Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of suh metrics is that they externalize costs not reducible to monetary values (for
instance human displacement, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, GHG (greenhouse gas)
emissions), and discount other values suh as socioecological sustainability, energy
sovereignty, local food security and dietary diversity. Arguably, suh one-dimen-
sional celebration of rising development indices is symptomatic of deepening com-
modity fetishism, where price is a proxy for an entirely abstract notion of (exhange)
value that actively obscures the concrete values by whih humanity might live, and
survive. The concluding section develops this point.
Conclusion
The corporate food regime has progressively modelled a form of agriculture valuing
its product solely as a commodity. That is, agriculture's use-value is conflated with
exhange-value, rendering crops as fungible investments - as in the multiple uses of
corn, soy, palm oil, and sugar, for example, whether as foods, feeds, fuels, cosmet-
ics, stabilizers, and so on. For the crops mentioned, their conversion from food to
exhange-value, magniied by inancialization, perhaps represents the ultimate fet-
ishization of agriculture as an input-output operation governed solely by profiting
from indiscriminate production of commodities. In this context, fuel crop competi-
tion for food crop-land puts considerable pressure on world food prices, transmitted
food regime has rendered global food security dependent on heap agro-industrial
surpluses traded globally (the US for 40 per cent of corn, along with Brazil and Ar-
gentina - who, as a threesome, account for 80 per cent of soybeans, with wheat being
exported by the ex-setler states and a few EU countries). his, in a context where
the volume of cereal imports into Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries (LIDFC) al-
most tripled between 1975-7 and 2005-07, with their prices rising 37 per cent in the
three years before 2008 (Weis, 2010, p328).
In a further contribution to food price inflation, under the conditions of the
agrofuels project, corporate hedging between fuel and food for these commodities
tion is ultimately about combining commodified inputs (seeds, fertilizer, antibiotics,
privately-owned genetic materials, pesticides and so on) with land or water or fact-
ory farms to produce outputs as ingredients of processed commodities to fuel labour
or mahinery without regard for ecological context. In other words, the process of
abstraction is not simply about the destination of the produced commodities, but
