What Lessons MUST BE LEARNED From Successful Indian Farmer Union Resistance?

lefteast  |  Amid the geopolitical and humanitarian crisis generated by the war in Ukraine, another crisis is unfolding globally which is also heavily affected by the war. Global food supply problems could cause food shortages and famine in several low-income countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Global food prices, increasing since the early 2000s, had already reached new peaks in the last years. Owing to the important role of Ukraine and Russia in the global food system (they are both among the largest grain exporters in the world, and Russia has a significant role in the fertilizer industry as well), they are expected to further accelerate to highest-ever levels. The war also reveals how important local food systems are in providing nutrition in Ukraine: people fleeing the cities are depending at the moment on food produced by small family farms. The solidarity of Romanian farmers providing Ukrainian family farms with seeds also shows the power of alternative ways of thinking outside the logic of the global food system.

The growing food crisis points to characteristics of the global food system that has emerged in relationship to the capitalist economy. The global food system’s dependence on fossil fuels, commercial seeds, and chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), and its devastating societal effects in certain parts of the world make the system unsustainable. Rural societies in general, but more specifically small producers and rural communities in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions, are affected by the global food system in a way that is inherently unjust. The marginalization of small producers and peasant communities who lack the capacity to successfully integrate into the global food system (but are also unable to remove themselves from it ), and inequalities in access to land and natural resources caused by land concentration or land grabbing are significant consequences of the global food system. The global division of labor means that while peripheral and semi-peripheral regions more frequently specialize in the more labor-intensive and less profitable activities in the global commodity chain, core countries are generally involved with more capital and technology-intensive production and more profitable activities, reproducing global inequalities in the accumulation of capital. Liberalization of the land market in semi-peripheries and peripheries, rather than aiding small or medium farms, has tended to benefit mostly the local elite (a minority of the rural society) or multinational corporations based in core countries. In semi-peripheral Hungary, the food-processing industry and supermarkets, which realize a great amount of profit from the food commodity chain are also to a significant extent operated by foreign capital.

The global food system has negative effects on society and more broadly a damaging impact on the environment. It is a main culprit in the loss of biodiversity and a major driver of climate change. Negative environmental effects like the emergence of herbicide-resistant superweeds, the loss of pollinators, and the increasingly prevalent droughts hit back at the global food system. Requiring costly interventions in agroecosystems such as new pesticides, artificial pollination, and irrigation, they contribute to higher food prices.

The concept of food sovereignty was developed and propagated by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way). Originally rooted in autonomous peasant organizations in Latin America, the movement later became global, and now has members from Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe. La Via Campesina centers its work around claims of social justice, the right of peasants to produce food, and more equal access to lands and other resources (like water or seed). It also focuses on the localization of food systems and emphasizes the right to control one’s food and the right to access healthy, culturally appropriate food instead of producing for and consuming the products of the profit-focused global food system. Food sovereignty not only concentrates on the health of people, but the health of the environment as well, it argues for ecologically sound and sustainable agriculture.

In its thematic issue on food sovereignty (#29), the Hungarian critical journal Fordulat addresses how the operation of the global food system affects rural society and ecosystems in Hungary and discusses the struggles and strategies of small producers, including those of women who work in agriculture. The first part of the issue contains five original articles and a translation, tied together by the concept of food sovereignty and what it entails. It gathers theoretical and empirical works that show how the history of struggles of rural societies for more fair distribution of land and natural resources and environmental degradation have developed in tandem with capitalism, focusing specifically on transformations in Hungary’s agriculture. It shows how the dialectical relationship between nature, society, and the capitalist system to a large extent shapes rural life in this semi-peripheral context today. The second part of the issue presents three book reviews that reintroduce anthropological works discussing local conditions, practices, and the changing meanings of food and farming as well as resistance and struggle, amid the capitalist and socialist transformations of the food systems in peripheral and semi-peripheral places. While these books were written several decades ago, they still hold relevance for understanding struggles in these rural areas today.