September 21st, 2021

What’s in your Share?

• Storage Carrots

• French Fingerling Potatoes

• Salad Mix

• Scallions

• Chesnok Red Garlic

• Kale

• Yellow Storage Onions

• Broccoli (Maybe…)

Agrarian Questions and the Struggle for Land Justice in the United States (From Land Justice: Reimaging Land, Food, and The Commons in the United States, by Eric Holt-Giménez

Afterwards they (as many as were able) began to plant their corn, in which service Squanto [Tisquantum] stood them in great stead, showing them both the manner how to set it, and after how to dress and tend it. Also he told them except they got fish and set with it (in these old grounds) it would come to nothing, and he showed them that in the middle of April they should have store enough come up the brook, by which they began to build, and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions necessary for them; all which they found true by trial and experience.

- Of Plymouth Plantation, 1604-1627 (Bradford 1621)

The Structural Roots of Land Justice

Tisquantum’s act of solidarity is an emblematic preface to 500 years of agrarian transformation in North America. How did a starving, inept band of pilgrims manage to introduce the explosive process of colonization and nation-building that would set the stage for the globe’s most powerful food regime in history? The short answer is: they didn’t.

It wasn’t the original colonists who transformed North America; it was wave upon wave of dispossessed British, Nordic, and European peasants. The Old World’s “agrarian transition” privatized the rural commons, destroyed village life, and subsumed agriculture to the needs of industry. It also uprooted millions of peasants. This provided a cheap, reserve army of labor to fuel the Industrial Revolution. It also threw masses of desperate villagers—willing to risk all for a new life—into the colonial cauldron of the Americas. These pioneers were part of a western demographic shift that included a quarter million indentured servants and over ten million enslaved Africans. Millions of immigrants from other parts of the world would follow, as variations of this massive transition blazed a trail of dreams and fortune; of genocide and empire; and of destruction, trauma—and, also, resistance. Contemporary agrarian transitions continue to this day, fueling social movements for an alternative agrarian future.

Racial injustice and the stark inequities in property and wealth in the US countryside aren’t just a quirk of history, but a structural feature of capitalist agriculture. This means that in order to succeed in building an alternative agrarian future, today’s social movements will have to dismantle those structures. It is the relationships in the food system, and how we govern them, that really matter.

The rural landscape of the United States has been thousands of years in the making. The transformation of indigenously-managed gardens, woodlands, marshes, drylands and prairies into industrial farms of globally-traded commodity crops and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) has been dramatic. However, the forms of private land ownership at the core of our food and farming systems have changed surprisingly little since early colonization.

On one hand, this dichotomy reflects the amazing ability of people to remake farming as a response to capitalism’s need for constant growth, concentration, and standardization. In doing so, they develop what are called agriculture’s “forces of production,” i.e., the resources, technologies, tools, and skills used to produce our food. On the other hand, it also reflects the steady expansion of a dominant system of private ownership and market exchange. This constitutes the “relations of production,” or interactions between all the owners, workers, and consumers that make up our food system. The association between the forces and relations of production has been far from peaceful, but over the last few hundred years, they have evolved in tandem, turning the US into the global center of a powerful, multi-trillion dollar food regime.

The forces of production and the relations of production in our food system are not working together very well, anymore.

Even as the pressures of industrialization and financialization drive medium-sized farmers out of agriculture, there is a contingent of farmers that are increasingly avoiding the destructive inputs pushed on them by the seed and chemical industries. Moreover, a growing number of consumers are rejecting the poisonous, processed food sold by the agrifoods industry; rural and indigenous communities are rising up to resist fracking, pipelines, and CAFOs; and farmworkers and foodworkers are organizing strikes and boycotts against starvation wages and inhumane working conditions. Across the entire country, there are instances of older and beginning farmers ushering in agroecology, permaculture, and organic and urban agriculture; they are working with consumers to get fresh, healthy food to the people who need it most. There are counter-movements for food justice and food sovereignty growing in rural and urban communities all over the US, and people from all walks of life are looking to return to farming. Historic forms of agrarian relations, like the commons (which was never a significant part of the relations of production in the US) are being revived and resituated to address the needs of communities in the present food system (Bollier 2014). It is an exciting time of innovation and solidarity as the food movement stretches its imagination across rural and urban areas, and from farm to fork. Paradigms, practices and politics are all changing, but facing resistance from the agencies and corporations of the existing food regime. Unlike the past, in which struggles for land and territory defined people’s resistance, today the entire food system makes up the terrain of agrarian struggle.

But the farmers on the front lines of this new agrarian struggle are finding that efforts to build healthy, equitable food systems that provide jobs and keep the food dollar in the community are inevitably limited by the lack of access to one essential resource: land.

Good agricultural land—rural or urban—is unaffordable for all but the top one percent of our society. The new forces of production being advanced by food movements—like agroecology, permaculture, and agroforestry—are being held back by the old relations of production and ownership, which serve the interests of the corporate food regime (McMichael 2009). Historically, when the forces of production and the relations of production enter into contradiction, deep reforms—or revolutions—happen.

The politics of food is never far from the politics of land, water, or labor. Changing the food system without changing the systems of land access, land tenure, and land use is not only unlikely, it may well be impossible. But to change the politics of land is to change the politics of property—a historically daunting proposition in the US.

Changing the politics of property is precisely what the authors of this book propose. From the acequias of the greater Southwest, to the centers of Black agrarianism in the Deep South, and to new farmers, women farmers, and urban farmers, communities on the front lines of food justice and food sovereignty are calling for land justice. At its core, the demands for equitable land access revive an age-old issue: the Agrarian Question.

The original Agrarian Question—the role of smallholder agriculture in the development of nineteenth century capitalism—was thought to have been resolved long ago in the United States. After all, agriculture had become highly industrialized, changing it from a way of life into a business. Over the last half century, corporate capital appeared to absorb all aspects of agriculture… until it didn’t. To understand why the Agrarian Question is still relevant today, we need to take a walk down the furrows of our agrarian history.

READ THE REST: https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/HoltGimenezIntro.pdf