Agriculture and diet

Wander around a supermarket, pick up an out-of-season fruit, note its long journey into your stomach and you may exalt the glory of capitalism to your young child. The child, barely able to talk, will look into your eyes and motion the fruit to their mouth. You pick up the fruit and try to feed the child but they shake their head and hand it to a stranger as security personnel make their way to secure the commodity.

Around 9 million people die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases and over 800 million are undernourised¹. The other² in the capitalist world market; whereby many countries and their constituents, obese with surplus calories, abstain from thought about the other’s predicament. The religion of capital, always takes credit for anything that can be produced, allocates value to commodities and circulates the assignation to invigorate the whole system. This circulatory function has enabled people to buy food from far away places and eat products that wouldn’t otherwise be available locally. It also impoverishes certain areas, where an allocated function of producing commodities for others dwindles the potential food supplies for locals.

But surely, capitalism has been an improvement on the historical impoverishment throughout ages and groups? A group of people, whose lifestyle was replaced with advancing capitalism, were well-nourished given disease and their lifestyle, one study found³. Equestrian Indian tribes on the American Plains in the late 1800s were the tallest people in the world. American Indians lived in egalitarian societies that provided a strong safety net for the disadvantaged in their tribes, meaning that no one went hungry or uncared for. In contrast to these advantages that American Indians enjoyed, many living in contemporaneous cities — particularly the poor — couldn’t afford food for a healthy and complete diet. These large cities and towns were densely packed and lacked modern sanitary practices, meaning they were breeding grounds for disease. American Indians did suffer from devastating epidemics such as smallpox that killed significant numbers of people but the tribes took steps to minimize the effects of these epidemics; such as splitting up the tribe when the illnesses started, which helped stop the spread. Also, they were adept at reorganizing their small bands following deaths from epidemics.

Directed by the middlemen of capital to produce profit, as the underlying function. The adjunct nature of producing food in the current system; not to nourish a population but to produce items for a market, has led to many catastrophes and continues to destabilise food systems. For a faith that takes pride in rationality, the loss of efficiency in producing food is staggering. Roughly one third of the world’s food is wasted post harvest^4,5. Food is lost in every step of the food life-cycle; production, handling and storage, processing, distribution, consumption and end of life stages. 35% of the wasted food is simply thrown out by supermarkets, shops, and households. Much of it is still perfectly fit for eating.

The world-wide axiomatic system of capitalism lets millions of children die from undernutrition^6,7; under-nutrition puts children at greater risk of dying from common infections, increases the frequency and severity of such infections, and delays recovery. In 2016, 155 million of children under 5 were considered stunted⁸ (significantly below standard height for their age), 45.4 million wasted (significantly below standard height to weight ratios) and 38.9 million are overweight. A double burden on people’s health has resulted – 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient malnutrition, while 1.9 billion are overweight/obese. Poverty⁹ due to the arrangements made to placate the markets, ensures lower health outcomes and standards of living for people in poorer countries.

Throughout history, capitalist nations have sanctioned policies contributing to famine deaths. While they may have natural causes, the plight of people during famines is greatly affected by political and economic influences before, during and after the events. During the period of the British Raj, famines in India — often attributed to El Nino droughts and failed government policies — were some of the worst ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78¹⁰, in which 5.6 million to 9.6 million people died and the Indian famine of 1899–1900¹¹, in which 1 to 4.5 million people died. The mechanisms of capitalist society also contributed to another famine in Bengal in 1943¹².

During famines, the greatest mortality is not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. Diseases such as measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera become severe as the malnourished are very vulnerable to infections¹³. This was evident during the Great Famine¹⁴ in Ireland, where around one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases¹⁵.

Polyani¹⁶ noted that capitalism came into existence by using starvation, or the threat of, to get a compliant workforce:

‘It is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which makes primitive society, in a sense, more human than market economy, and at the same time less economic. Ironically, the white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor….

Although it was acknowledged that there existed a customary standard below which no laborer’s wages could sink, this limitation also was thought to become effective only if the laborer was reduced to the choice of being left without food or of offering his labor in the market for the price it would fetch. This explains, incidentally, an otherwise inexplicable omission of the classical economists, namely, why only the penalty of starvation, not also the allurement of high wages, was deemed capable of creating a functioning labor market. ‘

When capitalism was being invented and implemented, it absorbed many puritanical views on making the poor work. A notable man of religious conviction, Joseph Townsend¹⁷, imparted his high-and-mighty Calvinist wisdom in ‘A Dissertation on the Poor Laws’¹⁸:

Promoting hunger to ensure manufacturers had bountiful labour was the imperative of the nascent capitalist system. If you read the dissertation, you can find many of the same talking points being made currently within the capitalist media cadre – e.g. poor people can only be industrious if they don’t have easy access to resources; virtuosity is related to industry; poor people shouldn’t have children; God’s chosen people naturally direct the labour of others; deserving and undeserving poor; the poor cannot be trusted to use money wisely.

For capitalism to reproduce itself, it has to ensure the labour commodity can replace itself via the process of nutrition. In a market economy, this is mainly achieved by consumable products being made available for sale to the populace. The cost of living is increasing for everyone due to inflationary pressures from increasing profits. 2021 was the most profitable year for big corporations since 1950, with pre-tax profits rising to $2.5 trillion. Food industry behemoths such as Cargill, Walmart, ADM, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus reported record profits, with Cargill alone recording its largest profit in history¹⁹.

From the supply side, any disruption in the supply chain or increase in the cost of production of goods and services, whether it be the cost of inputs such as raw materials, the cost of labour, logistical costs, or the profits derived from the sale of goods, can all contribute to the increase in prices. This is referred to as ‘cost-push’ inflation. Via the demand side, inflation can occur when the overall demand for goods and services in an economy is increasing at a faster rate than the economy’s ability to produce them. This could happen due to several factors including: a general rise in consumer demand, an increase in the supply of money from the central bank through measures like printing more currency (when everyone has more money, they tend to demand more goods and prices will subsequently rise), lowering credit interest rates (as it’s less expensive to borrow, consumers can borrow more money at less cost, and thus buy more goods), or a government stimulus like a tax cut (as it increases consumers’ disposable income). All of these could lead to an increase in demand that exceeds the supply of goods or services available, resulting in higher prices.

There are 4 main reason why corporations are able to retrieve larger profit margins.

1. Due to consolidation. The food sector is one of the most consolidated sectors globally, with just four firms controlling 60-90 percent of the market. While in 1994, four companies (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta and BASF) controlled 21%.
2. Rising input costs being passed to the consumer. Within the period 2021-2023, around 54% of price increases have been driven by profit margin gains, while wage increases were responsible for less than 8% and other input costs 38%. By systematically pushing farmers towards dependence on inputs, corporations can now extract profits directly from the point of production rather than waiting until the point of sale.
3. Agflation – refers to the increase in the price of food relative to other commodities, due to increased demand for non-food related agricultural products such as biofuels and animal feed. The industrial food system, which uses the vast majority of the agricultural resources (land, water, fossil fuels), actually only feeds 30 percent of the world. (70 percent of us are fed by small-scale farmers and peasant producers.)
4. Financialisation – since the 1990’s there has been a growing involvement of financial actors such as investors, hedge funds, pension funds, and commodity trading firms, in the food and agricultural industry. he transformation of food into a financial commodity that can be traded and speculated on like any other financial instrument in the market (such as stocks and bonds). These financial instruments enable investors to place bets on the expected future prices of food commodities through the use of a commodity futures contract. As a result of financialisation, prices today are determined more by investor expectations than the real production of food. According to the FAO, 98 percent of commodity futures end without the physical trade of commodities.

Inflation is often presented as an isolated crisis but it’s actually baked into capitalism’s design. Capitalism stimulates growth through overproduction, where too many goods are produced relative to the demand for those goods, and maintains power imbalances through underconsumption, where workers do not earn enough income to purchase all of the goods and services that are produced. As a result, there is always a surplus of goods being produced without enough people able to afford them, and corporations inevitably experience a falling rate of profits. In order to increase their profits, they respond by either decreasing wages or raising their prices even more, leading to inflation. In other words, the capitalist system has an inherent tendency towards crisis and instability due to the contradiction between corporations’ interest in accumulating more capital in pursuit of profits, and consumers’ and workers’ need for fair prices and wages.

What we put into our bodies, as sustenance, can be a perilous process; whereby the webbed food production system has many long supply chains with different standards of hygiene and inspection. Where the profit motif flares its entrails, potential contaminants or adulterated material gets whipped into the commodity form. It is argued that food adulteration is constitutive of capitalist food production²⁰. With nation states playing a key role in enforcing the distinction between legal and illegal forms of food adulteration. Karl Marx – with the aid of parliamentary committee papers – noted the rampant historical food adulteration^21,22 and the reasons behind it²³.

Food can be adulterated deliberately or unintentionally. Deliberate adulteration of food is usually performed for financial reasons and during processing. Accidental adulteration is usually caused by ignorance, negligence, or a lack of control. Economically motivated adulteration is the intentional adulteration of food for financial gain, and has enormous public health implications²⁴. Almost every food, including milk and dairy products, fats and oils, fruits and vegetables, grain foods, coffee, tea, honey, etc., is susceptible to adulteration. It is difficult to find food that is free from adulteration. Consumption of adulterated food contributes to numerous diseases in society, ranging from mild to life threatening. Prolonged consumption of adulterated food is very harmful to the human body²⁵. The total impact of food crime (which encompasses adulteration) in the UK is estimated to be between £409 million and £1.96 billion per year. The prevention of food adulteration would need the involvement of governments, food industries, consumers, and civil society organizations. Also, methods for detecting food fraud and adulteration would need to be used extensively²⁶.

In the UK, only 16 out of 610 recorded food crime intelligence reports to the Food Standards Agency are successfully prosecuted²⁷. While only 1 in 5 victims report food fraud to the authorities. In 2017-18 English local authorities (responsible in enforcing the Food Safety Act 1990) tested 30,744 samples (NAO, 2019) and members of the Food Industry Intelligence Network (FIIN) pool over 50,000 authenticity tests for intelligence purposes²⁸.

There is also concern about the constituent parts of food that is legally allowed. Exposure to ultra-processed food (UPF) is associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, especially cardiometabolic, common mental disorder, and mortality outcomes²⁹. UPFs contain stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin and obscure oils you’ll never find in a supermarket or ordinary kitchen³⁰. The ingredients save corporations money, as they reduce the need for real ingredients in the food.

Chris van Tulleken (doctor and health researcher), argues in his book Ultra Processed People³¹ that the food we eat is making us sick. Using a wide range of research data and interviews, van Tulleken proposes the leading cause of growing levels of obesity is the drastic change in our modern diet that has come with the introduction and proliferation of UPF. UPFs now constitutes more than half our diet in the UK, US, Canada and Australia but the big food companies are trying (successfully) to make it the staple across the globe.

Monoculture crops, favoured by the capitalist system, creates over-reliance on a small number of harvests being viable. Fragile living systems are created that can be destroyed via a single vector, e.g. the corn blight of 1970, which destroyed more than 15% of North America’s corn crops³², or the Panama disease³³, which annihilated the Gros Michel banana cultivar. Extensive monocultures of identical plants can become an ecological wasteland and cause permanent damage to the ecosystem, especially when combined with blanket application of fertilizer and pesticides³⁴.

Research has shown monoculture farming is destroying the planet’s most important pollinators, i.e., bees³⁵. Another serious problem is the application of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, and bactericides. Monoculture compromises soil quality, making ground crops vulnerable against strong winds and rainstorms. It also hinders leaf litter which is essential for topsoil health in terms of soil filtering and enhancement. Reusing the same soil for a single crop increases rain run-off and plant diseases and pathogens. Eventually, rendering the soil degraded and inhospitable for agriculture. In a conventional monoculture setting, the soil moisture is unstable. This pushes the need for enormous amounts of water to irrigate crops, which results in lopsided draining of water sources such as rivers and reservoirs. Ultimately depleting and polluting natural resources and aquatic life. For humans, use of pesticides is detrimental to health³⁶. The number of people affected by pesticide poisoning globally could have risen to an estimated 385 million per year³⁷(~740,000 reported), with 11,000 deaths.

The food business, along with forest loss and poor forest protection, is one of the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitters. It accounts for one-third of all anthropogenic greenhouse emissions³⁸. This has led to the current system of food production now at a tipping point, with climate change greatly affecting large swathes of production and distribution.

Wheat production^39,40 is down in places like Japan, UK and France (to record its smallest wheat harvest in 41 years after near-continuous rain from planting right through until harvest proved detrimental to yields⁴¹). On our current trajectory, the amount of land suitable for coffee cultivation will be halved in 30 years and eliminated in 60^42-44. Higher temperatures affect morbidity and decrease crop yield potential⁴⁵. The environmental temperature niche⁴⁶ that humans can inhabit is dwindling, with climate change already putting ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche⁴⁷. By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22–39%) of people outside the niche.

While food trade system networks can withstand some climate risks to a degree, with international cooperation on adaptation and transitioning to an agri-food system^48,49. It is necessary to implement climate change mitigation, more resilient agroecosystems, and sustainable management of biodiversity and natural resources. In the longer term, ensuring food security requires a renewed emphasis on larger-scale investments in seed development, mitigating and adapting to climate change, reducing losses pre- and post-harvest, and increasing the efficiency and resilience of food systems.

Climate change has had an effect on the hydrological cycle⁵⁰, both blue (in rivers, lakes and aquifiers) and green (in soil and vegetation) water. Agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater withdrawals globally and has also been responsible for about 70% of deforestation in tropical and subtropical regions. Globally, 80-90% of all blue water withdrawals are used for irrigation and 10% of freshwater withdrawals are used for urban purposes. Infrastructure development, urbanisation, and agriculture account for more than 70% of deforestation pressures⁵¹, with agricultural expansion the largest contributor^52,53. These incursions into forested lands and other natural habitats have reduced green water flows and downwind precipitation, lowering agricultural yields and threatening food security, particularly in regions dependent on rainfed agriculture.

A significant portion of the global population (about 2.9 billion people) and 55% of the world’s food production are in areas experiencing drying or unstable trends in total water storage. In some areas, the influence of irrigation on the drying trend is more than twice as strong as the climate effect. An estimated 23% of global cereal production could be lost if irrigation becomes unfeasible where total water storage declines are extreme, with significant ramifications for food prices and food security. Some of the most productive and important agricultural lands are at high risk of crop losses if irrigation cannot be sustained, such as northern India, northeastern China, and around the Mediterranean.

Deforestation, climate change,, and loss of biodiversity are mutually reinforcing drivers of shifts in the stability of freshwater runoff flows and vapour fluxes, which in turn determine future rainfall. Freshwater provides for the stability of environmental systems on land and thereby the global economy. Without freshwater, there can be no photosynthesis, no biomass (food or fibre) production, no biodiversity, and no land-based carbon sequestration. Worldwide, more than 1,000 children under 5 die every day from illnesses caused by unsafe water and sanitation. The Stern review⁵⁴ on the economics of climate change found that, without action, GDP in the UK would decline around 5% each year forever, based on market impacts, and by 11% when including the value of health impacts⁵⁵.

While some technological and policy improvements could be implemented – e.g. currently, about 40% of urban water supply globally is lost through pipeline leaks, costing USD 39 billion annually and generating significant CO₂ emissions – it shows that governmental policy changes are the main drivers responsible for any improvement in material conditions when under the auspices of capital. Without it, the market destroys the things it needs to reproduce – the environment and labour, with alarming regularity. Transforming food systems is necessary as food demand is projected to rise 60% between by 2050, driven by growth in the world population, urbanisation, and incomes⁵⁶. Food systems are under threat from climate change; the depletion of groundwater, surface water, and green water; water pollution; and inequitable distribution systems.

The capitalist system is always trying to capture the economic output of producers through various methods⁵⁷. It has always had to struggle with a powerful expression of the autonomy of nature: the ability of plants to reproduce. This radically undermines the dependence of farmers upon seed companies. Jack Kloppenburg⁵⁸ notes in his study of the political economy of the seed,

‘Capital has pursued two distinct but intersecting routes’

to overcome this barrier. One option is to impose the commodity form on seeds by means of legislation. By obtaining patent rights on seeds and installing DNA fingerprints in them, agrobusinesses can legally prevent farmers from exploiting the ability of seeds to reproduce, despite it being technically possible. Another option—one which has been pursued by capital with great success—is to genetically modify seeds in order to make their reproduction impossible. This was first achieved with the development of hybrid plants in the 1930s. As long as plants can reproduce, capital has to rely on patent rights, and thereby the coercive power of the state. The case of hybrid seeds, GMOs and terminator technology demonstrates how the economic power of capital can replace the violence of the state by means of technology. Here we see one dimension of what it means to say that mute compulsion is a form of power which operates by means of the restructuring of the material conditions of social reproduction; capitalist biotechnology inscribes the logic of valorisation into the biophysical structure of plants. It thereby becomes unnecessary for agro-businesses to inspect fields and (threaten to) sue farmers; instead, they simply relegate their power to the seeds.

The Green Revolution⁵⁹ thus resulted in a considerably tighter integration of peasants of the global south into the world market and there fore also a considerable increase in the reach of the economic power of capital. This ‘revolution’ exported the industrial agricultural model based on high-yield crops, hybrid seeds, irrigation, synthetic fertiliser, pesticides and machinery to countries in Latin America, Asia and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Around the same time, the revolution in logistics contributed greatly to securing the conditions for global competition in agriculture. ‘Food is logistical now, too’, Jasper Bernes⁶⁰ notes:

‘Under the coordinative power of the supermarket system, food travels farther than before. But even where source and destination are proximate, the logistics of agricultural inputs—from seeds, to fertilizers,to machinery—are themselves complex and likewise dependent upon long supply chains for their production’.

As a result, more than 80 percent of the volume and more than 70 percent of the value of global trade is transported by ship⁶¹.

The globalisation of industrial agriculture was institutionalised with the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995 and the effectuation of the Agreement on Agriculture, the aim of which is, in the words of Weis⁶²,

‘to entrench and extend the rights of transnational capital’ .

Mobility is power, and means of transportation and communication are weapons. Relative immobility of labour-power is often advantageous for capital, since it is generally easier to keep wages low if the unemployed are unable to migrate. If production is spatially fixed, however, a highly mobile labour force will often be beneficial for capital, especially if demand for labour varies with the seasons. For certain forms of agricultural production (e.g. fruit production), the ideal labour force is thus a free-floating surplus population of migrants. When capital seizes hold of agriculture and subjects it to real subsumption, it significantly tightens its grip on social reproduction.

The current state of agriculture is untenable— driven by capital and full of unsustainable inputs, which destroy our ecosystems. Various groups⁶³ advocate taking historical context to help explain why and how movements grew, failed, or succeeded, to look at how our food systems operate and envision how they could develop into the future. For the homo hubris^64-66 species to continue to survive and thrive past the next century, the logic and power of capital will have to be usurped.