Agribusiness Goes Abroad
What have these observations concerning the US food system to do with food systems in the Third World and with a New International Economic Order? More than meets the eye: the companies that have been largely responsible for entrenching the control of this system in the United States are not national but multinational and the model they have devised for the US—efficiency and all—is being proposed, or imposed, in UDCs.
What is wrong with the previous chapter? Among possible criticisms is this one: The description you have just read assumes, for the sake of clarity, that the American system exists in a vacuum "made in USA." As just set forth, it would appear to be self-contained, nothing enters it from outside food systems and it is apparently without influence abroad. Nothing could be farther from reality.
There are any number of links between the food systems of the "center" (the rich industrialized countries—the US being generally seen as the center of the center) and the "periphery" of poor, underdeveloped nations. The first link that usually comes to mind is the one originally forged by colonialism which we have already examined from the particular angle of the NIEO in Part I—the export of primary products and agricultural raw materials from the periphery to the center. Less well know, perhaps, are the exports of what the USDA calls supplementary products; in this case fruits, vegetables, fish, meat and flowers that flow from South to North in response to growing market demand in the rich countries. We will be coming back to both kinds of cash crops.
But what of flows in the other direction—from North to South? An attempt to analyze them requires that we imagine another line representing another, more labor-intensive type of agriculture employed in Third World food systems. It is obvious that food is actually produced and consumed in the poorer countries under an enormous variety of social and economic conditions—this line is thus not meant to be a picture of any society in particular, merely to illustrate some of the more common characteristics of Third World food systems. Upstream, on the input end, we find low levels of capitalization and few manufactured inputs. Research, when it is carried out at all, is frequently restricted to cash crops, although international research institutes have done work of a very particular kind on food grains. Credit to the agricultural sector as a whole is usually niggardly; legitimate bank loans naturally go to the best commercial risks and usury takes over from there.
The central segment representing agriculture per se is far longer than the corresponding segment in the US, since half or more of Third World populations is generally rural and tries to find a livelihood in farming. The proportion may be under 50% in areas of Latin America but can go as high as 95% in parts of Africa. Downstream, processing can be limited to the threshing floor and the family kitchen in a completely self-provisioning food system or it may involve sales of surplus by peasants to a local or regional market or to a State board. The State, or private enterprise, may also manage centralized storage and processing plants in the major cities. But even here, the level of capitalization is generally low. This, in any case, is a very schematic description of what Third World food systems used to be like. They are currently undergoing rapid change because, on the one hand, exploitation of cheap UDC land and labor for cash crop production has increased ever since perishable yet air-freightable crops have been added to the list of export commodities; on the other hand, every segment of their food chains is being modified by influences from the North. Perhaps the easiest way to test this proposition is to place the two imaginary lines one above the other and examine what the vertical relationships are between them. (See the appendix for a graphic summary of some of these relationships). This will give us a kind of simple model which has two uses: it can first summarize the nature and extent of Northern penetration of Third World food systems. More important, it can provide a tool for predicting what the following stages of this penetration may be. If it is true that the ultimate tendency of the capitalist center is to create a single global food model—but one in which UDCs will remain subservient to the dictates and needs of the center—then it is important that we have an idea of the roads capital's initiatives are likely to take.
A few short remarks on the suggested model. First, it is not intended to be quantitative, although other people might want to find out just how much has been invested in fertilizers, post-harvest technology or what-have-you in country X or continent Y. This would be useful work, but quantification necessarily implies something that is over and done with—it cannot be more than a photograph of a situation at a particular moment and cannot account for the dynamic, forward movement that is leading us towards a single integrated world food system.
Second, it will be quite impossible to comment here on all the interconnections and implications contained in the model. I merely hope that other researchers may find it useful for situating their own work in a more general context. Third, there is a basic ambiguity in the use of this model, because it seems to picture exactly what the Western world usually understands by "development.""Underdevelopment," in turn, is conceived of as a lack, an absence of elements that can only be supplied by the center—in the present case, the various elements of the high-technology food system model. Needless to say, this is not what I understand by development. The model is meant to be descriptive and possibly predictive, but in no way prescriptive—it does not suggest a direction that ought to be followed, quite the contrary. Nor, conversely, does it imply that past or present food systems in the UDCs, unsullied by foreign intervention, are models of equity. Refusal of Western "development" goals does not mean that one need defend usury, exploitation of peasants by landlords and the like.
Finally, while the model should be seen as dynamic and open- ended, as a kind of mirror of an on-going process, it is also important to understand that the phenomena that can be fit into it are spatially and temporally interdependent. For a Third World rural society, it is almost as hard to accept one part of the model and simultaneously to oppose all the others as it is to be, as the old joke goes, "a little bit pregnant."
The pace and rhythm of the changes introduced may be quite different according to the part of the model involved. The Center may find that it has almost no trouble imposing its presence or introducing its methods in one sector but that it meets with strong resistance in another. The trend, however, will be towards integration of the entire UDC food system into the larger whole.
Logic tells us that the same causes will produce the same effects. What, then, are the foreseeable results of imposing upon radically different societies a food system that grew up under social conditions peculiar to the United States? It is reasonable to say that as agriculture becomes an entirely mercantile operation in Third World countries, a great many small peasants who do not have the wherewithal to become capitalist farmers will have to "choose" irregular wage labor or migration to the cities in hopes of a problematic job, just as their counterparts have had to do in the US. The difference, of course, is that industrialized societies have relatively more jobs to offer them. More and more standard and luxury produce that can be grown cheaply in the periphery will take up the space, time and effort that should be devoted to food crops—for while the food systems of the UDCs are to become "like" the central one, this does not mean that they will be any less dominated. The Center will dictate the division of labor and will be the prime beneficiary of the "vacuum cleaner effect" that sucks the agricultural wealth of the periphery northwards. Small businesses and local processing efforts will fail as multinationals enter the field. MNCs are financially able to wait as long as necessary for this to happen. Storage and processing will become more centralized with good results for agribusiness but unfortunate ones for self-provisioning communities. More and more food will be fed directly to animals. But we are getting ahead of our-selves . . .
Naturally, it is impossible to explain everything with a single hypothesis. Nonetheless, and whatever its drawbacks, this schema is the only method I have yet discovered for imposing some sort of order on
thousands of events and rapidly shifting reality. The empirical evidence seems to fit. I think the basic intuition—that a gradual takeover of Third World food systems to suit the needs of the center is occurring—is fundamentally correct.
If so, this means that ultimately—and, of course, figuratively— when the super-system has at last been realized, diversity will be dead. We shall then have the Global Factory for producing standardized seeds and inputs. They will be financed by the Planetary Bank and used on a normalized farm by a plastic peasant. The commodities grown will be given universal processing in order that they may be sold in the World Supermarket to consumers who can pay a price set by agribusiness. Millions of people will be unable to participate in this system and, at best, will survive on its fringes if they survive at all. Too pessimistic, too apocalyptic for your taste? Let us hope you are right. Let us hope also that those in a position to stop the long march towards food-system uniformity may act before it is too late.