Henry Berstein, "V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward"
Journal of Peasant Studies, January 2009

And politics? The political economy in this paper is not deployed in any ‘antipeasant’ spirit or prescriptive stance on petty commodity production. Nor do any of my observations suggest withdrawing political sympathy and support for progressive struggles because they fail to satisfy the demands of an idealised (class-purist or other) model of political action. Rather, I have suggested that part of the problem with the ‘new’ agrarian question sketched is how it posits a unitary and idealised, and ostensibly world-historical, ‘subject’: ‘farmers’ or ‘peasants’ or ‘people of the land’. The point, then, is first, to recognise and, second, to be able to analyse, the contradictory sources and impulses – and typically multi-class character – of contemporary struggles over land and ways of farming that can inform a realistic and politically responsible assessment of them. This means rising to the challenges posed by a re-energised and radical agrarian populism, to engage both seriously and critically with the agrarian movements of the present time, and thereby to recover the spirit of Lenin’s ‘fresh and creative impulses’ of the early 1920s, and of Chayanov’s contributions to ‘practical theory’.

The irony of our global economy is that food flows through trade from areas were people are hungry toward areas where there is money.

manufacturing a food crisis:
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage--and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

africa's unnatural disaster:
The World Bank's continued market fundamentalism is difficult to understand, especially in light of the fact that after more than 25 years of imposing these policies in Africa and Latin America, success stories are few and far between. Those countries that do have productive agricultural sectors (almost none of which are in Africa) either rely on huge landholders to be productive (Brazil, Argentina, Chile) or on massive subsidies (India) or both (U.S., EU). The countries that have eliminated their subsidies and privatized their grain boards, including many in Africa, are those that are doing the poorest.
(...) If one is willing to look at the events of the last 30 years without the quasi-religious belief that free markets lead to development and growth, one would undoubtedly find that the opposite is true. In his groundbreaking work Kicking Away the Ladder (2003), Ha Joon Chang documents the development of every industrialized country, showing that protectionist policies were a fundamental part of development strategy in almost every case. The process of development that emerges from this story is not maximizing comparative advantage (for if so, the U.S. would be a sparsely populated country of fur traders and fisher people) but rather shifting comparative advantage to high value goods through calculated market distortions. In the case of the U.K. and the United States, those market distortions originally came in the form of colonialism and slavery. But market distortions continue in the U.S. today in the form of agriculture and steel subsidies, not to mention the tremendous government spending on biotechnology and defense, which largely serves as a subsidy for those sectors.
(...) The report does point out that a few countries (Brazil and Chile are the examples given) have successfully used agriculture to increase growth, but in Brazil and (to a lesser extent) Chile, small farmers are all but extinct, and agriculture is big business. Given the preoccupation with small farmers and poverty alleviation in other parts of the document, the examples are odd.
(...) Since about 1970, the World Bank, other international financial institutions and the private sector have succeeded in completely transforming agriculture from a primarily local affair to a complex industrialized process. Monocropping, over-reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers and trans-genetic manipulation have in some cases increased yields; but these practices have not led to a significant reduction in the number of hungry people in the world. The recommendations of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the World Bank amount to insanity - recommending more of the same and expecting better results.
(...) In the United States, Europe and elsewhere, many are beginning to understand that industrialized agriculture benefits neither those who produce nor those who consume food. In the current food crisis, more than 25 countries and the European Union have imposed tariffs, subsidies, price controls or other measures to protect consumers from the global free market. So why the double standard when it comes to Africa?
(...) For those interested in solutions, the organic and local movements aren't far off the mark. What producers and consumers in many parts of the world are beginning to understand is that the way that farmers have been growing food for millennia is more or less a good system. While there may be room for technology, (drip irrigation systems, for example) that innovation should not alter the food product nor add layers of cost. Many parts of Africa have an advantage in that they have never really lost their traditional relationships with the land. The problem has been that cheaper food from Europe and the United States is often dumped on African countries, undercutting the possibility for farmers to earn a living from their production. In the case of Africa, all that may be needed is a sensible trade policy to protect those who already grow enough food for all Africans.

between a rock and a hard place:
So much so that Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings and a staunch free marketer, calls it "Socialism for the rich." In his words "the Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Maseratis." He points out that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to bail out Wall Street as a whole. The theologians of the global market are between a rock and a hard place. Hypocrisy has rammed into reality.
(...) Three of the basic principles the believers of corporate-led globalisation swear by have been so eloquently summed by Professor James Galbraith Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. One: all successes are global. Two: all failures are national. Three: the market is beyond reproach.
(...) Through the reforms period, we have pushed millions of small farmers to shift from foodcrop to cash crops. The acreage under foodcrop has reduced across these years. And we also exported millions of tonnes of grain - as in 2002 and 2003. What's more, we exported at prices cheaper than those we charged poor people in this country for the same grain. The idea was that we had a "huge surplus" of grain and could well afford to export. The truth was that the massive pileup of unsold stock arose from a surplus of hunger rather than of grain. The purchasing power of the poor had collapsed. But the fake "surplus" story came in handy. It allowed the export of grain - heavily subsidised by us - to be consumed by European cattle.
(...) From 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 422 grams by 2005. With the top fifth of Indians doing better than ever before, this meant that those below were eating far less than they did just a few years ago.

survival of the fattest:
"The United States had doled out $27 billion in federal subsidies to its `farmers' in the last fiscal year. That's Rs. 135,000 crores." Just the top 10 per cent of America's farm owners collared close to two-thirds of this largesse. That includes "multi-million dollar corporations".
(...) The needy farmers thus rescued include media baron Ted Turner, a Rockefeller and other assorted struggling billionaires. Turner is "one of the largest landowners" in the U.S.. He owns ranches in Montana, South Dakota and Florida. And his companies raked in $1,90,000. That's Rs. 95 lakhs. David Rockefeller, who owns a 3,000-acre farm, got $146,000. A modest Rs. 73 lakhs. He is a former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and grandson of John D.
(...) There were at least 20 "Fortune 500" companies among yet other poor farmers pulled back from the brink. Including Chevron, Caterpillar, IBP and Archer Daniels Midland.
(...) These included, as the AP report written by John Kelly put it: "more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons". They got cash from programmes "touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York".
(...) Well, "63 per cent of the money went to the top 10 per cent of recipients". Many of whom "don't fit the image of the struggling family farm". In Iowa in 1998, I saw small holdings go bust that did fit the image of the struggling family farm. How did those families read their misfortune? Many felt they were victims of wasteful spending on welfare, affirmative action and immigrants. In truth, they were just squeezed out by big corporate farmers. Farm corporations who also held great control over input prices. And government subsidies. In fact, it all sounds a bit like home — only on a scale unthinkable in India. Top Indian business houses have plundered fertiliser subsidies worth thousands of crores of rupees for years. Of course, their amounts, crushing by Indian standards, look trifling next to the largesse doled out in the citadel of neo-liberal market economics.
(...) At the bottom end of this food chain, the average "real" farmer got about $16,000 each. These are perhaps the "needy" ones in the U.S.. And that's still Rs. 8 lakh per farmer. Compare that with the Indian small holder, relieved to have seen off another year when he's earned $80 from an acre.
(...) What happens if Africa, Latin America and Asia increase their share of world markets by just one percent? An Oxfam report says that 120 million people could beat the poverty trap. But that won't happen in the field of agriculture. Not while corporations — with billions of dollars of subsidies behind them — rule theworld.
(...) Lawmakers want to restrict "information about who receives federal farm subsidies". Why? Beats me.

see, neoliberalism works!
Even for the landed, if such a great share is grabbed by food, clothing, and health, it leaves little for anything else. That is why (also NSSO data) just six per cent of rural homes have telephones. And that is mainly amongst those with an MPCE of over Rs.950, a lot of which are non-farm households. It is also why we need to postpone the joy over the spread of the Net for a bit. PCs with Net connections almost do not exist in rural India. Just about 0.6 per cent of rural households have a computer.
(...) The NSSO seems to underestimate private moneylender debt. Yet it shows that nearly half of all farm households are in debt. In 1991, that figure was 26 per cent.
(...) Mostly crawling out of the bottomless data-on-demand pit of the capital's "think tanks." These surveys in turn get the rah rah treatment from a media dying to show how good the "reform years" have been. In one case, a daily crowed that "Bharat-matches-India-in-bang-for-buck." This was so over the top that even the gung-ho authors of the survey the daily was quoting felt compelled to write a piece saying "Don't romanticize the village." Well, also do not romanticize the growing gap between rich and poor. And do not celebrate gross inequality either.
(...) Mr. Pawar also tells his interviewer: "You will be surprised. In the budgetary provision, not more than two per cent money has been allocated for agriculture. [Though that is] where more than 65 per cent of the population works."

zero hour: nafta and mexico's agrarian collapse
Nor does the President and his cronies identify who it is that is actually benefiting from the NAFTA-TLCOM boom. According to the National Farmers Confederation or CNC, a creature of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party and once gung-ho for the trade treaty, only 2% of all Mexican producers are sharing the largesse. The other 98%, including 3.5 million corn farmers, 85% of whom grow on five hectares or less (average U.S. corn spreads are 270 acres), have no access to the NAFTA-TLCAN market whatsoever. The big winners? About 20,000 corporate tomato growers, avocado and tropical fruit moguls, and specialty crop niche market sharpies (organic coffee -but organic anything) - plus, of course, the beer barons.

around the globe, farmers losing ground:
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilisation. This soil, measured in inches over much of the earth, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. As soil accumulated over the eons, it provided a medium in which plants could grow. In turn, plants protect the soil from erosion. Human activity is disrupting this relationship. Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation in large areas. Perhaps a third or more of all cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land's inherent productivity. Today the foundation of civilisation is crumbling. The seeds of collapse of some early civilisations, such as the Mayans, may have originated in soil erosion that undermined the food supply. The accelerating soil erosion over the last century can be seen in the dust bowls that form as vegetation is destroyed and wind erosion soars out of control. Among those that stand out are the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great Plains during the 1930s, the dust bowls in the Soviet Virgin Lands in the 1960s, the huge one that is forming today in northwest China, and the one taking shape in the Sahelian region of Africa.

small farmers in india:
"Banks are turning the screws on hard-up farmers, sending them to jail. Mind you, these are farmers in drought-hit regions with no crop and no capacity to pay. The same banks won't touch big industrialist defaulters who owe them crores. But farmers owing a few thousand rupees go to jail." Till recently, the website of the A.P. Debt Recovery Tribunal listed some 200 names of VIPs, industrialists, contractors, and politicians owing over Rs.1,000 crore to the banks. The money was not recovered but the site seems to have vanished.
(...) In other respects, Mr. Nallappa Reddy's story is the same as that of millions of other farmers. As input costs shot up and bank credit declined in the past decade, he incurred heavy losses. As "water, electricity and other costs rose, things got worse." Then the water ran out. "I sank 32 borewells in ten acres within four or five years. All of them failed." This mandal shot to fame in 2004 when, desperate for water, farmer Chandrashekar Reddy sank four borewells in a graveyard linking it to his fields with an 8-km pipeline. (July 18, 2004.) He has since died. Ironically, a couple of those wells now yield some water, after their owner has himself gone to the grave.
(...) "The government is not interested in us," says Sainath Reddy, a nephew of the man who sank borewells in the graveyard. "They want corporate agriculture. We are a nuisance in the way. I tell you, those you wish well, ask them to stay away from agriculture. Don't even wish it on your enemies."

walden bello on small farmers and free trade:
In advanced capitalist countries like the United States, a deadly combination of economies of scale, capital-intensive technology, and the market led to large corporations cornering agricultural production and processing. Small and medium farms were relegated to a marginal role in production and a minuscule portion of the work force.
(...) The Soviet Union, meanwhile, took to heart Karl Marx's snide remarks about the “idiocy of rural life” and, through state repression, transformed farmers into workers on collective farms. Expropriation of the peasants' surplus production was meant not only to feed the cities but also to serve as the source of the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital for industrialization.
(...) Asian governments placed the burden of industrialization on the peasantry during the phase of so-called developmentalist, industry-first policies. In Taiwan and South Korea, land reform first triggered prosperity in the countryside in the 1950s, stimulating industrialization. But with the shift to export-led industrialization in 1965, there was demand for low-wage industrial labor, so government policies deliberately depressed prices of agricultural goods. In this way, peasants subsidized the emergence of Newly Industrializing Economies. Peasant incomes declined relative to urban incomes, and the resulting stagnation of a once-vibrant countryside led to massive migration to the cities and a steady supply of cheap labor for factories.
(...) In China, millions of peasants died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward as the government requisitioned grain surplus to finance Mao Zedong's super-industrialization drive. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution allowed peasants to regain a degree of control over production because the government was in crisis. Following the death of Mao in 1976, Deng Xiaoping dealt with the crisis by introducing the “household contract responsibility system.” Each family was given a piece of land to farm, along with the right to sell what was left over after a fixed proportion of the produce was sold to the government at a state-determined price. This led to peasant prosperity that, as in Taiwan, stimulated industrial production to fulfill rural demand.
(...) Currently, the various tiers of the Chinese government foist a total of 269 different taxes on farmers, along with often-arbitrary administrative charges. Not surprisingly, in many places, taxes now eat up 15% of farmers' income, three times the official national limit of 5%. Not surprisingly, too, while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”
(...) The forcing of peasants to subsidize industrialization was indeed harsh. But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
(...) As a result, the level of subsidization of agriculture actually increased in developed countries in the first decade of the WTO. The total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by the OECD's member governments rose from $182 billion in 1995 to $280 billion in 1997, $315 billion in 2001, $318 billion in 2002, and almost $300 billion in 2005. The United States and the European Union (EU) were spending $9-10 billion more on subsidies in the early 2000s than they were a decade earlier. For every $100 of agro-exports from the United States, government subsidies accounted for $20-30. In the case of the EU, the figure was $40-50. While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.
(...) As the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) notes, instantaneous import surges following the adoption of the AOA in a number of developing countries led to “consequential difficulties” for “import-competing industries.” The report continued, “Without adequate market protection, accompanied by development programs, many more domestic products would be displaced, or undermined sharply, leading to a transformation of domestic diets and to increased dependence on imported foods.” This historic shift to dependence on food imports was, needless to say, accompanied by the displacement of millions of peasants.
(...) In China, tens of thousands of farmers, including those growing soybeans and cotton, have been marginalized with China's entry into the WTO. Indeed, to maintain and increase access for its manufacturers to developed countries, the government has chosen to sacrifice its farmers.
(...) In India, tariff liberalization, even in advance of WTO commitments, has translated into a profound crisis in the countryside. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.
(...) India's rural electoral revolt was part of a global phenomenon that put governments on notice that the countryside would no longer accept policies that sacrifice farmer interests. In Asia, protests in the form of land occupations, hunger strikes, violent demonstrations, and symbolic suicides made rural distress a pressing issue. In China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.
(...) Committed under a banner that read “WTO Kills Farmers,” Lee's suicide was designed to draw international attention to the number of suicides by farmers in countries subjected to liberalization. He succeeded only too well. The event shocked the WTO delegates, who observed a minute of silence in Lee's memory. By adding to what was already a charged atmosphere, Lee’s act was certainly a key factor in the unraveling of the talks.
(...) Both Lee and the Korean farmers protesting in Hong Kong were members of Via Campesina, an international federation of farmers established in the mid-1990s. Since its founding, Via Campesina -- literally translated as the Peasants' Path -- has become known as one of the most militant opponents of the WTO and bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements.
(...) The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”
(...) his is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”
(...) Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.
(...)

on small farming in india:
India is a land of small farmers, with 650 million of her 1 billion people living on the land and 80 per cent farmers owning less than 2 ha of land. In other words, the land provides livelihood security for 65 per cent of the people, and the small farmers provide food security for 1 billion.
(...) Policies driven by corporate globalisation are pushing farmers off the land, and peasants out of agriculture. This is not a natural evolutionary process. It is a violent and imposed process. The 150,000 farmers suicides are one aspect of this violence. The killing of dozens of peasants in Nandigram who were resisting land acquisition for a Special Economic Zone is another aspect of the violence involved in the forced uprooting of India's small farmers.
(...) On 26th March 2007, while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry, Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh stated, " As I said recently in Parliament, we have to recognize that in a country like ours, where the average size of landholding is small, there are limitations to what you can do to improve agricultural productivity." (Pioneer, 27/03/07) This is a false assumption, as Navdanya's work over two decades has shown. In fact, it is the small biodiverse farm, which has higher productivity than large industrial farms. Large farmers and industrial farming has serious limitations on increasing agricultural productivity.
(...) Small farmers have tremendous scope for increasing productivity because the natural capital - the soil, the water, the biodiversity, can be enhanced through conservation and rejuvenation. On large farms, natural resources are exploited and depleted. The soil looses fertility through chemical fertilizers; it is compacted by heavy machinery. Water is over exploited since chemical farming needs ten times more water than ecological farming. Biodiversity is eroded since industrial scale farming can only be practised as a monoculture. And energy use is intensified, contributing to global warming. The small farms of India have the highest potential for increasing productivity. There are scientific reasons for this. A small farmer can intensify biodiversity and the higher the biodiversity, the higher the productivity and stability and sustainability of agriculture. A large farm has to intensify external inputs such agrichemicals and fossil fuels, which lower the productivity, and lead to non-sustainability and economic and ecological vulnerability. When the industrial model of high external inputs is imposed on small farmers, the result is debt and suicides. The industrial model of farming is at the root of farmers' suicides. Yet, the disease is being offered as a cure.
(...) The Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, whose job is to look after farmers' and provide them livelihood security has stated that farmers' need to be "weaned" off the land.
(...) The future defined by the majority of small farmers of India is in terms of their land sovereignty and food sovereignty. India needs her small farmers because her freedom is in their hands. Wherever the totally inappropriate model of industrial corporate agriculture has been applied, farmers are in distress, the soil has been destroyed, and the water has been over exploited and polluted. And wherever the government has pushed rural communities off the land for industrialization, it has had to use violence and has created zones where Naxalism is viewed as the only alternative.