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Books

Malthus, Agribusiness, and theDeath of the Peasantry

glenn davis stoneDepartment of Anthropology, Washington University,St. Louis, Mo. 63130-4899, U.S.A. (stone@artsci.wustl.edu). 25 ii 01

Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat toFarmers, Food, and the Environment. Edited by FredMagdoff, J. B. Foster, and F. H. Buttel. New York:Monthly Review Press, 2000.

The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty, andPolitics in Capitalist Development. By Eric B. Ross.London: Zed Books, 1998.

Of all the societal changes of the last half century, themost dramatic and far-reaching, according to Eric Hobs-bawm (1994:289), is the death of the peasantry. BetweenWorld War II and the 1980s, percentages of populationsinvolved in farming and fishing dropped dramaticallyworldwide. For instance, in Japan the drop was from 52%to 9%; in the United States, where Nixons AgricultureSecretary Earl Butz instructed farmers to get big or getout, less than .5% of the population claimed to run afarm as a principal occupation (NASS 1999: chap. 1, table16). Yet in less developed countries there remain vastpopulations still engaged in primary agricultural pro-duction and with only partly monetarized economies.Are claims of the peasantrys death exaggeratedormerely premature? Depeasantization is definitely afoot,and the prospect is ominous. Where it is difficult forcities to absorb greatly increased influxes, decimation ofagricultural peasantries would be catastrophic.

Depeasantization has been an issue of keen interestamong historical materialists. Their analysis begins withthe observation that capitalist development stops at thefarm gate (Mann and Dickinson 1978), barred by thespecial properties of all of the main productive resourcesin agriculture: land is fixed, seed is produced by thefarmer, and labor must be skilled and seasonally variable(and is therefore hard to commodify completely). Askhow agricultural capital has responded to these obstaclesand you will be led to the playbook for depeasantization.Magdoff, Foster, and Buttels Hungry for Profit bringstogether many of the most important answers to thisquestion. It is complemented by Rosss The Malthus Fac-tor, a sharp-edged analysis of the role of Malthusianism

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in capitalist development. Together the books offer a syn-thetic model of the ongoing transformation of agriculturethat may be summarized as follows: Agribusiness profitsby either driving independent farmers off their land ormetabolizing farm operation so that farmers become aproletariatone different from what Marx described buta proletariat nonetheless. The state subsidizes this trans-formation and the technologies used to pry peasants fromthe life of independent production. The transformationis justified by the deceptive trope of population outstrip-ping food supply, a trope designed to naturalize the urbanproletariat and instantly popularized into the ultimateantipolitics machine. Dominated by swollen and subsi-dized transnational corporations, the transformationcontinues today. It generates food insecurity and hungeras it goes and uses that hungerperennially interpretedin Malthusian termsto justify further expansion.

Hungry for Profit is made up of 11 articles originallypublished in Monthly Review in 1998, with additions byAraghi and by Majka and Majka. It begins with two chap-ters providing historical context to the ongoing trans-formation in world agriculture. In Agrarian Origins ofCapitalism, Wood argues that, although capitalism wassupposedly born and bred in the city, it actually cameinto its own in the English countryside. It was here, wellbefore the 18th-century parliamentary enclosures, thatmarket forces were first used to expropriate land rightsand force farmers into tenancy. This was paralleled bycompetition to boost productivity by improvement,meaning enhancement of the lands productivity forprofit. (The history is recorded in the language: farmercomes from the term for rent, while improvement isfrom the term for profit.) Foster and Magdoffs Liebig,Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility follows theeffects of these developments into the 20th century. Im-provement turned out to be urban robbery of rural en-dowment, and it prompted a global search for plunder-able nutrients. This led, improbably, to guanoimperialism and later to heavy reliance on synthetic fer-tilizers, disintegration of stock-crop ecology, increasingagricultural specialization and geographic concentration,and a host of related environmental problems. Thissplendid essay, which puts theory and agricultural ecol-ogy into a historical context, is marred only by its useof Maos China as an example of how nutrient cyclingand rural self-sufficiency can be achieved (this would bethe same Mao whose agrarian policies starved over 30million peasants).

Heffernans Concentration of Ownership in Agricul-ture covers the advent of vertically and horizontallyintegrated transnational food megacorporations. Theseprosper not by producing more efficiently but by destroy-ing smaller competitors (which is why new hog-pro-cessing facilities are being built in the United States

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while the market value for hogs is below the cost ofproduction). They further proletarianize farmers throughdebt traps and extract wealth from local communities,enjoying state protection all the while. These three ex-cellent chapters provide an efficient short course on thepolitical economy of agriculture from the paleotechnicsmall farmer to the global food corporation.

The book then heads off into multiple directions. Al-tieri summarizes the key issues in the ecology of indus-trial agriculture, with special emphasis on the problemsof the new genetically modified products. Lewontin an-alyzes the role of technology in capitalist penetration ofthe farm sector. Middendorf et al. provide an overviewof how biotechnology is changing uses of economicplants and animals, examining how these changes, hu-manitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, endanger foodsecurity.

McMichaels intriguing Global Food Politics iden-tifies the politics of subsidy as the driving force behindagricultural systems worldwide. He argues that, in con-trast to Britains colonial economies, the United Stateshad a history of integrated manufacturing and farmingthat produced an energy- and capital-intensive agricul-ture early on. U.S. government subsidies for inputs, grainexports, and agribusiness technologies have favoredtransnational food corporations to the point of virtuallyeradicating American small farmers and gravely endan-gering farmers in less developed countries. One directresult, as described in Araghis following chapter, is de-peasantization and the attendant rise in urban hopeless-ness and environmental deterioration.

The remaining chapters probe concrete effects and casestudies. Majka and Majka address Mexican farm immi-gration and the farm labor contract system. Hendersondescribes and advocates sustainable agriculture move-ments. Poppendieck analyzes redistribution programsthat provide moral relief while obscuring the recurrentpatterns of hunger amid food surpluses such as the de-pression-era breadlines knee-deep in wheat. Rossettdescribes the advent of sustainable agriculture in Cubafollowing the collapse of Soviet subsidies for high ex-ternal inputs, and Hinton covers land reform in China.

This is a strong and timely collection that distills workon various aspects of the transformation of world foodproduction. Although it is often not made clear, manyof these chapters are condensations of (or at least drawheavily on) longer works. Poppendieck draws on herbooks on depression-era food policies (1986) and currentfood charities (1998); Wood distills her book on agrarianorigins of capitalism (1999); Magdoff and Foster sum-marize material from Foster (1994) and Rossett sum-marizes material from Rossett and Benjamin (1994); Le-wontin summarizes issues that he has written much on(e.g., Lewontin and Berlan 1986) and that have beentreated extensively by Kloppenburg (1988). This conden-sation of much research is a strength, but the book is avery poor guide to what is being condensed. If not actualcitations, at least Further Reading lists should havebeen provided.

There are also a few topics that cry out for more cov-

erage. The book deals little with the patenting of South-ern crops and the uncomfortable collusion between uni-versities and corporations in this process. It barelymentions the deskilling of farmers that was a crucialelement in capitals penetration of agriculture in theNorth and is well under way in the South. Finally, it fallsshort with regard to proposals for action. For instance,following Hendersons relatively upbeat survey of sus-tainable alternatives to corporate farming, an editorsitalicized afterword asks if such activities might not besimply a minor irritant to corporate dominance of thefood system, since actual reform requires completetransformation of society. Good question, that; sowhere does this leave us?

These weaknesses are minor compared with the col-lections strength as a compelling, historically orientedsurvey of the political economy of the state-supportedcorporate takeover of world food production. But thereis a stark disparity between this view of food production,in which enormous social and environmental costs areexacted for corporate profit, and the deep-seated view inWestern public, government, and some scientific circlesthat technology-driven agricultural progress is imper-ative and ultimately humanitarian. Hungry for Profitdoes little to explain how we wound up with perspectivesseparated by such a chasm. The answer, in a word, isMalthus, and this is why Eric Rosss history of Malthu-sianism serves well as a companion volume.

Malthus is here seen as the smokescreen that allowsthe processes described in Hungry for Profit to operate.Malthusianism is a model that perpetually fails to fitworld events but every year arises phoenix-like fromthe ashes of popular opinion (Watts 2000). Essay on thePrinciple of Population purported to describe a relation-ship between agriculture and population growth, twotopics about which Malthus knew little. The reasons forthe models warm reception have always been not sci-entific but political. For Ross (p. 1), Malthuss mostenduring influence has been to shape academic and pop-ular thinking about the origins of poverty, and to defendthe interests of capital in the face of the enormous hu-man misery which capitalism causes.

Ross traces the history of the doctrine and its deepeffects on both popular thinking and public policies rang-ing from eugenics to the Green Revolution. The openingchapters place Malthusianism (and Malthus himself) inBritish history. Fifty years after its publication, his Essayenjoyed apparent confirmation by Irelands potato fam-ine. Irish peasants had been relegated to poor soils anda potato diet while landlords maximized production ofexport foods, and exports of wheat and beef contin-uedin fact, increasedthroughout the famine. Suchtragedies make a niche for ideas that forestall guilt or,as Poppendieck puts it in Hungry for Profit, providemoral relief. For Britain, moral relief came in the formof Malthuss model of the intrinsic relationship betweenpopulation and food production. To ice the cake, Rev-erend Malthus blamed the high population on the poorslack of moral restraint. Thus Ireland, a food-exportingcountry that had experienced no population buildup, be-

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came, as Marx wrote disdainfully (quoted by Ross, pp.3132), the promised land of the principle ofpopulation.

That famine also provided an early example of the the-orys concrete effects on policy. The director of the reliefprogram (a former student of Malthuss named Trevel-yan) set the tone when he described the famine as adirect stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.Aid was kept down, heeding Malthuss injunction thatfeeding the suffering would only produce more sufferers;the famine became the excuse for further concentrationof land, squeezing out small farmers and eventually turn-ing Ireland into a pasture for Britain.

Malthusianism became increasingly entrenched inpopular conceptions in the United States with the aid oforganizations such as the Malthusian League, foundedin 1877 to promote Malthuss unsupported claims, nowdescribed as laws of population.

The 20th century brought new outgrowths of Malthu-sianism. One was eugenics. Malthuss demographic de-terminism rationalized poverty as the result of overre-production promoted by the poors moral failings;eugenics took the next step in concluding that thesemoral deficiencies were innate. The poor threatened so-cial order not simply by their numbers but by erodingthe nations racial stock. Ross traces this variant ofMalthusianism through the Western intellectual estab-lishment (including the Harvard faculty, which gave usStoddards The Rising Tide of Color Against White WorldSupremacy [1920]) and on to the Nuremburg Laws andradical environmentalism (the introduction to RisingTide was penned by a leading environmentalist). By themid-20th century environmental catastrophism hadbecome the principal vehicle for Malthusian fears, fromOsborns Our Plundered Planet (1948) to Ehrlichs Pop-ulation Bomb (1968) and Hardins Tragedy of the Com-mons (1968). Ross points out that Garrett Hardin wasa eugenicist long before he became a darling of the en-vironmental movement; in 1949, when the ovens atAuschwitz and Dachau were barely cool, he wrote thatthe real problem with population was that those withlow IQs were overproducing. To Ross, Hardins famousTragedy of the Commons is a masterpiece of cold warMalthusianism, a clever defense of private property andan argument against the welfare state, phrased in termsof the environmental and demographic concerns of theworld in which it was published (p. 76). The parties thatwould engage in Hardins solution of mutual coercionmutually agreed on were always unequal in power, andthe results would invariably be appropriation of re-sources. His Tragedy stimulated research on commonproperty (e.g., McCay and Acheson 1987) that showedhow little his hypothetical unmanaged commons had todo with reality, but there had been plenty of informationon this before. The warm reception of his essay merelyreveals how deeply Malthusianism had penetrated sci-entific thought.

If the poster child for Malthuss theory in the 19thcentury was Ireland, in the 20th it was India. India hadlong been fertile ground for Malthusianism. Although

writers would now attribute famines to colonial taxationand land policies (e.g., Ludden 1999), 19th-century Brit-ish officials (including Trevelyan of the potato-faminerelief program, who served in India between 1859 and1865) stressed that Indian populations were reproducingfaster than food supplies. Malthusianism offered hu-manitarian justification of high taxes, as lowering thetax burden could be expected to encourage fertility. Thesignal event for 20th-century Malthusianism, however,was Indias Green Revolution. The reasons behind In-dias dependence on grain imports have been describedelsewhere (e.g., Perkins 1997): much of the countrysbreadbasket was lost in partition, and the United Stateswas dumping wheat both to protect prices and to combatcommunism. But Ross delineates the vital role of Mal-thusianism in the interpretation of the situation and theshaping of policy. Led by the Ford Foundation, a majoreffort was mounted to reapply Malthus to India, and thedoctrine of population growth as cause of political in-stability came to be a prime instrument of U.S. policy.By the 1960s the world believed that India was approach-ing a demographic point of no return, but Ross seesthe evidence for this prediction as the sort of jugglerywhich gives statistics a bad name. The post-Nehru gov-ernment favored the interests of the industrial elite inseeking to provide a cheap urban workforce. Thus, whenthe Rockefeller Foundation (another mouthpiece forU.S. interests) helped India buy 18,000 tons of GreenRevolution seed in 1966, it served U.S. cold war interestsand the interests of Indian capital while reinforcing theperception that Indias problems were Malthusian ratherthan political. Moreover, as several contributors to Hun-gry for Profit would be quick to point out, the new ag-ricultural technology, heralded as beneficial to Indianpeasants, actually contributed greatly to the state-sup-ported industrialization of agriculture that threatenssmallholder livelihoods.

This book is important, troubling, and fascinating.Rosss writing runs a bit to scorn, but it is clear andmostly devoid of Marxist jargon (for a less penetrablerecent critique of Malthuss effect on policy, see Greene1999). It is a more academically oriented book than Hun-gry for Profit, with better references, although there arestill numerous works discussed in the text that are miss-ing from the bibliography. One wishes that there were alighter version of it that might make a dent in publicdiscourse on the ongoing transformation of food produc-tion. Given the pivotal role of the Malthus factor inshaping and rationalizing policies promoting the agri-business threat to peasantries and the environment, thisperspective is of vital importance.

References Cited

e h r l i c h , p a u l r . 1968. The population bomb. New York:Ballantine Books.

f o s t e r , j o h n b . 1994. The vulnerable planet: A short eco-nomic history of the environment. New York: Monthly Re-view Press.

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g r e e n e , ro n a l d w. 1999. Malthusian worlds: U.S. leader-ship and the governing of the population crisis. Boulder: West-view Press.

h a r d i n , g a r r e t t . 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Sci-ence 162:124348.

h o b s b a w m , e r i c . 1994. The age of extremes: A history ofthe world, 19141991. New York: Pantheon Books.

k l o p p e n b u r g , j a c k r . , j r . 1988. First the seed: The politi-cal economy of plant biotechnology, 14922000. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

l e w o n t i n , r . c . , a n d j e a n - p i e r r e b e r l a n . 1986. Tech-nology, research, and the penetration of capital: The case ofU.S. agriculture. Monthly Review 38(3):2134.

l u d d e n , d a v i d . 1999. An agrarian history of South Asia.(The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4.) Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

m c c a y, b o n n i e j . , a n d j a m e s m . a c h e s o n . 1987. Thequestion of the commons: The culture and ecology of commu-nal resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

m a n n , s u s a n , a n d j a m e s d i c k i n s o n . 1978. Obstacles tothe development of capitalist agriculture. Journal of PeasantStudies 5:46681.

n a s s ( n a t i o n a l a g r i c u l t u r a l s t a t i s t i c s s e rv i c e ) .1999. 1997 census of agriculture. Vol. 1, pt. 5. Washington,D.C.

o s b o r n , f a i r fi e l d . 1948. Our plundered planet. Boston: Lit-tle, Brown.

p e r k i n s , j o h n h . 1997. Geopolitics and the green revolution:Wheat, genes, and the cold war. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

p o p p e n d i e c k , j a n e t . 1986. Breadlines knee deep in wheat:Food assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press.

. 1998. Sweet charity? Emergency food and the end of en-titlement. New York: Viking.

ro s s e t t , p e t e r , a n d m e d e a b e n j a m i n . 1994. Thegreening of the revolution: Cubas experiment with organic ag-riculture. Melbourne: Ocean Press.

s t o d d a r d , l o t h ro p . 1920. The rising tide of color againstwhite world supremacy. New York: Scribner.

w a t t s , m i c h a e l . 2000. Malthus, Marx, and the millen-nium, in Struggles over geography: The Hettner Lectures, pp.3575. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg Press.

w o o d , e l l e n m . 1999. The origin of capitalism. New York:Monthly Review Press.

What Remains of Modernity:Ferguson on 20th-Century Zambia

jon abbinkAfrican Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands(abbink@fsw.leidenuniv.nl). 3 iii 01

Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings ofUrban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. By James G.Ferguson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:University of California Press, 1999. 326 pp. $45cloth, $17.95 paper

Expectations of Modernity is a gripping narrative of theother side of the globalization process that calls intoquestion many of its assumptions. James Fergusonsstudy of declining urban Zambia presents a sensitive andinformed critique of modernization theory and of thewidespread myth of access to the blessings of industrial

consumer society for all if only the market can reachthem. (Even UN Secretary Kofi Annan has recentlyjoined the chorus of uncritical globalists.) It is a pitythat it is unlikely to be read by those who need itmostthose working in the World Bank, the WorldTrade Organization, and the development aid ministriesof the donor countries.

In this fascinating study, Ferguson reveals the painfulwin-lose situation that globalization is for many, es-pecially in Africa. Using the Zambian example, he ques-tions the teleological models of modernization and in-dustrial development that have long dominatedeconomic and social science debates and led to so manymisguided conclusions. He underlines that phases of ma-terial development and boom are not a linear move to-ward affluence but often temporary and, to the dismayof those caught up in them, apt to end in decline anddeep crisis. The social and cultural effects of dramaticdownturns are conveniently ignored by economists andadvocates of unfettered globalization.

When modernity, in its material shapes of industri-alization, urbanization, economic growth, and risingconsumption levels, collapses, personal disarray, loss ofmeaning, and despair can be the result (p. 14) as theideological superstructure of values, aspirations, and ex-pectations dissolves. Ferguson presents an interestingand acute analysis of such a process in Copperbelt Zam-bia. Zambia had a promising future at the time of itsindependence in 1964 because of its seemingly success-ful trajectory of industrialization and modernizationsince the 1920s, but it was all built on sand. The Araboil policy of the 1970s and the declining buying powerof Zambian copper on the world market did their work,and as a result not only did the urban working peoplesmaterial conditions of life melt away but their ambitionsand their belief in the future and in personal improve-ment and dignity eroded dramatically.

The book contains six chapters, most of them theo-retical-interpretive and two of them more empirical,based on observations, case studies, and interviews withformer miners and urban people in the late 1980s. Manyof these people were forced by the economic misery inthe cities to go back to the rural areas, often to rela-tives whose lifestyles they did not understand or feltuncomfortable with. Ferguson convincingly describesthe differences in style and in outlook and records theminers expressions of their failed expectations andstruggles.

The first chapter (The Copperbelt in Theory) is anaccount of the changes in Zambia in the period of eco-nomic growth (with the Zambian GDP per capita in 1969higher than in Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey, or South Korea)and of the way an earlier generation of social scientists(e.g., those of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute) inter-preted the industrial and urban developments there.While there were already some critical voices at the time(e.g., G. Wilson), most saw the changes as an irreversibleupward trend establishing a new urban culture and so-ciety. In his reanalysis, Ferguson ably dissects what hecalls the myth of modernity/modernization that has cap-