Food Security, Land, and Development

Abstract

IntroductionIn a fundamental sense, modern 'development' has been premised on replacing peasantries. Th is has been the case since the appearance of the fi rst monocultures in non-European colonies, 1 and it has informed understandings and theories of development over the last one and a half centuries as factory labour forces and industrial technology have emerged. Since the register of development is the (apparent) 2 absence of peasantries 3 in the Global North, this condition is projected as a universal goal-and has been written into representations of (capitalist and socialist) development from classical political economy through Rostow ( 1960 ) and Barrington Moore ( 1967 ) to contemporary World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publications. Given the substantial agrarian features of the non-European world, its (development) future has been represented as one in which peasantries disappear. 1 C.L.R. James observed that slave labour systems in the Americas prefi gured the fi rst proletariat, insofar as extensive monocultures in Europe were disallowed at the time by guild laws and property relations ( 1963 ). 2 Nevertheless, the USA, UK, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand have a percentage of small farms in the range of 10-25 % (Hilmi 2012 : 69). 3 'Peasantries' are diverse across time and space, sharing attributes of the 'farm as a place of labour, where… labour is provided by the family and mobilised within the community through relations of reciprocity' (Hilmi 2012 : 25).

Social Capital in Community Organizing for Land Protection and Food Security

“…Inequitable economic development policies enable negative practices such as 'land and/or water grabbing' resulting in rapid urban settlement and changing land uses including industrial pollution and reduced access to adequate quality water. Land and water degradation are incompatible with agricultural production and food security [3][4][5]. Small-holder agriculture is essential to a healthy diversified economy [4].…”

“…Land and water degradation are incompatible with agricultural production and food security [3][4][5]. Small-holder agriculture is essential to a healthy diversified economy [4].…”

Re-evaluating food systems and food security: A global perspective

“…Overall, there is sufficient reason to consider that 'land grabbing' is a real and continuing phenomenon -particularly in African nations (Allan et al, 2013) -and that its effects include the removal of peasant and subsistence farmers from ancestral lands, the conversion of those lands into large-scale farming operations producing crops such as corn, soy, sugar and palm oil as part of an export-oriented agro-industrialisation, and the movement of the 'surplus' population into villages and towns (often as slum dwellers) (Davis, 2007;Lawrence et al, 2010;McMichael, 2013). It is estimated that during the 1990s some 30 million subsistence farmers and peasants left their farms, as part of the WTO's insistence that food self-sufficiency was an inappropriate strategy in a world that should operate according to free market principles (see McMichael, 2016b).…”