The Dictionary of Human Geography

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overseas produce ushered in the first wave of

agricultural protectionism, and in so doing

established the foundations of the European

‘farm problem’, whose political economic re-

percussions continue to resonate in the halls of

the European Commission, the GATT/WTO

and trade ministries around the world

(Fennell, 1997).

The agrarian question was a product of a

particular political economic conjuncture,

but was made to speak to a number of key

theoretical concerns that arose from Kautsky’s

careful analysis of the consequences of the

European farm crisis: falling prices, rents and

profits coupled with global market integration

and international competition. In brief, he

discovered that: (i) there was no tendency for

the size distribution of farms to change over

time (capitalist enterprises were not simply

displacing peasant farms – indeed, German

statistics showed that middle peasants were

increasing their command of the cultivated

area); (ii) technical efficiency is not a precon-

dition for survivorship (but self-exploitation

might be); and (iii) changes driven by compe-

tition and market integration did transform

agriculture, but largely by shaping the produc-

tion mix of different enterprises, and by

deepening debt-burdens and patterns of

out-migrationrather than by radically recon-

figuring the size distribution of farms. The

crisis of European peasants and landlords

in the late nineteenth century was ‘resolved’

by intensification (cattle and dairying in par-

ticular in a new ecological complex) and by

the appropriation of some farming functions

by capital in processing and agro-industry

(see also Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson,

1987: see alsoagro-foodsystem).

Kautsky concluded that industry was the

motor of agricultural development – or, more

properly, agro-industrial capital was – but that

the peculiarities of agriculture, its biological

character and rhythms (see Mann, 1990;

Wells, 1996), coupled with the capacity

for family farms to survive through self-

exploitation (i.e. working longer and harder

in effect to depress ‘wage levels’), might hinder

some tendencies; namely, the development of

classical agrarian capitalism. Indeed, agro-

industry – which Kautsky saw in the increasing

application of science, technology, and capital

to the food processing, farm input and farm

finance systems – might prefer a non-capitalist

farm sector. In all of these respects – whether

his observations on land and part-time farm-

ing, of the folly of land redistribution, his com-

mentary on international competition and

its consequences, or on the means by which

industry does or does not take hold of land-

based production – Kautsky’s book was

remarkably forward-looking and prescient.

Terry Byres (1996) has suggested that there

are three agrarian questions. The first, posed

by Engels, refers to thepolitics of the agrarian

transition in which peasants constitute the

dominant class: What, in other words, are the

politics of the development of agrariancapit-

alism? The second is aboutproduction and the

ways in which market competition drives the forces

of productiontowards increased yields (in short,

surplus creation on the land). And the third

speaks toaccumulationand the flows of sur-

plus, and specifically inter-sectoral linkages be-

tween agriculture and manufacture. The latter

Byres calls ‘agrarian transition’, a term that

embraces a number of key moments; namely,

growth,terms of trade, demand for agrarian

products, proletarianization, surplus appropri-

ation and surplus transfer. Byres is concerned

to show that agriculture can contribute to in-

dustry without the first two senses of the agrar-

ian question being, as it were, activated, and to

assert the multiplicity of agrarian transitions

(the diversity of ways in which agriculture con-

tributes to capitalistindustrializationwith

or without ‘full’ development of capitalism

in the countryside). While Byres’ approach

has much to offer, it suffers from a peculiar

narrowness. On the one hand, it is focused on

the internal dynamics of change at the expense

of what we now refer to asglobalization.

On the other, the agrarian question for Byres

is something that can be ‘resolved’ (see also

Bernstein, 1996). ‘Resolved’ seems to imply

that once capitalism in agriculture has ‘ma-

tured’, or if capitalist industrialization can pro-

ceed without agrarian capitalism (‘the social

formation is dominated by industry and the

urban bourgeoisie’), then the agrarian ques-

tion is somehow dead. This seems curious on

a number of counts, not the least of which is

that the three senses of the agrarian question

are constantly renewed by the contradictory

anduneven developmentof capitalism itself.

It is for this reason that we return to Kautsky,

since his analysis embraces all three dimensions

of the agrarian question (something seemingly

not acknowledged by Byres) and because he

focused so clearly on substantive issues central

to the current landscape ofagro-food sys-

tems: globalization, verticalintegration, the

importance of biology in food provisioning,

the application of science, the shifts ofpower

off farm, the intensification of land-based

activities and the new dynamisms associated

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AGRARIAN QUESTION