Samir Amin on the catastrophe facing billions of peasants

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following Review of the Month article from the current Monthly
Review (www.monthlyreview.org)
is a very important article on the scope of the crisis facing 3
billion peasants in the world who  today face genocide at the hands of
the imperialist system.  It certainly sheds light on the revolt in
Bolivia as well as the revolt that sank the last meeting of the World
Trade Organization in Cancun.

I'm not sure what Samir Amin really  means to say about Mao here,
probably because I haven't read his previous work. But  I definitely
agree that "Marxists" who still spend valuable time warning against
"peasant deviations" in today's world are way, way out to lunch.

I also agree with him that peasant agriculture needs to be defended
and preserved against the onslaught of capitalism, and transcended in
a gradual way that benefits the practitioners of that agriculture.
That excludes either letting the laws of capitalism steamroll them or
campaigns of forced or high-pressure collectivization.

The first section of his article follows.
Fred Feldman


World Poverty, Pauperization
& Capital Accumulation
by Samir Amin
Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His
recent books include Specters of Capitalism: A Critique of Current
Intellectual Fashions (Monthly Review, 1998), and Obsolescent
Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder, forthcoming
from Zed Books.


 A discourse on poverty and the necessity of reducing its magnitude,
if not eradicating it, has become fashionable today. It is a discourse
of charity, in the nineteenth-century-style, which is does not seek to
understand the economic and social mechanisms that generate poverty,
although the scientific and technological means to eradicate it are
now available.

Capitalism and the new agrarian question

All societies before modern (capitalist) time were peasant societies.
Their production was ruled by various specific systems and logics?but
not those which rule capitalism in a market society such as the
maximization of the return on capital.

Modern capitalist agriculture?encompassing both rich, large-scale
family farming and agribusiness corporations?is now engaged in a
massive attack on third world peasant production. The green light for
this was given at the November 2001 session of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in Doha, Qatar. There are many victims of this
attack?and most are third world peasants, who still make up half of
humankind.

Capitalist agriculture governed by the principle of return on capital,
which is localized almost exclusively in North America, Europe,
Australia, and in the Southern Cone of Latin America employs only a
few tens of millions of farmers who are no longer peasants. Because of
the degree of mechanization and the extensive size of the farms
managed by one farmer, their productivity generally ranges between 1
to 2 million kilograms (2 and 4.5 million pounds) of cereals per
farmer.

In sharp contrast, three billion farmers are engaged in peasant
farming. Their farms can be grouped into two distinct sectors, with
greatly different scales of production, economic and social
characteristics, and levels of efficiency. One sector, able to benefit
from the green revolution, obtained fertilizers, pesticides, and
improved seeds and has some degree of mechanization. The productivity
of these peasants ranges between 10,000 and 50,000 kilograms (20,000
and 110,000 pounds) of cereals per year. However, the annual
productivity of peasants excluded from new technologies is estimated
to be around 1,000 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of cereals per farmer.

The ratio of the productivity of the most advanced capitalist segment
of the world?s agriculture to the poorest, which was around 10 to 1
before 1940, is now approaching 2000 to 1! That means that
productivity has progressed much more unequally in the area of
agriculture and food production than in any other area. Simultaneously
this evolution has led to the reduction of the relative prices of food
products (in relation to other industrial and service products) to one
fifth of what they were fifty years ago. The new agrarian question is
the result of that unequal development.

Modernization has always combined constructive dimensions, namely the
accumulation of capital and increasing productivity, with destructive
aspects?reducing labor to the state of a commodity sold on the market,
often destroying the natural ecological basis needed for the
reproduction of life and production, and polarizing the distribution
of wealth on a global level. Modernization has always simultaneously
integrated some, as expanding markets created employment, and
excludedothers, who were not integrated in the new labor force after
having lost their positions in the previous systems. In its ascending
phase, capitalist global expansion integrated many along with its
excluding processes. But now, in the third world peasant societies, it
is excluding massive numbers of people while including relatively few.

The question raised here is precisely whether this trend will continue
to operate with respect to the three billion human beings still
producing and living in peasant societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America.

Indeed, what would happen if agriculture and food production were
treated as any other form of production submitted to the rules of
competition in an open and deregulated market, as decided in principle
at the November 2001 WTO meeting in Doha. Would such principles foster
the acceleration of production?

One can imagine that the food brought to market by today?s three
billion peasants, after they ensure their own subsistences, would
instead be produced by twenty million new modern farmers. The
conditions for the success of such an alternative would include: (1)
the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new capitalist
farmers (and these lands would have to be taken out of the hands of
present peasant populations); (2) capital (to buy supplies and
equipment); and (3) access to the consumer markets. Such farmers would
indeed compete successfully with the billions of present peasants. But
what would happen to those billions of people?

Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of
competition for agricultural products and foodstuffs, as imposed by
WTO, means accepting the elimination of billions of noncompetitive
producers within the short historic time of a few decades. What will
become of these billions of humans beings, the majority of whom are
already poor among the poor, who feed themselves with great
difficulty. In fifty years? time, industrial development, even in the
fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent annually,
could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.

The major argument presented to legitimate the WTO?s competition
doctrine is that such development did happen in nineteenth and
twentieth century Europe and the United States where it produced a
modern, wealthy, urban-industrial and post-industrial society with
modern agriculture able to feed the nation and even export food. Why
should not this pattern be repeated in the contemporary third world
countries?

The argument fails to consider two major factors that make the
reproduction of the pattern in third world countries almost
impossible. The first is that the European model developed throughout
a century and a half along with labor-intensive industrial
technologies. Modern technologies use far less labor and the newcomers
of the third world have to adopt them if their industrial exports are
to be competitive in global markets. The second is that, during that
long transition, Europe benefited from the massive migration of its
surplus population to the Americas.

The contention that capitalism has indeed solved the agrarian question
in its developed centers has always been accepted by large sections of
the left, an example being Karl Kautsky?s famous book, The Agrarian
Question, written before the First World War. Soviet ideology
inherited that view and on its basis undertook modernization through
the Stalinist collectivization, with poor results. What was always
overlooked was that capitalism, while it solved the question in its
centers, did it through generating a gigantic agrarian question in the
peripheries, which it can only solve through the genocide of half of
humankind. Within the Marxist tradition only Maoism understood the
magnitude of the challenge. Therefore, those who accused Maoism of a
?peasant deviation? show by this very criticism that they lack the
analytical capacity to understand imperialist capitalism, which they
reduce to an abstract discourse on capitalism in general.

Modernization through capitalist market liberalization, as suggested
by WTO and its supporters, finally aligns side by side, without even
necessarily combining, the two components: the production of food on a
global scale by modern competitive farmers mostly based in the North
but also possibly in the future in some pockets of the South; and, the
marginalization, exclusion, and further impoverishment of the majority
of the three billion peasants of the present third world and finally
their seclusion in some kinds of reserves. It therefore combines a
pro-modernization and efficiency-dominant discourse with an
ecological-cultural-reserve set of policies allowing the victims to
survive in a state of material (including ecological) impoverishment.
These two components might therefore complement, rather than conflict
with, one another.

Can we imagine other alternatives and have them widely debated? Ones
in which peasant agriculture would be maintained throughout the
visible future of the twenty-first century, but, which simultaneously
engage in a process of continuous technological and social progress?
In this way, changes could happen at a rate that would allow a
progressive transfer of the peasants into non-rural and
non-agricultural employment.

Such a strategic set of targets involves complex policy mixes at
national, regional, and global levels.

At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant
food production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and
agribusiness corporations?local and international. This will help
guarantee acceptable internal food prices?disconnected from
international market prices, which are additionally biased by the
agricultural subsidies of the wealthy North.

Such policy targets also question the patterns of industrial and urban
development, which should be based less on export-oriented priorities
(e.g., keeping wages low which implies low prices for food) and more
attentive to a socially-balanced expansion of the internal market.

Simultaneously, this involves an overall pattern of policies to ensure
national food security?an indispensable condition for a country to be
an active member of the global community, enjoying the indispensable
margin of autonomy and negotiating capacity.

At regional and global levels it implies international agreements and
policies that move away from the doctrinaire liberal principles ruling
the WTO?replacing them with imaginative and specific solutions for
different areas, taking into consideration the specific issues and
concrete historical and social conditions.




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