The Dictionary of Human Geography

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with agro-processing (McMichael, 1996;

Goodman and Watts, 1997). Of course,

Kautsky could not have predicted the molecu-

lar revolution and its implications for the

role of intellectual property rights and so on.

But it is an engagement with his work that

remains so central to current studies of

modern agriculture.

The role ofsocialismalso stands in some

tension to the agrarian question. After 1917,

Russian theoreticians of rather different stripes –

for example, Chayanov and Preobrazhensky –

posited a type of socialist agrarian question in

which peasants were collectivized into either

state farms or co-operatives (Viola, 1996),

sometimes in practice through extraordinary

violence and compulsion. There were very

different experiences across the socialist

world as regards the means by which socialist

agricultural surpluses were generated and ap-

propriated by the state (here, for example, the

Soviet Union and China are quite different).

In the same way, the fall of actually existing

socialisms after 1989 produced a circumstance

in which a new sort of agrarian question

emerged as agrarian socialism was decollecti-

vized – in the Chinese case, for example, grad-

ually producing, after 1978, several hundred

million peasants (Zweig, 1997).

Kautsky was, of course, writing towards

the close of an era of protracted crisis for

European agriculture, roughly a quarter of a

century after the incorporation of New World

agriculture frontiers into the world grain

market had provoked the great agrarian de-

pressions of the 1870s and 1880s. A century

later, during a period in which farming and

transportation technologies, diet and agricul-

tural commodity markets are all in flux, the

questions of competition, shifting terms of

trade for agriculture and subsidies remain

politically central in the debates over the Euro-

pean Union, GATT and theneo-liberalre-

forms currently sweeping through thethird

world. Like the 1870s and 1880s, the current

phase of agricultural restructuringin the

periphery is also marked (sometimes exagger-

atedly so) by a phase of ‘democratization’

(Kohli, 1994; Fox, 1995: cf.core–periphery

model). Agrarian parallels at the ‘centre’ can

be found in agriculture’s reluctant initiation

into the GATT/WTO trade liberalization

agreement, albeit with a welter of safeguards

and, relatedly, the dogged rearguard action

being fought by western European farmers

against further attempts to renegotiate the

postwar agricultural settlement, which reached

its protectionist apotheosis in the Common

Agricultural Policy (CAP) during the 1980s.

It is a picture clouded, however, by the strange

bedfellows that the CAP has joined in opposi-

tion, including environmentalists, food safety

activists, animal liberationists, bird watchers,

rural preservationists and neo-conservative

free trade marketeers – all of which is to say

that if agrarian restructuring has taken on

global dimensions, it is riddled with uneven-

ness and inequalities (and here claims that the

agrarian question is ‘dead’ appear rather curi-

ous). The rules of the game may be changing,

but the WTO playing field is tilted heavily

in favour of the OECD sponsors of this

neo-liberal spectacle. mw

Suggested reading

Bobrow-Strain (2007).

agribusiness A term coined by economists

Davis and Goldberg (1957, p. 3) at the

Harvard Business School, who defined it as

the sum total of all operations involved in the

manufacture and distribution of farm sup-

plies; production operations on the farm;

storage; processing and distribution of farm

commodities and items made from them.

The term emphasizes the increasinglysys-

temiccharacter of food production, in which

the activities offarmingare integrated into a

much larger industrial complex, including the

manufacture and marketing of technological

inputs and of processed food products, under

highly concentrated forms of corporate own-

ership and management. Agribusiness has

since become used in much looser and more

ideologically loaded ways as shorthand, on the

Left, for the domination of capitalist corpor-

ations in the agro-food industry and, on the

Right, for the role of] in themodernizationof

food production capacities and practices. In

this looser sense it has become a synonym of

the industrialization of theagro-food system.

The classic model of agribusiness centres

on theverticalintegration of all stages in

the food production process, in which the

manufacture and marketing of technological

farm inputs, farming and food processing are

controlled by a single agro-food corporation.

This model was based largely on the US

experience, where corporations such as Cargill

and Tenneco gained control of particular

commodity chains through a combination

of direct investment, subsidiary companies

and contracting relationships. Numerous

studies in the 1970s drew attention to its

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_A Final Proof page 16 31.3.2009 9:44pm

AGRIBUSINESS