BRICS varieties of capitalism and food regime reordering: A comparative institutional analysis

The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has sparked debates on the possibility of a ‘great transformation’ in the course of neoliberal capitalism and the global agrifood system. This paper seeks to contribute to these debates by providing a comparative institutional analysis of the BRIC(S) ‘varieties of capitalism’ in the current ‘food regime’ international reordering. Capital accumulation, social reproduction and politics are key problems of the ‘agrifood question’ in the BRIC(S) varieties of capitalism. My argumentation is that capitalist diversity stems largely from the historically embedded legacy of the agrarian question in each country, that the dynamics of the agrifood system influence their development trajectories in decisive ways, and that the BRIC(S)‐driven polycentric shifts in the contemporary food regime are crucial to the destiny of global capitalism.     

‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’Part I: The Alchemy of Capital,Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648

In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero‐American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans‐Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed.     

Beyond market dependence: The origins of capitalism in Catalonia

Buried in the footnotes of his famous 1976 essay, Robert Brenner left the remark that Catalonia had experienced an agrarian transition to capitalism in parallel to England. This important claim has been completely forgotten by his followers of the political Marxist tradition, who since then have developed his views on the origins of capitalism. Building on the specialist literature, this article revisits the question of the Catalan transition through the prism of political Marxism and teases out its implications. In particular, it argues that the Catalan case illustrates the centrality of agency and subjectivity in the process of capitalist change. Contrary to Brenner's claim, this paper will argue that pre‐capitalist social property relations persisted in agriculture throughout the period of transition. Instead, the region's capitalist breakthrough was prompted by sociocultural struggles in its 18th‐century proto‐industry.     

The Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Post‐Soviet Russia

A core set of criteria have been met, so that it is accurate to speak of an agrarian capitalist system in Russia. The development of agrarian capitalism carries with it increased stratification, which is analysed along five dimensions: earned income, land expansion, use of credit, income from food sales and income from household enterprise. The paper demonstrates increasing differentiation between households, between professional cohorts and within professional cohorts. The data showing stratification within professions suggest that intra‐cohort stratification is driving most of the inter‐cohort stratification. The Russian model of agrarian capitalism and its processes of stratification have yielded a bifurcated countryside in which a thin stratum of ‘super winners’ has emerged. Economic processes have developed beyond simple stratification and have created the basis from which a rudimentary class structure appears to be forming.     

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

Histories of agrarian capitalism have often been constrained by the implications of Robert Brenner's work on the subject. This essay, employing archival and secondary research on Ecuador's long 19th century experiences with cacao capitalism, argues that production processes and localized forms of accumulation, rather than class structure and legal relations, should be included in our definition of the concept. By focusing on how fixed capital in cacao trees and the production of the yearly cacao commodity responded to global demand and local material conditions, I propose amplifying the concept of agrarian capitalism, as well as a rethinking of coastal Ecuador's history of capitalist development. I highlight how both absolute and relative forms of surplus value generation coexisted in coastal Ecuador's cacao haciendas, while demonstrating how financial instruments used for extending the cacao frontier undermined the prospects for long‐term growth.     

Dragon Head Enterprises and the State of Agribusiness in China

This paper examines the political trajectory of agribusiness firms called ‘dragon head enterprises’ in China's ongoing agri‐food transformations. It starts from the premise that state and private elites in China are working together to consolidate a robust domestic agribusiness sector, as both an arena for national‐level rural and economic development, and a new frontier for access to resources and markets abroad. Through analyses of policy documents, market share data and ethnographic materials, I explore the organization and operation of dragon heads in the pork sector. My findings reveal that agribusiness development in China's pork sector is largely domestic, has a mixed state–private form and tends to marginalize the foreign‐based TNCs that have been the most powerful actors in the global agri‐food system to date. I argue that China is not only a destination for ‘external’ transnational capital, but also a site of agribusiness development in its own right. This has important implications for analysing capitalist transformations and for engaging global agri‐food politics.     

Rethinking the agrarian question: Agriculture and underdevelopment in the Global South

In recent years, agriculture has come to be seen as increasingly irrelevant to processes of industrialization and economic development in the Global South. The integration of developing economies into global capitalism and the continued advance of structural transformation would seem to indicate that there is no longer a classic “agrarian question” in the developing world. In other words, agriculture is no longer a major barrier to capitalist development in these countries. However, there is reason to doubt this growing consensus. This article argues for a rethinking of the agrarian question in the Global South and presents evidence that capitalist property relations have not penetrated agriculture throughout much of the developing world. Contrary to recent trends in the literature, I argue that not only is there still an agrarian question in the Global South but also that it remains central to explaining lower levels of industrialization in these countries and, thereby, their relative underdevelopment.     

The Role of Microfinance in Contemporary Rural Development Finance Policy and Practice: Imposing Neoliberalism as ‘Best Practice’

Microcredit emerged in the 1970s as a mechanism whereby virtually all poor individuals could supposedly escape their poverty through self‐help and individual entrepreneurship. Crucially, neoliberal policy‐makers found the microcredit concept ideologically compelling, and the international development community soon began to provide massive support to establish and expand the microfinance movement. Today, however, even long‐standing microfinance advocates now reluctantly accept that microcredit has actually had no positive impact upon poverty or ‘bottom‐up’ rural development. In fact, those rural communities most exposed to microcredit have been severely damaged in a number of ways, especially through sub‐prime‐style ‘boom‐to‐bust’ episodes. Largely because of its supreme ideological usefulness, the microfinance movement nonetheless still retains some support in the major neoliberal‐oriented international development institutions, pro‐globalization think‐tanks, and in a number of Western governments.     

Values and Markets: an Analysis of Organic Farming Initiatives in Andalusia

This article sets out the overlapping political and cultural roots of an innovative farming co‐operative in Andalusia, one composed of both ex‐labourers and small farmers. One strand of values involves the realization of a food chain in which no capitalist enterprise can extract profit from their labours: this, together with various conceptions of personal and local autonomy, shapes much of their practice of organic farming. Nevertheless, their labour has to generate an acceptable livelihood through selling food in an environment dominated by large‐scale commercial agriculture in both the ‘conventional’ and ‘organic’ sectors. The article explains how they achieve this by building ties with consumers around a variety of shared values. This focus on the particularities of a radical food movement sheds light on many larger issues, both the nature of markets and competition in the dominant economy, and the debates about organic certification and ‘conventionalization’.     

Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism: Germany and England Compared (c.1200–c.1800)

Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio‐economic developments from c.1200 to c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing economic significance of the ‘sub‐peasant classes’, which had a growing impact on the market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which – towards the end of the period – a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200–c.1400 cannot really be categorized as ‘feudal’ according to Brenner's definition; and ‘agrarian capitalism’ does not adequately describe the socio‐economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts and on the evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after c.1800.     

An Analysis of Standards‐based Regulation in the EU Organic Sector, 1991–2007

Against the background of a discussion of recent analyses of capitalist subsumption of agriculture and of neo‐liberalism, the paper uses a ‘liberal governmentality’ framework to trace the development of the EU Regulation on organic agriculture from its adoption in 1991 to its recent repeal and replacement in 2007. The central argument is that regulatory development took the form of a cycle of elaboration, tightening, increasing deviation and finally a ‘return to principles’ in order to reduce deviation. At different stages in this cycle, different groups of ‘stakeholders’, including experts, were influential. Likewise, different forms of expertise became dominant or were sidelined. Meanwhile, ‘capital’ in its different incarnations remained marginal throughout. The paper leaves open the questions of the generalizability of this analysis to regulatory arenas other than the EU, as well as to regulatory objects more central than organic agriculture to capitalist accumulation.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

New Paths to Capitalist Agricultural Production in Africa: Experiences of Ghanaian Pineapple Producer–Exporters

With the global restructuring of agri‐food markets since the 1980s, an impressive amount of scholarship has examined its impacts in African countries. However, little has been written on the emergence of local medium and large‐scale commercial farmers selling to export companies or controlling their own export marketing arrangements. This article examines Ghanaian commercial farmers producing and exporting fresh pineapples to European markets. This group of pineapple producer–exporters represents a path to capitalist agricultural production that can be conceptualized as capitalism from outside: where capital flows into the countryside, rather than accumulation occurring from above or below within the agrarian economy. The emergence of this form of agrarian capitalism is stimulated by opportunities in new high‐value agricultural export markets, but its stabilization depends on country‐specific characteristics such as rural social structures, property rights and state support. The article documents the conditions of emergence of this new group of Ghanaian capitalist farmers, the period of destabilization caused by increasing international competition that resulted in a small number of large‐scale agribusiness firms surviving, and the challenges that these agribusiness firms faced in stabilizing their capitalist agricultural production.     

A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions in Zimbabwe

The recent land invasions in Zimbabwe represent a profound and contradictory revolution in that country's agrarian social order, with implications that have already spilled over the borders of this small southern African country. A settler colonial heritage that tenaciously mapped land and tenure forms into unequal zones according to race is giving way to a more complex and spatially diversi ?ed con?guration of agrarian property forms and production strategies. Control over access to the means of violence has been devolved to ruling party loyalists, war veterans, army personnel, provincial administrators and local councillors, thus shifting the forms and functions of power exercised in the name of the state and the nation. ‘Resettlement’, ‘squatting:rsquo; and ‘farm invasions’ constitute morally charged alternatives in the lexicon of movement across tenurial boundaries. Contested rights to land and to movement are mediated through discourses of national and sub‐national belonging and exclusion, with commercial farm workers – deemed foreigners – the chief victims. The dramatic challenge that the invasions pose to private property, and to the rule of law more generally, suggest the possible collapse of large‐scale capitalist farming and the withdrawal of aid and foreign investment. Yet, at the same time, new forms of capitalist investment in transnational safari hunting and eco‐tourism continue to nibble away at the land base of the most peripheral of the old African reserves, facilitated by the romantic idealism of international conservation NGOs, and the aggressive disciplinary impulses of Rural District Councils. The same shifts in patterns of elite global consumption have led conservative white ranchers to take down fences in favour of wildlife conservancies organized around a coextensive commonage. These profound, if contradictory, transformations in Zimbabwe's agrarian social order are illuminated by a new generation of ethnographically grounded scholarship, the range of which is represented in the contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change.     

Discipline,Governmentality and ‘Developmental Patrimonialism’: Insights from Rwanda's Pyrethrum Sector

An ongoing academic debate examines the implications of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ for African citizens. Rwanda is a key case study in this debate, with proponents of developmental patrimonialism and ‘party capitalism’ arguing that companies owned by the ruling party or the military play positive roles in economic development. This debate often focuses on macro‐level, elite politics. This paper instead uses a Foucauldian lens to examine the micro‐level politics of pyrethrum production in Rwanda, which is managed by a military‐owned company. The company utilizes incentive‐based governmental strategies, in line with state discourses, in addition to punitive, disciplinary regimes. The paper demonstrates that state agricultural strategies depend on multiple factors, including multi‐scale political tensions between the ruling party's desire for control and its discourse of ‘entrepreneurship’.     

Institutional Diversity and Capitalist Transition: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Arunachal Pradesh, India

This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein–Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant.     

Land outsourcing and labour contracting: Labour management in China's capitalist farms

Difficulty in labour supervision has been considered to be one of the obstacles to the development of capitalist agriculture. This paper presents two distinctive labour management strategies in China's large‐scale agriculture, which contribute to the development of agrarian capitalism in China. As shown in these cases, agribusiness companies engaged in grain crop production retreat from direct labour management by outsourcing crop cultivation, while acquiring profits from upstream and downstream activities. On the other hand, capitalist producers, who are involved in the labour‐intensive and capital‐intensive crop production, tend to mobilize local elites to manage the farmworkers. Although independent labour contracting services have not emerged, a specialized group of labour contractors is being cultivated. Rural social resources are utilized in labour recruitment and supervision to minimize the labour management costs in both strategies. However, the conflicts between capital and labour are covered or replaced instead of being settled.     

Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants. I then detail the ways in which these upper peasants mobilized around notions of distributive justice to successfully press demands for land restitution in the late 1980s, drawing on Vietnamese newspapers and other sources to construct case studies of local land conflicts. Finally, I argue that the successful mobilization of the upper peasants around such a moral economy has helped, over the past two decades, to facilitate the re‐emergence of agrarian capitalism in the Mekong Delta, in contrast to other regions in Vietnam.     

The Coal Crisis in Appalachia: Agrarian Transformation,Commodity Frontiers and the Geographies of Capital

Capital's commodity frontiers strategy has at once woven together regional differences within an expanding world‐system and remade the productive and reproductive activities of humans and the rest of nature. The development of successive commodity frontiers gave way to long waves of economic expansion that have been pivotal to accelerating accumulation and transcending capital's recurrent crises. In short, commodity frontiers are constitutive of world‐ecological moments premised on booms and crises of accumulation. In this paper, I examine the coal commodity frontier in Appalachia, to illustrate the region's history as one of succeeding frontiers in and out of the region over the long twentieth century of American capitalism. I argue that the origin of Appalachia's coal frontier was decisively made through the nineteenth‐century agricultural revolution expressed outside of the region. Appalachia's full‐fledged development was an outcome of capital's under‐reproduction strategies. The crisis of the region's frontier turned on a lack of surplus from under‐reproduction strategies, competing coal basins, economic diversification and competing energy sources. I find that the commodity frontier concept not only illuminates regional political economies and ecologies of difference, but also explains the production of nature of historical capitalism.     

From neoliberalism to national developmentalism? Contested agrarian imaginaries of a postneoliberal future for food and farming

This review examines three recent books that address the relationship between neoliberalism and agribusiness, on the one hand, and the demise of smallholder farming, traditional diets and the rise of diet‐related chronic illness, on the other. The first, by Timothy Wise, adopts what may be characterized as an ‘agrarian populist’ stance, constructing a universal binary between trans‐nationalizing agribusiness and a unified family farm sector. Protagonists from the latter are seen to embody the future, using agroecology to feed the world sustainably in a time of climate crisis. This is not a consistently propeasant stance, however; Wise seems rather to advocate a ‘farmer road’ to national capitalist development. The other two books, by Alyshia Galvez and Gerardo Otero, cover quite similar ground to one another, looking explicitly at the rise of neoliberalism, the decline of traditional farming and diets and the rise of processed food‐related diseases. Unlike ‘agrarian populists’, both authors privilege the state and ‘class struggle’ (sensu lato) in analysing the dynamics of neoliberalism, free trade agreements and food policies. Normatively, both see the state as pivotal in generating policies centred around smaller scale farming and the production of nutritious food for all. For Otero, like Wise, these policies seem to be tied to a form of national developmentalism as an escape route from neoliberalism. For Galvez, the future is less clear‐cut—although by inclination ‘propeasant’, she does not exclude elements of national developmentalism in envisioning a postneoliberal world.