Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
volution was initially proitable for upstream supply irms (seeds, mahinery, agro-
hemicals). However, the upstream and downstream companies servicing the grain
corporations, accounting for 20 per cent of food expenditures, have experienced a
proit squeeze as rising investments (hemical inputs, genetic engineering and meh-
anization) have not been mathed by rising productivity rates (Holt-Giménez. 2007b,
p10). The consequence has been the development of two, related tendencies: (1) the
centralization of capital into 'inancialized' food conglomerates (Rama, 2005; Burh
and Lawrence, 2009) to manage the proit crunh; and (2) rising ofshore investment
in agro-industry in the global South, where land is heap and labour plentiful.
These tendencies express contemporary world-market ordering of agricultural
production and circulation, conceptualized as 'food empires' whih 'increasingly ex-
ert a monopolistic power over the entire food supply hain' (van der Ploeg, 2010,
p99). Industrialization and 'globalization' processes require 'permanent scale in-
creases', triggering 'a heightened dependency of farming upon capital markets', in-
creasing debt and puting a premium on short-term inancial gains (van der Ploeg,
2010, p100). he result is a 'world agriculture' (McMihael, 2005) or 'the complete
interhangeability of large agricultural systems' (van der Ploeg, 2010, p101) where
high-value industrial crops are grown anywhere, expressed in the export of food pro-
cessing and supermarkets to colonize Southern urban consumption patterns (Rear-
don and Timmer, 2005). Meanwhile, the financialization of food empires (for ex-
ample Parmalat, Ahold, Carrefour, Charoen Pokphand, Salim Group, Fonterra) has
exerted increasing pressure on food prices at eah end of the supply hain: namely,
rising for consumer foods, and declining for farmer produce (Rosset, 2008; McMi-
hael, 2005). Van der Ploeg (2010, p102) points out that in both Italy and the Neth-
erlands during the last two decades of the twentieth century, total value-added in-
dexes for industrial subsectors (for instance hemicals, wood, auto, mineral process-
ing, textiles) rose considerably more slowly than those for the food industry, under-
lining the atraction of agro-food investments for inancial capital.
Agriculture as capital's new frontier?
The agro-industrialization of the global South is a logical response to capital's
crisis of proitability. Rising food prices, peaking oil, heap land, and stalled invest-
ment funds together drive a new solution to the accumulation crisis, represented as
serving the interest of humanity and the planet. This would appear to be a feasible
explanation for shifting financial flows into agriculture, specifically in the global
