Philip McMichael

Commodity chains and global capitalism

Introduction: Global Commodity Chains by Gary Gereffi, Roberto P. Korzeniewicz, and Miguel Korzeniewicz Historical and Spatial Patterns of Commodity Chains in the World-System: Commodity Chains in the Capitalist World-Economy Prior to 1800 Commodity Chains: Construction and Research by Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein The Shipbuilding Commodity Chain, 1590-1790 by Eyup Ozveren The Grain Flour Commodity Chain, 1590-1790 by Sheila Pelizzon Conclusions About Commodity Chains by Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein Competition, Time and Space in Industrial History by Erica Schoenberger The Global Distribution of Commodity Chains by Roberto P. Korzeniewicz and William Martin The Organization of Commodity Chains: The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks by Gary Gereffi Where Is the Chain in Commodity Chains? The Service Sector Nexus by Eileen Rabach and Eun Mee Kim Institutionalizing Flexibility: A Comparative Analysis of Fordist and Post-Fordist Models of Third World Agro-Export Production by Laura T. Reynolds The Geography of Commodity Chains: The New Spatial Division of Labor and Commodity Chains in the Greater South China Economic Region by Xiangming Chen Commodity Chains and Industrial Restructuring in the Pacific Rim: Garment Trade and Manufacturing by Richard Appelbaum, David Smith, and Brad Christerson Strategic Reorientations of U.S. Apparel Firms by Ian M. Taplin Automobile Commodity Chains in the NICS: A Comparison of South Korea, Mexico and Brazil by Naeyoung Lee and Jeffrey Cason Consumption and Commodity Chains: Commodity Chains and Marketing Strategies: Nike and the Global Athletic Footwear Industry by Miguel Korzeniewicz Fresh Demand: The Consumption of Chilean Produce in the United States by Walter L. Goldfrank Commodity Chains and the Korean Automobile Industry by Hyung Kook Kim and Su-Hoon Lee Cocaine, Commodity Chains, and Drug Politics: A Transnational Approach by Suzanne Wilson and Marta Zambrano Bibliography Index

A food regime genealogy

Food regime analysis emerged to explain the strategic role of agriculture and food in the construction of the world capitalist economy. It identifies stable periods of capital accumulation associated with particular configurations of geopolitical power, conditioned by forms of agricultural production and consumption relations within and across national spaces. Contradictory relations within food regimes produce crisis, transformation, and transition to successor regimes. This ‘genealogy’ traces the development of food regime analysis in relation to historical and intellectual trends over the past two decades, arguing that food regime analysis underlines agricultures foundational role in political economy/ecology.

Global Development and The Corporate Food Regime

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring.

Land grab appears to be a phenomenal expression of deepening contradictions in the corporate food regime. In particular, the end of cheap food (signaled in the 2008 ‘food crisis’) has generated renewed interest in agriculture for development on the part of the development industry, matched by a rising interest in offshore land investments, driven by governments securing food and fuel exports and financiers speculating on commodity futures and land price inflation. This paper interprets these developments as illusory solutions to a fundamental accumulation crisis of the neoliberal project. While this new (and final?) enclosure registers a restructuring of the food regime, as its geopolitical relations and productive content re-centers on Southern land and an emergent bioeconomic imperative, it is likely to only buy time (and space) in the short run for political and economic elites and a global consuming class. In the longer run, the attempt to resolve food regime contradictions by a spatial fix may well be catastrophic.

The power of food.

In the developmentalist era,industrialization has simultaneously transformedagriculture and degraded its natural and culturalbase. Food production and consumption embodies thecontradictory aspects of this transformation. Thispaper argues that the crisis of development hasgenerated two basic responses: (1) the attempt toredefine development as a global project, includingharnessing biotechnology to resolve the food securityquestion, and (2) a series of countermovementsattempting to simultaneously reassert the value oflocal, organic foods, and challenge the attempt on thepart of food corporations and national and globalinstitutions to subject the food question to marketsolutions. It is proposed that the power of food liesin its material and symbolic functions of linkingnature, human survival, health, culture and livelihoodas a focus of resistance to corporate takeover of lifeitself.

The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors' introduction

This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity. An engaged agrarian political economy combined with global political economy, international relations and social movement theory provides an important framework for analysis and critique of the conditions, dynamics, contradictions, impacts and possibilities of the emerging global biofuels complex. Our hope is that this collection demonstrates the significance of a political economy of biofuels in capturing the complexity of the ‘biofuels revolution’ and at the same time opening up questions about its sustainability in social and environmental terms that provide pathways towards alternatives.

Agrofuels in the food regime

The biofuels rush represents the continued externalisation of capitalisms costs, through the distraction of green fuel. This essay argues that the agrarian question has been posed as a distinctive problematic across the three so-called ‘food regimes’ associated with high colonialism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism – and that the third form of the agrarian question is revealing most visibly the contradictions of the commodification of food and fuel crops. These contradictions are clearest in their developmental (and climatic) effects in biofuel expansion at the expense of human habitats and ecologies; as well as in reducing ecological processes to a price metric to facilitate carbon trading, but revealing the incommensurabilities of carbon flows and, therefore, the shortcomings of market environmentalism as a proponent of greening accumulation with biofuels.

Peasant prospects in the neoliberal age

Peasant prospects today are matters of significant contention, not least regarding the question of the recomposition of the peasantry. The question of the peasantry’s future links to another longstanding debate about the trajectory of capitalism. This continues the Marxist/populist debate over peasant prospects anchored in Lenin’s claim that what Russian Narodniks viewed as peasant ‘differentiation’ was indeed peasant ‘disintegration’ in the context of a developing home market for capital. 1 Variants of this debate echo in the extensive literature concerning the persistence of small farmers in the capitalist era. While the latter centres on the reproduction of small farming within the circuits of capitalist agriculture, a broader agrarian question concerns the reproduction of small farming by capitalism globally and across sectors. This broader ‘agrarian question’ focuses attention on the relentless assault on small farming by a new balance of forces, including financial relations incorporating agriculture into global industrial-retailing circuits, intellectual property rights protocols displacing peasant knowledges through seed monopolies, and globally-managed circuits of food displacing small farmers. In reviewing these questions, this essay argues that the current agrarian question and its resolution depend on the peasantry itself, in a politicised movement on a world scale to confront the international power, and socio-ecological impact, of capital.

Deepening, and repairing, the metabolic rift

This paper critically assesses the metabolic rift as a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism. As a social concept, the metabolic rift presumes that metabolism is understood in relation to the labour process. This conception, however, privileges the organisation of labour to the exclusion of the practice of labour, which we argue challenges its utility for analysing contemporary socio-environmental crises. As an ecological concept, the metabolic rift is based on outmoded understandings of (agro) ecosystems and inadequately describes relations and interactions between labour and ecological processes. Historically, the metabolic rift is integral to debates about the definitions and relations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity as historical concepts. At the same time, it gives rise to an epistemic rift, insofar as the separation of the natural and social worlds comes to be expressed in social thought and critical theory, which have one-sidedly focused on the social. We argue that a reunification of the social and the ecological, in historical practice and in historical thought, is the key to repairing the metabolic rift, both conceptually and practically. The food sovereignty movement in this respect is exemplary.

Rethinking globalization: the agrarian question revisited

The agrarian question, like most questions about the trajectory of (capitalist) development, was framed as a national question about a national process. This article critiques the latter assumption, arguing, as Karl Polanyi dicl, that the classical agrarian question was a national interpretation of a global process. It also argues that the current processes of globalization crystallize the agrarian question in new and challenging ways. The key to these arguments is that the capitalist organization of agriculture is a political process, and is central to the dynamics of an evolving state system (including supra-statal institutions). The discussion contextualizes agricultuial developments within the contradictory dynamics of the two main periods of world capitalism over the last century: the national (developmentalist) and the global movements. The crisis of developmentalism coincides with the crisis of the post-Second World War food regime. It is currently generating new social movements that combine original and tenure questions with food and green questions, reversing the antiagrarianism of the development, or productivist, paradigm.