Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho

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СКАЧАТЬ the world’s leading oil reservoirs in 2007 that contained proven or probable reserves in excess of 500 million barrels. According to Klare (2012), this study affirmed two crucial findings. First, production is declining more than suspected and, secondly, the rate of decline is increasing each year. So, all of the major oil wells that have driven industrialisation and accumulation over the past few decades have now peaked and are rapidly depleting.

      This crisis-inducing tendency has two major implications for global accumulation. First, buoyant demand from countries such as China and India has led to a scramble for the last remaining oil resources on the planet, which, in turn, has sparked a shallow resource boom (Klare 2012). At the vanguard of new frontiers of extractivism, oil, coal and gas companies are extracting hydrocarbons from tar sands, shale gas and oil, and from deep-water drilling – all referred to as unconventional hydrocarbons (Yergin 2012). In the US alone there are 800 000 oil and gas fracking wells, with a target of 1 million to be achieved by the end of 2015. Unconventional hydrocarbons are expensive, their extraction has serious environmental impacts, they are increasingly implicated in geopolitical conflicts and are difficult to source. Currently, with overproduction of oil due to fracking in the US, and Saudi Arabia’s continued output and reluctance to push up the price of oil, global oil prices are declining. However, this is not sustainable given supply constraints in the medium to long term. Petro-state economies are not only hit badly by declining oil prices in the short term, but the shallow resource boom also means that oil-price volatility is likely to continue, with ramifications through the global economy in the medium to long term. In the end, peak oil and the fact that oil is a finite resource will also limit the future of unconventional hydrocarbons.

      The second implication of the hydrocarbons boom is its undermining of efforts to mitigate climate change. The interests at stake are powerful – not only the interests of the top oil-producing countries (such as the US, ranked third by the IEA), but also those of some of the most powerful corporations in the world. These include the world’s most valuable company, unlisted state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco, with annual revenue of at least US$150 billion; the world’s top-10 oil companies, ranked by their reserves of oil and gas, which are all state-run corporations; and, ranked by revenue, five of the world’s top-six listed companies, which are oil majors – Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Sinopec and PetroChina (Hiscock 2012).

      To ensure we mitigate the effects of climate change, such as slowing down the rate of the Antarctic’s destruction, reducing the rate at which sea levels are rising and generally lowering greenhouse-gas emission levels to prevent runaway global warming, current fossil-fuel extraction and usage has to be abandoned. Yet this solution is not on the agenda (Klein 2014). In short, the close relationship between the oil-peak-driven resource boom and the climate crisis vividly demonstrates the logic of ecocide at work within contemporary capitalism.

      Food-system crisis

      In the first half of the twentieth century, the US agricultural system underwent a dramatic shift with the adoption of Fordist mass production and consumption systems. This increasingly tended to remake the international division of labour and food systems inherited from colonialism in the peripheries of capitalism (McMichael and Raynolds 1994). After World War II, monoculture production and fossil-fuel-driven, chemical-based, mass-scale agriculture became the norm in the US. This system also became part of the country’s international response to the cold war, the end of British hegemony and the need to reconstruct Europe through the Marshall Plan (Friedmann 2004). This model was therefore exported to various parts of the world as part of the Pax Americana, and had implications for family farms in Europe and peasant agriculture in Latin America and Asia as the Green Revolution, as it was known, was rolled out. This process has continued with neoliberal globalisation over the past three decades, through structural-adjustment programmes, through pressure brought to bear by the World Trade Organization to liberalise agriculture and promote the patenting of genetic material, and through alliances of governments and transnational corporations, such as the G7’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa. Today a new global division of labour prevails in the agricultural system, centred on transnational corporations.

      Globalised industrial agriculture is controlled by a few transnational corporations at different points in the value chain, from land, seeds and agrochemicals, to biotechnology, trading, retailing and consumer-goods companies. Hilary (2013: 120–121) summarises the global domination of transnational corporations in the food systems as follows:

      Just three transnational corporations – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control between them over half the world’s entire commercial seed market; all three are also ranked in the top ten list of world agro-chemical companies, which Syngenta dominates with close to 20 per cent market share, and all three are major players in the biotechnology industry. The four largest commodity traders – ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus – the ‘ABCD companies’ – enjoy significant power over world trade in grains, oilseeds and palm oil. The top ten food processing corporations control 28 per cent of the global market, with Nestlé far and away the largest single company, followed by PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. In addition, the world’s largest ten food retailers have more than doubled their share of the global market over the last decade as the major supermarket chains of Europe and the USA have sought to expand their operations … this intensity of market concentration means that a group of no more than 40 transnational corporations effectively control the global food regime from farm to fork, and have amassed spectacular profits as a result of their market domination.

      To understand the food-system crisis we need to concentrate our focus not on single problems in the food system or on the inability of the food system to provide access to certain caloric levels. Such a focus ends up in technocratic problem solving inside the system. To appreciate the systemic nature of the food crisis requires a focus on the systemic logic of the transnational industrial agricultural system and how it engenders systemic food crises. The spread of this systemic dynamic, albeit uneven in the global political economy, is grounded in five contradictions.

      First, it creates food injustice, or what Vandana Shiva (2013) terms ‘hunger by design’. In 1996 the Food and Agriculture Organization claimed there were about 800 000 hungry people on the planet. Today there are 1.52 billion hungry people and 2.56 billion who are food-stressed (Hilary 2013: 119). The irony of this situation is that farm workers, peasants and rural communities are some of the hungriest in the world, even though they are at the front line of food production. With dramatic increases in global food prices, first in 2006 to 2008 and then in 2010 to 2012, the poor and workers have been hit the hardest. These hikes sparked food rebellions in at least 40 countries, and demands for bread in the case of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet in 2010 alone the world’s largest grain and agrochemical companies made profits between them of US$20 billion (Hilary 2013: 121).

      Second, the industrial agricultural food system wastes large quantities of food at several points in the value chain: harvesting, handling, storage, processing, packaging and retail. In South Africa, estimates suggest that thirty-one per cent of annual food production (about 10 million tonnes of 31 million tonnes of food produced) is lost to waste in some form or another. Food waste is highest for fruit and vegetables: over fifty per cent produced is wasted along the value chain.⁹ СКАЧАТЬ