AGRICULTURE AND THE
STATE SYSTEM
The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the
present
Harriet Friedmann and
Philip McMichael
Sociologia Ruralis 1989, Vol XXIX-2
Artigo que pretende investigar o papel da agricultura no
desenvolvimento do capitalismo mundial:
"At present, when food security and foreign debt command
policy attention, it is useful to examine the assumptions behind attempts to
build up national agricultures in Third World countries." p93
"Two basic processes are at work: the development of a
system of independent, liberal national states, and the industrialization of
agriculture and food." p94
"We conceptualize nineteenth-century nation-state
formation as a systemic process, in which settler states played a key role.
Exporting temperate crops competitive with European agriculture, the
independent settler states: (i) provisioned the growing European proletariat
with wage-foods, and (ii) became the basis of a new type of trade within a new
international order, alongside the colonial relation whereby metropoles
directly administered (complementary) tropical export agriculture. The new
international order encouraged a movement towards not only comparative
advantage, as an apparently automatic mechanism of specialization. [...] The US
exemplified the national economy balanced between agriculture and
industry." p94
"We conclude that the growing power of capital to
organize and reorganize agriculture undercuts state policies directing
agriculture to national ends, such as food security, articulated development
and the preservation of rural/peasant communities." p95
"We organize our argument around the concept of the food
regime [...]. It allows us to characterize late nineteenth century capitalism
as an extensive form constructing capitalist production relations through the
quantitative growth of wage labour; and mid-twentieth century capitalism as an
intensive form reconstructing consumption relations as part of the process of
accumulation [...]. In the first food regime settler agricultural exports
produced by family labour underwrote the developing wage-relation and attendant
growth of food markets. [...] In the second food regime, this relationship was
extend to the post-colonial world. [...] As a component of global
political-economic dynamics, each food regime embodied two opposing movements -
in the first, culmination of the colonial organization of precapitalist regions
and the rise of the nation-state system; in the second, completion of the state
system through decolonization and its simultaneous weakening through the
transnational restructuring of agricultural sectors by agro-food
capitals." p 95
"The link between the two food regimes is the
US..." p 95
THE FIRST FOOD REGIME
"The first food regime was centred on European imports
of wheat and meat from the settler states between 1870 and 1914. In retour,
settler states imported European manufactured goods, labour, and
capital..." p 95-6
"The first food regime was, therefore, a key to the
creation of a system of national economies governed by independent
states." p96
THE CULMINATION OF
COLONIALISM
"The culmination of colonialism came hard on the heels
of the opposite movement, in wich settler colonies - Canada, Australia, New
Zealand - gained political independence and with the capacity to enact tariffs
and other controls over their political-economic frontiers, indeed to raise
capital to expand those frontiers." p97
"Late nineteenth century colonialism expand the supply
of tropical products to metropolitan economies." p97
"In short, late nineteenth-century colonialism, which
reproduced direct metropolitan political control, simultaneously expressed new
dynamics of the emerging nation-state system. The very scale of world partition
demonstrated the competitive capacities of a reconstituted industrial state
system with greater military and financial powers. In this way the opposing
movements of the nineteenth century - the culmination of colonialism, and the emergence of the nation-state system - mutually
conditioned one another." p98
THE RISE OF THE
NATION-STATE SYSTEM
"European imports of wheat and meat from the settler
states, and exports of capital and people to organize production, were the core
of the first food regime, geared to industrial capitalism. The settler family
farm, which represented a new form of specialized commercial agriculture
(Friedmann 1978) was itself industrial. Settler agriculture provided demand for
emerging national industries in the settler states [...]. This was a new form
of capitalist development: whereas the European metropoles had fostered
proto-industry and colonial trade through mercantalist policies, the settler
states at once defined national territories and established fully commercial -
and integrated - sectors of production." p 100
"This reconstitution of the world economy as an
international economy altered the content, if not the form, of the colonial
division of labour and anticipated its long-term decline." p 100
"The major link in the reconstitution of the world
economy was between goods - and regions - of wage labour and settler
agriculture. Despite different weights of industry and agriculture, of domestic
and export production, all major national economies now produced (or could
produce) the same products. Wage labour expanded through the cheap wagefoods
and raw materials flowing between nations within a unified, price-regulated
world market. This facilitated the relocation of commercial agriculture from
Europe to extensive settler frontiers." p101
"The resulting competition of cheaper grains from
settler regions induced an agriculture crisis in Europe, particularly in
large-scale grain [...] economic nationalism expressed world market forces.
[...] Across the oceans, settler states introduced direct regulation of
agricultural markets to help farmers cope with the collapse of international
trade. Price supports and other market controls would eventually be adopted in
both Europe and the new nations formed through decolonization." p 101-2
Três novas relações entre a agricultura e a indústria:
"1. Complementary products based on differences in
climate and social organization gave way to competitive products traded
according to Ricardian comparative advantage. [...] This anchored the first
international division of labour and underpinned a new phase of industrial
development." p 102
"2. Market links to industry clearly demarcated
agriculture as a capitalist economic sector. [...] Chemical and mechanical
inputs increasingly replaced the biological inputs produced internal to the
farm in mixed farming. [...] Yet this agriculture was industrial mainly in its
external links, purchasing inputs from industry and providing raw materials to
industries doing minimal processing (flour mills, meat preservation). The clear
boundaries between agriculture and industry would be undercut in the second
food regime." p 102
"3. The complementarity between commercial sectors of
industry and agriculture, wich originated in international trade and remained
dependent on it, was paradoxically internalized within nationally organized
economies. The resulting home market for domestic industrial capital - the
agro-industrial complex - represented in social thought the model of national
economy." pg 102
THE SECOND FOOD REGIME
"The second food regime is a rather more complex and contradictory
set of relations of production and consumption rooted in unusually strong state
protection and the organization of the world economy under US hegemony. [...]
The present anarchy in world markets reflects a fundamental transformation of
old patterns of international specialization. As in the earlier regime, there
have been two opposing movements of the state system and international division
of labour:
1. Extension of the state system to former colonies.
Decolonization [...] destroyed the political basis for colonial specialization
within protected trading blocs centered on the metropole. Instead, integration
into the second food regime proceeded on two completely new fronts: a)
importation of wheat from the old settler colonies, especially the US, at the
expense of domestic food production, and b) decline of markets for tropical
exports, notably sugar and vegetable oils, through import substitution by
advanced capitalist countries.
2. Transnational restructuring of agricultural sectors by
agro-food capitals. [...] Agriculture became an industrial sector as food
increasingly shifted from final use to manufactured (even durable)
products." pg 103
EXTENSION OF THE STATE
SYSTEM
"The first movement, decolonization, broke up the
colonial trading blocs, with their politically constructed specialization, and
completed the state system. Yet as new states were created, their first
economic goal, like that of their earliest predecessors in Europe, was to
establish a national economy based on commodity relations as an effective base
for political control and taxation." p 104
"...only the US had the ability to act on its interest
in selling wheat in the Third World. Its economic power was expressed through
the dollar as world currancy. This underpinned the main mechanism for
redirecting wheat trade towards Third World countries despite their lack of
dollars, concessional sales in American-held non-convertible national
currencies..." p104
"Thus proletarianization in the Third World far from
depending on national food markets occurred through imported American wheat, at
the expense of domestic agricultural production. Cheap American grain led to
the displacement rather than the commodification of traditional foods..."
p 104
TRANSNATIONAL
RESTRUCTURING OF SECTORS
"The completion of the state system occurred
simultaneously with the transnational restructuring of agricultural sectors.
The sectoral boundaries started to blur through i) intensification of
agricultural specialization [...] and integration of specific crops and
livestock into agro-food chains dominated at both ends by increasingly large
industrial capitals; and ii) a shift in agricultural products from final use to
industrual inputs fo manufactured foods." p 105
"Restructuring mainly occurred through two large
complexes: the intensive meat complex and the durable foods complex." p
105
“The durable foods complex changed food from a local...” p106
“Like the automobile, meat was a key product in the mass
production and consumption of standardized products that provided the central
dynamic of post-war capitalismo in advanced capitalista economies; and like
petroleum [...] soy was a critical input to mass production.” P 106
“With the Common Agricultural Policy, France, like the resto
f Europe, was opened to American soy. The US accepted European protection
against wheat in return for excluding soy from duties in successive GATT rounds
[...]. American corporations, already well established domestically during the
War, established subsidiaries with processing plants in Europe. The
corporations of the meat/soy/maize complex later extended the transnational
integration of the most dynamic agricultural production to certain peripheral
economies.” P 107
“Turning to the durable foods complex, the shift from farm
produce to manufactured foods in the centre during the 1950s and 1960s
reflected the larger trend to mass consumption and mass production of
standardized products. Consumption of frozen foods in the US, for instance,
more than tripled between 1950 and 1975 [...] For farmers all over the world
this shift to manufactured foods meant a transformation of markets from either
local markets or na anonymous mass of distant consumers, to na oligopolistic
relation to corporate buyers of agricultural raw materials.” P 108
“The key to understanding this renationalization of domestic
agriculture in the core countries is substitution of tropical sugar and oils by
generic sweeteners and fats. US per capita consumption of sugar actually
declined by one-third between 1970 and 1983.” P 109
“The key to oils is soya, which integrates the double
movement of import substitution [...] and transnational integration of sectors.
Soy oil largely displaced other vegetable oils, both temperate and tropical, as
a function of its joint production with meal cakes for animal feeds. The shift
to soy [...] reflect American power.” P109
“soy was at the centre of the postwar transformation of
agriculture, and with it major shifts in the international division of labour. Mosto
f the story applies to meat, but its origins lie in the combined properties of
processed soybeans as vegetable oil [...] and na excelente source of protein in
animal feed. Here the advantage, after considerable manoeuvring, aliance formation,
and lobbying by agro-food industries in the 1930’s, created ideal conditions
foi soy oil relative to existing oilseeds.” P110
“We have argued that the US modelo f capitalista development
constitutes the link between the two regimes that promoted the nation state
system, the industrialization of agriculture, and the growing tension between
these processes.” P 111
“As the hegemonic power, American capitalismo became the
model for post-war theories of development applied to the Third World.” P 111
“The overriding shift is from state to capital as the
dominant structuring force.” P112
“The restructuring, not only shifts sectoral balances whithin
nations, but also disaggregates large sectors, such as agriculture, into minute
divisions and reintegrates each division into a complex web of inputs and
outputs to increasingly complex and differentiated food products. Not only is
agriculture no longer a coherent sector, but even food is not.” P112
“The food and agriculture componente took the formo f a
proposal, defeated at a meeting in Washington in 1947, for a World Food Board that
would have given considerable planning and enforcement powers to the Food and
Agriculture Organization.” P113
