SYP Agriculture

CHAPTER FIVE

Cheap Food

On his first voyage to the New World, Columbus paid far more attention to potential returns from the sale of new plants than to the food he ate. Aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, diet followed a protocol so regimented that there’s no mention of it in the first two months of the ship’s log.1 When food does crop up, it’s two days after first contact, when Columbus writes about an old man who came on board and cried to his friends on the shore to bring the sailors things to eat and drink. Columbus permitted himself the rituals of gastrotourism a month later, on November 5, 1492, when he tried some local food and reported that the Indigenous People had “mames which are like carrots and have the flavor of chestnuts; and they have faxones and beans of kinds very different from ours.” But Columbus wasn’t there to taste test. The bulk of his notes look like this: “There are a thousand other kinds of fruits, which it is impossible for me to write about, and all must be profitable.”2

His daily rations—hardtack (a double-baked wheat biscuit) and a range of cured meats and cheeses—didn’t matter enough to make it into his journals. Only on the way home, on January 25, 1493, did he report that the “sailors killed a tunny [dolphin] and a very large shark, which was very welcome as they now had nothing but bread and wine, and some yams from the Indies.”3

It is such food, the food that sustains working human bodies, that is at the heart of our discussion in this chapter. Madeira’s sugar revolution was a central and early part of capitalism’s ecology, and Columbus himself introduced the plant to the New World, so that by 1506 it was widely and intensively cultivated on Hispaniola.4 But the

food that matters in that story is not the processed sugar that Columbus and his kind conveyed from Madeira to Genoa but instead the food of sailors and slave families, the sustenance that allows the extraction of cheap work.5

Crop varieties matter to soil and human ecology. We cannot talk about food in general but need to recognize its particularities and the way that different crops have formed their own ecologies. Rice, maize, and wheat—Fernand Braudel’s “plants of civilization”6—have yielded very different forms of power, work, gastronomy, and nature:

Europe chose wheat, which devours the soil and forces it to rest regularly; this choice implied and permitted the raising of livestock. Now, who can imagine the history of Europe without oxen, horses, plows, and carts? As a result of this choice Europe has always combined agriculture and animal husbandry. It has always been carnivorous. Rice developed out of a form of gardening, an intensive cultivation in which man could allow no room for animals. This explains why meat constitutes such a small part of the diet in rice-growing areas. Planting corn is surely the simplest and most convenient way to obtain one’s “daily bread.” It grows very rapidly and requires minimal care. The choice of corn as a crop left free time, making possible the forced peasant labor and the enormous monuments of the Amerindians. Society appropriated a labor force that worked the land only intermittently.7

Although capitalism is often associated with coal- and oil-fueled revolutions, transformations in the food system came first. Without food surplus, there’s no work outside agriculture. The textbook civilizations—the Sumerians and the Egyptians, the Hans and the Romans, the Mayans and the Incas—grew through revolutions that allowed fewer people to produce more food. The diversity of food relations in the arc of human history from the Neolithic revolution to the dawn of the sixteenth century is breathtaking.8 But they all shared two common characteristics: a system of agricultural productivity premised on land rather than labor, and a system of controlling food surplus through politics rather than the market.

Capitalist agriculture transformed the planet. Some land became the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems: monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated from the work of growing on those lands and had gone to live more

closely together in places where their labors might be better rewarded—the cities. Cities and fields have long been siblings, bound by another timeless imperative: cheap food for the urban poor. Everyone from Cicero to the imperial Chinese has understood the importance of making sure that city dwellers are sufficiently well fed to prevent urban discontent.9 What’s different about an ecology of cash agriculture is the single-minded focus on profit and the drive for cheap food to feed urban workers and their families not just to prevent riots but also to keep work cheap. As we have seen in the chapters on work and care, maintaining a system of wage work is expensive and becomes more so over time. Cheap food enables that expensive system to yield riches. Those riches flowed through infrastructures of power and production that created a new ecology of the city and the country. Like the relation between employers and workers, it was profoundly unequal. A rural-urban ecology is woven into the fabric of capitalism, one whose patterns formed through Atlantic frontiers, major European cities, the Indian Ocean, and Asia’s spice routes.

HOW FOOD MADE THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD

By 1700, most English peasants had been either reduced to cottagers, pushed into agricultural wage work, or forced off the land and into cities—61 percent of England’s working population was doing something other than growing food. The proportion of city dwellers had doubled over the previous century.10 The enclosures of the previous two centuries had made agriculture a competitive business, and a cluster of innovations—new ploughs, crop rotations, and drainage systems especially—had made it biologically productive. While historians debate the precise timing of its agricultural revolution, it’s clear that by 1700 England was doing the two big things that every great capitalist power must: increasing the agricultural surplus and expelling labor from the farm.11 It could expel labor from the farm because it was productive in a new sense: labor

productivity advanced rapidly, rising nearly 46 percent between 1500 and 1700.12

English agriculture was so robust at the dawn of the eighteenth century that it was able to rescue a rapidly proletarianizing Europe from hunger. While we tend to think of industrialization as producing new workers, it’s truer to say that the expulsion of labor from agriculture favors new forms of industrialization. Europe’s wage- earning population may have grown by as much as sixty million in the two centuries after 1550, and these workers had to be fed cheaply. Every global factory needs a global farm. That global farm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been Poland, whose wheat and rye filled the bellies of Dutch fishers, sawyers, and peat cutters. By 1700, however, Poland’s exports had collapsed—in great measure from soil exhaustion. For the next half century, England was western Europe’s granary, its exports growing fivefold. Grain prices held stable in western European cities as a result—but for capitalism, ever hungry for economic growth, stability is never enough.13 Food prices in England—and across northern Europe— fell.14

England’s triumph was short lived. Like Poland before it, the island saw its agricultural revolution stall. Farmers progressively “cashed in” their biological reserves.15 By 1750, a tipping point was reached. Grain exporting ground to a halt. Productivity growth slowed, and food prices rose.16 Even with sharply rising imports from Ireland, English food prices increased twice as fast as the industrial price index, climbing 66 percent faster than textile prices and 48 percent faster than coal prices between 1770 and 1795.17

If this were simply an English phenomenon, it mightn’t matter, but productivity slowed, inequality widened, and food became more expensive throughout the Atlantic world. Labor productivity fell or stagnated across western Europe in the half century after 1750.18 In France the price of bread rose three times faster than wages before 1789’s Revolution.19 In central Mexico too, yields declined, and the price of maize rose 50 percent toward the end of the century.20 Across Europe between 1730 and 1810, the price of “the chief bread

grains” (wheat and rye above all) soared: 250 percent in England and more than 200 percent in northern Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. France experienced lower rates of food price inflation—163 percent in this period—but that was hardly enough to forestall massive social unrest.21

By 1760 there were signs of a fundamental change in the English countryside that marked the triumph of agrarian capitalism—as well as its exhaustion. In response to an increasing number of food rebellions across the country and rising grain prices,22 the scale and tempo of parliamentary enclosure jumped sharply, an attempt to rekindle a flare of productivity by repeating the cause of the agricultural boom. Six times as many Enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 and 1790 as in the three decades prior.23 In the century after 1750, a quarter of England’s cultivated land, previously open fields and commons, was privatized.24

This ecology was premised on cheap nature and cheap work, but it also needed cheap food. Cheap food is “cheap” in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system. Certainly, some noncapitalist modes of cultivation have enjoyed very high levels of food production with modest effort. In early nineteenth-century Brazil, swidden agriculture —in which cultivators clear plots of forest for cultivation, then repeat the cycle after several harvests—could yield between 7,000 and 17,600 calories of manioc, maize, and sweet potatoes for every hour of work. By way of contrast, this was somewhere between three and five times greater than England’s labor productivity at the same time.25 But nowhere was rising labor productivity in agriculture sustained for large concentrated populations until the rise of capitalism.

The cheap food model worked like this. Capitalism’s agricultural revolutions provided cheap food, which lowered the minimum-wage threshold: workers could be paid less and not starve. This in turn reduced employers’ wage bills as the scale of proletarianization increased, allowing the rate of exploitation to rise. Accumulated capital could continue to grow only insofar as a rising food surplus

underwrote “cheap” workers.26 It is a simple model. This system of cheap food didn’t emerge on purpose, but understanding its emergence in capitalism’s ecology makes it possible to think of and see the world differently—including how the imperatives of providing cheap food have helped to create the modern world.

We quoted Braudel on rice, maize, and wheat—but a central part of Britain’s calorie intake in the Industrial Revolution was New World sugar. As Kenneth Pomeranz notes, “Replacing Britain’s 1801 consumption of Caribbean sugar with locally grown calories would have required 850,000 to 1.2 million acres of the best wheat land; by 1831—still before the great fall in sugar prices and quintupling of per-capita consumption that followed—the figure is 1.2 to 1.6 million.”27 The story of capitalism is a global one, from the belly out.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European governments tried to manage food prices in cities, not always successfully. There were bread riots, led overwhelmingly by women, whose provision of care and dependence on markets put them on the front lines of battles over cheap food.28 The most famous began the French Revolution. In 1789, as the food-price crisis worsened, Parisian women marched on Versailles to get “the Baker, the Baker’s wife, and the Baker’s son” (the king and his family).29 Two years later, a sugarcane colony rose against its French colonizers, with aspirations to the kinds of liberty, equality, and fraternity that were rallying cries in the metropole. Nor were the Haitian and French uprisings alone in an era of worldwide agrarian revolt that stretched from Russia to Peru to North America.30

To feed their workers, empires needed food. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin quoted Cecil Rhodes, the colonialist whose patrician statue has only just been torn down from the steps of the University of Cape Town, as saying in 1895, “I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread’, ‘bread’, ‘bread’, and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism… . The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and

butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”31 Two decades later, in 1917, Lenin found himself at the center of a revolution whose slogan was “Peace, Land, and Bread,” building on years of bread riots led, as in the French Revolution 130 years earlier, by women.32

Empire provided Europe’s industrial workers with cheap food, though at huge cost to people in other parts of the planet. European empire created networks of commodity trade that made the Third World, as Mike Davis argues.33 One example from an old British colony demonstrates the generalized contempt for peasants held throughout European empires. During the 1845–48 potato famine, poverty and market forces instructed the Irish to work for a living, even if there was no employment to be had and no food they could afford: at the height of the famine, Ireland was exporting around three hundred thousand tons of grain a year to feed the mother country. That the ensuing famine would destroy large parts of the Irish population was, if anything, a bonus. Charles Trevelyan, the British assistant secretary to the Treasury, who controlled funds for famine relief, was quite clear on the matter: “the real evil” was “not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil … of the [Irish] people.”34 Trevelyan received a knighthood for his services to the realm while Ireland starved, and wrote that as a way of curbing unchecked Irish population growth, “the famine is a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.”35

Other British colonies were subject to the same forces. Indian customs of feeding the poor were replaced, at gunpoint, by free market relations so that India could export grain.36 As we saw in chapter 2’s discussion of money, military force is never far from financial power, and sometimes the latter can be wielded to pay for the former. Under colonial rule, India was tasked with funding, through taxation, Britain’s worldwide imperialism: “Ordinary Indians … paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896– 98).”37 Colonial exploitation intensified yet further when Germany

and the United States—and quickly Japan and the rest of Europe— joined Britain on the gold standard after 1871. The value of India’s silver-based rupees collapsed by more than a third between 1873 and 1894—while its payments to Britain were denominated in gold.38

Market mechanisms and violence went hand in hand with the flow of cheap food from Asia to Europe. When Britain’s warships blockaded China’s Pearl River in November 1839, the struggle was over silver and opium—the latter cultivated on plantations across India. The East India Company had monopolized the production and trade of opium at the end of the eighteenth century. A rapidly growing volume of opium found its way—illegally but profitably—to China. The Chinese didn’t need to trade with the English, but the English wanted Chinese tea. And for this they needed silver. With the opium trade, Eric Wolf wryly observes, “the Europeans finally had something to sell to the Chinese.”39 That trade was threatened in 1839 when the Chinese government “refused British smugglers food, water and trade until they promised to stop hauling their shipfuls of opium into China.”40 The first of two Opium Wars was waged over the next few years. At stake was control of the Chinese market. As China was progressively opened to European power and commerce after 1842, among the greatest windfalls for the British was their ability to secure tea plants. By 1851, Robert Fortune had moved some two thousand tea plants and seventeen thousand tea seeds from China—via Hong Kong, then under British control—to the Botanic Garden in Calcutta.41 By the end of the century, the English were drinking tea grown in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not China.42

Britain turned botanical imperialism into something of an art. Rubber seeds were smuggled out of Brazil, nurtured at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, and trialed in south and southeast Asia. Sisal, used to manufacture rope and agricultural twine, made a similar migration, from southern Mexico to Asia. For colonial expansion to overcome the malaria endemic to tropical latitudes, cinchona—the source of quinine—was cultivated and spread far from its native home in Brazil.43

One of the more significant agricultural innovations emerged, like so many before it, as a result of war and geopolitics: fertilizer. Until the early twentieth century, most inorganic fertilizer was mined. Saltpeter—potassium nitrate (KNO3)—was an important mineral in agriculture and in gunpowder. In Europe, tensions around managing such food supply inputs helped, as the historian Avner Offer argues, to precipitate the First World War.44 The Allies oversaw the blockade of Chilean saltpeter mines as a means to cripple German and Austro-Hungarian food supplies, and military campaigns spurred the commercial development of prewar technologies of atmospheric nitrogen fixing, pioneered by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.45 Their actions transformed the earth: planetary nitric oxide (NO) and ammonia (NH3) levels are now five times their pre- 1800 levels,46 and the energy required to manufacture ammonia comes directly from cheap fossil fuel, as we discuss in chapter 6. This is one of the reasons why up to ten calories of oil are now required to produce a single calorie of food.47

The twentieth century saw other changes that made these biotechnological interventions seem trivial. The spread of revolutionary communist ideas was the realization of Rhodes’s fears and those of his fellow bourgeois. The Russian Revolution was every capitalist’s nightmare made real—and governments sought ways to manage and accommodate restive workers rather than run the risk of falling under their hammers and sickles. A former Spanish colony, Mexico, was the site of one such compromise among workers, capitalists, and the state.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution began as an affair of the middle class but soon began to exceed it, with workers and peasants making militant demands. In 1934, Lázaro Cárdenas was elected Mexico’s president on a platform to meet those demands: he instituted wide-ranging land reform, redistributing 47 percent of all cultivatable land48—and began to nationalize the assets of the oil industry, including the refineries of the Standard Oil Company. Control over cheap energy was a central part of the project of Mexican corporatism.

For the Standard Oil Company’s founding family, the Rockefellers, this was nothing short of an outrage. It was also further evidence of the grave threat posed by a growing population and a limited food supply. There was a general fear among the American ruling class that Malthus’s prediction might come true: a collapse of society precipitated when an urban population’s hunger outstrips its food supply.

Philanthropists set themselves the task of saving society. “The World Food Problem, Agriculture, and the Rockefeller Foundation,” a strategic document issued by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1951, almost a decade after it had begun to work in Mexico, crystallized the themes of insurgency, population, and food: “Whether additional millions … will become Communists will depend partly on whether the Communist world or the free world fulfils its promises. Hungry people are lured by promises, but they may be won by deeds. Communism makes attractive promises to underfed peoples. Democracy must not only promise as much, but must deliver more.”49

The foundation went to work in Mexico in 1943, recruiting a brilliant young plant breeder, Norman Borlaug, to develop crops to prevent urban hunger. That it was urban and not rural hunger that troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for people in rural areas—where most of the world’s hunger was concentrated—was of little concern. Hunger began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature. It’s here—in the bourgeois concern about that rule and its need for worker quiescence—that we find the origin of what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

The term Green Revolution is one to savor. It was coined in 1968 by William Gaud, an administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, who spoke glowingly of a range of interventions: “[Recent] developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like

that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”50 In other words, the Green Revolution used agriculture, new crop varieties, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, landholding mechanisms, marketing approaches, and state power to maintain cheap labor, care, raw materials, and—to acknowledge Iran’s impact on international oil markets—energy.

Mexico’s Green Revolution program is the embodiment of the regime of cheap food. The orthodox narrative says that Borlaug “realized that Mexico’s traditional wheat-growing highland areas could not produce enough wheat to make the country self-sufficient in wheat production.”51 So he set about breeding varieties that would allow cheap wheat to flow freely in urban areas. For this work he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and such is the allure of this history of the Green Revolution that governments and philanthropists have sought to repeat its success elsewhere, recently through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. But the official story of the Green Revolution doesn’t have it quite right about Mexico. For the majority of Mexican peasants, corn (maize) was a far more important crop than wheat. Nearly ten times more land was planted with corn (4,781,759 hectares, or 11,815,984 acres) than wheat (555,756 hectares, or 1,373,303 acres) in 1950.52 Wheat tended to be grown by commercial farmers with models and resources more comparable to their US counterparts than those of corn production. Similarly, when the Green Revolution was introduced into India, the crop at the spear tip of research investment was corn, which accounted for less than 3 percent of the country’s agricultural output and isn’t a staple there at all.53

Seed technology wasn’t the only mechanism needed for certain crops to jump continents and begin to be cultivated globally. The Green Revolution required agricultural extension services and government field workers to proselytize on behalf of the new crops. It also needed national governments to subsidize farmers, through agricultural marketing boards, to grow more of those crops. Cheap food required the suppression of political dissent. The Green Revolution was, after all, a package of reforms designed to prevent

the Red revolutionary political goal of many peasants’ and landless workers’ movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform. That’s why, in its implementation, the Green Revolution was often an authoritarian program.54

It’s possible to see the Green Revolution as a success. Globally, grain output more than doubled—and yields, the amount of output per unit area, more than doubled—between 1950 and 1980. In the heartlands of the Green Revolution, yields grew even faster. India’s wheat yields shot up 87 percent between 1960 and 1980, close to what American corn farmers experienced in the two decades after 1935.55 A rising share of all this food was traded on the world market, with global grain exports increasing 179 percent over the 1960s and 1970s.56 The political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked. Food prices declined 3 percent a year between 1952 and 1972, three times faster than the already steep decline in commodity prices across the twentieth century.57 Real prices for rice, maize, and wheat declined yet further from 1976 to 2002.58 Perhaps the greatest success was the effective quieting of peasant demands for land reform and urban demands for political change.

Yet the long Green Revolution’s prodigious output achievements did not reduce hunger. If China—where the agricultural revolution was decidedly redder but no less productive for it—is removed from the analysis, the ranks of the hungry swelled by more than 11 percent over the course of the Green Revolution.59 And while reporters are happy to celebrate the fact that “India’s wheat production doubled” from 1965 to 197260 and rose steadily throughout the 1970s, the amount that Indians actually ate hardly improved over the same period.

Figure 4. Food and protein supply in India. Source: FAOSTAT, www.fao.org/faostat/en/.

India’s pesticide consumption increased seventeenfold from 1955 to 2005, with a large share of that directed at the state of Punjab.61 Communities where the Green Revolution was practiced most intensively have, more recently, become cancer clusters, with some areas officially declared “cancer stricken villages.”62 But again, the Green Revolution wasn’t directed toward Indian villagers—just those workers in the urban cash nexus who might nurse ideas about defecting from capitalism. Through trade agreements, subsidies, and technology, governments have managed food prices, particularly for staples and processed food. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those of fresh fruits and vegetables.63 To get their recommended daily five fresh fruits and vegetables, residents of low-income countries would need to spend at least half of their household income on just these five healthy items, with households in rural areas spending a greater percentage: 70 percent of rural residents in low-income countries

can’t afford to buy three servings of the cheapest vegetables or two servings of fruit.64

Since 1990, wage rates for workers in countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been relatively static. This was a direct consequence, as we noted in chapter 3, of anti-labor policies that scholars aptly call “wage repression.” Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it makes sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as no accident that a foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is chicken in Mexico—a direct consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), technology, and the US soybean industry. NAFTA originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted to “modernize” its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into urban circuits of industry.65 The strategy worked: Mexico’s campesino agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the 2003 El Campo No Aguanta Más (The countryside can’t take it anymore) protests throughout the country.66 Circuits of migration and pools of labor for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was cheap.

Meat has been at the epicenter of the global dietary transformation since the 1970s. As we consider the future of the long Green Revolution, we turn to examine both how we became an increasingly carnivorous planet and how the logic that allows meat to be manufactured cheaply is twinned with the rise of “nutritionism,” a way of treating “hunger not by directly addressing poverty but by prioritizing the delivery of individual molecular components of food to those lacking them.”67 A grim future of cheap food presents itself.

Figure 5. Percentage real annual food price changes in Mexico (MX), South Korea (KR), Brazil (BR), China (CH), and the United Kingdom (UK), 1990–2012. Source: Wiggins and Keats 2015, 10.

FROM VEGETABLES WITH A LITTLE MEAT TO POVERTY WITH ADDED VITAMINS

The Canadian food scholar Tony Weis has pointed to the scale of recent changes in meat consumption: “In 1961, just over three billion people ate an average of 23 kg [51 pounds] of meat and 5 kg [11 pounds] of eggs a year. By 2011, 7 billion people ate 43 kg [95 pounds] of meat and 10 kg [22 pounds] of eggs a year… . In a mere half-century, from 1961 to 2010, the global population of slaughtered animals leapt from roughly 8 to 64 billion, which will double again to 120 billion by 2050 if current rates of growth continue.”68

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Yet the industrial labor techniques of simplification,

compartmentalization, and specialization first developed in sugar production have found their way into meat production too. Feed and oilseed crops, made possible in the Global South partly by the spread of the Green Revolution, form part of what Weis terms “the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex.”69 The creation of markets for uniform grain and meat commodities—such as the Chicago Board of Trade—made it possible for these commodities to become not only cheap food but the backing for financial instruments. These instruments in turn require the uniformity, homogenization, and industrialization of the crops they transform.70 Such industry demands the invention of new veterinary practices—from intensive breeding to hormonal supplementation to antibiotic use to concentrated animal feeding operations—which have had globally transformative effects on the quality of food, soil, water, and air. Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.

One result is a meat-production system that can turn a fertile egg and a nine-pound (four-kilogram) bag of feed into a five-pound (two- kilogram) chicken in five weeks.71 Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to twenty weeks from egg to thirty-five-pound (sixteen-kilogram) bird.72 Other animals have seen similar advances from a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations, and global supply chains. Half of the world’s pork is eaten in China, and its feed import sources are a planetary affair. As are the consequences: 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.73 One pound (about half a kilogram) of beef requires 1,799 gallons (6,810 liters) of water and seven pounds (three kilograms) of feed to produce.74

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system. This is one of the reasons why meat is so cheap. Cheap labor is another. The danger is to see “factory farming” as an environmental question and “factory production” as a social question. Given the centrality of cheap labor power in the US neoliberal meat-packing sector, we might also point out the centrality of Latino immigrants.

The delivery of this cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the United States, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms— such as Hormel—to destroy union power and replace unionized workers with low-wage immigrant labor.75 The other was the destabilization of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by NAFTA, which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labor, unemployed workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US border to the other.76

Despite the considerable environmental and governmental subsidies afforded the meat industry, many people are unable to afford its products. For them the private sector and the international development community have offered an alternative: improved nutrition of industrially produced plant-based food. This is more than a little ironic: industrialization and the Green Revolution bred nutrition out of many of the staples in the food system.77 Those nutrients were casualties of the drive to maximize the yield, shelf life, and consumer acceptability of a standardized commodity. Reintroducing them is a means of increasing the profitability of an ultraprocessed food substance. In a way, the logic of cheap meat production comes full circle, with additives in food designed not to produce profitable animal flesh but to sustain cheap human labor, which, in its turn, will produce more profit further down the line.

You can see this logic at work most acutely in the Global South. The G8’s 2013 summit was titled “Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science,” which points rather clearly to the direction of its—and its partners’—thought. It launched an initiative on hunger, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to bring the work of the long Green Revolution to Africa. Recall that the Green Revolution began in the twentieth century as an intervention in class politics, a way to manage the political concerns of hungry and angry urban insurgents. The New Alliance was built on foundations suggested at the World Economic Forum—a group of business interests that the Financial Times once called the “masters

of the universe”78—to address concerns of urban unrest while developing markets for agriculture and food industries.

This helps explain why the New Alliance’s largest donor is Yara, the Norwegian fertilizer giant. Yara is keen to address the decades of export-oriented asset stripping of African soils. Deficiencies of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, selenium, and other trace elements are a result of their shipment away both under colonial regimes and after independence, in the latter case to repay the World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans taken out by postcolonial countries in the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s not just soil that’s ripe for amendment—humans are too. The G8 plan requires that foreign corporations be granted increased access to African markets and land and that African bodies be supplemented with fortified processed food to manage some of the diseases associated with poverty and an inability to access food. This is the quintessence of the era of poverty with added vitamins, an agricultural policy that makes it harder for the rural poor to thrive in farming but treats their penury with micronutrients, a policy that combines exploitation with a strategy to prolong and manage that exploitation.79

Here we come to an important point about cheap food regimes: they guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well —as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest. Indeed, capitalism’s cheap food regimes are, as Farshad Araghi quips, hunger regimes.80

Meanwhile, capitalism’s agricultural frontiers continue to press against the world’s peasants, who provide 75 percent of the food in large parts of the Global South.81 But while the present is bleak, with agricultural frontiers pushing through Amazonia and displacing peasants around the world, a new wrinkle has appeared in the twenty-first century that will fatally undermine capitalism’s five- century-long food regime: climate change. The imagery of the frontier lends itself easily to thinking only about land. But the past two centuries have witnessed a very different kind of frontier

movement: the enclosure of the atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions.

In the twenty-first century, agriculture and forestry (which includes land clearance for cash cropping) contribute between a quarter and a third of greenhouse gas emissions.82 They have to, because they’re profoundly energy intensive and have become more so since the 1940s.83 That’s a big problem, because there are no more atmospheric commons to enclose and no obvious way to keep the costs of climate change off capitalism’s ledgers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the faltering global farm, whose productivity growth has been slowing, just as it did for English farmers in the middle of the eighteenth century. In American grain agriculture, labor productivity growth has slowed by a third since the 1980s, and Indian wheat yield growth declined by 80 percent between the 1980s and 1990s.84 Agrobiotechnology’s promise of a new agricultural revolution has so far been worse than empty—failing to deliver a new yield boom, creating superweeds and superbugs that can withstand glyphosate and other poisons, and sustaining the cheap food model that is driving the ongoing state shift in the world’s climate system.85

Frontiers always allowed cash-crop agriculture to boom by treating soil, work, and life as props to advance labor productivity. Climate change represents something much more than a closing frontier—it is something akin to an implosion of the cheap nature model, bringing not the end of easy and cheap natures but a dramatic reversal. As a growing body of research demonstrates, climate change suppresses agricultural productivity. Climate refers to extremely diverse phenomena, including drought, extreme rainfall, heat waves, and cold snaps. Braudel’s “plants of civilization”—plus soy, the paradigmatic neoliberal crop—have already experienced what agronomists call yield suppression as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How much remains a matter of debate, but many analyses land somewhere in the ballpark of a 3 percent reduction in yields since the 1980s—a value of five billion dollars per year from 1981 to 2002.86

Worse, climate change promises absolute declines. Each successive degree Celsius increase in average annual global temperature is accompanied by a greater risk of nonlinear and dramatic effects on global farming. Agricultural yields will decline between 5 and more than 50 percent in the next century, depending on the time frame, crop, location, and extent to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today’s prodigious rates.87 World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by 2050.88 That means that not just the climate but also capitalism’s agricultural model is in the midst of a state shift, one of the abrupt and irreversible moments of change we encountered in the introduction. Bound up with the global factory and global family has been the global farm. With climate change, that food system will break in the coming century.

Through climate change, the end of cheap food threatens a dramatic end for capitalism’s ecology, but such food made it possible for cheap workers to survive. Food is not, however, the only requirement for cheap care to be sustained. Historically, after the cost of food, the most important cost facing workers throughout Europe from the sixteenth century on was that of energy. Indeed, it is through the atmospheric consequences of cheap energy that cheap food will end. To understand how, it is to cheap energy that we now turn.