Donatella Gasparro suggests the real culprit is capitalism, and we need a post-growth alternative.
After more than ten years of involvement in agri-food matters from a bizarrely wide variety of angles – from organising farmers’ markets to studying agronomy, from sociological perspectives to ethnographic fieldwork in rural Italy, from Marxist agrarian studies to reviving abandoned olive groves, chainsaw in hand – I can say with a certain degree of confidence that food systems, technically, don’t exist.
Let me explain. When I say “food systems don’t exist” I mean that they don’t – and have never – existed in isolation from the rest of “the economy”, whatever that economy is at any given moment, in any given place.
In our globalised, neoliberal, industrial, digitalised, financialised (the list could continue), but fundamentally capitalist economy, “food systems” are a unit that can hardly be isolated. Despite the obvious peculiarities that “food” carries in itself – that make the working of this sector under capitalist mechanisms always clumsy, tied to awkward subsidy schemes and in a permanent crisis – food production, processing, distribution, and consumption are fully enmeshed in the fabric of the capitalist mode of production, and of multiple other “systems” that cannot but systemically intersect with the “food” one.
I’m not only talking about all the other products that come from the land that we automatically exclude when we limit ourselves to the category of “food” (fibre, wood, biofuels – and we could stretch it to mineral resources and even energy). The capitalist “food system” is dependent on industrial fertiliser production, heavily industrialised food processing, ever-more-digitalised machinery, energy from all kinds of (unsustainable) sources, and ever more complex global supply chains – all in the context of coercive market dynamics and relentless profit motives that shape and condition all of the above. Of little use are then the seemingly cutting-edge institutional discursive efforts of using an abstract “systems approach” to “transform” agrifood systems, if the very capitalist dynamics that orchestrate these systems are left completely unaddressed.
When we express dismay that the food system is the main cause of transgression of planetary boundaries, I interpret it as: capitalism is the main cause of transgression of planetary boundaries. Rooted in accumulation, profit pursuit, and extracting value from nature and people, there is no way that food production could operate differently under its principles.
Where are the post-growth food systems?
It is for reasons similar to these that I refrained from focusing on agri-food early on and switched to the critical social sciences, influenced by heterodox economics. One of the most compelling frameworks to emerge in the last decades, as both a comprehensive analytical lens and a radical proposal for a new economy, is the degrowth/post-growth perspective.
Economic growth that doesn’t destroy the planet (as it did so far) – is a contradiction in terms and nothing more than an unattainable myth.
With clear anti-capitalist stances, degrowth scholarship repoliticises the environmentalist question, pointing out that “green growth” – i.e. economic growth that doesn’t destroy the planet (as it did so far) – is a contradiction in terms and nothing more than an unattainable myth. And with this simple, scientific fact, the entire institutional infrastructure of Sustainable Development Goals and Green Deals – built to consolidate the growth-obsessed status quo rather than bringing any real change – implodes. In fact, much work from the post-growth and degrowth scholarship has gone into envisioning Green Deals without growth that boldly merge environmental and social justice policy measures for a transition away from capitalism, with a “non-reformist reform” approach.
Yet, food systems are also remarkably non-existent in the post-growth policy literature, with matters of land and food often being treated only from the bottom-up, grassroots initiatives perspectives (with food coops, community-supported agriculture et similia often being in the spotlight). Yet we cannot envision a different, non-capitalist economy that puts human needs and ecological health at the centre, without putting land and food production center stage at all scales.
European post-growth policy scholarship seldom engages with questions of food production, land ownership and concentration, and agri-food supply chains, missing the opportunity to contribute to debates on the largest item of EU expenditure: the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). And I get it: this piece of institutional genius is a jargon nightmare even for those who work in the sector. Yet it has defined European agriculture for six decades in socially, economically and environmentally irreversible ways, and any economic proposal that wishes to overcome the current socio-economic impasse must grapple, if not with participating in the never-ending story of CAP’s wicked reforms, at least with attempting to actively dismantle and substitute it, with a careful transition that, really, leaves no one behind.
Bringing back the agri-food
Now, I have argued that food systems don’t quite exist as separate entities under the capitalist mode of production. Still, as mentioned earlier, agri-food matters remain rather special within these economic conditions. As in, food systems have never operated smoothly under neoliberal capitalism: they have always required some form of state or institutional intervention, subsidies, special quotas, and so on.
As long as economic growth remains the goal of national, European, and global economies, no CAP reforms, conditionalities, carbon taxes, payments for ecosystem services, and farm-to-fork strategies will significantly mitigate the catastrophic impact that the capitalist mode of food production has on both people and nature.
But the inability to make agri-food systems function effectively under the invisible hand of the market does not indicate a flaw in agriculture as a sector – it highlights a flaw in capitalism as an economic system. The unique characteristics of “the first sector” are not errors in the system; they are inherent to life itself. When agri-food systems fail under capitalism, it demonstrates that socio-ecological reproduction (that is, the continuation of human and non-human life) is incompatible with capitalism. Even when institutional mechanisms somewhat control market forces, the conditions of farmers, rural workers, peasants, and (agro)ecosystems remain dire, and many issues remain unresolved.
As long as economic growth remains the goal of national, European, and global economies, and as long as profit and distorted market logics dominate (re)production, no CAP reforms, conditionalities, carbon taxes, payments for ecosystem services, and farm-to-fork strategies will significantly mitigate the catastrophic impact that the capitalist mode of (food) production has on both people and nature.
That is why I invite post-growth policy scholars and advocates to urgently integrate agri-food issues into institutional reforms aimed at dismantling capitalist naturalisation from within, so as to join forces with agri-food organisations that have been fighting for fairer EU agricultural policies, establishing the necessary link with broader political-economic changes and radical reforms across the economy, and broadening the horizon beyond farmers’ survival. How can European- and national-level post-growth policies defuse capitalist food production mechanisms while enabling territories and people to self-determine their agroecologies?
Non-reformist agri-food reforms must necessarily, for instance, reconsider land distribution and land concentration, and the feared “land reform” binomial might need to be urgently reintroduced. The much-wished-for “relocalisation” of economies that degrowth proponents advocate needs ad hoc policies that start on larger scales to reorient and redistribute production that coercive geographical specialisations have long skewed at the expense of the global majority. “Peasant” and “agroecological” farming cannot keep on remaining empty signifiers with no real-world manifestations in Europe: the remnants of “peasant” farming are disappearing with the silent generation, and all efforts deployed so far to salvage what remains of those agrarian economies have only aimed at museification, touristification and spectacle for the outsider’s eye. Last but not least, the emptying of European countrysides and their profound demographic crises must be addressed hand-in-hand with (re)production matters, in post-growth policy plans that truly work towards centring needs, justice, territories’ self-determination and a thriving (agro)ecology.
