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A partir de un análisis crítico de la Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible, este artículo se propone evidenciar los nexos que unen los discursos dominantes sobre alimentos y agricultura con las dinámicas socioecológicas que subyacen a las transformaciones y a la crisis del capitalismo contemporáneo.
El supuesto inicial es que el capitalismo —en cuanto ecología-mundo— debe su supervivencia a la posibilidad de identificar continuamente nuevas y efectivas formas de combinar la explotación del trabajo asalariado con la apropiación gratuita de la naturaleza humana y extrahumana. Esto implica que la crisis en la que el capitalismo se halla hoy en día representa también la crisis de una forma específica de organizar la naturaleza. Más precisamente, es una crisis que tiene sus raíces en el “fin de la naturaleza barata”, es decir en el agotamiento de las fronteras y de las relaciones de valor que han permitido reducir periódicamente el coste del trabajo, de los alimentos, de la energía y de las materias primas. Frente a este fenómeno, las reacciones adoptadas por los principales actores de la gobernanza global han propiciado una reconfiguración general de las estrategias de acumulación vinculadas a la producción y distribución de alimentos.
Como muestra el artículo, uno de los principales pivotes en torno al cual actualmente giran estas estrategias es representado por las políticas que se inspiran en los conceptos de "desarrollo sostenible" y "seguridad alimentaria", tal y como están articulados en la Agenda 2030. Nuestra tesis es que detrás de estos mismos conceptos es posible detectar una racionalidad de gobierno que pretende eludir los problemas que surgen de las contradicciones socioecológicas inherentes al capitalismo mediante el establecimiento de nuevas relaciones de valor y nuevas maneras de organizar y producir la naturaleza. Esta operación, sin embargo, exacerba la tensión entre la inclinación del capital a la mercantilización y monetización de nuevas áreas situadas al margen de la esfera productiva y su necesidad de poder seguir contando con amplias fuentes de naturaleza gratuita y trabajo no remunerado. La imposibilidad de devolver el excedente ecológico a niveles que permitan iniciar una nueva fase de expansión, por un lado, da lugar a una intensificación de los procesos de explotación impulsados por la lógica de los mercados globales y, por otro lado, hace cada vez más evidente la crisis del modelo neoliberal de desarrollo, alimentando algunas contratendencias que con la emergencia pandémica parecen destinadas a alcanzar un nivel de madurez más elevado.
La primera parte del artículo reconstruye las recientes transformaciones de la economía-mundo capitalista a través de las lentes proporcionadas por el análisis de los regímenes agroalimentarios. La segunda parte se propone deconstruir las prácticas discursivas subyacentes a la Agenda 2030 y poner de relieve las ambigüedades y contradicciones inherentes a las políticas de desarrollo inspiradas en los conceptos de "desarrollo sostenible" y "seguridad alimentaria". La última parte utiliza la perspectiva de la ecología-mundo para exponer con mayor profundidad las tesis del artículo.
From the 1970s onwards, the development programs promoted by key global actors have gone through significant transformations. The industrial-expansion projects of the post-colonial era have been replaced with a set of actions increasingly focused on agriculture and rural areas. At the same time, the neoliberal policies carried out since the 1980s have deeply affected the global dynamics related to food production and distribution, giving rise to the birth of a new food regime that is driven by new modalities of regulation and new extractive strategies based on global value chains and transnational corporations.
Despite the increases in productivity and the decline in food prices linked to these processes, the world economy has not managed to recover the levels of growth prior to the crisis of the 1970s. On the contrary, the neoliberal reaction to this crisis has generated a growing disillusionment towards development, fuelled also by the awakening of greater sensitivity to the ecological issues raised by environmental movements from as early as the 1960s. This “legitimacy crisis” of development, in turn, has led multilateral organisations to redefine their strategic objectives and to develop a new language. Thus, concepts such as “sustainable development” and “food security” have become increasingly important, until assuming the crucial role they currently play within the United Nations 2030 Agenda.
The article provides a critical reading of the recent trajectories of agrarian change and rural development, as well as of the food narratives produced by the actors of global governance, particularly focusing on the “sustainability discourse” which inspired the United Nations 2030 Agenda. The authors point out the importance of analysing the dominant discourse and policies surrounding food production and distribution in the light of capitalist restructuring arising from the recurrent accumulation crises. In doing so, they put into dialogue food regimes analysis with world-ecology theory.
The departing assumption is that capitalism – as a system characterised by a specific combination of class relations, territorial power and nature – has relied on the expansion and deepening of the frontier of accumulation, needing to continuously identify new effective ways to combine the exploitation of labour with the free appropriation of the work of human and extra-human nature. In this sense, “cheap nature” – following Jason Moore’s definition – represents at once a prerequisite of capitalist development and a historical product of evolving strategies of accumulation reproducing a metabolic rift between humans and nature. These strategies are always based on a specific international division of labour and determined by global economic and geopolitical dynamics. At the same time, they are also characterised by changing patterns of (semi)proletarisation, as well as by ways of organizing nature whose constant renewal is crucial for the reproduction of capitalism.
What truly distinguishes the current global scenario from the past is the “end of cheap nature”, i. e. the exhaustion of the frontiers and the value relationships that have historically allowed for a reduction in the cost of four fundamental elements: labor, food, energy and raw materials. Against this phenomenon, by looking at the recent trajectories of the accumulation strategies underlying food production and distribution, two main dynamics emerge: the first one is hinged on a reconfiguration of extractivism based on natural resources dispossession and land concentration processes, as well as on a cost-reduction strategy based on labour exploitation; the second one can be portrayed as the reflex of a new governmental approach to development according to which the formal reunification of the producers with some basic means of production is functional to their inclusion into the global value-chains ruled by the agri-business corporations. Leveraging the neoliberal rhetoric of self-entrepreneurship, this second dynamic put into practice a sort of “indirect proletarisation”, in which the incitement of the individual creative and productive capabilities accompanies the implementation of new mechanisms of control based on the provision of credit and other inputs, as well as on the proliferation of standardisation procedures, practices of patenting of nature, and technological control.
Under these premises, the authors read the food security discourse embedded in the UN 2030 Agenda as an attempt to elude the socioecological contradictions inherent in capitalism, which ends up providing a sort of ideological legitimacy to the aforementioned dynamics, thereby engendering new explosive contradictions.
The article is divided into three sections. The first one retraces the transformations that the capitalist world-ecology has experienced from the 1970s onwards from a food regimes approach. The second section aims to deconstruct the discursive practices underlying the United Nations 2030 Agenda, as well as to bring to light the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in development policies inspired by the concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘food security’. In the last section, the authors use the world-ecology perspective to interpret ongoing agrarian change dynamics.
In seeking to revitalise the neoliberal development model, the authors argue, the dominant food narratives use scarcity as a pretext to extend and intensify the logics of the market, turning it into a universal principle for the regulation of human and extra-human nature. Dominant food policies aim to elude the problems deriving from the exhaustion of the frontier logic underlying the historical evolution of capitalism through the creation of a new spatiality and a new way of organising nature. Yet, this operation exacerbates the tension between capital’s inclination towards the commodification/monetisation of ever new areas outside the sphere of production and its need to keep relying on extended sources of unpaid work of human and extra-human nature. The lack of new effective solutions to this tension is, in turn, feeding a combination of contrasting tendencies. While it produces a deepening of the mechanisms of control and exploitation driven by global market logics, it also nourishes processes of de-globalisation, along with a set of phenomena which recall the dynamics described by Karl Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement”. At the same time, it has also constituted a fertile ground for the emergence of new conflicts, counter-narratives and anti-systemic movements for food sovereignty and agroecology. The authors come to the conclusion that the reorganisation of the food regime in XXI century world-ecology will be highly affected by the responses provided to the ongoing pandemic crisis, thus representing an important opportunity for each of the aforementioned tendencies to gain ground over the others.
