Akram-Lodhi & Kay Surveying Agrarian Question

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Surveying the agrarian question (part 2): current debates and beyond
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi; Cristbal Kay
Online publication date: 21 April 2010
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The Journal of Peasant Studies
Vol. 37, No. 2, April 2010, 255284
Surveying the agrarian question (part 2): current debates and beyond
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay
This two-part article surveys the origin, development and current meaning of the
agrarian question. Part One of the survey explored the history of the agrarian
question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin,
and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others.
Part Two of the survey identifies seven current variants of the agrarian question
and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so,
how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production
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within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of

neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the
agrarian question continues to oer a rigorously flexible framework by which to
undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material
conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian
accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that is located within the law of value
and market imperatives that operate on a world scale.
Keywords: agrarian question; agrarian change; rural development; rural
transformation; peasant studies; globalisation
The problematics of the agrarian question

During the twentieth century new layers of meaning were grafted onto the classical
exposition of the agrarian question that was developed in the nineteenth century by
Marx, Kautsky, and Lenin, and examined in the first part of this survey (Akram-
Lodhi and Kay 2010). These layers were drawn clearly by Byres (1991a); but it was
Henry Bernsteins (1996/97) review of Byres Capitalism From Above and Capitalism
From Below (1996) that oered both the most clear and the most critical elaboration
of how the classical agrarian question had come to be understood, by Byres and
others, at the end of the millennia. Bernstein did this by showing that Byres
understanding of the agrarian question could be analytically deconstructed into
three problematics.
The first problematic Bernstein called accumulation. Derived from an under-
standing of agrarian change rooted in the work of Preobrazhensky (1965, orig. 1926)
and the concept of primitive socialist accumulation discussed in the first part of this
survey, this problematic is based upon an argument first identified in classical
political economy: that agriculture has the potential capacity to produce food and
non-food output and financial resources above its reproductive requirements, and
that this agricultural surplus could be used to support the substantial resource costs
of industrialisation, structural transformation, accumulation, and the emergence of
capital, both within agriculture and beyond. This problematic therefore seeks to
understand the extent to which agriculture can supply a surplus and meet these
resource costs, the ways by which such a surplus can be appropriated to fund
ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

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DOI: 10.1080/03066151003594906
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256 A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay
industrialisation and accumulation, and the ease or diculty with which such an
appropriation may occur (Byres 1991a). The accumulation problematic has, under a
variety of guises, underpinned a large and significant body of rural research for more
than eight decades at both a macro political economy and a micro political economy
level, using analytical approaches and methods derived from both historical
materialism and other, more orthodox branches of social theory.
The second problematic, which Bernstein called production, has its origins more
centrally in the classic work of Kautsky (1988, orig. 1899) and Lenin (1964, orig.
1899) and, to a lesser extent, Marx (1976, orig. 1867). This problematic explores the
extent to which capitalism has developed in the countryside, the forms that it takes
and the barriers which may impede it (Byres 1991a, 10). A central moment in the
development of rural capitalism is, as was stressed in the first part of this survey, the
emergence of generalised rural wage labour and, as a corollary, the emergence of
agrarian capital as a consequence of the dispossession of pre-capitalist predatory
landed property and the peasantry (Bernstein 2006, 451). Thus, this problematic
explores the micro political economy issues aecting the structural transformation of
petty commodity producing peasant labour into its commodified form, labour-
power, through both the restructuring of rural labour processes, shifts in the
technical coecients of production, and processes of peasant class dierentiation,
processes that were highlighted by Kautsky and Lenin in the classical exposition.1
Like the accumulation problematic, the production problematic has also under-
pinned an extensive body of rural research over more than eight decades, a large
proportion of which does not use analytical frameworks derived from historical
materialism.
The third problematic Bernstein called politics, and is drawn directly from the
theorisation of Engels (1950, orig. 1894). In countries which have or which have had
large peasant populations, political formations and forces seeking social justice and
human emancipation have had to explicitly seek to create and sustain alliances with
strata within the peasant population when such political formations and forces have
been successful in facilitating social, political and economic change. This
problematic we would render in more specific terms: that, following the debate on
the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Sweezy et al. 1976, Aston and Philpin
1985) and Byres (2006) critique of Brenner (1977, 1986), the balance of class forces
and class struggle should be placed at the heart of the rural politics problematic. This
should be done in order to make clear the dynamic tensions that exist between
prevailing structures of domination, subordination and surplus appropriation and
the capacity of individuals and social classes to express agency in order to transform
and transcend these structures. So the politics problematic examines the impact of
the balance of class forces on political forms and processes and their subsequent
impact on the evolution of agrarian change and structural transformation. The
politics problematic is significant because the factors conditioning or constraining
the agrarian change explicit in both the accumulation and production problematics
can shape and be shaped by rural struggle. As with the accumulation and production
problematics, the politics problematic has underpinned an important body of rural
research.
By the mid-1990s it was clear in historical materialist agrarian political economy
that the problematics of the agrarian question could be usefully combined in a
1
The analytical complexities of the term peasant were discussed in Part One of this survey.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 257
rigorous but flexible analytical framework to explore the processes that contribute to
or constrain the emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism. Within these
problematics, the key dynamic process in the emergence of agrarian capital and
agrarian capitalism was the transformation or non-transformation, or indeed even
partial transformation of petty commodity producing peasants into wage labour,
and hence labour-power, through complex forces of dispossession. This process is
central because, as was noted in the first part of this survey, in order for peasants to
be so transformed they must be, in some way, divorced from the land that they work,
which in turn compels them to fundamentally reconfigure their livelihoods. Once
they are no longer able to produce a sucient fraction of their consumption needs,
they must start to sell their labour and buy the food, clothing and shelter that they
previously provided, at least in part, themselves. Thus, wage labour gets sold to
urban employers, rural capitalist farmers and non-farm enterprises, and to petty
commodity producers that are being transformed into emerging agrarian (proto-)
capitalists. Like other forms of capitalist enterprise, transforming petty commodity
producers are constrained by the coercive discipline of the need to sell in the market
in order to realise profit, and so must seek to continually enhance their eciency and
their profitability under the market imperative (Wood 2009).
In other words, the commodification of labour underpins deeper processes of
commodification across the rural economy as a whole and the concomitant
transformation in the purpose of farm production from production for use and
household reproduction to production for exchange and accumulation. The
agrarian question is hence about the process by which this does or does not occur,
and the implication of this process for accumulation and the social changes
associated with the emergence of capital. It is, in this sense, and as Bernstein (2004,
2006) has framed it, an agrarian question of capital, in that these changes are
necessary for, initially, the emergence of agrarian capital, and later, the expanded
reproduction of capital, which is, in turn, predicated upon the appropriation, in a
fully developed capitalist economy, of surplus value through relations of
exploitation.
One final aspect of Bernsteins understanding of the work of Byres is important
to stress, and this is the way in which Byres reconfigures the three problematics of the
agrarian question by arguing that in order for agriculture to no longer pose any
obstacles to the capitalist transformation of an economy the agrarian question must
be resolved through some form of successful agrarian transition. So, in Byres
account, in order to understand the pattern of capitalist development in a social
formation it is necessary to closely examine how accumulation, production and
politics contribute to or constrain agrarian transition.
The concept of agrarian transition allows an understanding of what were noted
in part one of this survey as historical puzzles (Byres 1996, 15): how capitalism can
become dominant in a society without capitalist social relations of production
becoming fully developed in agriculture. While these historical puzzles are
consistent with the analysis of the agrarian question developed by Marx, Kautsky,
and Lenin, adequate attention to them has often been neglected in the analysis of the
development of capitalism in agriculture. For Byres, this indicated the analytically
impoverishing way in which the agrarian question in contemporary poor countries is
handled within the political economy tradition (Byres 1996, 3), in part because the
full range of historical instances of successful transition is not referred to (Byres
1996, 4), and in part because the understanding of successful transitions is too
stereotyped and too narrow (Byres 1996, 34). Byres fascination with these
historical puzzles led him to start to undertake a broad comparative study of the
historical experience of capitalist agrarian transition (1996, 34) in England,
Prussia, the United States, France, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, a preliminary
sketch of which was published almost two decades ago in the form of an important
and influential essay (Byres 1991b).2 Bernstein (1994) has produced an extremely
useful summary table of the key characteristics of Byres paths of agrarian transition,
which is reproduced in Table 1 with additional material from Byres (2003) and
Bernstein (2010) incorporated by us.
To this work Byres has, more recently, added additional examples to his range of
broad comparative experiences (Byres 2003). An important conclusion Byres draws
from this comparative analysis is that many context-specific paths of agrarian
transition have been attempted (Byres 1991b, Bernstein 1994) within the context of
both capitalist and post-capitalist modes of production, and that agrarian transitions
can operate both within the dominant paths identified or within their interstices. A
critical variable in understanding a specific path of agrarian transition is, as

emphasised by Brenner (1986) and Byres (2009), class struggle, both between
dominant and subordinate classes and within subordinate classes undergoing
processes of socio-economic dierentiation, and the role of the state in shaping or
succumbing to class struggle.
The contemporary debate: globalisation and Bernsteins challenge

Many authors have made directly important contributions to the analysis and debate
on the agrarian question over the last four decades.3 There have also been, more
broadly, extensive debates within development studies that have significant
implications for our understanding of the agrarian question and agrarian transition.
Three we would identify in particular: dependency theory4; the mode of production
debate;5 and the impact of the work of Bill Warren (1980) and the intense debates
2
In an even earlier, albeit more limited, attempt Byres (1977) already tackled the agrarian
question in a comparative and contemporary context. For a comparative analysis of the
transition to agrarian capitalism between Europe and Latin America, see Kay (1974), and
between South Korea, Taiwan and Latin America, see Kay (2002).
3
In addition to those already mentioned in part one of this survey (Akram-Lodhi and Kay
2010), see Harris (1978), Harriss (1980), de Janvry (1981), Murray and Post (1983), Cox and
Littlejohn (1984), Pearce (1985), Saith (1985), Mamdani (1987), Levin and Neocosmos (1989),
Watts (1989, 2002), Brass (1990), van der Ploeg (1993), Roseberry (1993), Drew (1996),
McLaughlin (1998) and OLaughlin (2009), amongst others.
4
Important contributions to dependency theory with implications for the agrarian question
and agrarian transition include Frank (1967), Emmanuel (1969), Sunkel (1969), Dos Santos
(1973), Furtado (1973), Amin (1974) Thomas (1974), Palma (1978), Cardoso and Faletto
(1979), Kay (1989), Larran (1989), Weeks (1991), and Saul and Leys (2006).
5
The mode of production debate is very much rooted in the concerns of the agrarian question,
and can be considered an attempt to apply the analytical framework of the agrarian question
to specific circumstances. The mode of production debate can be broadly portioned in two: the
contributions of French anthropologists working in an Althusserian tradition, such as Rey
(1971, 1973, 1975) and Meillassoux (1980), amongst others; and the debate over the
development of capitalism in rural India, including Patnaik (1971, 1972), Chattopadhyay
(1972a, 1972b), Thorner (1982) and a host of others. Important general contributions to the
mode of production debate include Banaji (1972, 1977), Laclau (1977) and Taylor (1979).
Table 1. Paths of capitalist agrarian transition.

Investment in Character of
Case Peasants Landlords Form of production farming Intersectoral links transition
1. The English path From serfs to tenants From feudal lords to Trinity of landowners Rents held in check, 1846 repeal of Corn Agrarian transition
(15C.19C.) (14C.15C.). private landowners tenant (capitalist) allowing for Laws marks from below:
Gradual (enclosures [16C. farmers wage investment. To dominance of classic model of
dierentiation of 19C.]) workers (16C. some extent industrial capital transition to
the peasantry 19C.) improving (cheap food) capitalist farming
landlords. that develops
Agricultural productive forces
revolution of 18C. and facilitates
develops the capitalist
productive forces industrialisation;
special features
include an
accommodating
vs. obstructive
landowner class
2. The Prussian path Enserfment of a free Called Junkers: Junker transition Limited development Restricted home Agrarian transition
(16C.19C.) peasantry 16C. (commercial) to estate economy of the productive market constrains from above:
Abolition of manorial Gutswirtschaft with forces industrialisation Internal
serfdom 1807 production mostly tied labour metamorphosis of
Grundherrschaft (former serfs). feudalist landlord
From 1870s economy,
increasingly capitalism from
(migrant) wage above (Lenin).
labour Contrast south and
west of Germany:
no junkers,
dierentiation of
peasantry,
emergence of
capitalist farming
(continued)
259
260
Table 1. (Continued).
3. The American path No feudalism. In the South, slave In the North and Extensive cultivation Capitalist Agrarian transition
(second half of Absence of tenancy owners become West, rise and of vast land industrialisation in from below in the
19C.) in North and West, landlords consolidation of frontier. South constrained North and West:
but sharecropping family farming Mechanisation by character of petty commodity
in the South after from 1860s, from 1870s capitalist farming. production from
the abolition of especially with develops the State support of (a) below gives rise to
slavery settlement of productive forces colonisation of powerful
internal land prairies (19C.); (b) development of
frontier west of commercial family productive forces
Mississippi. In the farming and capitalist
South, landlords (subsidies), 1920s industrialisation.
become capitalist Agrarian
farmers. Relative transition from
absence (and high above in South, but
costs) of wage with stifled
labour capitalist
industrialisation
4. The French path From serfs to tenants From feudal property Post 1789: family Limited development Protracted transition Agrarian transition
(15C.20C.) (by 15C.) Strong to purely rentier farming (including of the productive after 1789, marked from below:
resistance by landlords (vs. tenanted and forces until 20C. by tenacity of small dierentiated
village community England, Prussia) share-cropping) in peasantry and its peasantry fail to
to enclosures. Very central and political weight metamorphose
limited southern France. into capitalist
dierentiation 1840s on: agriculture, stifling
development of capitalist
capitalist farming industrialisation
in northern France
(continued)
5. The Japanese path Tenancy central Mostly resident in Landlordtenant Extreme labour Heavy state taxation Agrarian transition
(second half of (increased 1860s countryside (vs. family farming. intensity. Very of peasantry. from above:
19C.20C.) 1945) France) (To post-1945 land heavy rents in kind Problem of cheap primitive
reform: owner (rice). Strong food supply and accumulation
cultivators) interest of colonial policies borne by peasantry
landlords in (see below) (semi-
improvement feudalism?). Key
role of state in (a)
securing
conditions of high
rent landlordism;
(b) taxing
peasantry; (c)
controlling
peasantry
6. The Taiwanese/ Tenancy central (as Japanese as well as Landlordtenant Extreme labour Cheap food for No agrarian
South Korean path Japan) indigenous family farming intensity. Heavy Japanese transition: colonial
(a) Japanese (colonial system) rents and taxes on industrialisation (and semi-
colonial period peasantry. feudal?)
(first half of 20C.) Improvement by exploitation of
landlords/state peasantry without
capitalist
agriculture or
capitalist
industrialisation
(continued)
261
262
7. The Taiwanese/ Land reforms Landlords eliminated Owner-cultivation of Extreme labour Substantial net Agrarian transition
South Korean path very small farms intensity capital transfers from below,
(b) 1950s, 1960s that use family through heavy imposed from
labour taxation, especially above: state
intersectoral terms substitutes for
of trade landlords:
primitive
accumulation for
industrialisation
with self-
exploitative
peasantry and
super exploitative
state
Source: Bernstein (1994) with additional material from Byres (2003) and Bernstein (2010).
that surrounded it.6 But the historical puzzles identified by Byres, which in
themselves are in part an outcome of an engagement with dependency theory, the
mode of production debate, and the work of Bill Warren, and the lack of a clearly
singular and unique explanatory variable that resolves the agrarian question and
facilitates a process of agrarian transition have led to a broad re-examination of the
characteristics of the agrarian question and agrarian transition since the mid 1990s,
as an outgrowth of the changed world-historical context.
During the heyday of agrarian reform, and particularly during the 1950s and
1960s, an explicit objective of state policy was, in line with the prevailing
Keynesianism of the period and in response to pressure from peasant movements,
to use state intervention as a means of boosting domestic demand through an
expansion of the home market. Increased domestic demand was expected, through
its impact on growth, to be a principal transmission mechanism by which rural
accumulation would proceed, and hence, in the explicitly articulated rhetoric of
governments, poverty reduction would be achieved and income distribution
improved.7
The emphasis on the expansion of the home market that prevailed during the
mid-twentieth century was, during the last 30 years, largely, but not completely,
replaced by an emphasis on the promotion of an agricultural export-led strategy as
the principal means of enhancing rural accumulation. Thus, in a range of diverse
countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America eorts have been made to deepen
agricultural integration into global economic flows and agro-food commodity
chains. The policy conditionalities of the international development institutions did
this as a means of boosting access to foreign exchange, facilitating debt repayments,
increasing funds for investment, promoting technological change and boosting rural
productivity and profits. In other words, increasing and intensifying integration into
the global economy globalization has been argued by neoliberals to be the most
eective means of enhancing rates of accumulation, in the rural economy and more
generally. This is most starkly witnessed in the rural development policies flowing
from the analysis contained in the World Banks (2007) important World
Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (Akram-Lodhi 2008, 2009,
Oya 2009, Veltmeyer 2009).
So globalisation has transformed the development of the forces and relations of
production on a world scale; and, for many, this must have implications for the
agrarian question and agrarian transition. In seeking to understand the impact of
neoliberal globalisation on agrarian transformation, a number of often divergent
and at times diametrically opposed understandings of the contemporary character of
the agrarian question can be identified. Notably, Henry Bernstein has asked whether
agriculture continues to have, in developing capitalist countries, the capacity to
facilitate or constrain structural transformation and the emergence of capital
(Bernstein 1996/97, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009). Indeed, this can thus be reformulated: in
6
A good summary of Warren is found in Leys (1996). Important contributors in this tradition
include Hyden (1980), Gulap (1986), Sender and Smith (1986, 1990), Berman and Leys (1993),
Sender and Pincus (2006) and Kiely (2009).
7
The reality was dierent. Undervalued agricultural products subsidised the growth of an
urban proletariat and undermined agriculture, while this period was also marked by the rise of
cheap food imports in many developing countries, which further undermined domestic
agriculture.
the early part of the twenty-first century, under a regime of neoliberal globalisation,
is agrarian transition possible, or indeed, even relevant?
In making this claim, Bernstein focuses upon two key issues that he believes need
to be confronted. The first is that the development of the forces of production on a
global scale has, in the past 50 years, meant that, globally, agriculture has eectively
become decoupled from the process of capital accumulation. This proposition is
supported by the extent to which agricultural production is located on the periphery
of global capital accumulation, which is of course driven by manufacturing and
services, and particularly financial services, on a world scale. In this sense, then, the
agrarian question of transnational capital has been resolved: transnational capital
does not require access to surplus agricultural resources in order to facilitate
accumulation,8 and there are also, at the same time, non-rural and indeed non-
national sources of capital that can be used to sustain national capital accumulation.
It is therefore, according to Bernstein, no longer necessary that capital reorganise
agricultural production, a corollary of which is that agrarian transition is no longer a
necessary precondition of the development of capitalism. Rather, transnational

capital requires the technical capacity to ever more eciently allocate resources on a
global scale so as to enhance the surplus value generated within production as well as
the ability to develop and control markets so as to realize that surplus value which is
created (Araghi 2009).
The second key issue identified by Bernstein is implicitly embedded within the
first. The internationalisation of capital has decoupled transnational capital from
national labour regimes, which are becoming ever more fragmented even as they
become less capable of providing a livelihood. Thus, it is not only the case that
agriculture does not really matter for the global accumulation of surplus value; it is
also the case that national labour regimes that do not enhance the surplus value
generated within production can also be by-passed by transnational capital,
segmenting labour on a global scale, enlarging the global reserve army of labour
and fostering a crisis of reproduction amongst fragmented classes of labour. In
fragmenting classes of labour neoliberal globalisation has sustained an agrarian
question of labour while rendering the agrarian question of capital redundant.
Seven agrarian questions?

Not surprisingly, Bernsteins sustained criticism over more than a decade has
generated a wide-ranging debate that continues to reverberate within agrarian
political economy. It has become, as a consequence, possible to identify seven
dierent and at times competing approaches to framing the contemporary agrarian
question and its salience for rural development: seven agrarian questions, if you like.
These seven agrarian questions are summarised in Table 2, and explored in detail in
this section. These variations on the agrarian question have their origins in the classic
debates at the turn of the nineteenth century, mid-century iterations, and current
developments within agrarian political economy that reflect the combined and
uneven eects of neoliberal globalisation. Each approach constitutes, in many ways,
8
While Clapp (2009) and Ghosh (2010) stress that the entanglement of finance capital with
agriculture has dramatically increased, this is not about facilitating the accumulation of
surplus value but rather about reallocating existing stocks of surplus value.
Table 2. Contemporary agrarian questions (AQ).
Rural production Rural accumulation Rural politics

AQ1: class forces Asset dierentiation restructures rural Dependent upon the emergence of the Class struggle shapes and is shaped by
labour-processes and facilitates the capital-labour relation the character of production and the
emergence of agrarian capital, but is traits of accumulation
highly contingent
AQ2: path-dependent Capitalism in agriculture is developing Will occur as agrarian capital emerges Class struggle is over the terms and
the forces of production, albeit conditions of wage labour as
unevenly, as labour capitalism develops
commodification proceeds
AQ3: decoupled The emergence of agrarian capital is no Rural accumulation is not relevant to Class struggle is over the terms and
longer relevant global capitalism conditions of livelihoods facing
fragmenting classes of rural labour
AQ4: global reserve Increasingly subordinated to the law of An outcome of dispossession and/or Focuses on the terms and conditions
army value operating on a world-scale displacement as rural populations by which agrarian labour
through the enclosure food regime are marginalised and/or expelled reproduces as the value of its labour-
from agriculture power is depressed and the global
reserve army of labour increases
AQ5: corporate Must be located within the dynamics of The corporate food regime is Politicise economic processes to
food regime the global food regime: predicated upon an accumulation incorporate global peasant
financialisation, neoliberalism and fetish resistance that situates the class
supermarketisation produce a struggles of the dispossessed in the
commodity fetish terms and conditions of access to
and control over food
AQ6: gender Shapes and is shaped by gender Shapes and is shaped by gender Shapes and is shaped by gender
relations relations relations
AQ7: ecology Shapes and is shaped by the Shapes and is shaped by the Shapes and is shaped by the
biophysical ecology biophysical ecology biophysical ecology
265
a unique analytical framework by which to examine agrarian change and rural

transformation.
The first perspective, which we label AQ1 and term the class forces agrarian
question, holds that transformations in agrarian production systems and the forces
of production are shaped by and shape relations between class forces. This
perspective is exemplified by the work of Byres (1991a, 1991b, 2003). The class forces
perspective argues that imperialism did, in some respects and instances, introduce
capitalist relations of production and dynamic processes of labour commodification
in the rural economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, through the use of
coercion, as labour regimes were reconfigured. However, those that oer an analysis
rooted in AQ1 emphasize that this introduction was by no means universal. In other
parts of the world, as part of a set of mechanisms to reinforce processes of capital
accumulation in Europe, imperialism reinforced pre-existing pre-capitalist class
relations in an eort to sustain surplus appropriation by dominant class forces from
subordinate classes, particularly petty commodity producing peasants. In other parts
of the world, again, as part of a set of mechanisms to reinforce accumulation in

Europe, imperialism partially transformed pre-existing relations of production,
grafting, in time-, space- and place-specific ways, aspects of capitalist relations of
production with aspects of pre-capitalist relations of production, again as part of an
eort to sustain surplus appropriation.
So AQ1 would suggest that it was rare for an unambiguous process of labour
commodification to emerge. Rather, AQ1 argues that the articulation of forces and
relations of production can take place in complex and multifaceted ways: rural
politics shapes reconfigurations in rural production and as a consequence the impact
of production upon rural accumulation. This suggests that agrarian transition will be
highly contingent, subject to substantive diversity, and is embedded within historical
trajectories of variation that reflect processes of dierential and uneven incorpora-
tion into the capitalist mode of production operating both within capitalist social
formations and on a global scale.
As a consequence, it is necessary to understand the diverse and uneven ways in
which rural production processes and agrarian accumulation are or are not being
transformed by the capitalist mode of production, and the way in which relations
between and within class forces impact upon such transformation. Critical analytical
variables in this understanding include the nature, extent and progress of social
dierentiation found within the peasantry, the nature of the landlord class and other
dominant class forces, including capital, the severity to which the law of value and
the market imperative applies and shapes the actions of class forces and the process
of rural change, and the role and character of the state. These processes must also be
globally contextualised, accommodating reconfigurations in the spatial and social
relations of the world food system. Cumulatively, AQ1 suggests that the possibility
of the emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism, through some kind of
agrarian transition, results ultimately from the balance of class forces, including the
impact of peasant class dierentiation (Brenner 1986, Byres 2006).
The second position, which we label AQ2 and term the path-dependent agrarian
question, is based on the influential work of Bill Warren (1980). Warren argued that
imperialism, by introducing capitalist relations of production throughout the world,
albeit unevenly and dierentially across both time and space, unleashed an
inexorable, if contingent, dynamic process of labour commodification that is
ongoing everywhere across developing capitalist countries. This transformation in
the character of rural production reconfigured the process of accumulation, with

implications for rural politics focused upon struggles around the labour-process. So
the creation of labour-power is the central dynamic process in the development of
agrarian capital and rural capitalism, a source of socioeconomic and spatial
dierentiation, and a propellant of capitalist industrialisation. Thus, the ongoing
expansion of waged labour signals that the capitalist mode of production is
deepening its ongoing diusion into the rural worlds of developing capitalist
countries, transforming the agrarian production system by massively developing the
forces of production, and establishing, in a relentless and inescapable yet contingent
and dierentiated process, capitalist agriculture. In a very real sense, then, the
emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism is, as our term for this perspective
makes clear, path-dependent and hence inevitable.
The third position, which we label AQ3 and call the decoupled agrarian question
of labour, is that of Henry Bernstein who, as we have just noted, doubts whether the
agrarian question continues to be of relevance for capital, which, in his view,
resolved it in the 1970s. The agrarian question that remains is that of labour, which is
struggling to construct a livelihood in the face of the development of the productive
forces of capital. In this view the globalisation of capital has meant that the
emergence of agrarian capital within a state is now largely irrelevant except in how it
shapes political struggles by subordinate classes of labour over resources, production
and accumulation. Bernstein thus prioritises the rural politics problematic over the
rural production and accumulation problematics.
The fourth position, which we label AQ4 and term the global reserve army of
labour agrarian question, is based on the analysis of Farshad Araghi (2009), who
situates the agrarian question within the dynamics of the world-historical system of
globalised capitalism. Araghi argues that current processes of neoliberal globalisa-
tion are a direct continuation of the liberal imperialism witnessed during the
nineteenth century. So the period between 1834 and 1870 and that from 1973 to the
present have more in common than is usually assumed: economic liberalism,
antiwelfarism, free market fetishism, and designs for constructing a global division
of labour using workshops of the world. For Araghi it is the period between 1917
and 1973 that was, in world-historical terms, exceptional.
In seeing continuity in the transformation of rural production and accumulation
over a long historical period Araghi argues that modern forms of neoliberal
globalisation have constructed an enclosure food regime that produces, transfers and
distributes value on a world-scale and in so doing has an impact on the value of labour-
power and the production of surplus value on a world-scale. The enclosure food
regime has established the subsidised consumption and overconsumption of classes in
the global North. Simultaneously, it has created a massive reserve army of migratory
labour as the law of value is reconstructed on a global scale, leading, through the
market imperative, to processes of dispossession by displacement in agriculture
(Araghi 2000). Such ongoing processes of enclosure have clear implications for rural
politics and are deepening and broadening the creation of a planet of slums (Davis
2006) predicated on the inability of surplus migratory labour to reproduce itself. So the
enclosure food regime has the eect of both lowering the value of labour-power and,
what is but the other side of the same coin, raising the rate of relative surplus value for
capital. For Araghi, then, the agrarian question is now about the terms and conditions
by which agrarian labour and indeed labour more generally is reproduced under
ever more demanding circumstances as the value of its labour-power is reduced under
the enclosure food regime: it is a conclusion that is shared with AQ3, but as a result of
a dierent theoretical apparatus.
The fifth agrarian question we identify is the corporate food regime agrarian
question, or AQ5, which is associated with Philip McMichael (2009). Like Araghi,
McMichael argues that the contemporary agrarian question needs to be defined
within and through the world-historical conjuncture. Unlike Araghi, McMichael
stresses the specificity of the world-historical moment: financialisation, neoliberal-
ism, and the creation of a global food regime that fosters a commodity and
accumulation fetish in agriculture. According to McMichael, focusing on capital as
both a relation of production and, embedded within that, a relation of circulation
allows the economic to be politicised. But the politicisation of the economic must
also analytically incorporate global peasant resistance (Borras 2008), which has
developed a praxis premised on a critique of the conditions of the global movement
of capital at this historical conjuncture, focusing upon the global politics of food in
an eort to transform as well as transcend capitals relations of subjection and its
developmentalist teleology.
In this emphasis on the complex articulation of rural politics, production and
accumulation, McMichael argues that the contemporary global agrarian crisis can
be reframed as an agrarian question of food: the corporate food regime subordinates
public good for private profit through free markets that exclude agrarian
populations that are increasingly dispossessed. Addressing the social and political
exclusion produced by the agrarian question of food opens up the possibility of a
transformation of rural production predicated upon the social and ecological justice
that is central to the food sovereignty movement and the consequent class struggles
that shape the contemporary character of accumulation under the corporate food
regime (McMichael 2006a, 2006b).
So, for McMichael the agrarian question is now about the terms and conditions
by which peasant households and rural labour are reproduced when increasingly
excluded from the corporate food regime. Again, in its focus on the simple
reproduction squeeze facing agrarian labour, it is a conclusion that McMichael, like
Araghi, shares with Bernsteins AQ3, but as a result of some quite distinct premises.
Tangential to these variations on the content and meaning of the contemporary
agrarian question we can identify two missing links that should be there but which
are largely absent from the debate. The first of these missing links is the gendered
agrarian question, which we shall refer to as AQ6. As Bridget OLaughlin (2009) has
cogently argued, production, accumulation and politics have gender dynamics. For
instance, gender is a relation of production and reproduction that encompasses both
cooperation and contradiction and which directly impacts upon the processes of
production and class formation; non-commodified labour contributes to accumula-
tion; and gender relations, which unequally distribute reproductive work, shape and
are shaped by the balance of class forces and the operation of the formal and
informal social and political institutions that result from the balance of class forces.
So, a failure to address the gender dimensions of production, accumulation and
politics renders any understanding of the agrarian question, at best, as highly partial
and, at worst, as wrong. The agrarian question must interrogate the character of
gender relations and the ways in which they impinge upon and refract through the
resolution or otherwise of the agrarian question, and in so doing address
contradictions of class and gender if it is going to oer an account of social change
in contemporary rural settings.
The second of these missing links is the ecological agrarian question, which we
shall refer to as AQ7. Notable amongst those that could be said to adopt this
position would be Piers Blaike (1985), Tony Weis (2007), Michael Watts (2009), as
well as John Bellamy Foster (2009). The ecological agrarian question is predicated
on the proposition that the rural production process, agrarian accumulation and
rural politics have ecological dynamics: the biophysical agroecological setting by
definition must directly impact upon the process of production and hence processes
of class formation, whether it be in the assets that are available to rural producers,
the adoption of techniques and technologies that are or are not suitable to the
agroecology, and in the food and non-food products that are eventually produced
using biophysical resources. In so doing, agroecological resources, whether
monetarily costed or non-costed, can contribute to or constrain the process of
accumulation. Furthermore, the balance of class forces and the operation of the
formal and informal rural social and political institutions that result from this
balance shape and are shaped by a set of agroecological relations embedded within a
biophysical context through which individual and collective agency are refracted. So,
a failure to address the ecological dimensions of production, accumulation and
politics renders any understanding of the agrarian question, at best, quite limited,
particularly in light of the agroecological degradation caused by contemporary
corporate agricultural practices. The agrarian question must critically investigate the
character of ecological relationships and the ways in which they impinge upon and
alter the resolution or otherwise of the agrarian question, and in so doing address
contradictions of class and ecology if it is going to explain social change in
contemporary rural settings.
During this decade the agrarian question has generated a level of intense debate
within political economy that belies its age. But now the level of sophistication in its
analysis of rural transformation and the complex diversity through which
contemporary farming in developing capitalist countries has encountered the
neoliberal phase of globalisation has resulted in not one agrarian question with
three problematics but seven dierent agrarian questions. So it is important to
identify what the seven positions have in common: the use, as the critical analytical
variable, of the balance of forces, locally, nationally, and internationally, between
capital and labour, which are conjuncturally and contextually specific.
Here then is the heart and soul of the debate about the contemporary relevance
of the agrarian question: conflicting assessments of the balance of forces in an age of
neoliberal globalisation. AQ1 sees struggles between dierentiating peasantries and
the emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism as highly contingent and
context-specific. AQ2 sees struggles over the terms and conditions of access to wage
labour as an outcome of the central dynamic force in rural change, the establishment
of rural capitalism, as well as being a source of socioeconomic and spatial
dierentiation. AQ3 adopts a capital-theoretic perspective to argue that the struggle
over rural livelihoods is the central thrust of a politically-charged agrarian question
of labour, which is increasingly divorced from capital. AQ4 sees struggles between a
globalising capitalism and peasants dispossessed through enclosure and dierentia-
tion as part of the world-historical establishment of the law of value and a
consequent eort to reduce the value of labour-power in order to increase the rate of
relative surplus value for capital. AQ5 also uses a world-historical perspective to
identify an agrarian question of food, as the struggle over rural livelihoods becomes
the central thrust of a politically-charged agrarian question between globalising
capital and globalising labour. AQ6 is critical of the conception of struggle and
agrarian change in other formulations of the agrarian question, stressing that these
need to be gendered. Similarly, AQ7 suggests that the political ecology of struggle
and agrarian change shapes and is shaped by biophysical contradictions in
capitalism that are integral to any understanding of the agrarian question.
There are clearly possible complementarities between analyses of the con-
temporary balance of forces witnessed in each of these approaches: certainly, for
example, AQ6 and AQ7 may or may not be consistent with the other five approaches
to the agrarian question. However, more tellingly, there are also clear dierences in
the assessment of the balance of forces within all of these perspectives, dierences
that might threaten to create an impasse in agrarian political economy if, rather than
the process of agrarian change, the dierences themselves became the sterile purpose
of debate.
The agrarian question in the twenty-first century

As the agrarian question has reached a level of intense debate within political
economy there is a need to point a way out of and beyond this debate in order to
prevent it descending into the narrow corners of dogmatic detail. Our intent, then, in
this final part of the survey is try and establish a way forward for those interested in
further developing the historical materialist understanding of the relationship
between farming and agriculture within and between countries, within the context of
the process of capitalist development on a world-scale.
Our starting point is that the character of the relationships both between and
within farms, which has important consequences for the dynamics of rural change,
has dramatically changed as a consequence of neoliberal globalisation. This
emphasis means that we are not going to discuss fully-fledged rural proletarians or
footloose labour, even though these two categories of classes of labour are of course
extremely important, and are growing. Rather, our focus is what has happened since
the end of the Keynesian golden age: neoliberal globalisation and what can be
termed neoliberal agrarian restructuring (Akram-Lodhi 2007) has fostered a
dramatic expansion of agricultural exports, in the form of non-traditional exports, at
the expense of production for the domestic market. This has been done by altering
the land-, labour- and capital-intensity of production, reconfiguring the rural
production process and cropping patterns in ways that may or may not aect
processes that expand the commodification of labour, as well as altering the purpose
of production from production for domestic use to production for exchange in the
domestic market, the export market, or both. In so doing neoliberal agrarian
restructuring has impacted upon the character of agrarian accumulation and
profoundly altered the terrain upon which the agrarian question is played out.
Forms of farm production: the stylised facts

In this context, we begin by making two key analytical distinctions, both of which
are important to an agrarian political economy perspective. The first is the extent of
commodification and hence the development of rural capitalism: the relative extent
of production for use versus production for sale can be used to distinguish, in
general, two productive subsectors in the rural economy of contemporary developing
capitalist countries. Production for use and production for sale can be strongly
linked, but need not be. Of course, crop specificities have an important bearing on
patterns of specialisation and hence the extent of commodification. Secondly, the
productive subsector that produces to sell must strive under the market imperative to
improve its competitive profitability within a law of value that is global in scope. By
way of contrast, the market imperative for the productive subsector that produces
lesser amounts for exchange and greater amounts for direct use is not only that of
product markets subject to the law of value but also that of the market for labour-
power.
These two distinctions allow the identification of two forms of farm production
that can typically be found in much of the rural worlds of Africa, Asia and Latin
America. One is an export-oriented capitalist and proto-capitalist subsector that is
both more closely integrated into the global agro-food system than ever before and,
crucially, within the context of the law of value, more important to the
internationalised circuit of capital. This is because it acts as a provider of agro-
food commodities that lower the value of labour-power in the advanced capitalist
countries, and hence raises the rate of relative surplus value.9 The second is a petty
commodity producing peasant subsector, for which the market imperative has also
become more binding than was previously the case; this is both for products that are
sold on markets subject to the law of value and in the market for labour-power that
is productive, often for the first time, of surplus value. Peasants, straddling farm and
o-farm activity, have become increasingly reliant on income arising from the sale of
their commodified labour-power as waged labour.
The export-oriented capitalist subsector

The export-oriented subsector consists of fully capitalist farms or rich peasants that
may be about to become capitalist: what might be seen as proto-capitalist peasants.
For the most part it is more capital-intensive and less labour absorbing in its
technical coecients of production, seeking to utilise those economies of scale and
scope that can be unlocked in the production of crops principally but not singularly
destined for export markets that are primarily but not exclusively located in the
advanced capitalist economies. As such, the characteristics of this productive
subsector are defined by its location within the circuit of capital. As it produces
almost exclusively for the market, this productive subsector is strongly bound by the
logic of the market imperative, in that it must continually strive to improve
competitiveness by reducing per unit costs and improving per unit yields in order to
generate the surplus value that sustains enhanced profitability. However, the markets
in which the productive subsector participates are heavily regulated by dominant
class forces. Thus, this productive subsector is often closely linked to agro-food
transnational capital operating in all or some of the spheres of input supply,
production, processing, distribution, retailing and finance in what is now a buyer-
driven global agro-food system.
9
Some might argue that agricultures importance to capital is now as a source of agrofuels.
However, despite massive US investment in agrofuels they account for only a small share of its
gasoline usage, and agrofuels do not have the potential to power capitalist production. What
they do demonstrate, though, are the stark biophysical contradictions of the global food
system.
The linkages between agro-food transnational capital and emerging export-

oriented capitalist and proto-capitalist farms may be direct, through the physical
ownership of farms or the control of production through contract farming with
capitalist farmers and proto-capitalist rich peasants. However, they may also be
indirect, operating through public or private intermediaries that arbitrate between
on farm production, global processing, and global wholesale and retail distribution.
In this sense, then, agro-food transnational capital plays a key role in shaping the
configuration of this productive subsector and the agrarian change that it witnesses.
This productive subsector often has limited backward linkages into seed and
chemical producing industries because of its connections to agro-food transnational
capital which supplies it with such inputs, but such need not be always the case.
Forward linkages in this productive subsector into domestic markets may be more
significant, especially in terms of employment, in that in addition to on-farm
employment crops are not necessarily produced for local consumption and there can
thus be basic packing and processing carried out, although again this need not be the
case. Linkages into export markets are very important and very diverse for this
subsector, albeit in a manner that is restricted by the regulatory activities of
transnational capital. These include, very importantly, the global supermarket chains
that have an increasing influence over what should be produced, how it should be
produced, and by whom it should be produced within internationalised circuits of
capital.
In the wake of the 2008 global food crisis the dynamics of the export-oriented
capitalist and proto-capitalist subsector have changed because of the emergence of
land-grabbing by a diverse range of countries. In order to secure accessible food
supplies a number of agriculturally-constrained countries have sought to buy or lease
millions of hectares of land in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While these processes
are too recent to draw any empirically-supported conclusions, it is nonetheless the
case that export-oriented private-equity or sovereign wealth fund-controlled
capitalist farms are being established for export, and that this may take place on
the basis of the enclosure of land operated by petty commodity producers,
predicated upon the use of a waged labour force drawn from the dispossessed. This
trend has thus served to further promote the establishment of export-oriented
capitalist farming in developing capitalist countries.
In general, then, the emerging export-oriented capitalist, proto-capitalist and rich
peasant subsector is witnessing the generation of surplus value and agricultural
profitability under a market imperative regulated by dominant classes. This
demonstrates sharpened global value relations in a world food system governed by
highly internationalised circuits of capital seeking to raise the rate of relative surplus
value. A key point to make, then, is that interventions into the export-oriented
productive subsector that came about as a result of neoliberal agrarian restructuring
were designed to enhance the rate of relative surplus value over a prolonged period
of time and in so doing improve capital accumulation on a global scale. This sits
quite uncomfortably with AQ3.
The petty commodity producing peasant subsector

While the second productive subsector resembles a classic petty commodity
producing peasant farm sector it is important to take a nuanced approach to
assessing some of its characteristics. For a start, in this subsector the social, political
and ecological characteristics of landscapes may shape behaviour and identity, and
in this sense economic relations are refracted through and embedded within a
broader set of social relations. Nonetheless, in terms of its economic characteristics
this productive subsector is for the most part far more labour-intensive in its
technical coecients of production, with correspondingly lower levels of capitalisa-
tion and greater challenges involved in reaping economies of scale and scope.
It is important to stress that this productive subsector is not homogenous; even
marginal dierences in the technical coecients of production and the ability to
capture incremental economies of scale and scope, when placed within the context of
crop specificities, can lead to the emergence of stratification amongst farms as the
capacity to produce food and non-food output surplus to consumption requirements
generates processes of peasant class dierentiation. At the same time, petty
commodity producers can be dierentially engaged in non-farm activities, which
are, overall, growing in importance for many, with implications for processes of
socio-economic stratification, agrarian change and accumulation.
The petty commodity producing peasant subsector produces a greater diversity

of crops, commonly but far from exclusively for direct consumption by the
producing household, or for sales in the home market, whether it is local or regional.
At times petty commodity producers may be linked to the world market and the law
of value, usually as a consequence of the disciplines imposed by cheap food imports.
The peasant subsector thus has, through its impact on product as well as on labour
markets, significant forward and backward linkages into the domestic economy.
The petty commodity producing peasant subsector is dierentially incorporated
into the logic of the market imperative. There are thus those peasants that are
relatively more strongly incorporated into dynamic domestic markets for farm
commodities as a consequence of rapid urbanisation and transformations in the
domestic food system, who must seek to improve competitiveness as rural capitalism
slowly emerges. For these farmers the ownership of land and other means of
production must be set beside the fact that the capacity of transnational capital and
dominant domestic classes to regulate both export and, increasingly, domestic
markets has resulted in the eective loss of control of much of the labour process,
and hence an emerging loss of access to non-market based subsistence, as surpluses
are transferred from the direct producer to dominant classes and production is
therefore carried out by the peasantry . . . but not for the peasantry under the logic
of capital (Araghi 2000, 151).
For those peasants that are less incorporated into the market the issue of control
of land is critical for their very survival. The control of land can bring with it the
possibility of production for direct use, a non-commodified subsistence guarantee
that gives peasants a degree of autonomy from capital that may secure a livelihood
although it will not open up the possibility of accumulation. At the same time,
however, if the control of land relies on land owners for that access it will be the case
that despite the subsistence guarantee oered by land surpluses will be transferred
from the direct producer to dominant classes. Production for those that rely on land
owners is thus once again by peasants but not for peasants.
Semi-proletarianisation
Standing beside these two forms of farm production is a significant and increasing
proportion of the global rural population that is seeking, day by day, refuge in their
small plot of land, producing agricultural products for food security reasons while
simultaneously engaged in selling their labour-power to capitalist farmers, richer
proto-capitalist peasants, or non-farm capitalists (Kay 2000). This stratum tries to
retreat from the market imperative in terms of their food production, as they can no
longer compete with cheap food imports or with local capitalist farmers.
Nonetheless, for them the market imperative holds, in that, in order to survive,
they must be able to sell their increasingly commodified labour-power, which is
productive of surplus value, and an inability to sell labour-power results in
pauperisation. This then is why this stratum is separated from the productive
agricultural subsectors: with insucient means of production, they do not produce
for exchange but rather sell their ability to work and, indeed, their potential to
produce surplus value.
This stratum was described by Lenin in the first part of this survey as being semi-
proletarian: neither peasant nor proletarian, this part of the rural population is
nonetheless the result of the drive of capital to separate producers, to a greater or
lesser extent, from the means of production. It can therefore be suggested that
context-specific factors contributing to or constraining semi-proletarianisation are
very important, in that they can help explain a significant fraction of the variation in
processes of agrarian change in contemporary developing capitalist countries, or
indeed the lack thereof.
There are, in addition to areas of comparability in this tripartite rural
configuration, areas of contrast that may be witnessed in the contemporary agrarian
structure that has emerged under neoliberal globalisation. There are also clear
outliers to this description; for example, the countries of the Caucasus and Ethiopia,
amongst others (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2008). But this tripartite configuration does, in
our view, capture the key essence of the forms of production that dominate much of
agriculture in the South today.
Reproduction, accumulation, and agrarian transition

Situating this tripartite configuration within the process of capital accumulation, our
approach starts, like that of Preobrazhensky, from Marxs analysis of reproduction
schemas elaborated in Capital Volume II (Marx 1956, orig. 1885). The central
insight of reproduction schemas was that the character of capital accumulation is a
consequence of the interrelationships between production in two economic sectors;
Marxs focus was on the flows between the wage goods and the investment goods
subsectors. In what follows, we adapt this approach, proposing to focus on the
interrelationship between the export-oriented subsector and the home market
producing subsector, both of which are subject to the law of value, which operates
on a world-scale.10 In so doing, we are not confusing our level of analysis, as, like us,
Marx clearly focused on aggregated subsectors.
A neoliberal agricultural export bias

In seeking to understand the relationship between the export-oriented subsector and
the home market subsector it is important to start by recognising that the period of
neoliberal globalisation has led to a marked increase in both food imports to and
10
For a similar mode of analysis, see FitzGerald (1985).
agricultural exports from developing capitalist countries across Asia, Africa and
Latin America. Many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have become
net food importers. There has also been a significant change in the composition of
agricultural trade, in that traditional agricultural exports and traditional tropical
products have not grown as rapidly as non-traditional agricultural exports such as
fresh and processed fish and seafood and fruit and vegetables: changes that clearly
reflect shifts in the food regime as agro-food transnational capital dierentially
incorporates capitalist farmers and petty commodity producers from developing
capitalist countries. The result: countries have become increasingly oriented towards
production for export in both the capitalist and the petty commodity producing farm
subsectors as a neoliberal agricultural export bias has been configured.
These shifts are illustrated in Figure 1 and Table 3. The solid line in Figure 1
displays the share of agricultural exports in total agricultural production for
developing capitalist countries between 1986 and 2007, while the dashed line
provides a trend for that data. The figure is unambiguous: between 1986 and 2007
the share of exports in agricultural output for developing capitalist countries almost
doubled. The significance of this trend should not be underestimated: during the
same period agricultural exports as a share of world exports declined dramatically
(Akram-Lodhi 2000). So processes of neoliberal globalisation have clearly fostered a
neoliberal agricultural export bias in developing capitalist countries as the
international division of labour of the corporate food regime solidified.
Table 3 disaggregates the data for part of the period contained in Figure 1 by
broadly defined agricultural commodities. Table 3 demonstrates the restructuring of
developing capitalist country agricultural exports since the early 1980s, in which
tropical products have noticeably declined in their importance while fish and seafood
and fruit and vegetables have become far more important. Although it is not
demonstrated in the table, another marked structural change has been the increased
significance in these categories of fresh products, many of which are now packed and
Figure 1. Developing capitalist country agricultural exports as a share of agricultural output,

19862007.
Source: World Bank (2009).
Table 3. The structure of developing country exports in agricultural products, 19812001,

percent.
Product classification 1980/11990/1 1990/12000/1

Tropical products
Coee, cocoa and tea 18.3 8.5
Nuts and spices 2.4 2.8
Textile fibres 8.0 3.3
Sugar and confectionary 10.5 4.3
Subtotal 39.2 18.9
Temperate products
Meat, fresh and processed 7.2 6.0
Milk and milk products 0.3 1.1
Grains, raw and processed 9.3 7.0
Animal feed 7.5 8.5
Edible oil and oil seeds 4.6 5.5
Subtotal 28.8 28.1

Fish and seafood, fruits and vegetables
Fish and seafood, fresh and processed 6.9 19.4
Fruits and vegetables, fresh and processed 14.7 21.5
Subtotal 21.6 41.0
Other processed products
Tobacco and cigarettes 2.6 3.3
Beverages, alcoholic and non-alcoholic 1.1 3.6
Other products and processed food 6.7 5.2
Subtotal 10.4 12.1
Total 100.0 100.0
Source: Henson (2007).
processed in developing capitalist countries so that they can be rapidly made

available in supermarkets in the advanced capitalist countries.
In light of a neoliberal agricultural export bias, and bearing in mind the insight of
the reproduction schema that focuses upon interrelationships between productive
subsectors, we suggest that those countries that have sought to foster increases in
agricultural exports as a principal mechanism to increase rates of rural accumulation
can be, admittedly simply but not simplistically, subdivided in two, which have
dierent conditions governing material reproduction and dierent traits of
accumulation, and within which there is substantive diversity.
The articulation of the home and export market

In the first group are countries in which production for export goes alongside and
along with production for the home market. Brazil and Vietnam are two leading
examples: countries where more than a quarter of all exports are agricultural
products, the growth of both high value meat production in Brazil and fruit and
vegetable production in Vietnam exceeded five percent per annum between 1990
and 2005 (World Bank 2007, Table A4). At the same time though significant
proportions of the agricultural products produced for export also find their way
onto the rapidly-growing home market. So while the agricultural export sector,
which is dominated by capitalist farms in Brazil and petty commodity producing

peasants in Vietnam, drives material extended reproduction the impetus to
accumulate seeps out of exporting; it is transmitted into the rural economy as a
whole, and from there into the wider economy.
In countries where production for export interlocks with production for the
home market rural accumulation continues to be of importance for both capital and
labour, both within each country but also internationally. Producing for export in
Brazil and Vietnam brings with it the possibility of capital formation and
accumulation within each country. At the same time, Vietnamese agro-exports in
basic commodities such as rice and Brazils agricultural dominance in commodities
such as beef, sugar, oranges, and soya directly reduce the cost of the reproduction of
labour-power on a global scale and in so doing enhance the relative rate of surplus
value. In this sense, then, and contrary to the view espoused in AQ3, agriculture
remains important for capital in the early years of the twenty-first century
(Wilkinson 2009).
At the same time though it must be stressed that the petty commodity
producing peasant subsector in this set of countries is exposed to the law of value.
This conditions the character of its material extended reproduction, in particular
subjecting it to processes of dierentiation as a consequence of both accumulation
and enclosure. As a result, alongside rapid rates of accumulation there can still
be high degrees of poverty and inequality, marked semi-proletarianisation
and, for many, food insecurity, as is clearly demonstrated in both Brazil and
Vietnam.
The disarticulation of the home and export market

In the second group are countries where production for export is eectively
divorced from production for the home market. Amongst others, Kenya and
Ecuador provide good examples, with agricultural exports accounting for 54 and
37 percent of all exports (World Bank 2007, Table A4), respectively, but where
important agro-food exports cut flowers, in this case have very limited domestic
demand. In these countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America higher-value
agricultural exports are an important determinant of aggregate rates of rural
accumulation, but rural accumulation in the largely capitalist and, at times, proto-
capitalist export-oriented subsector does not seep into the home market, in part
because the two subsectors operate separately and few producers straddle the
subsectoral divide.
Indeed, the eective segregation of two dierent farm economies and two
dierent sets of producing units, one for export and one for the home market, means
that the greater emphasis on higher-value agricultural exports, coupled with
devaluations and the removal of import restrictions resulting from ongoing
structural adjustment in agriculture has, as a consequence, neglected agricultural
production for the home market. Indeed, the neoliberal agricultural export bias is
usually predicated upon prioritising capitalist agriculture for export over petty
commodity production for the home market and this has led to rising food imports
in many countries. Moreover, in too many cases food imports have risen faster than
agricultural exports, fostering a crisis in the domestic food sector, in large part
because the law of value results in domestic production being undercut by imports.
In these circumstances, the 2008 global food crisis could have been foretold as being
a wholly predictable outcome of deep structural tensions in global agricultural

development policy.11
An agrarian crisis has thus been fashioned as a consequence of the conditions
of material reproduction that govern the traits of accumulation in this second
group of countries. In many countries a simple reproduction squeeze is being
witnessed within the increasingly fragmented petty commodity producing peasant
sector as the conditions facing agrarian labour deteriorate, in terms of farming
possibilities, employment opportunities, wages, and other working terms and
conditions. This helps explain the character of the tripartite agrarian structure
depicted in the previous subsection: capitalist agriculture has promoted a process
of dispossessive enclosure and market-led resource appropriation, while peasant
class dierentiation has redistributed resources from relatively poorer peasants to
proto-capitalists as the former semi-proletarianise, being made in many cases
redundant (Bryceson et al. 2000). But there is, as would be expected, dierential
uniformity.
The role of China

When considering the issue of agrarian accumulation it is important to stress the
pivotal role now played by China. China is a source of demand for the agro-food
commodity exports produced by capitalist and proto-capitalist farms in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. This suggests that rural accumulation in some countries may be
becoming reliant upon Chinas ongoing capitalist transition. This might lead to the
inference that, unlike the proposition of AQ3, agriculture matters for global
accumulation, because Chinas capitalist transition is now a global driver of
accumulation in the North and in the South; a collapse of Chinas access to imported
agro-food commodities, whether they be for people, for animal consumption, or as
industrial inputs, would have an impact on global accumulation. Indeed, it might be
argued that China is, as a source of demand, in some places in the South facilitating
the deepening of capitalist relations of production in export-oriented capitalist,
proto-capitalist and petty commodity producing peasant agriculture. In so doing,
China would be reconfiguring the agrarian question in some countries as its demand
for food and non-food agricultural products facilitates processes of agrarian
transition in the countries that supply it.
At the same time, Chinas capitalist transition relies upon continued and
sustained access to agro-food commodities imported within the corporate food
regime because Chinas rural economy has witnessed disappointing production and
productivity performance since the mid-1980s even as the country has witnessed an
exceptionally rapid shift towards more meat-intensive diets (Bramall 2009).
Ironically, this is consistent with Bernsteins decoupling thesis presented in AQ3:
agriculture within China itself does not matter for Chinas capitalist transition
because accumulation in China is not linked to improved production and
productivity in the rural economy as a source of capital, as a result of which the
agrarian question that remains in a spatially and socially dierentiating China is an
agrarian question of labour.
11
For a political economy analysis of the ongoing world food crisis, see the symposium articles
in the Journal of Agrarian Change 10(1), 2010.
Conclusion: the agrarian question and the global subsistence crisis

We have argued that neoliberal globalisation and a neoliberal agricultural export
bias has had the eect of restructuring rural production processes in relatively more
capital- or more labour-intensive patterns, generating changes in agrarian structure
and the material conditions governing extended reproduction, and altering traits and
rates of accumulation in both the capitalist and petty commodity producing peasant
subsectors. This in turn has aected both inequality and poverty, as witnessed in the
stark growth in semi-proletarianisation throughout the developing capitalist
countries. An important variable in this process has been the extent to which
capitalist farms and petty commodity producing peasants produce for the export
market, the home market, or, crucially, both. In some cases the complementary
production of agricultural commodities for the home market and the international
market have generated strong increases in accumulation amongst capitalist farms
and petty commodity producing peasants. However, more commonly, agricultural
export production is separated from production for the home market amongst
capitalist farms and petty commodity producing peasants, accumulation only weakly
seeps out into the wider economy, and semi-proletarianisation without full
proletarianisation is widely and increasingly witnessed. We have stressed though
that these processes are subject to a substantive diversity that is rooted in the
contingent and conjunctural complexity that arises out of a historically-embedded
process of variable incorporation of rural economies and societies into capitalism
operating on a world scale.
It is, in our view, hugely ironic that the ongoing and systemic global subsistence
crisis of the twenty-first century has occurred at a time when agrarian political
economy has been asking whether we are witnessing the death of the peasantry
(Hobsbawm 1994, Vanhaute 2009). We would instead argue that these circumstances
are precisely the wrong time to doubt the continued salience of the agrarian question,
and that in contrast, it has assumed a new relevance, albeit in a variety of forms and
in dierent circumstances. The renewed relevance of the agrarian question is
witnessed in postsocialist repeasantisation through decollectivisation; semi-proletar-
ianisation and fragmentation without full proletarianisation as livelihood strategies
reconfigure; the remarkable stability in the absolute number of peasant farmers over
the last 40 years; the continued importance of smallholder food production to rural
livelihoods in much of the South; the deepening of the market imperative and the law
of value across the world capitalist economy under neoliberal globalisation, with
implications for capitalist agriculture and petty commodity producing peasant
farming; the expanded commodification of natural resources, including land, labour-
power and genetic resources; the strong spatial specificities to these processes, as
cross-border megaregions transcend the state in driving substantial shares of global
capital accumulation; and the global resurgence, in response, of peasant movements
in Chiapas, Brazil, India, China, and Indonesia, amongst others, as well as, of
course, the critical, pivotal transnational response of La Via Campesina (Borras
et al. 2008).
If anything these phenomena say to us that the emergence of capitalist
agriculture, de-peasantisation, semi-proletarianisation, re-peasantisation and petty
commodity production cannot be seen as aspects of a linear process but rather
dynamic and recurrent manifestations of multifaceted and contradictorily changing
patterns of social and economic relations that continually and complexly reconfigure
rural labour regimes, and hence the agrarian question. If such is indeed the case, then
rural transformation and its intersection with the development of capitalism the
agrarian question continues to have relevance.
But this two-part survey suggests that there is not a set of standard, uniform
lessons that can be learnt from the contemporary reflection of the agrarian question.
Rather, for us the agrarian question oers a suciently nuanced account that
rigorously yet flexibly captures both the common processes at work in the
countryside of developing capitalist countries as well as the substantive diversity,
rooted in globally-embedded, historically-informed and country-specific trajectories
of variation, which can cumulatively assist in understanding paths of agrarian
transition and the challenge facing global peasant movements confronting global
capital. Admittedly, the lack of certainties that can be ascribed to this analytical
framework might be, for some, a disappointment. For us, it is an indication of its
theoretical and empirical coherence, providing the analytical tools and analytical
sensitivity necessary to understand the continuing salience of the agrarian question.
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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of International

Development Studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada and Associated Research
Professor of the Academic Unit in Development Studies of the Universidad Autonoma de
Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico. His most recent book, co-edited with Cristobal Kay, is entitled
Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian
Question. Email: haroonakramlodhi@trentu.ca
Cristobal Kay is Emeritus Professor in Development Studies and Rural Development at the
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The
Netherlands; Adjunct Professor of International Development Studies at Saint Marys
University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Professorial Research Associate in the
Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London. He is an editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Email: Kay@iss.nl

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within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of

The problematics of the agrarian question

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

critical variable in understanding a specific path of agrarian transition is, as

The contemporary debate: globalisation and Bernsteins challenge

Table 1. Paths of capitalist agrarian transition.

necessary precondition of the development of capitalism. Rather, transnational

Seven agrarian questions?

Table 2. Contemporary agrarian questions (AQ).

Rural production Rural accumulation Rural politics

a unique analytical framework by which to examine agrarian change and rural

of the world, again, as part of a set of mechanisms to reinforce accumulation in

the character of rural production reconfigured the process of accumulation, with

The agrarian question in the twenty-first century

Forms of farm production: the stylised facts

The export-oriented capitalist subsector

The linkages between agro-food transnational capital and emerging export-

The petty commodity producing peasant subsector

The petty commodity producing peasant subsector produces a greater diversity

Reproduction, accumulation, and agrarian transition

A neoliberal agricultural export bias

Figure 1. Developing capitalist country agricultural exports as a share of agricultural output,

Table 3. The structure of developing country exports in agricultural products, 19812001,

Product classification 1980/11990/1 1990/12000/1

Subtotal 28.8 28.1

Source: Henson (2007).

processed in developing capitalist countries so that they can be rapidly made

The articulation of the home and export market

which is dominated by capitalist farms in Brazil and petty commodity producing

The disarticulation of the home and export market

a wholly predictable outcome of deep structural tensions in global agricultural

The role of China

Conclusion: the agrarian question and the global subsistence crisis

Perspectives, 5(4), 226.

Marx, K. 1976. Capital: a critique of political economy, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin

transformation and the agrarian question. London: Routledge, pp. 190213.

Veltmeyer, H. 2009. The World Bank on agriculture for development: a failure of

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of International

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