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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to understand the global corporate food regime and capitalist accumulation in agriculture, particularly in the global South and locates Kudumbashree’s collective farming in Kerala, India as an example of an agroecological alternative framework, based on cooperation and solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

The neoliberal growth models have pushed small and marginal farmers into impoverishment across the global South as nation-states open up their markets for global capital to expand and accumulate. With the establishment of global corporate food regimes, the contradiction between the peasantry and the global agro-capitalist system has deepened further. While the states are forced to withdraw themselves and relinquish from the economic domain, global capital has further expanded into the global South through indirect and direct expropriation of land and surplus.

The commercialization of agriculture and global food regimes across the world are challenged by popular movements across the global South such as La via Campesina and MST, based on cooperativism and solidarity economy. Such frameworks call for an agroecological approach based on ecological principles, biodiversity, and the use of local resources, in contrast with the industrial agricultural paradigm, which is primarily dependent on monocultures, chemical inputs, and fossil fuels. This approach brings back the focus to peasant-led developmental models, which had been pushed into obsolescence in the development paradigm and present mainstream visions of addressing global hunger and ecological crisis.

This paper tries to locate the collective farming initiative of the Kudumbashree women’s network in Kerala, India as an example of peasant-led development, enriched by grassroots democracy and popular mobilization. This paper argues how such forms of solidarity economies could potentially emerge as grassroots responses to the economic and social crises capitalist expansion causes, while acting as counter-hegemonic transformative alternatives, in opposition to capitalist power structures.