Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In other words, heap land is available as a subsidy to investors by governments
trading away social reproduction rights of peasants. Essentially this amounts to an
ongoing process of 'primitive accumulation', whereby capital's profitability depends
on publicly-managed expropriation.
Agrofuels may be the new frontier of capital
accumulation, but they depend on subsidies from home and host governments. A
recent World Bank study 'found that large-scale export agriculture in Africa has
succeeded only with plantation crops like sugar and tea or in ventures that were
propped up by extreme government subsidies, during colonialism or during the
apartheid era in South Africa' (Rice, 2009); it is not difficult to extrapolate forward
to current conditions, where, according to Friends of the Earth and EarthTrak, the
combination of the Renewable Fuels Standard Mandate (whih provides a market
for biofuels) with tax credits would subsidize the US biofuels industry to the tune of
'in 2009 governments provided subsidies worth between $43bn (£27bn) and $46bn to
renewable energy and biofuel industries, including support provided through feed-in
tariffs, renewable energy credits, tax credits, cash grants and other direct subsidies'
(Business Green, 2010).
Subsidization of industrial biofuels underpins the 'agrofuels project', based as it
is on the 'externalization' of a number of 'costs'. These costs include the rights of
small farmers to ancestral lands; food insecurity arising from the conversion of food-
producing land to food- or fuel-crop export agriculture; environmental deterioration
resulting from industrial agriculture; and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Eah
of these issues eventually become monetary (and opportunity) costs, as governments
and development agencies are confronted with displacement, food shortages, and
ecological disruptions.
In other words, the 'biofuels revolution' is not simply about restoring profit-
ability to capital via investment fund management within a subsidy regime. It is
also about pursuing an agro-imperial development trajectory premised on sacrifice
- of land and its inhabitants to a financial calculus. In what follows, I argue that
the commercial development trajectory embodied in the agrofuels project authorizes
large-scale removal of peasant populations from ancestral lands to install 'agricul-
ture without farmers' - as the international peasant coalition, La Vía Campesina,
calls agro-industrialization. In this process, the agrofuels project follows a diabolical
logic: arresting a crisis of profitability for capital, at the expense of human and nat-
ural ecology.
