Agrofood-feed-fuel complex & the land grab

1. Agrofood-feed-fuel complex & the land grab Philip McMichael Cornell University

2. Agro-food-feed-fuel complex? • Integrated agro-industrial sector: crops interchangeable as fungible investments  indiscriminate production • Food regime vector: with class & conjunctural conditions structuring policy & markets

3. ‘security mercantilism’ • New development ~ food/energy crises • Replacing ‘free trade driven ‘food security’ • State/investor compacts to guarantee food & fuel supplies for consumer citizens vs food insecure.

4. ‘aginvestment’ emphasis • National food security strategies • Protection of land & natural resource rights • How can these be met? • Investment in sustaining smallholders, pastoralists, fishers and indigenous people rather than sustaining consumers

5. World Bank, WDR 2008 • ‘new agriculture’ – containing smallholders w/in value chains • Peasant agriculture as impoverished baseline for development (paradigm) • Peasant out-migration = underachievement or choice

6. Alternative explanation of peasant out-migration “the massive movement of food around the world is forcing the increased movement of people” (Via Campesina 2000)

7. Displacement: planet of slums • For India: by 2015 peasant migrants to be “equal to twice the combined population of the UK, France & Germany” (W/Bank).

8. Re-centering of agriculture • Official (W/Bank) version: outgrower model + value chains • Philanthropic version (Gates F’n): ‘some degree of land mobility and a lower % of total employment involved in direct agricultural production’ • IAASTD version: multifunctionality, valuing farmer knowledge & biodiversity

9. Commodification of food • Even so, industrial agr. heavily subsidized • Global inequality deepened by: • ‘ghost acres’ • Inertia of rising energy & meat consumption

10. ‘Ghost acres’: food from nowhere • Kenya: 90% of horticulture is destined for Europe, produced by ♀ migrant labor • UK supermarkets (76% of organic foods) imported 34% of organic food sold in 2006, including from China…. • Mexican agro-maquilas depend on migrant labor force of indigenous women, displaced by US corn dumping

11. Consuming the Amazon 2006 Greenpeace Report: “Meat reared on rainforest soya finds its way onto supermarket shelves and fast food counters across Europe.”

12. ‘Meatification’ – meat consumption per capita (kg per annum) 1968 2008 Incr. US 89 124 40% Spain 22 119 440% Europe 56 89 59% Brazil 39 68 74% China 4 54 1250% Japan 8 42 425%

13. Mangroves become aquaculture: “We have turned the blood of our people [shrimp] into an appetiser”

14. Agricultural investment frontier? • Commodity index funds speculation • Safe haven in global economic recession • Profit squeeze on agribusiness • Investment fund fungibility • Subsidies (energy, food) -- incl. cheap land & labor in global South

15. Deforestation in Sumatra for pulp and palm [Greenpeace, The Guardian 8-20-10]

16. Infrastructure of land grab • Millennium Challenge Corporation: market-based solutions to food security • Externalizes rights through inordinate valorization of land as economic resource [WB land grab price-mechanism omits eco-system values] • Infrastructure for global consumers rather than local producers as citizens

17. Global consumer footprint

18. Development? • Paradigm of growth values yield per plant = industrial ‘agriculture without farmers.’ • Ecological paradigm values yield per ha. from small-scale, biodiverse farming. • Choice: land-grabbing on behalf of global consumer sovereignty, vs. local food & energy sovereignty…