Corporate Agribusiness Research Articles

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

Corporate Power in the Bioeconomy Transition: The Policies and Politics of Conservative Ecological Modernization in Brazil

The bioeconomy transition is a double-edged sword that may either address fossil fuel dependence sustainably or aggravate human pressures on the environment, depending on how it is pursued. Using the emblematic case of Brazil, this article analyzes how corporate agribusiness dominance limits the bioeconomy agenda, shapes innovation pathways, and ultimately threatens the sustainability of this transition. Drawing from scholarship on power in agri-food governance and sustainability transitions, an analytical framework is then applied to the Brazilian case. The analysis of current policies, recent institutional changes and the case-specific literature reveals that, despite a strategic framing of the bioeconomy transition as a panacea for job creation, biodiversity conservation and local development (particularly for the Amazon region), in practice major soy, sugarcane and meatpacking conglomerates dominate Brazil’s bioeconomy agenda. In what can be described as conservative ecological modernization, there is some reflexivity regarding environmental issues but also an effort to maintain (unequal) social and political structures. Significant agribusiness dominance does not bode well for smallholder farmers, food diversity or natural ecosystems, as major drivers of deforestation and land-use change (e.g., soy plantations, cattle ranching) gain renewed economic and political stimulus as well as greater societal legitimacy under the bioeconomy umbrella.

Corporate political activity as part of enterprise strategy in South African agribusinesses

Background: The South African agricultural sector is facing regulatory uncertainty relating to land reform and distribution, restrictive labour policies and minimum wages. Corporate agribusinesses play an important role in the agricultural industry. Increasing political influence on their activities manifested in the lack of government support, and the uncertainty surrounding public policy threatens investment and growth in the sector. This calls for an intelligent integrated enterprise strategy that includes corporate political activity (CPA). Setting: Four South African agribusinesses and two agricultural associations. Aim: The purpose is to explore the CPA adopted by corporate agribusinesses and agricultural associations in terms of enterprise strategy during times of regulatory uncertainty. Method: Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. A questionnaire, consisting of sections focused on regulatory uncertainty, responses to regulatory uncertainty and strategy, was completed during the interviews. Results: The participants experience significant regulatory uncertainty. There is a clear distinction between the strategic approach to CPA followed by corporate agribusinesses and agricultural associations. The parties surveyed pursue a combination of CPA strategies. A desire for greater cooperation and shared prosperity with government is evident, supported by a strong sense of conducting business ethically, traced across the results. Conclusion: This article addresses the role that CPA plays in an integrated enterprise strategy – especially in times of regulatory uncertainty – such as the agricultural industry in South Africa is experiencing. It not only reports on the CPA approach of both corporate agribusiness and agricultural associations, but also describes the strategies agribusinesses follow during times of uncertainty.

Yam physic-chemical parameters assessment and its bread sensory attributes for corporate agribusiness boosting

A research work entitled: “Yam physico-chemical parameters assessment and its bread sensory attributes.” was carried out in the laboratory of INES-Ruhengeri for adding value to local yam called Dioscorea spp. The main objective was to assess physico-chemical parameters of fresh yam tubers and sensory attributes of produced bread from yam fermented flour. A sample size of 10kg of each Dioscorea variety as fresh crude yam tubers was brought from Musanze market to INES laboratory for chemical analysis, fermentation and bread processing. Physico-chemical parameters analyzed in fresh crude yam tubers included moisture content, pH, nutrient content and sensory evaluation of yam bread. The results showed that fresh crude yam tubers moisture content ranged from 75 to 77%. This moisture content is favoring yam tubers spoilage and there is a need to process fresh yams into bread for adding value. The yielded fermented yam flour ranged from 18 to 20% from crude yam tubers. The dried and fermented yam flour moisture content was around 13% and met the standards, while pH was around neutral (from 6.66 to 6.72) leading to tubers deterioration. The flour had a dark-brown color from enzymatic browning occurring during fermentation process. According to Hedonic scale, the overall acceptability of yam breads was good with mean sensory scores ranging from 7.33 to 7.83 over 9 emitted by trained panelists. Fermented yam flour with Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus oryzae followed by Saccharomyces cerevisiae used in yam bread making was considered nutritious by panelists. Hence, the processed yam bread is a good source of nutrients including carbohydrates, protein, fat, minerals and probiotics. The use of fermented yam flour in bread making is advantageous due to increased nutritional value and reduced rate of staling. Adding value to fresh yam tubers can lead to income generation and enhanced shelf life of new developed yam bread. It is therefore recommended to promote yam cultivation and processing of tubers at industrial level for food security and sustainability.

Exporting contradictions: the expansion of South African agrarian capital within Africa

ABSTRACTAgrarian change in South Africa over the past two decades has seen consolidation of the hegemony of large-scale commercial farming and corporate agribusiness within agro-food systems. Constrained domestic demand and growth opportunities elsewhere have driven both farming and agribusiness capitals to move into other African countries, attempting to reproduce agro-food systems similarly centred on the dominance of large capital. This is evident in five areas: first, the financialization of agriculture and ‘farmland funds’; second, multinational and South African input supply industries; third, large-scale land deals to expand industrial farming systems; fourth, the export of South African companies’ food processing, manufacture, logistics and distribution operations; and fifth, the expanding reach of South African supermarkets and fast food chains. Regional expansion involves South African agrarian capital encountering substantial obstacles to entry, and challenges mounted by competitors in destination markets. Success as a regional hegemon in Africa’s agro-food system is thus far from assured, and even where it does appear to succeed, generates contradictions, and rising social tensions of the kinds experienced in South Africa itself.

‘Don’t stop the mill’: South African capital and agrarian change in Tanzania

South African corporate agribusiness and large-scale commercial farmers have been major players in the current acquisitions of large tracts of very fertile land in southern and eastern Africa through massive investments in large-scale commercial farming, food processing, the production of biofuels and eco-tourism. By emphasising the significance of analysing the changing capital smallholder relationship in historical perspective, the paper explores continuity and change in the agrarian social structure and the land use dynamics of the Kilombero valley. It argues that smallholders are differentially and adversely integrated within agribusiness-led vertically organised agri-food chains consolidating and widening existing patterns of social inequality.

Serbian Large Agribusiness Corporations Knocking at the Door of E-Agribusiness Revolution

Transformation of large agribusiness corporations in Serbia is at its beginning. Institutional investors are taking control of these firms through foreign direct investments. Corporate reorganization of agribusinesses starts up by introducing efficient management, information technology, Net and e-commerce. IT environment generates a new business model, which creates connections in Serbia between the large agribusinesses, business processes and IT. The market of agricultural production in Serbia is rapidly changing and adapting itself to the global trends, mainly to the Internet economy. The speed of transactions and volume of information is increasing dramatically. It is important to explain the basic economic principles at macro and micro levels. Such revolutionary changes affect the operations and management of agribusiness on the Internet and outside of it. The purpose of this work is to stimulate further research in these processes, and to use the acquired knowledge as a tool for efficient corporate agribusiness management.

Inducing food insecurity: financialisation and development in the post-2015 era

The G7 ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ follows an established approach of ‘connecting smallholder farmers to markets’, while extending the role and influence of corporate agri-business in new ways. This paper explores the implications of the ‘New Alliance’ model’s incorporation into the Sustainable Development Goals framework for smallholder producers already facing greater uncertainty in financialised agri-food chains, and in light of a consensus around the primacy of private finance in the post-2015 era. The question for alternative food and development movements is how to confront the ‘value chain challenge’ in an increasingly financialised global agri-food system.

Certification and Neoliberal Governance: Moral Economies of Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean

ABSTRACTMany consumers and food‐justice activists regard Fair Trade as a moral alternative to markets dominated by corporate agribusiness. Fair Trade frames producer–consumer relationships in the language of reciprocity and justice rather than the impersonal logic of the market. Despite its moral economy discourse, the movement embodies neoliberal assumptions that regulation and development should occur through the realm of consumer choice rather than state intervention. To receive the higher prices that Fair Trade promises, farmers are subject to certification processes that heavily regulate their planting practices and development priorities. Here I explore the contrasting views of economic morality held by Fair Trade organizations and Caribbean banana farmers. Farmers do not view Fair Trade in terms of the lofty values of social justice and reciprocity animating the movement's discourse. Rather, they operate with a working definition of economic morality similar to those elucidated by E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Marc Edelman, and others who have examined peasant and worker responses to injustice. From farmers’ points of view, compliance with Fair Trade certification should at least enable them to persist in agriculture. As Fair Trade prices have fallen while surveillance of their working lives has increased, many regard this notion of economic morality as increasingly violated.

Соціоекономічні аспекти функціонування корпоративних агроформувань

Соціоекономічні аспекти функціонування корпоративних агроформувань

Beyond Global Summitry: Food Sovereignty as Localized Resistance to Globalization

Recently there has been a marked shift reflecting increased theoretical interest and political practices embracing strategies of localism or relocalization against neoliberal globalization. Specifically, individuals, farmers, and communities embracing the framework of food sovereignty have increasingly adopted localism tactics in response to the globalization of food systems, the corporate agribusiness model, and attendant food crises. The spread of the food sovereignty concept from the global peasants' movement Vía Campesina to locales as diverse as industrial France and the rural state of Vermont in the United States demonstrates the way in which food sovereignty has been appropriated in different international settings. Additionally, the turn toward localism merits further scrutiny as a reflection of an unsettling of forms of collective resistance at a moment of structural crisis in global capitalism. Localism as an alter-globalization tactic is still overshadowed by protest summitry and large-scale mobilizations, when small-scale micro-encounters arguably are part of a growing, broader, and more nuanced process of transnational diffusion of resistances, struggles, and reformulations over sovereignty at multiple political and social scales. Recientemente ha habido un cambio que se refleja en el incremento de un interés teórico y prácticas políticas, que incluyen estrategias de localismo o relocalización contra la globalización neoliberal. Como táctica de respuesta a los sistemas de globalización alimentaria, a los modelos agroindustriales corporativos, y a las crisis alimentarias, los individuos, agricultores y comunidades responden abogando por la soberanía alimentaria, adoptando mecanismos locales. La propagación del concepto de soberanía alimentaria que parte de movimientos globales de campesinos ‘Vía Campesina’, en lugares tan diferentes como la Francia industrial y el estado rural de Vermont en los Estados Unidos, demuestra la manera como la soberanía alimentaria se ha apropiado de diferentes ámbitos internacionales. Además, el giro hacia el localismo merece un estudio más detallado, como reflejo de formas inquietantes de resistencia colectiva, en un momento de crisis estructural del capitalismo global. El localismo como una táctica alterna a la globalización, está todavía opacado por las protestas de las cumbres y las movilizaciones a gran escala, sin embargo los micro-encuentros son sin duda, parte de un proceso creciente, más amplio y con más matices, de la difusión trasnacional de las resistencias, los conflictos y la reformulación de la soberanía, a múltiples escalas políticas y sociales. 最近有一个明显的转向，反映出以地方主义或再地方化抵制新自由主义全球化的理论兴趣和政治实践在增长。具体来说，拥护粮食主权的个人、农民和社群越来越多地采用地方化策略来应对粮食体系全球化、公司化农业经营模式化和随之而来的粮食危机等。从全球性农民运动“农民之路”到地方如工业化的法国和美国农业州佛蒙特，粮食主权这一概念广泛传播，表明其已在不同国际场合被认可。此外，在全球资本主义发生结构性危机之时，这一本土化转向作为未成形的集体抵制的一种反映，值得进一步研究。地方化作为改造全球化运动的一种策略，其作用仍然被抗议峰会和大规模群众运动所掩盖，而小规模微观层面的抵抗是正在进行中的更广泛和细微的、在诸多政治和社会层面对主权进行抵制、斗争和重建的跨国扩散过程的一部分。

Fresh Food Supermarkets in India: An Analysis of their Inclusiveness and Impact on Primary Producers

Linking primary producers with modern markets through corporate agribusiness, especially food supermarkets, is being seen as one of the ways to improve rural livelihoods. But, given smallholder dominance of farming in India, it is important to consider the implications of corporate linkage for smaller links involved/proposed to be involved in the chains i.e. primary producers, so that the process is not exclusionary in nature, and becomes a win-win situation for most of the participants in the supply/value chain. Gujarat is one of the Indian states which have seen significant food retail chain presence and penetration in the last few years in fruit and vegetable procurement and retailing. This paper analyses the functioning of two fresh food (fruit and vegetable) supermarket retail chains (Reliance Retail’s Reliance Fresh and Aditya Birla’s More) in Gujarat with special focus on implications for small producers. The paper situates the food supermarket retail phenomenon in the Indian context and profiles the operations of major players in fruit and vegetable sector and analyses their primary producer interface with a field study of two major vegetable crops procured by the retail chains each. It examines the inclusiveness of the retail chain operations and its impact on farmer incomes. The paper also attempts inferences about the competitiveness of food supermarkets and the mechanisms to promote inclusiveness and significant farmer benefits from emerging supermarket retail operations in terms of both policy and practice, based on the case study.

The biopolitics of food provisioning

Beginning with Foucault’s writing on food provisioning in the mercantile period, this paper explores how a moral economy of hunger is gradually replaced by a political economy of food security that promotes market mechanisms as a better protection against scarcity. In Western Europe the emergence of political liberalism and laissez‐faire economics substantially shaped how hunger and scarcity were conceptualised and socially managed. Beyond Europe these social forces were manifest in the development of colonial plantations. Here the transformation of non‐capitalist social formations into market economies – what Harvey (2003) terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’– was a foundational moment in the development of a global provisioning system that undermined the anti‐scarcity strategies of some populations, while ensuring food security for others. The subsequent discovery of the ‘Global South’ hunger, together with the desire to encourage better habits and purer morals among ‘backward’ peoples, created the context in which further curative interventions, designed to consolidate a capitalist food economy, were valorised and maintained. These reflections set up the final part of the paper, where I contextualise recent efforts to present agro‐biotechnologies as a pro‐welfare and anti‐scarcity response. Moving beyond the causes of hunger to explore its strategic function, this analysis highlights how corporate agribusiness – in partnership with the life sciences – is attempting to recondition human, animal and bacterial life in order to quicken the reproduction of capital. I term this new moment in the commercialisation of food systems accumulation by molecularisation. The paper concludes by examining how the corporate management of food folds into biopolitical strategies for managing life, including the lives of the hungry poor who are ‘let die’ as commercial interests supplant human needs.

Tax Policy and Swine Production in Iowa, United States

This paper examines county level decision-making regarding swine confinement permits in Iowa. The case study follows a 2003 Iowa State Legislature ruling that gives county supervisors the option to adopt a detailed Department of Natural Resources Master Matrix plan for swine manure management. In this research, I sought to understand environmental policy conflicts associated with industrialized hog production. This study examines four counties in North Central Iowa located in the region of rapidly expanding, corporate-formed, swine confinement operations. Ethnographic field research was conducted from May 2003 to October 2006. Comparison of qualitative and quantitative data for each of these four counties reveals different stakeholder and agroecology dynamics at the level of county decision-making processes. I explain these differences in terms of a family farm-corporate agribusiness continuum which reflects diverse local agricultural attitudes and practices related to environmental values, economic rationales and social investments. In some rural areas where family farm agricultural attitudes and practices related to livestock production persist along side of corporate agribusiness, there exist some county assessors, engineers, and auditors who seek to protect family farm social and cultural interests because of their stabilizing effect on the local environment and economy. This study explains why local county-level decision-makers have become proactive in supporting family farms and local businesses by challenging state policies biased in favor of corporate agribusiness.

Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L.Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction

Fertile CosmofeminismRuth L. Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction Shameem Black (bio) "Women Have No Need of Borders" Women have no need of borders We need only bear the child of the man we love Race, nationality, religion—none matter Men war to make women theirs They make boundaries, they make nations But women have no need of borders We need only to love. Nakagaki Sachiko (1993)1 In an era of globalization, are women the ideal subjects without borders? Mythologizing the role of women around the world, the poetry of the Japanese homemaker Nakagaki Sachiko suggests that women embody transcultural values from the moment they embrace particular ideologies of femininity. Eliding female desires with romantic love, maternal concern, and sentimental longing, the poem "Women Have No Need of Borders" asserts that the private world of cultural feminism offers the clearest public possibilities for an avant-garde global identity. Women stand at the forefront of transnational forms of life, and as the rhetoric of childbearing suggests, they control the reproduction of this world without borders. In this essay, I explore how cosmopolitan feminist visions of motherhood and fertility emerge in the fiction of the Japanese American writer Ruth L. Ozeki. In Ozeki's work, the world of female fertility and maternity [End Page 226] cannot be so easily divested from the public complications of "men war[ring]" to which Nakagaki alludes in her poem. When women want children in Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats (1998), they find themselves immersed in a discourse of reproduction that situates the intimate workings of the childbearing body within the social politics of public health, family formation, racial mixing, meat eating, and corporate profit. The story of an Asian American filmmaker whose documentaries market American meat to Japanese women, My Year of Meats exposes the collusion between global television and corporate agribusiness in the transnational spaces across the Pacific Ocean. These collaborative worlds of media and meat take their greatest toll upon the lives of women, specifically at the charged sites of their sexuality and fertility. In its narrative construction, My Year of Meats relies upon this link between fertility and violence to exploit the discursive strategies that empowered transnational feminist activism in the 1990s. As the novel unites women to oppose challenges to their fertility, it seeks to extend the conceptual tactics of activism in order to shape an even more powerful political imaginary. In doing so, the novel suggests a crucial role for literature in the development of cosmofeminism. The feminist literary strategies of the novel attempt to give birth to a new form of cosmopolitan community. The rhetoric of cosmopolitanism has proliferated over the past decade, as scholars seek to understand actions, identities, and ideas that seem to elude the constraints of well-defined social borders. Since "cosmopolitanism" is an old word dense with historical signification and changing connotations, its etymological meaning of "world citizenship" has been used both literally and metaphorically for centuries. Stoic philosophers described themselves as citizens of the world, offering both forms of dissent against unconditional political loyalty and philosophical justifications for expanding imperial powers (Nussbaum 1996, 6-7, 9, 10; Malcomson 1998, 233). Eighteenth-century European and American philosophes continually congratulated themselves on their cosmopolitan outlooks, and in doing so, associated the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism with the cultural capital of an exclusive, well-traveled, intellectual class (Schlereth 1977, 1-2). In contemporary scholarship, cosmopolitanism has been used to describe exiles, refugees, and strangers as well as world travelers, elites, and intellectuals. Depending upon the author, cosmopolitanism might refer to psychological conditions, political organizations, [End Page 227] international relations, cultural sensibilities, moral stances, works of art, or social geographies.2 As a result, cosmopolitanism in contemporary usage is not well defined, and some of its exponents suggest it should not be (Pollock et al. 2000, 577). However, throughout this essay, the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism serves a more specific purpose that draws upon one strand of its history. In particular, I use the language of cosmopolitanism to describe progressive and enabling responses to the dilemmas created by globalization. These responses attempt to avoid both the tyranny of imperialist knowledge and the silence of parochial retreat, offering us...

Banishment from the “gold mountain”

In 1942 California corporate agribusiness seized upon racist hysteria and pseudo "national security" issues to manipulate social ideology so that it could unlawfully seize tens of thousands of acres of productive farm land from law-abiding American citizens. It was such seizures that then allowed already existing large-scale capital to further consolidate California's agricultural resources while at the same time restructuring and increasing its concentration of the state's agricultural production and food manufacturing capabilities. Meanwhile, in "the most striking mass interference since slavery with the right of physical freedom," over 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in concentration camps and illegally deprived of their property and human rights.

Sustainable agriculture in historical perspective

This paper is an evaluation of the sociological significance of the development and adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. The concept of “appropriationism” is introduced as a means of determining whether or not sustainable agriculture is an expression of class antagonisms in U. S. agriculture. “Appropriationism” is the process by which corporate agribusiness replaces natural processes with industrial products. A comparison of responses to farm crisis in the late 19th century and in the 1980s is employed as a heuristic device to determine the contemporary sociological significance of sustainable agriculture. Based on past experience and changes in key institutions over the past century, it is concluded that the development of sustainable agricultural practices will not significantly challenge the economic prerogatives of agribusiness and that the long-term process of the industrial appropriation of natural processes in agriculture will continue into the 21st century.