Abstract
Modern development is associated with replacing small-scale producers. This goal, or outcome, stems from a historical process within Europe, dependent at the time on sourcing food and fibre from non-European peasants. Despite being historically specific to the rise of Europe, ‘development’ as a universal has come to mean displacing place-based farming with agro-industrialisation. This chapter explores the implications of this trajectory, and its claims of addressing ‘food security’, at the same time examining the epistemic origins of the separation of society and its ecological foundations that enable the abstraction of nature in modern agriculture. Given the declining indicators of agro-industrial efficiency, and the rising degradation of ecosystems alongside persistent poverty and hunger, the possibility of preserving and promoting biodiverse small-scale farming is becoming increasingly attractive to communities and citizens across the world, supported by a growing scientific consensus regarding its greater productivity and resilience, and thereby inverting the development narrative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
C.L.R. James observed that slave labour systems in the Americas prefigured the first proletariat, insofar as extensive monocultures in Europe were disallowed at the time by guild laws and property relations (1963).
- 2.
Nevertheless, the USA, UK, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand have a percentage of small farms in the range of 10–25 % (Hilmi 2012: 69).
- 3.
‘Peasantries’ are diverse across time and space, sharing attributes of the ‘farm as a place of labour, where… labour is provided by the family and mobilised within the community through relations of reciprocity’ (Hilmi 2012: 25).
- 4.
Davis shows how this was hardly the case for colonial subjects (2001).
- 5.
The WTO’s export regime has contributed to the transformation of Africa into a food importer, importing 25 % of its food, and exporting high-value crops such as green beans, coffee, flowers, and biofuels. While economic theory postulates that high-value exports can assist in financing staple food imports, the food crisis revealed the limits of this scenario.
- 6.
Thus: ‘Underpinning these deals is the longstanding failure of many African states to recognise, in law and practice, the customary land rights of existing farming households and communities, and the perpetuation of the colonial legal codes that centralise control over such lands in the hands of the state as trustee of all unregistered property’ (Hall 2014).
- 7.
Unsurprisingly, AGRA recognises ‘this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production’ (Gates Foundation 2008, quoted in Mittal 2009: 4).
- 8.
Unless supply chains are regulated in the interest of the producer—thus, the UN Right to Food Rapporteur has proposed, in addressing rights violations stemming from buyer concentration: ‘global food supply chains will contribute significantly to the reduction of rural poverty only to the extent that such abuses are effectively combated through competition law regimes that are designed to be consistent with the obligation of States to protect the right to adequate food’ (De Schutter 2010a: 6).
- 9.
Thus, ‘for many agribusiness companies the contract farming solution is a public relations exercise designed to build alliances in the areas where they produce and source their throughput, and to access subsidised credit from agencies buying into the “smallholder path” to development. In fact, access to subsidised credit seems a significant factor driving agribusiness to engage smallholders’ (Oya 2012: 10).
- 10.
For example: ‘conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1’ (Holt-Giménez 2012: 1).
- 11.
For example, in the Kisarawe region, southwest of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), 11 villages agreed to convert ‘village land’ into 20,000 acres of ‘general land’ to Sun Biofuels for a large-scale biofuel plantation to supply Europe. The project failed, the villagers remain excluded from their land (now planted in Jatropha trees) and without the compensation promised in the form of 1000 jobs, infrastructure, schools, health clinics, and investment in local farms. And so long as the company pays the minimal rent, the land remains available for the next investor (Wise 2014). As the World Bank’s recent Report on The Practice of Responsible Investment Principles in Larger-Scale Agricultural Investments (2014c) makes clear, this is not an isolated occurrence.
- 12.
Thus: ‘benchmarking produces comparisons and contrasts that will stimulate policy change’ (World Bank 2014e)—policy change, that is, in the Bank mold, now termed ‘the process of agricultural transformation’—involving reforms ‘towards a more favourable enabling environment (to) support the growth and productivity of small, medium and large-scale smallholder farmers engaged in agribusiness’ (Idem). Note the ‘goldilocks trilogy’ language here that does not distinguish farming models between industrial and non-industrial agriculture. This obscuring process is repeated in the Bank’s report The Practice of Responsible Investment Principles in Larger-Scale Agricultural Investments (2014c, emphasis added).
- 13.
Accompanied by misinformation from the biotechnology industry, since GM crops (overwhelmingly for feed and fuel) have not proven to be any more productive than conventional crops, encourage superweeds and overuse of chemicals, and certainly do not match small farm biodiversity (Patel 2013).
- 14.
This is exemplified in Moore’s comment that, in distinguishing capitalism’s value from nature’s wealth: ‘Marx does not deny that external nature does work useful to humans, only that (from the perspective of capital) its productions do not directly enter into capitalism’s particular crystallization of wealth’ (2003: 450).
- 15.
This is not to say Marx approved of this. Thus: ‘the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits—stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has concerned itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations’, and ‘The moral of the tale … is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers’ (quoted in Foster 2000: 164–165).
- 16.
This percentage includes both agriculture and land use change, much of which involves clearance for agriculture.
References
ActionAid. 2009. Assessing the alliance for a green revolution in Africa. Available at. http://www.actionaidusa.org/sites/files/actionaid/aai_report_-_assessing_agra.pdf.
AGRA. 2008. AGRA and the millennium challenge corporation launch a historic collaboration to provide Africa’s farmers with technologies, infrastructure and financing. Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. www.agraalliance.org/content/news/detail/682/
Almås, R., and H. Campbell. 2012. Introduction: Emerging challenges. New policy frameworks and the resilience of agriculture. In Rethinking agricultural policy regimes: Food security, climate change and the future resilience of global agriculture, ed. R. Almås and H. Campbell. Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Altieri, M., and C.I. Nicholls. 2008. Agroecological approaches in Latin America. Development 51(4): 472–480.
Altieri, M., and V. Toledo. 2011. The agroecological revolution in Latin America: Rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(3): 587–612.
Andrée, P., J. Ayres, M. Bosia, and M.-J. Massicotte (eds.). 2014. Globalization and food sovereignty: Global and local change in the new politics of food. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Badgley, C., J. Moghtader, E. Quintero, E. Zakem, M.J. Chappell, K. Aviles-Vazquez, A. Samulon, and I. Perfecto. 2007. Organic agriculture and the global food supply. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22(2): 86–108.
Bain, C. 2010. Governing the global value chain: GLOBALGAP and the Chilean fresh fruit industry. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 17(1): 1–23.
Baines, J. 2014. The ethanol boom and the restructuring of the food regime. Working Paper on Capital as Power, 3: 1–50.
Barrington Jr., Moore. 1967. Social origins of dictatorship and democracy. Boston: Beacon.
Booth, D. 1985. Marxism and development sociology: Interpreting the impasse. World Development 13(7): 761–787.
Borras, S.M. Jr., and J.C. Franco. 2012. A ‘land sovereignty’ alternative? Towards a people’s counter-enclosure.
Borras, S.M. Jr., and J.C. Franco. 2012. A “Land sovereignty” alternative? Towards a people’s counter-enclosure. TNI Agrarian Justice Programme Discussion Paper. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
Burch, D., and G. Lawrence (eds.). 2007. Supermarkets and agri-food supply chains: Transformations in the production and consumption of foods. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Burnett, K., and S. Murphy. 2014. What place for the international trade in food sovereignty? The Journal of Peasant Studies 41(6): 1065–1084.
Bush, R. 2010. Food riots: Poverty, power and protest. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(1): 119–129.
Carasik, L. 2014. Commercial land grabs threaten global food ecosystem. Al Jazeera, 12 June.
Chatterji, P. 2001. Nationalist thought and the colonial world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cleaver, H. 1977. Food, famine, and the international crisis. Zerowork 2: 7–70.
Committee on World Food Security (CFS). 2011. Land Tenure and International Investments. In Agriculture: A Report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, July. Rome: Committee on World Food Security (FAO).
Committee on World Food Security (CFS). 2013. Investing in smallholder agriculture for food security, high level panel of experts. Rome: FAO.
Corson, C. 2011. Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism: Non-state influence in struggles over Madagascar’s forests. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(4): 703–726.
Cribb, J. 2010. The coming famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crush, J. (ed.). 1995. The power of development. New York: Routledge.
Davis, M. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts. El Niño Famines and the making of the third world. London: Verso.
Davis, M. 2006. Planet of slums. London: Verso.
De Schutter, O. 2010a. Addressing concentration in food supply chains. Briefing Note 03. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
De Schutter, O. 2010b. Responsibly destroying the world’s peasantry. 4 June, farmlandgrab.org/13528.
De Schutter, O. 2011. The World Trade Organization and the post-global food crisis agenda. Briefing Note 04, November. Rome: FAO/United Nations.
Deininger, K., and D. Byerlee. 2011. The rise of large farms in land abundant countries: do they have a future? Policy Research Working Paper 5588. Washington, DC: WorldBank Development Research Group Agriculture & Rural Development Team.
Desmarais, A.A. 2007. Globalization and the power of peasants: La Vía Campesina. Halifax: Fernwood Books.
Diouf, J., and J.-M. Severino. 2008. Africa must grow to rely on its own farms. Guardian Weekly 2: 18.
Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
ETC. 2009. Who will feed us? ETC Group Communiqué, 102 (November). www.etcgroup.org
Fairbairn, M. 2013. Indirect dispossession: Domestic power imbalances and foreign access to land in Mozambique. Development and Change 44(2): 335–356.
Fairhead, J., M. Leach, and I. Scoones. 2012. Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 237–262.
FAO. 2008. The state of food insecurity in the world 2008: High Food Prices and Food Security—Threats and Opportunities. http://www.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/i0291e/i0291e00a.htm
Foster, J.B. 2000. Marx’s ecology: Materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Friedmann, H. 1982. The political economy of food: The rise and fall of the postwar international food order. American Journal of Sociology 88S: 248–286.
Friedmann, H. 2000. What on earth is the modern world system? Foodgetting and territory in the modern era and beyond. Journal of World System Research VI(Summer/Fall): 480–515.
Gana, A. 2012. The rural and agricultural roots of the Tunisian revolution: When food security matters’. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19(2): 201–213.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A post-capitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
GRAIN. 2008. Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security. GRAIN Briefings, Oct. http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212
Hall, R. 2014. Stop selling off African land – invest in farmers instead. The Guardian, 23 January.
Hilmi, A. 2012. Agricultural transition. A different logic. The more and better network. http://ag-transition.org/pdf/Agricultural_Transition_en.pdf.
Holt-Giménez, E. 2012. We already grow enough food for 10 billion people – and still can’t end hunger. The Huffington Post 2: 1–2.
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). 2008. Executive summary of the synthesis report. www.agassessment.org/docs/SR_Exec_Sum_280508_English.pdf
IPC (International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty). 2008. Civil society declaration of Terra Preta forum. 6 June. Available at. http://viacampesina.org.en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/food-sovereignty-and-trademainmenu-38/534-civil-society-declaration-of-the-terra-preta-forum.
James, C. 1963. The black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Overtoure and the San Domingo revolution. New York: Vintage.
Jarocz, L. 2009. The political economy of global governance and the world food crisis: The case of the FAO. Review 32(1): 37–60.
Kaag, M., and A. Zoomers (eds.). 2014. The global land grab. Beyond the hype. Halifax: Fernwood.
Kugelman, M., and S. Levenstein. 2013. The global farms race: Land grabs, agricultural investment, and the scramble for food security. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Lappé, F. 1971. Diet for a small planet. Boston: Beacon Books.
Lewis, W. 1954. Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour. Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22: 139–191.
Liberti, S. 2013. Land grabbing. Journeys in the new colonialism. London and New York: Verso.
Madeley, J. 2000. Hungry for trade. London: Zed Books.
Mann, A. 2014. Power shift. Global activism in food politics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mann, S., and J. Dickinson. 1978. Obstacles to the development of capitalist agriculture’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 5: 466–81.
McCalla, A. 1999. World agricultural directions: What do they mean for food security? CIIFAD Presentation, Cornell University, 30 Mar.
McKeon, N. 2014. Food security: From crisis to governance. London: Routledge.
McKeon, N. 2015. Food security: From crisis to governance. London: Routledge.
McMichael, P. 1996. Development and social change: A global perspective. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.
McMichael, P. 2005. Global development and the corporate food regime. In New directions in the sociology of global development, ed. F.H. Buttel and P. McMichael. Oxford: Elsevier Press.
McMichael, P. 2009. A food regime analysis of the “world food crisis”. Agriculture and Human Values 26: 286–295.
McMichael, P. 2011. Development and social change: A global perspective. London: Sage Publication.
McMichael, P. 2013a. Value-chain agriculture and debt relations: Contradictory outcomes. Third World Quarterly 34(4): 671–90.
McMichael, P. 2013b. Food regimes and Agrarian questions. Halifax: Fernwood Press.
McMichael, A.J., J.W. Powles, C.D. Butler, and R. Uauy. 2007. Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. Lancet 370: 1253–1263.
McMichael, A., J. Powles, C. Butler, and R. Uauy. 2007. Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. Lancet, 13 Sept.
Memmi, A. 1967. The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon.
Mitchell, T. (ed.). 2000. Questions of modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mittal, A. 2009. Introduction. In Voices from Africa. African farmers and environmentalists speak out against a new green revolution in Africa, ed. A. Mittal and M. Moore. Oakland: Oakland Institute.
Moore, J.W. 2003. Capitalism as world-ecology. Braudel and Marx on environmental history. Organization & Environment 16(4): 431–58.
Nielson, J., and B. Pritchard. 2009. Value chain struggles: Institutions and governance in the plantation districts of south India. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Oya, C. 2012. Contract farming in sub-Saharan Africa: A survey of approaches, debates and Issues. Journal of Agrarian Change 12(1): 1–33.
Patel, R. 2013. The long green revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies 4(1–2): 1–64.
Patel, R., and P. McMichael. 2009. A political economy of the food riot. REVIEW 32(1): 9–35.
Paul, H., and R. Steinbrecher. 2013. African agricultural growth corridors and the new alliance for food security and nutrition. Who benefits, who loses? EcoNexus, June.
Payne, A., and N. Phillips. 2010. Development. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pearce, F. 2012. The land grabbers. The new fight over who owns the earth. Boston: Beacon Press.
Phillips, L., and S. Ilcan. 2003. “A world free from hunger”: Global imagination and governance in the age of scientific management. Sociologia Ruralis 43(4): 433–453.
Porter, E. 2014. Old forecast of famine may yet come true. The New York Times, April 2, B1, B10.
Ponte, S., and P. Gibbon. 2005. Quality standards, conventions and the governance of global value chains. Economy and Society 34(1): 1–31.
Pretty, J., and R. Hine. 2001. Reducing food poverty with sustainable agriculture: A summary of new evidence. Final report from the “SAFE World” Research Project, University of Essex. www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/FresearchProgrammes/SAFEWexecsummfinalreport.htm
Pretty, J., J.J.L. Morison, and R. Hine. 2003. Reducing food poverty by in-creasing agricultural sustainability in developing countries. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 95: 217–34.
Rist, G. 1997. The history of development: From western origins to global faith. London: Zed Books.
Ritchie, M. 1993. Breaking the deadlock: The United States and agricultural policy in the uruguay round. Minneapolis: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Rosset, P. 2006. Food is different: Why we must get the WTO out of agriculture. Halifax: Fernwood.
Rosset, P., R. Patel, and M. Courville (eds.). 2006. Promised land: Competing visions of Agrarian reform. Oakland: Food First Books.
Rostow, W. 1960. The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifest. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ploeg, van der J.D. 2009. The ‘New’ peasantries. Struggles for autonomy and sustainability in an era of empire and globalization. London: Earthscan.
Sachs, W. (ed.). 1992. The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. London: Zed.
Sage, C. 2012. Environment and food. London: Routledge.
Said, E. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Schuurman, F. 2000. Paradigms lost, paradigms regained? Development studies in the twenty-first century. Third World Quarterly 21(1): 7–20.
Smith, N. 2007. Nature as accumulation strategy. In Coming to terms with nature, ed. L. Panitch and C. Leys. London: Merlin Press.
Spitz, P. 1985. The right to food in historical perspective. Food Policy 10: 306–316.
Taylor, M. 2014. The political ecology of climate change adaptation: Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. London: Routledge.
The Guardian. 2012. Does the future of farming in Africa lie in the private sector?, Poverty Matters Blog. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/nov/23/future-farming-africa-private-sector.
TNI Agrarian Justice Programme Discussion Paper, July. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
UN. 2005. Millennium ecosystem assessment. www.maweb.org/en/index.aspx
UNCTAD. 2013. Wake up before it is too late. Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate. New York: United Nations.
van der Ploeg, J.D. 2010. The food crisis, industrialized farming and the imperial regime. Journal of Agrarian Change 10: 98–106.
van der Ploeg, J.D. 2013. Food sovereignty: A critical dialogue. Presented at International Conference, Yale Univeristy. 14–15 Sept 2013.
Vidal, J. 2012. Land acquired over past decade could have produced food for a billion people. Guardian Weekly, 3 October.
Wald, N., C. Rosin, and D. Hill. 2012. “Soyization” and food security in South America. In Food systems failure: The global food crisis and the future of agriculture, ed. C. Rosin, P. Stock, and H. Campbell. London & New York: Earthscan.
Waring, M. 1988. If women counted: A new feminist economics. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers.
Weis, T. 2007. The global food economy. The battle for the future of farming. London: ZedBooks.
Weis, T. 2010. The accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3): 315–41.
Wise, T.A. 2014. “Land grabs” and responsible agricultural investment in Africa. Triple Crisis Blog, August 4. Available at. http://triplecrisis.com/land-grabs-and-responsible-agricultural-investment-in-africa/?utm_source=GDAE+Subscribers&utm_campaign=3c3dc9b3f9-Land_Grabs_8_4_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72d4918ff9-3c3dc9b3f9-49715917.
Wittman, H., A.A. Desmarais, and N. Wiebe (eds.). 2010. Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature and community. Halifax: Fernwood.
Wittman, H., A.A. Desmarais, and N. Wiebe. 2011. Food Sovereignty in Canada. Creating just and sustainable food systems. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
World Bank. 2007. World Development Report, 2008. Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank. 2014c. The practice of responsible investment principles in larger-scale agricultural investments. implications for corporate performance and impact on local communities, Report No 86175-GLB. Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank. 2014e. Benchmarking the business of agriculture. http://bba.worldbank.org/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McMichael, P. (2016). Food Security, Land, and Development. In: Grugel, J., Hammett, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-42723-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-42724-3
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)