HOW DID OUR CAPITALIST FOOD SYSTEM COME TO BE?
In our last shareout from the book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism by Eric Holt-Giménez, we expressed the importance of understanding our capitalist food system in order to change it. In this shareout, we seek to contextualize the origins and development of our current-day capitalist food system.
Holt-Giménez identifies Western Europe’s enclosure system as the origin of our capitalist food system. Over the last few centuries, our capitalist food system has developed into a pervasive global force through colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism.
Enclosures & Primitive Accumulation
Before the 1600s, English peasants worked collectively to cultivate food and other crops under shared land ownership known as the Commons. All community members were welcome to farm on the common land, which was owned and managed by the people.
However, in the 1600s, British lords began more actively enclosing (dividing and privatizing) common lands. From the 1750s onwards, Parliament passed 4,000 Enclosure Acts that authorized the creation and allocation of enclosures or subdivided plots to certain farmers and lords who claimed an exclusive right to the soil. The British government argued that privatization of the land would lead to greater economic development. Over 300 years, the Enclosure Acts fenced off most of the land in England and consolidated it into the hands of a few landlords and elite farmers.
The Enclosure Acts were bitterly contested as they destroyed common property rights and fragmented the peasant community. The creation of private enclosures ultimately “undermined the ability of people to feed themselves and created a destitute landless class that was obliged to work for wages” (25). Many displaced peasants moved to the city to find work, while others became laborers on large farms that used machinery and other inputs to yield more crops. Large-scale farmers began to consolidate agricultural land and passed laws that kept wages low and outputs high to maintain their control over food production.
Following the privatization of common lands, Western Europe’s colonial conquest of labor, land, and raw materials—primarily in the Global South—enabled the development of capitalism. Karl Marx described this initial process of violent extraction of wealth, land, and resources as "so-called primitive accumulation.”
The author argues that food in particular played a foundational role in the development of capitalism. Crops from the Global South like wheat, maize, and potatoes were imported to feed slaves and European peasants. The British widely imported sugar and tea to suppress the hunger of factory workers and maintain their productivity over long hours. This drove the expansion of the market for tea and sugar, along with slave-powered monocultures in the colonies.
By the end of the 19th century through colonialism and industrialization, a new globally-linked system of capitalism had emerged.
The Three Food Regimes
We can better structure our understanding of the history of capitalism and its relationship to agriculture by studying food regimes. Food regime analysis helps us understand the governing principles underpinning the world food system affecting food production, consumption, and distribution and answer questions such as:
Who decides what to grow?
Who decides how & where it’s grown?
Who grows it? Who transports it?
Who consumes it?
Who/what decides its costs?
The three food regimes outlined by Holt-Giménez are:
(1) The Colonial Food Regime
The first food regime comprises late 19th-century European empire expansion and the rise of global capitalism in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Under this food regime, imperialists transformed food, land, and labor into global commodities through colonialism. Imperialists strategically facilitated the flow of raw materials from the colonies to the imperial core. Agricultural products like sugar, coffee, wheat, maize, and rice were farmed as export crops for the imperialists rather than for the subsistence of the locals.
Furthermore, capitalist industrialized methods of farming were unsustainable. Britain and the U.S. had to find ways to fertilize their overfarmed lands depleted of key nutrients, so they began monopolizing and importing fertilizers such as guano (bird droppings rich in nitrogen). The U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act of 1856 to seize over a hundred guano-rich islands in Central and South America to fuel the growing U.S. empire.
(2) The Surplus Food Regime
The dawn of the 20th century marks the end of the first food regime and the beginning of the second. This was the United States’ golden age of food production. High crop prices enabled farmers to enjoy a decent livelihood as they covered production costs and had extra to spare.
WWI amplified American wealth even further as Europeans increasingly relied on the U.S. for food, weapons, and machinery. Rising land values and grain prices in the U.S. incentivized intense financing of agriculture in the pursuit of more profit. But the war ended, and European farmers began growing their own food again. The global oversupply of agricultural products destabilized international markets and led to a widespread crash in crop prices. In the years following the war, Wall Street capitalists continued to make more profits. Farmers, on the other hand, struggled to keep themselves afloat and attempted to “farm their way out of debt” by increasing their rate of production, which only created more surplus, driving prices further down. Mass unemployment across the United States meant that nobody could afford to buy produce, no matter how low the prices were.
The FDR administration’s New Deal policies revitalized the economy and watered the seeds of the second food regime. In response to post-war economic stagnation, “The agricultural policies of the New Deal set the institutional and regulatory framework for the relation between food, agriculture, government, and capitalism for the next half-century” (41-42).
The advent of WWII officially initiated the second food regime. A shortage in their labor supply prompted the United States to turn to other countries to replenish its workforce. The agricultural sector transformed into a system largely driven by the labor of Mexican peasants, whose work was rendered cheap and expendable, but critical to the progressive development of the national economy. As Holt-Giménez describes, “the ‘immigrant labor subsidy’ transferred billions of dollars in value to the agricultural sector, increased agricultural land values, and turned the Second World War into an agricultural boom placing the United States at the forefront of global agricultural markets” (45).
The second food regime is defined by oversupply or “surplus.” Overproduction is used as a tool by countries like the U.S. to offload food surpluses to new foreign markets, or pressure nations in the Global South to accelerate capitalist modes of agricultural production. Such interventions force the latter to rely on capitalist agriculture (seeds, technology, and machinery) as alternatives — like local production and consumption of food – are rendered untenable.
(3) The Corporate Food Regime
The third food regime is the culmination of the previous two regimes and marks our current era of corporate control over the food system. Three key intertwined aspects define this regime:
The Green Revolution
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Neoliberalism
1. The Green Revolution
The author describes The Green Revolution (1960-1990) as a “...campaign to spread capitalist agriculture—itself an extension of the industrial North's economic model—into the countries of the Global South” (47). The Green Revolution pushed Global North synthetic fertilizers, high-yielding hybrid seeds, pesticides, and farm machinery onto the Global South. However, what often goes uninterrogated is how the Green Revolution was meant to counter and quell the “Red revolutions” (communist and socialist revolutions) sweeping the Global South. The Green Revolution was touted to have saved the world from hunger, but, in reality, “the Green Revolution also produced as many hungry people as it saved” (47).
The Green Revolution led to the displacement of thousands of local crops, reducing agrobiodiversity by 90%, and driving small-scale and peasant farmers bankrupt because they could not afford the machinery and inputs to cultivate high-yield hybrids. Most sinisterly, it made the Global South reliant on Global North seeds and inputs.
2. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
Many in the Global South were forced to take out loans from private banks in the Global North to finance these expensive agricultural inputs. Because many could not repay their loans, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in to “address” the unpayable debts.
On the condition that debtor countries would accept structural adjustment programs (SAPs), the World Bank and IMF lent money to debtor countries so that they could repay their loans to private banks in the Global North. SAPs essentially deregulated international markets and labor, and allowed for foreign privatization, all under the guise of helping Global South countries “develop” with the guidance of the Global North.
3. Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism emerged in the 1980s from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s policies that brought about “deregulation, privatization, and the growth and consolidation of corporate monopoly power in food systems around the globe” (55).
The World Bank and IMF imposed SAPs onto Global South countries, which granted the Global North power to deregulate and open up markets on their terms. This set the stage for the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
The WTO worked to allow the Global North entry into Global South markets in a one-sided trade relationship through Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). FTAs allowed Global North companies to dump their surplus of agricultural production onto Global South markets. FTAs are often greatly opposed by Global South farmers because they drive the prices of produce down and thus bankrupt local farmers. Furthermore, these FTAs also loosen labor and environmental protection policies to maximize Global North profits.
Our current capitalist food system did not spontaneously emerge in the 19th century with the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe. Rather, our current food system has been formed through a long process, shaped by over 400 years of systematic strategies like the privatization of the Commons, colonialism, primitive accumulation, imperialism, and neoliberalism.
As Holt-Giménez states:
To call the system broken is to believe it once worked well for people, the economy, and the environment . . . [to ignore] centuries of violence and destruction characterizing global food systems…
Our food system isn’t “broken,” but it can be broken down. Stay tuned for our next shareout breaking down current problems in our capitalist food system!