those engaged in the corn, wheat, and cotton sectors, sought protection from the ‘free play’ of ‘market forces’, in this case, the tendency for capitalism to encounter (another) crisis of over-production (over-accumulation). Over-production and the resumption of freer trade regimes following the First World War began to depress agricultural prices in the 1920s, a trend which continued into the 1930s (Winders, J Agrar Chang 9(3):315–344, 2009). Class fractions of US agriculture, by contrast to their British forebears in the pre-Liberal era of the nineteenth century, were sufficiently powerful and competitive to influence national policy and, consequently, to mould the form of the post–Second World War food regime, particularly, to conform to their interests. These class fractions strove for the national regulation and support of agriculture, and subsequently, for the creation of international food aid as a means of alleviating over-supply. Nonetheless, this was not necessarily unitary class fractional advocacy; divisions as much as alliances existed within the agriculture sector, shaping US agricultural policy and the international food regime that was to arise from this (Tilzey, Int J Sociol Agric Food 14(1):1–28, 2006). There was, then, no single capitalist interest position that then translated automatically into US policy, as Friedmann and McMichael (Sociol Rural 29(2):93–117, 1989) seem to suggest. Rather, this was an agential process of negotiation, contestation, and co-optation.
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- 1.
This led gross farm income to fall from US$13.3 billion in 1926 to US$6.4 billion in 1932 (Hosen 1992, 270). More generally, between 1926 and 1932 the gross national product of the USA fell from US$97 billion to US$58 billion, and general unemployment rose from 1.8 per cent to 23.6 per cent (Hosen 1992, 257, 268).
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Britain, along with France and other colonial powers, attempted to extract even more out of the subject farming populations of Africa and Asia. The marketing boards for key agricultural commodities that emerged to support farmers and agricultural industries in Europe were adapted in colonial Africa to extract larger revenues from its farmers. In India, the great depression intensified the existing pattern of displacing staple food cultivation with export production of cotton, jute, sugar, and fine grains, and contributed to the great Bengal famine of 1943–44 (Bernstein 2010, 70–71).
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Tilzey, M. (2018). The Rise and Demise of the ‘Third’ or ‘Political Productivist’ Food Regime (1930s–1980s). In: Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8_5
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