Trade specialisation and the rise of globalism
The notion of free trade was proposed quite early in capitalist history, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by David Ricardo. The justification was international co-operation in place of nationalist competition, which seemed to make sense. However, there are too many crucial issues, notably ecological issues, which the theory sweeps aside. Its basis was the notion of ‘comparative advantage’, according to which each country should specialise in only the few products in which it could ‘do best’ (Ricardo, 1951). We cannot over-emphasise the importance of this point: under liberalism, free trade is equivalent to specialisation.
The most obvious ecological issue is to discount the impact of transport (plus refrigeration, etc.), hence the whole issue around food miles, but there is also something deeper.
The natural approach was always to cultivate a wide spread of crops, since, while any given year might be disastrous for some, this would not matter because it would be good for others. Every year is in some way ‘extreme’ and you may lose some crops completely: for example, the broad bean (Vicia faba) is prone to attack by a form of aphid, which is normally controlled by its natural predator, ladybirds (Coccinellidae). However, the disruption of seasons caused by climate change may lead to the latter breeding at the wrong time, in which case you lose the whole crop. Nevertheless, there will always be a bumper harvest of something else to compensate so, in that sense, there is no such thing as a ‘bad year’. If you are specialised, on the contrary, both your livelihood as a farmer, and the food security of the consumer, will be jeopardised. Specialisation in agriculture is therefore antithetical to resilience. Although for the global South one could obviously say there is some comparative advantage for tropical crops, this argument is deceptive: the South’s real ‘advantage’ under imperialism is cheap labour and lax environmental rules.
Given the exploitative potential, from an imperialist perspective the liberalisation of global trade seems a no-brainer.
Why, then, did it take so long to implement? The answer lies in the fact that a counter-trend also exists. One of imperialism’s key dualities lies in the tension between its globalising face and its nationalistic/fascist/military face. Early imperialism, while highly internationalised at some level (notably investment), was also hyper-nationalist. In particular, wartime brought home the importance of food security as an offshoot of national security (thus an essentially militaristic definition). Accordingly, in the postwar/pre-neo-liberal phase (i.e. 1945 through to the 1980s), a strange situation prevailed: while the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) began tentatively to explore free trade in industry, in agriculture the capitalist powers actually became more nationalistic. The UK augmented its food self-sufficiency to a point where (by the early 1980s) 95 per cent of indigenous-type food was locally grown (Barling, et al., 2008, p.11). That period in the history of food imperialism was extremely important, because it laid the foundation for where we are today. While colloquially we tend to call the global North ‘industrialised’ (which seems to imply the South is agricultural), in reality the powerhouse of agriculture is also in the North, while the South, owing to the impact of ‘development’ policies which throttled rural investment, must depend on imports either of food itself or of agricultural technology. Thus the nationalism of the core served to restrict and deny that of the periphery.
More specifically, the systemic power of the North is concretised under two aspects:
The issue of staples (starchy crops that supply the majority of carbohydrates and are thus strategic for food security). Parts of the core where agribusiness productivity is extremely high become major staple food exporters (notably of wheat) to the South, often displacing indigenous staples (sorghum in India, maize in Mexico) in the process. Here, we again see how a system, by being simplified and homogenised, is easier to control.
It is precisely on the basis of being in control of the world food system that imperialism felt safe – under neo-liberalism and globalisation, from the early 1980s onward – to realise more fully the exploitative potential of ‘free’ trade in industry. While a tendency to import consumer manufactures from the South was always latent in imperialism – as shown in the predictions of Hobson (Hobson, 1902) – it took a long time to realise. I would argue that it required the North to build its food empire first.
Global value chains in food. The point of value chains is to fragment productive processes, sub-contracting tasks to small firms for whom the core company has no responsibility; if they go bust, someone else will pick up the contract. This has spawned a whole terminology: ‘flexibility’, ‘zero stocks’, etc. (Biel, 2000). Initially, this system was experimented with in industry but, during the latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s, the value chain approach was extended to food. With the Uruguay Round of GATT (1986–94) and inauguration of the World Trade Organization (1995), agricultural trade was subsumed into global accumulation, along with the ‘trading’ of intellectual property rights, which were of key significance for food-related technologies. From a food-regimes standpoint, there was at the same time an effect in accentuating the North-South divide: when the limitations of productivism were revealed within the global North – its focus solely on quantity had led to qualitative decline (Welch and Graham, 1999) – the intensive sector was internationalised (Marsden and Morley, 2014, p.8).
Once agricultural trade was globalised, this took to a whole new level the possibilities for controlling systems by homogenising them.
The effect was notably to promote an absurd expectation that there should be no seasonality in what we consume and that every crop must be available throughout the year. To take the case of asparagus, this can be grown perfectly well in England (as the author does), but only for six weeks per year, which is fine because that makes it special and there is a sense of expectation. Under globalisation, it is imported from Peru. Asparagus makes significant demands on water so, if there was any genuine comparative advantage, it would be from a country with plentiful water, but Peru is actually water-poor compared to the UK (Castanas, 2014). The legitimate aspiration is for people to have plenty of good-quality food every day; the insane aspiration is to have strawberries or asparagus 365 days a year. Yet the latter is what forms the basis of the flagship advertising campaign of the Tesco supermarket chain in Britain, with the slogan ‘freshly clicked’ (illustrated with graphics of asparagus and strawberries): you need only click your touchpad and they source the goods globally. The consumer has no connection with, or responsibility for, how this happens.
Homogenised systems are good for exploitation but bad for sustainability. Even now, neo-liberal economists shamelessly promote ‘free trade’ in food as a security against climate-induced scarcity (for example, Purdue University, 2016). The reality, however, is the opposite: any setup which is homogenised, de-localised and non-modular is vulnerable to shocks and system collapse; there is no security for any country, community, or city which depends on such a setup. Such a critique helps take our grasp of dependency beyond the point reached by the Dependency school: we now see it in terms of systemic vulnerabilities.