BIOFUELS AND THE FINANCIALIZATION OF THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM - Food Systems Failure - page 86

population. 23 Haroon Akram-Lodhi (2008) notes the Bank's World Development Re-
port, 2008 , 'clearly expects that over time agriculture-based countries should, even-
tually, shift to becoming transforming countries before, eventually, becoming urban-
ized countries'. This large-scale transition is premised on developmentalist assump-
tions about agro-industrialization, ultimately rooted in labour displacement and land
concentration. 24 Viewing agriculture as the servant of growth, the emphasis is on
plant yield - rather than agricultural function - in order to develop capacity for
seeds and fertilizer inputs. An alternative conception of raising productivity is as
'food output per acre rather than yield per plant' where farming is diverse, need-
ing investment in 'ecologically sound and socially just tehnologies' (Murphy, 2008).
This trajectory, however, is at odds with the appropriation of farmer knowledge as
the condition of agribusiness centralization, and, therefore, 'development'. 25
De-peasantization is the ultimate development litmus test, including the enclos-
ure of smallholders within what the World Bank calls the 'new agriculture', 'led
by private entrepreneurs in extensive value hains linking producers to consumers
and including many entrepreneurial smallholders supported by their organizations'
(World Bank, 2007, p8). The artificiality of this conception is that it is synchronic ,
advocating instant incorporation of smallholders into a hierarhical global market
structure, rather than the assumed 'evolutionary' (diahronic) process within par-
ticular countries. Amin (2003) has reclassiied this agrarian hierarhy as: high-input
grain-livestok farmers in the North; a relatively small group of industrial-capitalist
farmers in the agro-industrial export regions of the South; and the globally pervas-
ive, underprivileged, low-input smallholder population (whih comprises about 40
per cent of humanity (Araghi, 2000)). Within this hierarhy, agricultural productiv-
ity ratios across high- and low-input farming have risen from 10:1 prior to 1940 to
2000:1 in the twenty-first century, deepening the competitive exposure of smallhold-
ers (Amin, 2003, p2). By conlating a diahronic evolutionary assumption with a syn-
hronic regime - whose competitive advantages reside in subsidized agribusiness
trade and investment at the expense of peasant agriculture - the World Bank con-
signs peasants to a residual status, thus implying their justifiable replacement in the
name of human progress.
The evident obsolescence of smallholder agriculture in the context of a market-
driven project of managed competition, with complicity by government and devel-
opment agencies in land-grabbing, rests on a development episteme unable to re-
cognise the social, ecological and cultural functions and potentials of small farming