The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 10

Globalization and the Agrarian World

PHILIP MCMICHAEL

INTRODUCTION

Over a century ago, Mahatma Gandhi posed the question: ‘If it took Britain the exploitation of half the globe to be what it is today, how many globes would India need?’ One might just as provocatively ask this question today, noting that the division of the world under colonialism continues to shape the uneven consumption of resources, and that it is now commonplace to substitute the United States for Britain and China for India.

The British ‘workshop of the world’ model depended on an unprecedented radical experiment of outsourcing its agriculture to the colonies. Today, while the United States and Europe, and to some extent Japan, continue to protect their intensive farm sectors, the model of agricultural outsourcing continues, and is expected to intensify with the rising costs of Northern farm subsidies. Meanwhile, the corporate reconstruction of food consumption relations on a world scale increasingly overrides customary (subsistence) food cultures in the global South, where the bulk of rural populations reside, and consume 60 per cent of the food they produce. For the roughly 4 billion of the world’s population excluded from the global marketplace, to access land and resources means competing with the combined pressures of agro-exporting and the global supermarket revolution. To the extent that the agrarian South represents the vortex of globalization, it is the major focus of this chapter.

Pressure ...