Paper short abstract:

Globally, small-scale farmers cannot socially reproduce themselves. In the Southern U.S., this appears as a dilemma of rigidly opposed “interests” of farmers vs workers. Yet food corporations determine food’s “global price”: too expensive for workers to buy, too cheap for farmers to subsist from.

Paper long abstract:

Globalized food commodification and its deepening penetration through financialization (e.g. food commodity futures) have led to widespread crises in social reproduction in both global South and North. In the global South, commodification has expanded and deepened through neoliberal Structural Adjustment policies and global trade agreements that dispossess small-scale farmers through debt and monopoly power to expropriate their labor, land, water, and the food they grow. This renders them unable to access food sufficient for their own consumption, and consigns them to precarious wage labor.

Corporate control over food production for global markets plays out differently in the global North, in the opposed “interests” of small-scale “sustainable” agro-ecological farmers versus poor food consumers. While labor control by capital operates through intentional food insecurity imposed on large populations of urban workers, small farmers engaged in petty commodity production for local food markets are unable to earn income to maintain themselves. In Food Activism Today (Nonini and Holland 2024), a multi-sited study of local food activism in the southern U.S., this situation presented itself in the form of an ethnographic dilemma. To solve this dilemma, food activists’ unpaid labor sought both to provide food for food-insecure workers and to create market outlets through which small-scale “sustainable” farmers could make a living. However, at the structural level, the efforts of food activists almost invariably failed given the ubiquity of transnational food corporations’ determination of “the global price” of food: too expensive for workers to buy, too cheap for farmers to subsist from.