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in capitalist development. Together the books offer a syn- Malthus, Agribusiness, and the thetic model of the ongoing transformation of agriculture Death of the Peasantry that may be summarized as follows: Agribusiness profits by either driving independent farmers off their land or metabolizing operation so that farmers become a glenn davis stone proletariat—one different from what Marx described but Department of Anthropology, Washington University, a proletariat nonetheless. The state subsidizes this trans- St. Louis, Mo. 63130-4899, U.S.A. (stone@artsci. formation and the used to pry peasants from wustl.edu). 25 ii 01 the life of independent production. The transformation is justified by the deceptive trope of population outstrip- Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to ping food supply, a trope designed to naturalize the urban Farmers, Food, and the Environment. Edited by Fred proletariat and instantly popularized into the ultimate Magdoff, J. B. Foster, and F. H. Buttel. New York: antipolitics machine. Dominated by swollen and subsi- Monthly Review Press, 2000. dized transnational corporations, the transformation continues today. It generates food insecurity and hunger The Malthus Factor: Population, , and as it goes and uses that hunger—perennially interpreted Politics in Capitalist Development. By Eric B. Ross. in Malthusian terms—to justify further expansion. London: Zed Books, 1998. Hungry for Profit is made up of 11 articles originally published in Monthly Review in 1998, with additions by Araghi and by Majka and Majka. It begins with two chap- Of all the societal changes of the last half century, the ters providing historical context to the ongoing trans- most dramatic and far-reaching, according to Eric Hobs- formation in world agriculture. In “Agrarian Origins of bawm (1994:289), is the death of the peasantry. Between Capitalism,” Wood argues that, although capitalism was II and the 1980s, percentages of populations supposedly “born and bred in the ,” it actually came involved in farming and fishing dropped dramatically into its own in the English countryside. It was here, well worldwide. For instance, in the drop was from 52% before the 18th-century parliamentary enclosures, that to 9%; in the , where Nixon’s Agriculture market forces were first used to expropriate land rights Secretary Earl Butz instructed farmers to “get big or get and force farmers into tenancy. This was paralleled by out,” less than .5% of the population claimed to run a competition to boost productivity by “improvement,” farm as a principal occupation (NASS 1999: chap. 1, table meaning enhancement of the land’s productivity for 16). Yet in less developed countries there remain vast profit. (The is recorded in the language: farmer populations still engaged in primary agricultural pro- comes from the term for rent, while improvement is duction and with only partly monetarized economies. from the term for profit.) Foster and Magdoff’s “Liebig, Are claims of the peasantry’s death exaggerated—or Marx, and the Depletion of Fertility” follows the merely premature? Depeasantization is definitely afoot, effects of these developments into the 20th century. “Im- and the prospect is ominous. Where it is difficult for provement” turned out to be urban robbery of rural en- to absorb greatly increased influxes, decimation of dowment, and it prompted a global search for plunder- agricultural peasantries would be catastrophic. able nutrients. This led, improbably, to guano Depeasantization has been an issue of keen interest and later to heavy reliance on synthetic fer- among historical materialists. Their analysis begins with tilizers, disintegration of stock-crop ecology, increasing the observation that capitalist development “stops at the agricultural specialization and geographic concentration, farm gate” (Mann and Dickinson 1978), barred by the and a host of related environmental problems. This special properties of all of the main productive resources in agriculture: land is fixed, seed is produced by the splendid essay, which puts theory and agricultural ecol- farmer, and labor must be skilled and seasonally variable ogy into a historical context, is marred only by its use (and is therefore hard to commodify completely). Ask of Mao’s as an example of how nutrient cycling how agricultural capital has responded to these obstacles and rural self-sufficiency can be achieved (this would be and you will be led to the playbook for depeasantization. the same Mao whose agrarian policies starved over 30 Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel’s Hungry for Profit brings million peasants). together many of the most important answers to this Heffernan’s “Concentration of Ownership in Agricul- question. It is complemented by Ross’s The Malthus Fac- ture” covers the advent of vertically and horizontally tor, a sharp-edged analysis of the role of integrated transnational food megacorporations. These prosper not by producing more efficiently but by destroy- Permission to reprint items in this section may be obtained only ing smaller competitors (which is why new hog-pro- from their authors. cessing facilities are being built in the United States 575 576 F current anthropology while the market value for hogs is below the cost of erage. The book deals little with the patenting of South- production). They further proletarianize farmers through ern crops and the uncomfortable collusion between uni- debt traps and extract wealth from local communities, versities and corporations in this process. It barely enjoying state protection all the while. These three ex- mentions the “deskilling” of farmers that was a crucial cellent chapters provide an efficient short course on the element in capital’s penetration of agriculture in the political economy of agriculture from the paleotechnic North and is well under way in the South. Finally, it falls small farmer to the global food corporation. short with regard to proposals for action. For instance, The book then heads off into multiple directions. Al- following Henderson’s relatively upbeat survey of sus- tieri summarizes the key issues in the ecology of indus- tainable alternatives to corporate farming, an editors’ trial agriculture, with special emphasis on the problems italicized afterword asks if such activities might not be of the new genetically modified products. Lewontin an- simply a “minor irritant to corporate dominance of the alyzes the role of in capitalist penetration of food system,” since actual reform requires “complete the farm sector. Middendorf et al. provide an overview transformation of society.” Good question, that; so of how biotechnology is changing uses of economic where does this leave us? plants and animals, examining how these changes, hu- These weaknesses are minor compared with the col- manitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, endanger food lection’s strength as a compelling, historically oriented security. survey of the political economy of the state-supported McMichael’s intriguing “Global Food Politics” iden- corporate takeover of world food production. But there tifies the politics of subsidy as the driving force behind is a stark disparity between this view of food production, agricultural systems worldwide. He argues that, in con- in which enormous social and environmental costs are trast to Britain’s colonial economies, the United States exacted for corporate profit, and the deep-seated view in had a history of integrated manufacturing and farming Western public, government, and some scientific circles that produced an energy- and capital-intensive agricul- that technology-driven agricultural “” is imper- ture early on. U.S. government subsidies for inputs, grain ative and ultimately humanitarian. Hungry for Profit exports, and agribusiness technologies have favored does little to explain how we wound up with perspectives transnational food corporations to the point of virtually separated by such a chasm. The answer, in a word, is eradicating American small farmers and gravely endan- Malthus, and this is why Eric Ross’s history of Malthu- gering farmers in less developed countries. One direct sianism serves well as a companion volume. result, as described in Araghi’s following chapter, is de- Malthus is here seen as the smokescreen that allows peasantization and the attendant rise in urban hopeless- the processes described in Hungry for Profit to operate. ness and environmental deterioration. Malthusianism is a model that perpetually fails to fit The remaining chapters probe concrete effects and case world events but every year “arises phoenix-like from studies. Majka and Majka address Mexican farm immi- the ashes of popular opinion” (Watts 2000). Essay on the gration and the farm labor contract system. Henderson Principle of Population purported to describe a relation- describes and advocates move- ship between agriculture and , two ments. Poppendieck analyzes redistribution programs topics about which Malthus knew little. The reasons for that provide “moral relief” while obscuring the recurrent the model’s warm reception have always been not sci- patterns of hunger amid food surpluses such as the de- entific but political. For Ross (p. 1), Malthus’s “most pression-era “breadlines knee-deep in wheat.” Rossett enduring influence has been to shape academic and pop- describes the advent of sustainable agriculture in Cuba ular thinking about the origins of poverty, and to defend following the collapse of Soviet subsidies for high ex- the interests of capital in the face of the enormous hu- ternal inputs, and Hinton covers land reform in China. man misery which capitalism causes.” This is a strong and timely collection that distills work Ross traces the history of the doctrine and its deep on various aspects of the transformation of world food effects on both popular thinking and public policies rang- production. Although it is often not made clear, many ing from eugenics to the Green Revolution. The opening of these chapters are condensations of (or at least draw chapters place Malthusianism (and Malthus himself) in heavily on) longer works. Poppendieck draws on her British history. Fifty years after its publication, his Essay books on depression-era food policies (1986) and current enjoyed apparent confirmation by Ireland’s potato fam- food charities (1998); Wood distills her book on agrarian ine. Irish peasants had been relegated to poor and origins of capitalism (1999); Magdoff and Foster sum- a potato diet while landlords maximized production of marize material from Foster (1994) and Rossett sum- export foods, and exports of wheat and beef contin- marizes material from Rossett and Benjamin (1994); Le- ued—in fact, increased—throughout the famine. Such wontin summarizes issues that he has written much on tragedies make a niche for ideas that forestall guilt or, (e.g., Lewontin and Berlan 1986) and that have been as Poppendieck puts it in Hungry for Profit, provide treated extensively by Kloppenburg (1988). This conden- moral relief. For Britain, moral relief came in the form sation of much research is a strength, but the book is a of Malthus’s model of the intrinsic relationship between very poor guide to what is being condensed. If not actual population and food production. To ice the cake, Rev- citations, at least “Further Reading” lists should have erend Malthus blamed the high population on the poor’s been provided. lack of moral restraint. Thus Ireland, a food-exporting There are also a few topics that cry out for more cov- country that had experienced no population buildup, be- Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 F 577 came, as Marx wrote disdainfully (quoted by Ross, pp. writers would now attribute famines to colonial taxation 31–32), the “promised land of the principle of and land policies (e.g., Ludden 1999), 19th-century Brit- population.” ish officials (including Trevelyan of the potato-famine That famine also provided an early example of the the- relief program, who served in between 1859 and ory’s concrete effects on policy. The director of the relief 1865) stressed that Indian populations were reproducing program (a former student of Malthus’s named Trevel- faster than food supplies. Malthusianism offered hu- yan) set the tone when he described the famine as “a manitarian justification of high taxes, as lowering the direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” tax burden could be expected to encourage fertility. The was kept down, heeding Malthus’s injunction that signal event for 20th-century Malthusianism, however, feeding the suffering would only produce more sufferers; was India’s Green Revolution. The reasons behind In- the famine became the excuse for further concentration dia’s dependence on grain imports have been described of land, squeezing out small farmers and eventually turn- elsewhere (e.g., Perkins 1997): much of the country’s ing Ireland into a pasture for Britain. breadbasket was lost in partition, and the United States Malthusianism became increasingly entrenched in was dumping wheat both to protect prices and to combat popular conceptions in the United States with the aid of . But Ross delineates the vital role of Mal- organizations such as the Malthusian League, founded thusianism in the interpretation of the situation and the in 1877 to promote Malthus’s unsupported claims, now shaping of policy. Led by the Ford Foundation, a major described as “laws of population.” effort was mounted to reapply Malthus to India, and the The 20th century brought new outgrowths of Malthu- doctrine of population growth as cause of political in- sianism. One was eugenics. Malthus’s demographic de- stability came to be a prime instrument of U.S. policy. terminism rationalized poverty as the result of overre- By the 1960s the world believed that India was approach- production promoted by the poor’s moral failings; ing a “demographic point of no return,” but Ross sees eugenics took the next step in concluding that these the evidence for this prediction as “the sort of jugglery moral deficiencies were innate. The poor threatened so- which gives statistics a bad name.” The post-Nehru gov- cial order not simply by their numbers but by eroding ernment favored the interests of the industrial elite in the nation’s “racial stock.” Ross traces this variant of seeking to provide a cheap urban workforce. Thus, when Malthusianism through the Western intellectual estab- the (another “mouthpiece for lishment (including the Harvard faculty, which gave us U.S. interests”) helped India buy 18,000 tons of Green Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Revolution seed in 1966, it served U.S. interests Supremacy [1920]) and on to the Nuremburg Laws and and the interests of Indian capital while reinforcing the radical (the introduction to Rising perception that India’s problems were Malthusian rather Tide was penned by a leading environmentalist). By the than political. Moreover, as several contributors to Hun- mid-20th century “environmental catastrophism” had gry for Profit would be quick to point out, the new ag- become the principal vehicle for Malthusian fears, from ricultural technology, heralded as beneficial to Indian Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948) to Ehrlich’s Pop- peasants, actually contributed greatly to the state-sup- ulation Bomb (1968) and Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Com- ported industrialization of agriculture that threatens mons” (1968). Ross points out that Garrett Hardin was smallholder livelihoods. a eugenicist long before he became a darling of the en- This book is important, troubling, and fascinating. vironmental movement; in 1949, when “the ovens at Ross’s writing runs a bit to scorn, but it is clear and Auschwitz and Dachau were barely cool,” he wrote that mostly devoid of Marxist jargon (for a less penetrable the real problem with population was that those with recent critique of Malthus’s effect on policy, see Greene low IQs were overproducing. To Ross, Hardin’s famous 1999). It is a more academically oriented book than Hun- “” is a masterpiece of cold war gry for Profit, with better references, although there are Malthusianism, a “clever defense of private property and still numerous works discussed in the text that are miss- an argument against ‘the welfare state,’ phrased in terms ing from the bibliography. One wishes that there were a of the environmental and demographic concerns of the lighter version of it that might make a dent in public world in which it was published” (p. 76). The parties that discourse on the ongoing transformation of food produc- would engage in Hardin’s solution of “mutual coercion tion. Given the pivotal role of “the Malthus factor” in mutually agreed on” were always unequal in power, and shaping and rationalizing policies promoting the agri- the results would invariably be appropriation of re- business threat to peasantries and the environment, this sources. His “Tragedy” stimulated research on common perspective is of vital importance. property (e.g., McCay and Acheson 1987) that showed how little his hypothetical unmanaged commons had to do with reality, but there had been plenty of information on this before. The warm reception of his essay merely References Cited reveals how deeply Malthusianism had penetrated sci- entific thought. ehrlich, paul r. 1968. . New York: Ballantine Books. If the poster child for Malthus’s theory in the 19th foster, john b. 1994. The vulnerable planet: A short eco- century was Ireland, in the 20th it was India. India had nomic history of the environment. New York: Monthly Re- long been fertile ground for Malthusianism. Although view Press. 578 F current anthropology greene, ronald w. 1999. Malthusian worlds: U.S. leader- consumer society for all if only the “market” can reach ship and the governing of the population crisis. Boulder: West- them. (Even UN Secretary Kofi Annan has recently view Press. hardin, garrett. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Sci- joined the chorus of uncritical “globalists.”) It is a pity ence 162:1243–48. that it is unlikely to be read by those who need it hobsbawm, eric. 1994. The age of extremes: A history of most—those working in the , the World the world, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon Books. Trade Organization, and the ministries kloppenburg, jack r., jr. 1988. First the seed: The politi- cal economy of plant biotechnology, 1492–2000. Cambridge: of the “donor” countries. Cambridge University Press. In this fascinating study, Ferguson reveals the painful lewontin, r. c., and jean-pierre berlan. 1986. Tech- “win-lose” situation that is for many, es- nology, research, and the penetration of capital: The case of pecially in . Using the Zambian example, he ques- U.S. agriculture. Monthly Review 38(3):21–34. tions the teleological models of modernization and in- ludden, david. 1999. An agrarian history of South Asia. (The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4.) Cambridge: dustrial development that have long dominated Cambridge University Press. economic and social science debates and led to so many mc cay, bonnie j., and james m. acheson. 1987. The misguided conclusions. He underlines that phases of ma- question of the commons: The culture and ecology of commu- terial development and boom are not a linear move to- nal resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. mann, susan, and james dickinson. 1978. Obstacles to ward affluence but often temporary and, to the dismay the development of capitalist agriculture. Journal of Peasant of those caught up in them, apt to end in decline and Studies 5:466–81. deep crisis. The social and cultural effects of dramatic nass (national agricultural statistics service). downturns are conveniently ignored by economists and 1999. 1997 census of agriculture.Vol.1, pt. 5. Washington, advocates of unfettered globalization. D.C. osborn, fairfield. 1948. Our plundered planet. Boston: Lit- When , in its material shapes of industri- tle, Brown. alization, , , and rising perkins, john h. 1997. Geopolitics and the green revolution: consumption levels, collapses, personal disarray, loss of Wheat, genes, and the cold war. New York: Oxford University meaning, and despair can be the result (p. 14) as the Press. poppendieck, janet. 1986. Breadlines knee deep in wheat: ideological superstructure of values, aspirations, and ex- Food assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick: pectations dissolves. Ferguson presents an interesting Rutgers University Press. and acute analysis of such a process in Copperbelt Zam- ———. 1998. Sweet charity? Emergency food and the end of en- bia. Zambia had a promising future at the time of its titlement. New York: Viking. independence in 1964 because of its seemingly success- rossett, peter, and medea benjamin. 1994. The greening of the revolution: Cuba’s experiment with organic ag- ful trajectory of industrialization and modernization riculture. Melbourne: Ocean Press. since the 1920s, but it was all built on sand. The Arab stoddard, lothrop. 1920. The rising tide of color against oil policy of the 1970s and the declining buying power white world supremacy. New York: Scribner. of Zambian copper on the world market did their work, watts, michael. 2000. “Malthus, Marx, and the millen- nium,” in Struggles over geography: The Hettner Lectures, pp. and as a result not only did the urban working people’s 35–75. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg Press. material conditions of life melt away but their ambitions wood, ellen m. 1999. The origin of capitalism. New York: and their belief in the future and in personal improve- Monthly Review Press. ment and dignity eroded dramatically. The book contains six chapters, most of them theo- What Remains of Modernity: retical-interpretive and two of them more empirical, based on observations, case studies, and interviews with Ferguson on 20th-Century Zambia former miners and urban people in the late 1980s. Many of these people were forced by the economic misery in the cities to “go back” to the rural areas, often to rela- jon abbink tives whose lifestyles they did not understand or felt African Studies Centre, Leiden, The uncomfortable with. Ferguson convincingly describes ([email protected]). 3 iii 01 the differences in style and in outlook and records the miners’ expressions of their failed expectations and Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of struggles. Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. By James G. The first chapter (“The Copperbelt in Theory”) is an Ferguson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: account of the changes in Zambia in the period of eco- University of California Press, 1999. 326 pp. $45 nomic growth (with the Zambian GDP per capita in 1969 cloth, $17.95 paper higher than in Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey, or South Korea) and of the way an earlier of social scientists (e.g., those of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute) inter- Expectations of Modernity is a gripping narrative of the preted the industrial and urban developments there. other side of the “globalization process” that calls into While there were already some critical voices at the time question many of its assumptions. James Ferguson’s (e.g., G. Wilson), most saw the changes as an irreversible study of declining urban Zambia presents a sensitive and upward trend establishing a new urban culture and so- informed critique of and of the ciety. In his reanalysis, Ferguson ably dissects what he widespread myth of access to the blessings of industrial calls the myth of modernity/modernization that has cap-