Capitalist Agriculture Research Articles

From Sustainable Agriculture to Sustainable Agrifood Systems: A Comparative Review of Alternative Models

This paper reviews, compares, and critically evaluates two broad groups of sustainable agriculture models: “sustainable agriculture” and “sustainable agrifood systems”. The “sustainable agriculture” models—comprising organic farming, regenerative agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, carbon-capture agriculture, and nature-based solutions—focus primarily on improving ecological sustainability through farm-level practices. These models emphasize reducing external, industrial inputs, enhancing biodiversity, and promoting climate resilience, relying on technological and market-based solutions to address environmental concerns. On the other hand, the “sustainable agrifood systems” models—agroecology, alternative food networks, and permaculture—offer more ambitious visions of systemic transformation. These approaches not only seek to implement environmentally sound practices but also aim to reconfigure the broader food system by challenging corporate power, promoting local governance, fostering food sovereignty, and prioritizing social justice. Grounded in grassroots movements, these models emphasize social justice and economic viability in addition to ecological sustainability. This paper’s contribution lies in its comparative analysis of the wide array of sustainable alternatives, highlighting both their strengths and limitations. Adopting an agrarian political economy perspective, it critiques the former camp for limited engagement with structural issues inherent in capitalist agriculture and the latter camp for underplaying the importance of industrial agriculture for national development in the Global South.

Dynamics of class and labour: Evidence from a longitudinal study in Rajasthan (India)

AbstractIn the Gang Canal region of Rajasthan, the cropping pattern changed from a labour intensive crop, cotton, to a mechanized crop, cluster beans. The shift in cropping pattern not only displaced workers from farm wage work but also brought changes in labour hiring contracts with large scale conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece‐rate contracts. Drawing on a primary survey in a village from Gang Canal region, the paper examines the change in the agrarian relations in rural Rajasthan by analysing the emerging development in the rural labour relations. For piece‐rate work in farm wage work in some parts of Rajasthan, the wage rate is unilaterally decided by the landlords and large capitalist farmers and is denoted as the ‘village rate’. The manual workers have negligible bargaining power vis‐à‐vis the village rate. The conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece‐rate contracts has enhanced the duration of working day that involves a rise in the rate of surplus value. Access and availability of low wage labour facilitates the accumulation of capital. With the limited availability of employment in the non‐farm sector (in both public and private sectors), workers are compelled to sell their labour power at wages that do not exceed the level of subsistence. The paper concludes with a brief examination of continuum of coercion and varied degree of unfreedom among worker in the village.

Australia’s new peasantry: towards a politics and practice of custodianship on agroecology-oriented farms

ABSTRACT Since settlement, colonial values of productivity and improvement have transformed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country into a site of agricultural extraction. We examine the nascent peasantisation movement in Australia driven by small-scale farmers rejecting colonial capitalist agriculture within an agroecological transition. Our case studies explore how new peasants seek guidance from First Peoples and peasants in developing a politics and practice of custodianship, while fostering degrowth economies. Custodianship, we argue, offers a theoretical and practical framework for the agroecological transition in settler contexts through foregrounding social and ecological reparations across scales from the farm to global food sovereignty activism.

‘The Wild West of England’: Enclosure, Stag-Hunting, and the Creation of New Popular Perceptions of Exmoor in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT Recent research emphasises parallels between agrarian enclosure campaigns in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, and neo-colonial discourses. Both used the ‘wasteful’ under-exploitation of land by indigenous populations as moral justifications for its appropriation for capitalist agriculture. Focusing on reclamation campaigns on Exmoor, a former royal forest in south-west England, sold by the Crown in 1818, this article shows how these discourses were displaced by emergent defences of undeveloped ‘wildness’, advanced in sustained media campaign by advocates of stag hunting. Although they pitted ‘wildness’ against ‘civilised’ agriculture, the article argues that this was an alternative discourse of modernity. 1

Ill Fares the Land: Confronting Unsustainability in the U.K. Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth

The U.K. food system exhibits strong unsustainability indicators across multiple dimensions, both in terms of food and nutritional insecurity and in terms of adverse climate change, biodiversity, and physical resource impacts. These indices of an unsustainable and inequitable social metabolism are the result of capitalist agriculture and society in general and, more specifically, of neoliberal and austerity policies adopted with vigour since the global financial crisis. The causal, capitalistic, and, latterly, more neoliberal bases of the U.K. food system are delineated in the first section of the paper. These bases are then detailed in terms of their impacts in exacerbating climate change, biodiversity (and resource) decline and loss, and food and nutritional insecurity. The political narratives and policy frameworks available to dissemble, mitigate, or, more rarely, to address (resolve) these impacts are then delineated. It is argued that the only policy framework available that strongly integrates food security (social equity) with ecological sustainability is political agroecology and an accompanying degrowth strategy. The final section of the paper details what political agroecology and degrowth might entail for the U.K. food system.

Gate-Cane: (Un)tying the knots between climate, cane, and early marriage in rural India

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the multiple tensions and interactions between social reproduction and the trajectories of accumulation amidst climate change in India’s historically drought-prone Marathwada region. By linking everyday experiences to broader socioecological transformations, I draw on the local practice of Gate-Cane weddings in Marathwada, and situate it within the context of climate change, capitalist agriculture, and gendered labour relations. Specifically, I document the ways in which cyclical drought and peculiar labour arrangements in the sugarcane industry have multiplied the drivers and compounded the problem of early marriage in the region. I combine a feminist political ecology framework with social reproduction and girlhood theories to make a twofold argument: first, recurring dry spells, loss of local livelihoods and the urgency to migrate and survive, are aggravating the drivers of early marriage in Marathwada. Second, by absorbing the marital unit into the labour unit – marked by territorial dislocation, patriarchal control, and devaluation of young women’s and girls’ work – the sugar industry sustains and reproduces early marriage. The article is based on a multi-sited feminist ethnography, including intergenerational family conversations, group discussions, stakeholder interviews, and thick field notes documented in village households and cane fields between October 2020 and August 2021.

Smallholders in Capitalist Agriculture: Persistence and Challenges

Abstract This paper posits that the majority of “smallholders” in contemporary China are commodity producers who must engage in various commodity exchanges to carry out agricultural production and accomplish their social reproduction. Consequently, “smallholder” refers to a family-based economic operation model, rather than a social identity or psychological identification. Within this framework, the study focuses on the intricate relationships between smallholders, various commodity markets, and other market participants. Specifically, it examines two aspects: the relationship between smallholders and capitalized large-scale producers and other agriculture-related capital entities, and the relationship between smallholders and the commodified labor force. The paper argues that the interaction between smallholders and capitalized large-scale producers is not a zero-sum game of mutual replacement; except in certain areas, smallholders are not driven out of agricultural production by large-scale capitalized producers, but coexist and interact with them in various ways. On the other hand, smallholders heavily rely on short-term hired labor for their agricultural production, and many also become wage earners themselves, participating in the agricultural production of other producers and earning wage income. Compared to the expansion of capitalized large-scale production, the most significant challenge facing China’s smallholder economy, as this paper contends, is the intergenerational reproduction crisis brought about by the aging of the labor force and the urbanization of the younger generation.

Trends and dynamics of modernization changes in the agrarian system of post-reform Russia

The subject of this article is the agrarian policy of Russia, conducted after the abolition of serfdom. Specifically, we are talking about the modernization of agriculture in Russia at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. It is no secret that, despite the lingering remnants of feudal-serfdom relations, the peasant reform of 1861 gave a noticeable impetus not only to the development of agriculture, but also to the economic development of Russia as a whole for several decades. The object of the study is the analysis of the state of agriculture in Russia, the level of development of which largely determined the state of the economy as a whole. The authors place special emphasis on the comparison of the American and Prussian ways of developing the agrarian system, as well as on the analysis of P.A. Stolypin's policy. The article presents two ways of developing the agrarian system – the Prussian and the American. If the Prussian way was typical for Russian agriculture in the first two decades after 1861, the American way became a reality in the early twentieth century. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the fact that in modern historiography there is no consensus on the question of the correlation of types of agrarian evolution in Russia. In the "old", serf-like areas, of course, the "Prussian" way of development prevailed. The "American" way of developing capitalism in rural areas, or rather, its potential, has become a historical reality where the level of development of landed proprietorship was low or it was absent as such. Despite the fact that the reforms initiated by P. A. Stolypin were curtailed, the trace of Stolypin's evolution of peasant farming on capitalist principles turned out to be quite noticeable in the agrarian policy of some regions. So, in those provinces where the remnants of serfdom did not have a significant impact on the socio-economic development of the village, there was a lot of free land and there was an active process of colonization, the colonists created separate farms. Modernization was actively underway in these regions: the most developed, mature forms of capitalism in agriculture emerged – using large capital, mass wage labor and improved tools and machines. It is no coincidence that after 1917, bran and farmsteads often existed until complete collectivization.

The Archaeology of Field Systems in Al-Andalus

The Berber and Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 C.E. led to a profound transformation of the agricultural landscape. The layout of the irrigated areas, both rural and urban, is recognisable because it is the result of social and technological choices. But irrigated agriculture was not the only option in Al-Andalus. Rainfed agriculture is supposed to have been the main form of agriculture in large areas of the centre and west of the peninsula, although the field systems have been scarcely identified. In regions where irrigation was the preferred option, rainfed crops were complementary. In regions where dry farming was the only possible agriculture, there were settlement networks linked to livestock breeding and to droveways and pasture areas. The original selections made by the Berber and Arab farmers can still be recognized despite the expansion that has mainly taken place since modern times. However, the more recent and destructive capitalist agriculture is erasing the last vestiges of the Andalusi agricultural landscape.

Agribusiness moving through the Capitalocene: slow violence and renewed strategies of capitalist agriculture in Chile

ABSTRACT Chilean fruit exports grew 252% between 1975 and 2016. This paper aims to analyze agribusiness’s readjustment strategies to face the socio-ecological impacts of the Capitalocene. For this purpose, our guiding questions are: How is agribusiness reading the current socio-ecological crisis, and what strategies are its main actors proposing? The main strategies in progress are technical innovations in productive systems, the increasing scale of infrastructure, displacement toward the south of the country, and renewed narratives. This contributes to legitimizing the current agricultural model without questioning its principles, while becoming more profitable and adaptable to the Capitalocene era.

Itinerant Agriculture and Food Sovereignty: agricultural scenario in the modern world

The expansion of agribusiness in Brazil challenges the future of traditional agricultural systems. This article intends to identify processes by which traditional farmers maintain agricultural diversity on the frontier of monocultures in the Brazilian Midwest, with ethnobotanical records of agricultural practices and agrobiodiversity with 86 quilombolas farmers in Baixada Cuiabana, resulting from production in spaces derived from cutting agriculture and burns. The crops are configured as islands of agrobiodiversity designed among cerrado fields, forests and fallow land, with the ingenious combination of cultural practices and production and conservation of creole and hybrid seeds in the face of the advance of capitalist agriculture. In these relatively stabilized territories, active agriculture is not yet threatened by commercial agricultural expansion or by the extraterritorial process of cultural disqualification. Valuing traditional territories are basic conditions to encourage farmers to continue conserving agrobiodiversity in a dynamic and cultural way over time and achieving the desired food sovereignty.

Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India

AbstractThis paper looks at a case of rural‐to‐rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio‐political factors at play.

A Prize for the Village Ruling Class: “Village Funds” and Class Dynamics in Rural Indonesia

The Village Fund in Indonesia has been praised as a breakthrough policy in eradicating rural poverty. This article, based on a study of a “best practice village” in central Java, however, reveals that the Village Fund has simply facilitated the triumph of the village ruling class. Though village political institutions have adopted good governance measures (participation, transparency, accountability, and so on), the poor remain largely powerless and are unable to gain a significant share of the Village Fund. In contrast to existing “elite capture” literature which has often highlighted local elite domination, this article moves beyond this limited view. By looking at the economic bases of the powerful actors occupying village political positions and institutions, this article shows how members of the village ruling class are primarily capitalist farmers whose power lies in land ownership and agricultural commodity production. As a result, development projects in rural areas continue to be the “prize” for the village ruling class when there is no re-organisation in the structure of land ownership and production relations in the countryside.

Neocolonial agenda: Agrarian transformations in Ethiopia and Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT The aim of the article is to show how neocolonial development has led to increasing ‘de-agrarianisation’ despite agricultural expansion, and this is at the expense of peasant production and pastoralism. Based on the authors’ own ethnographic research and literature studies, the article presents two cases of agricultural expansion: the Mahaweli Development Programme in Sri Lanka, aimed at redeveloping small-scale agriculture, and the reorganisation of pastoralist areas into large-scale cash cropping areas in Ethiopia. The authors find that recent agricultural ‘developers’ have failed to acknowledge the role and value of the traditional agrarian economy, as well as the pressure put on small-scale farmers and pastoralists through increasing capitalism in agriculture, land grabbing, and expropriation for agri-business. In conclusion, despite the historical and cultural differences between Sri Lanka and Ethiopia, both countries exemplify how the expropriation of state land under colonialism and after has facilitated the development of capitalist agriculture, involving irrigation, new settlements and migration, cash cropping, land alienation, and external public and private control. In Sri Lanka, increasing capitalism and technical reforms have led to social inequity and de-agrarianisation among small-scale farmers. In Ethiopia, agricultural development has been a political and economic process of alienation and exploitation for pastoralists.

Muhammad Saleem Kamdar. Development of Capitalism in Agriculture: An Essay on the Nature of Transformation (Change) of the 19th Century Agrarian Structure of Sindh Province in Pakistan. Stuart, Florida. 1996. 146pp.Paperback. price not give

This study examines the nature of ‘transformation’ or ‘change’ in the agrarian structure of the then western part of India (now Sindh province of Pakistan). It employs a Marxist-Structuralist framework in contrast to earlier, mainly historical, studies. The author indicates that development or change is a long-term process which involves relations between producers and others (landed aristocracy, agricultural traders, and the state) involved in the agricultural structure. And he considers ‘change’ or ‘development’ as a consequence of interactions between the ‘forces of production’ (inputs, technology, and natural resources) and the ‘relations of production’ (control of the forces of production). The major objective of the author’s analysis is to determine whether or not British control of Sindh for more than a century resulted in a major implementation of capitalism in agriculture.

Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in 21st century Pakistani Punjab

AbstractActivists and scholars have debated whether “agrarian populisms” premised on multiple classes and groups can pursue progressive objectives if exploiters and exploited are in the same movements. In Pakistan, the militant Pakistan Kissan Ittehad emerged in 2012 by uniting different classes of owner‐cultivators who are largely not in direct relations of exploitation with each other. We argue that the PKI nevertheless advances the interests of a “second tier” of rural capitalists, who exploit rural labourers, while underplaying the interests of owner‐peasant farmers. This divergence of interests has contributed to the fragmentation of PKI along class and political lines, including attempts by peasant farmers to independently organize around issues particular to them. We suggest that progressive agrarian populism must hinge on the interests of rural labourers and peasant farmers and that second‐tier capitalist farmers may be tactical allies as they oppose neoliberal globalization. However, rural labourers and peasants are ideologically and organizationally weak, and thus, the possibility of left‐wing agrarian populism requires much legwork.

Immigrant Farm Fiction, “Agricultural Fitness,” and the Racialized Yeoman Farmer, 1890–1950: A Bibliography

ABSTRACT This annotated bibliography uncovers a forgotten body of immigrant farm fiction published from 1900 to 1950 and examines the cultural work of these novels in responding to xenophobic, nativist conceptions of immigrants as unfit for farming. Agricultural fitness discourse warned of the perceived threat to US-born writers posed by immigration, calling immigrants “unfit” to farm and viewing white, northern Europeans as the most capable and productive farmers. Employing racialized topes, characters, and plots, some farm fiction writers echoed the xenophobic idea that immigrants lagged behind US-born farmers, whereas others depicted immigrants at the vanguard of modern capitalist agriculture—defined in terms of mechanization, scientific agriculture, and agribusiness—with US-born farmers seen falling behind. These farm fictions reveal that the wider conflict around US immigration was rooted in the rural as much as the urban cultural imaginary. They engaged with the era’s public and legislative debates surrounding immigration restrictions and the decline of the family farm.

The Reformed Agrarian Structure and Changing Dynamics of Rural Labour Migration in Zimbabwe

This article examines the changing dynamics of rural labour migration in Zimbabwe following the radical land redistribution since 2000 through the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Since the colonial period, dispossessed peasants with inadequate land access were forced to offer cheap migrant wage labour for large-scale capitalist farms (LSCFs) and beyond. Despite the wide acknowledgement of the redistributive nature of the FTLRP, there is sparse understanding of how the new land access patterns impacted on rural labour migration. Empirical evidence from Goromonzi and Kwekwe districts demonstrates that while there were many peasant beneficiaries, land shortages were not completely eradicated and the new farm labour markets depended on the super-exploitation of landless migrants. Altogether, the data contradicts the conventional wisdom that views migration as a deliberate diversification strategy of household labour to enhance a livelihood. Rather, resistance to proletarianisation undergirds the struggles of farm labourers as they largely seek autonomous land-based social reproduction outside the wage economy.

A Reformulated Version of Marx’s Theory of Ground Rent Shows That There Cannot Be Any Absolute Rent

This article develops a simple theoretical model to analyze Marx’s theory of ground rent. Using the model, I demonstrate two important results. First, if we take capital outlay as exogenously given, then total ground rent can be decomposed into the three components: differential rent of the first variety (DRI), differential rent of the second variety (DRII), and absolute rent (AR). Second, if we let the amount of capital outlay on each plot of land be determined by the profit-maximizing behavior of capitalist farmers, then absolute rent becomes zero. Neither the low organic composition of capital nor the monopoly power of the class of landlords can generate any absolute rent. I conclude that under reasonable behavioral assumptions about landlords and capitalist farmers, there will be no absolute rent in a capitalist economy. JEL Classification: B51

Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger

ABSTRACT This article applies an anarchist lens to the food sovereignty movement. It analyzes food regimes as capitalist agriculture regimes which rely on the State’s monopoly on hunger, wherein the State relies on the dispossession of people from their land and food systems, the protection of property, and the primacy of capital. The interdependence of this State-capital-property trinity is violently enforced, and manufactures compliance through counterinsurgent strategies of social war. The State monopoly on hunger justifies a new offshoot of the larger food sovereignty movement, a prefigurative praxis which dismantles all food regimes to build new counter-worlds: food anarchy.